ASHES TO ASHES

[Crewleader]

Answers to the ever-pressing question:
What To Do With Your Cremains?


By Frank Kaiser

Boomer Alert: By 2025, half of us will choose cremation when we die. The $20-billion funeral business is not happy.

With the average cost of a funeral today about $6,500, not including plot and headstone, cremation at $500 or less is a bargain to die for. At least one crematory here in the Tampa Bay area charges only $345. Of course, you must pick up the ashes or get charged another $150 for “disposal.”

Disposal! That’s the key to cremation.

What happens to the cremains, as the ashes are called, is a hot topic of conversation in elder circles. I know folks who have changed their wills a half dozen times just to accommodate new ideas on the fate of their ashes.

It's wise to stipulate specifics here, or you could end up where my friend Jack Treadway's dad ended up, rolling around on the back-seat floor of his son's car. With every start and stop, Jack's father's urn lurched forward and back again, daily reminding Jack of the frailty of life and leaving him wondering why his dad never specified what he wanted done with his cremains.

http://www.suddenlysenior.com/FULLSTORY.html

[NV Whino]

1. My mother and I opted for cremation

She chose to be scattered at sea, which she was last year. I decided I wanted to be a little more useful and asked to be scattered in the rose garden. The cremation society charged me an extra $150 to be scattered in the rose garden. Go figure.

[Adsos Letter]

2. My wife and I have opted for cremation...

...with cremains scattered in a nice forest...

[tech3149]

3. Not just us boomers

After a few serious discussions playing cards, my 80 something parents agreed with me. It makes no sense to spend all that money and take up all that space. We're all going to be cremated and have our ashes spread somewhere that is special to us.

[emilyg]

4. Both my parents urns are

sitting on a bookcase. That's what they wanted. I opted for cremation, too.

[Maq]

5. The body on the cart is dead, but its trillions of cells are all still alive

The body on the cart is dead, but its trillions of cells are all still alive.
When does Brain Memory, both short term and long term memory Die. As an approaching senior member of society. I wonder what would I want to preserve a decrepit old body for. However the vast accumulation of experiences I have amassed has value which warrants preserving. Yeah, frigg the body and preserve the brain function


To Treat the Dead
The new science of resuscitation is changing the way doctors think about heart attacks—and death itself
By Jerry Adler
Newsweek
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18368186/site/newsweek?GT1=9951

May 7, 2007 issue - Consider someone who has just died of a heart attack. His organs are intact, he hasn't lost blood. All that's happened is his heart has stopped beating—the definition of "clinical death"—and his brain has shut down to conserve oxygen. But what has actually died?
As recently as 1993, when Dr. Sherwin Nuland wrote the best seller "How We Die," the conventional answer was that it was his cells that had died. The patient couldn't be revived because the tissues of his brain and heart had suffered irreversible damage from lack of oxygen. This process was understood to begin after just four or five minutes. If the patient doesn't receive cardiopulmonary resuscitation within that time, and if his heart can't be restarted soon thereafter, he is unlikely to recover. That dogma went unquestioned until researchers actually looked at oxygen-starved heart cells under a microscope. What they saw amazed them, according to Dr. Lance Becker, an authority on emergency medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. "After one hour," he says, "we couldn't see evidence the cells had died. We thought we'd done something wrong." In fact, cells cut off from their blood supply died only hours later.

The URL has the full story. You may be cremating living Cells.