Scattered, sealed, or sent into space
How would you like your remains handled?
As a kid growing up in Ohio, I never went to Waffle House. We were a Frisch’s Big Boy family on Sunday mornings, and my (otherwise pretty reasonable) mother warned that Waffle House was a place where “people go to buy drugs.”
Once, as a teenager, I rebelled by eating at a Northern Kentucky Waffle House after hanging out at the Cincinnati airport for fun (this was pre- September 11th). It wasn’t until I moved to Atlanta, though, that I started eating at Waffle House on a more regular basis and came to understand their hash brown terminology: scattered, smothered, covered, chunked, drugged (just kidding, Mom!).
Scattered
After writing my post about an everyday burial site, I was intrigued by a headline I saw the New York Times last week regarding a meteorologist whose ashes were released into the eye of Hurricane Milton over the Gulf of Mexico. The meteorologist, Peter Dodge, was a long time hurricane tracker who had devoted his career to better understanding the storms. He traveled on air missions into the eye of a hurricane 387 times, and the scattering of his ashes was deemed his final mission.
Sealed
Instead of having your remains scattered, you may prefer to have them gathered and sealed up in some way (e.g., body buried in a casket or ashes collected in an urn). One thing I find fascinating about early American funerary imagery is that urns are often engraved or sculpted on grave markers even if the person themself was not cremated. A lot of Victorian funerary symbolism drew on practices of earlier cultures like the ancient Greeks and Romans, who did cremate their dead and use urns to hold their remains.
On a related note, this reminds me of a pair of headstones I saw in Vermont last weekend that included depictions of an obelisk on a pedestal:
Like urns, obelisks are associated with ancient funerary imagery (originally Egyptian), but in cemeteries, they’re usually reproduced in full form rather than engraved like the stones above.
Sent into space
Reading about the meteorologist whose ashes were scattered in the eye of Hurricane Milton sent me down a rabbit hole of research into other usual forms of casting ashes. Turns out, there are a number of private companies that offer options for having your ashes sent into space. One company, Celestis, offers different tiers of flights depending on how far into space you want to go: earth’s orbit, lunar surface, or deep space (a.k.a., the final frontier).
Can I take your order?
Choosing a burial option is a bit more complicated than placing an order at Waffle House and definitely a decision of higher stakes (steaks?). It’s a topic I know I’ve avoided thinking about for myself despite the amount of time I spend in cemeteries. But with the information presented here, what can I get you:
Would you like to be scattered, sealed, or sent into space?
Interesting! I think scattered, why take up space when you can be somewhere you would want to in life?
I have a series of running jokes with younger friends of mine about what they'll put on my headstone when I'm gone (usually some variation of "Nice guy. Not too bright."), but I haven't talked much about the disposition of my human remains. I suppose I'd like to be cremated but not necessarily dispersed or strewn about. Being shot into space doesn't interest me, personally.