Huh, what do they do if you just say "Alright, guess he's your problem now"? Pretty sure my parents would be cheering me on from the after life. We're not the most sentimental bunch.
Ha, good point. We had relatives back in the States that were expecting something to bury so I was stuck.
You could have burned something else of similar volume, maybe a load of his clothes, and put it in an urn.
Cremains are kind of distinctive, though. In fact, once you know what they look like you can find them at waterfalls and mountain tops all over the place.
err... Not sure if i should google or not...
Edit: got curious. I guess it's just white/pale ash?
It has little chunks, maybe 3 or 4 millimeters wide, where you can see the spongy, internal structure of the bones.
I heard that used to be true for older cremations, but not for newer ones (due to higher heat & efficiency) ?
Last time I saw a dateable sample (i.e. straight from the crematorium vs. at a mountaintop or waterfall) was about nine years ago, and it was quite chunky. This was from a crematorium in Arizona that was presumably using modern methods. I do recall that there was an episode of a TV show a while back (Dexter?) where someone did an ashes swap and it was discovered because the ashes looked like they were from the 70's, but that could have just been something the writer dreamed up.
You can almost imagine an eccentric subculture rife with debate over the preferences and arguments in favor of the virtues distinctive degrees of granularity in cremated human ashes, not unlike peanut butter varieties.
The defining aspect of the argument being whether you can tell the ashes came from a human, or whether you'd rather not know, or care to think about it.
Re:Why undertakers are worried
by bbernoulli on Friday April 13, 2018 @08:30AM
(#16829319)
The show was "six feet under"
Interesting. Maybe someone can chime in on how it would be different from ash at the center of a fire pit?
Watch the movie "Meet the Parents" ("dinner scene"). It's funny, but you can skip to 2:30.
Re:Why undertakers are worried
by ThrustVectoring on Thursday April 12, 2018 @05:29PM
(#16825089)
File a claim against his estate, most likely.
You can add Ambulance service as one of the extremely exploitive services. They don't even give you an estimate of what it's going to be then you get a bill in the mail for 2900$ for a 25 minute ride!!! Word to wise, never use ambulance service unless you have a really high degree of confidence in your medical insurance company.
This is one of the greatest things about the internet: the reduction of information asymmetry.
Occupations like investment advice and sometimes auto repair exploit the heck out of information asymmetry.
The death business is especially nefarious because not only are they exploiting information asymmetry, they also exploit emotional overload.
When I was in college, my dad died in another country. The mortician had me over a barrel. The hospital had one funeral home they worked with and before I knew it, the funeral home was in possession of my dad's body. Want to transfer it to another funeral home? Well there's a charge for that. My only option was to pay them whatever they asked to cremate him. I paid some outrageous amount (I believe it was about $600, which was a fortune in the small 3rd world country he was in) for cremation and a little urn and box to carry him in.
Even as a guy who was emotionally relatively stable (I was mostly estranged from my father), it was still an infuriatingly weak position to be in as a "customer" of one of these predatory businesses.