Ashes to ashes…

A month or so before my husband’s death, we talked about where Jim would like his ashes to land. We came up with a list of places where I would put a smidge – his parents’ grave; my parents’ grave; the graves of Bill and Carrie, his aunt and uncle; my Aunt Margaret’s grave…Jim also wanted his ashes to do a bit of traveling, so there’s a bit of him in Galway. And some of his ashes were shot into space. I still have a few more places to go, in good time.

While Jim and I were talking, I was googling, and found that Mt Auburn Cemetery had ash plots.

There, we decided, was where we wanted our ashes to spend eternity. Or however long we have before Massachusetts is inundated and the cool old mausoleums, sepulchers, and crypts at Mt. Auburn become an actual Atlantis.

Who wouldn’t want to be in Mt. Auburn, one of the original garden cemeteries of the 19th century and a truly lovely and beautiful spot. And at Mt. Auburn, you’re in pretty good company.

Julia Ward Howe. McGeorge Bundy. Buckminster Fuller. Felix Frankfurter. Mary Baker Eddy. Curt Gowdy. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Charles Bulfinch. Joyce Chen. Millie Dresselhaus. Fanny Farmer. B.F. Skinner. I.F. Stone. Winslow Homer. Bernard Malamud. Henry Cabot Lodge. Abraham Maslow.

Abraham Maslow? Not that I would have thought that where I’d be buried (or my ashes would be laid to rest) was among my hierarchy of needs. But there you have it. Pack my ashes in a Skinner box and put me under. 

Anyway, right after Jim died, my sister Kath took me over to Mt. Auburn and I bought two ash plots. So did Kath. An excellent day for the salesman: the sale of four choice plots on Azalea Way.

As a future resident of Mt. Auburn, I was interested in an article that appeared in The Globe the other day on one Joe Bancewicz, who manages the crematory at the cemetery. (Before you can plot your ashes, you have to go ashes-to-ashes. Mt. Auburn is, thus, also “my” go-to crematory.) Joe:

…begins his day firing up the retorts to about 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s the temperature needed to consume a body to the bones. With the new state-of-the-art, environmentally sensitive crematory facility opening next month, Bancewicz will be able to use an app to start the crematory chambers so they’re ready to go when he arrives at 7 a.m. He checks to see whether any bodies were delivered overnight and makes sure paperwork is in order for the medical examiner.

Now that the old crematory and its aging gas-fired units have been demolished, everything is computerized, and Bancewicz doesn’t have to adjust air flow to make burners go faster or slower. (Source: The Boston Globe)

There truly is an app for everything, and beyond the app that kick-starts the crematory chambers, Mt. Auburn’s crematory has gotten more high tech. The doors open automatically, the caskets load automatically And the family – if they so desire – can “even press a button starting the actual cremation.”

I’m plenty hands-on about a lot of things, but I think I would have taken a pass on pressing the button. In fact, I didn’t even go to the cemetery for the burial of Jim’s ashes. I’ve been to plenty of funerals, and stood at plenty of gravesides when the casket was lowered, but I somehow felt no need to see Jim’s little box go under. We didn’t have a classic couple-of-days-post-mortem funeral, so there wasn’t any process that would logically end with burial. (Jim’s memorial service was a month after he died.)

I have visited the ash plot a couple of times, but not as often as I would have thought would have been the case. Probably because I still have some of Jim’s ashes with me. I have his space capsule, and enough cremains to bring to Paris, to NYC, to the other places where Jim wanted to be. Someday

Neither one of us believed/believes in the afterlife. But there is an afterlife for the living, that’s for sure.

And it’s the Joe Bancewicz-es of the world who ease that path for us.