Pure Cremation is body disposal right?

[josephiine]

The advert makes it sound like it’s a lovely thing and saves money. I get that it’s cheaper but surely that’s because it is literally a body disposal service?
My FIL has just planned his, he asked my husband if he minds which he doesn’t, but it got us talking, am I missing anything?

You're just an empty shell when you die. Your soul has gone. The body is just excess waste then.

I’m having direct cremation, I hate funeral/cremation services mainly because of so much hypocrisy I have experienced over the years.
My family are perfectly happy with this, I will leave money for them to have a nice meal or something at a future point.

Exactly. I can't think of anything worse than my body rotting in the ground. I am 100% being cremated.

What religion/philosophy do you follow out of interest?

Yes exactly this. ^

I know a woman who has no relationship with her birth mum (BM) - and hasn't had for 30 years. Her dad died when she was a toddler. Her BM was abusive and violent, and she had to be raised by her aunt who was 15 years older than her BM. (Moved in when she was about 9.) Her aunt died 20 years ago when she was 30 and she walked away and pretty much lost touch with her 3 cousins (her aunt's children) after several years. She's hardly heard from them for some 18-20 years.

Her BM died last year, and 2 of the cousins contacted her on Facebook, and told her she had died, and told her when the funeral was. She messaged back and said she's not going, and like, why would she?! Both cousins said 'you're joking, no way are you not going, to your own MOTHER'S funeral?!' She said 'that's correct, and she is not my mother, she is nothing, and she has been dead to me for 30 years.'

The next day, a family friend who knew the BM contacted her and said it's horribly disrespectful to not go, as that she is her mother! 🙄 No contact for 30 years and nothing but hate and abuse when she was a child, and she was being guilt tripped into attended her funeral, purely because she was her birth mother. She just blocked them all, and deactivated her Facebook or a few weeks, so they couldn't contact her again.

She did not need to 'get closure' on anything. She 'got closure' when she went no-contact with her in the late 1990s, and cut her from her life.

I don't think there's a body/soul dichotomy. I get that's a key ancient Greek philosophy, Plato and all that. But everything we experience in life is through our bodies: what we see, how we feel, what we touch. Everything in life that you went through and experienced was through your body and that's why it deserves to be treated with respect.

It's not made clear that they may take the body hundreds of miles away immediately upon collection.

I'd like to hope they make it clear before you sign up that once the body is gone that is it, no further access to it, but the older couple I was referring to didn't realise it, they just thought they would do it locally, and they may be offered the chance to say goodbye at a chapel of rest if they wanted to.

Even their website says the body is taken 'into their care'.. it says nothing about what specifically happens to it. They also say it is more expensive to use a funeral director, and if they do choose a funeral director to do a direct cremation they will 'cut corners'.. which is bullshit scaremongering to drive sales.

I like the idea of direct cremation personally, but wouldn't use faceless company like them.

I think funerals are more for the living than the dead.

I think the wishes of the dead should be adhered to, and it's horribly disrespectful to their memory to have a big funeral and to bury them when they wanted a direct cremation. What a kick in the teeth that is, and a horrible thing to do.

To be honest the only difference between a cremation and ‘body disposal’ is just that there is a quick ‘service’ before.
The cremation itself isn’t happening at the time of the service even if you see the coffin disappear behind a curtain.

I suppose it feels more final, like the opportunity of a final goodbye similar to a church service with the coffin there.

But that’s about it re difference.

I've already paid for my direct cremation. Funerals are stressful things to plan, especially when you're in shock and distress, and as I like to be organised and don't like being the centre of attention, it seemed to be the most sensible option!

It just means that you don't have a funeral service... and let's be honest, how many people love and look forward to going to funerals?! Your ashes can be collected afterwards.

If you ring them up to book, they talk you through it, where the body will be taken etc. You can choose whether or not to know what day the cremation will be and then they arrange to deliver the ashes to your house. I found it very clear and if there was anything I didn’t want, I could have taken my business elsewhere with no problem.
I believe local undertakers can offer direct cremations, they just don’t tend to admit it as they want your money. We went with Pure Cremations because it was the wish of our relative but we were happy with it and don’t feel we missed out on anything except extra fuss for no real point.

I agree that some people won't understand that and maybe it should be made clearer. I absolutely do understand this. I have never seen anywhere the suggestion that a funeral director would cut corners but I haven't done massive reasearch, just seen the ads on TV while doing something else. I did assume though that a cremation service meant just that with nothing else.

In your personal opinion.

In mine, that’s bollocks.

They are now startting to advertise it as was mentioned upthread. It said that they use unfilled slots at the local crematorium so i guess that some of the charge will be what the crematorium charge. They didn't exist when my husband died but they certainly didn't try to upsell me anything. I can still remember when I was there, the lady gently but firmly steering me to the budget end of the coffin catalogue saying something like "these are what people usually choose for cremation"

I feel this is where the needs of both the deceased and the living can be taken into account.

I very much feel that the choice between cremation and burial should be left to the deceased.
But a choice between cremation and direct cremation could be left to the livings because this might be an important step to say goodbye for a lot of people. There is a finality to a cremation with the coffin there you dint have with the direct cremation. So I’d go fur what works for those left.

totally agree. My loved ones were not their withered and damaged flesh.

I have posted this before but I think it belongs here too.
"You want a physicist to speak at your funeral. You want the physicist to talk to your grieving family about the conservation of energy, so they will understand that your energy has not died. You want the physicist to remind your sobbing mother about the first law of thermodynamics; that no energy gets created in the universe, and none is destroyed. You want your mother to know that all your energy, every vibration, every Btu of heat, every wave of every particle that was her beloved child remains with her in this world. You want the physicist to tell your weeping father that amid energies of the cosmos, you gave as good as you got.
And at one point you'd hope that the physicist would step down from the pulpit and walk to your brokenhearted spouse there in the pew and tell him/her that all the photons that ever bounced off your face, all the particles whose paths were interrupted by your smile, by the touch of your hair, hundreds of trillions of particles, have raced off like children, their ways forever changed by you. And as your widow rocks in the arms of a loving family, may the physicist let him/her know that all the photons that bounced from you were gathered in the particle detectors that are her/his eyes, that those photons created within her/him constellations of electromagnetically charged neurons whose energy will go on forever.
And the physicist will remind the congregation of how much of all our energy is given off as heat. There may be a few fanning themselves with their programs as he says it. And he will tell them that the warmth that flowed through you in life is still here, still part of all that we are, even as we who mourn continue the heat of our own lives.
And you'll want the physicist to explain to those who loved you that they need not have faith. Let them know that scientists have measured precisely the conservation of energy and found it accurate, verifiable and consistent across space and time. You can hope your family will examine the evidence and satisfy themselves that the science is sound and that they'll be comforted to know your energy's still around. According to the law of the conservation of energy, not a bit of you is gone; you're just less orderly".
Aaron Freeman

Absolutely not. I do not want a funeral. I don’t want people gathering around watching my coffin go down. I don’t want random people who I haven’t seen in years showing up for a sandwich after the show. It’s entirely up to the person themselves what kind of final exit they have. I absolutely won’t be having something i do not want to pacify others. My final journey is my business.

That’s until you are the one digging the burial.

My FIL (and then later in both PIL) have dug the ground for burials.
Both Methodist, strong believers.
Neither of them wanted a burial. Because they’ve seen what it means. Digging the ground and finding a corpse that wasn’t supposed to be there (fwiw bodies move underground as years pass). How it looked.
So they had a church service with- very important to them - and then a cremation. Neither of them would entertain anything else.

The main difference is no one attends.

But you’ll be dead. How is it your journey?

Apart from a church service or not etc… which is clearly related to you/your beliefs, how is having people gathering or not to the service impacting you?

It is my choice. What I want is important to me. Ultimate it’s my death so I will defend my right of choice all day long.

Fortunately I have managed to raise respectful DCs who I fully expect to follow my wishes.

In some ways though, the wishes to have a direct cremation take away the pressure from the living, a lot of people left behind, spend a lot of time agonising about what the deceased would have wanted, flowers, cars, donations, music poems, etc, etc, it genuinely goes on and on, with some families actually falling out with each other because the disagree on what the deceased 'would have wanted'.. when really, they're dead, they don't care!

A direct cremation takes away all of that, so even if not everyone in the family agrees, it should really be respected as a choice the deceased made, as you can still have a service somewhere if you want (just not with a body in a coffin with you), and definitely a wake somewhere without over-riding the deceased wishes.

You won't be there, though?

I dug my grandmother's grave with my uncle (who had worked for an undertaker when younger and knew what he was doing). We came across fragments of bone from my long-dead grandfather/his father (well, presumably, he was the last one buried there). I'm still planning to be buried.