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Portland, OR, United States
I am living in the age of quarantine and a brand-new LPN.

Thursday, November 29, 2007

The Burning Question

A conversation had a month ago that I'm still chuckling over...

My in-laws were visiting and we took them to Forest Park for a hike. Forest Park is the largest city park in the US, and except for the sounds of traffic, you could forget that you're within a city. It looks like a mountain hideaway.

We brought a lunch along and when we'd gone as far into the woods as we wanted to go, we found a nice little grassy knoll and sat down to eat. We had garlic cheese bread from Di Prima Dolce--to die for! Get yourself some--they make it on Fridays; apples we'd just picked from Hood River, and a soft cheese with an ash layer. Have you had cheese with an ash layer? It's really good. My mother-in-law was wondering aloud, who thought of putting ash in cheese? Who thought, hey, maybe ash would taste good in cheese! We wondered about that for awhile and had many jokes about eating ash. And then my dear mother-in-law reminded us that they want to be cremated when they die.

You can see where this conversation went from there!

3 comments:

Mimi said...

Yeah, unfortunately, I suspect I am the only member of my family that will be buried (excepting, hopefully my kids). Lord have Mercy.

I smile and nod.

Elizabeth said...

Well, as far as the cremation vs. burial thing....honestly, I think cremation is a whole lot better than pumping the body full of chemicals, which is what happens with embalming, plus lots more disgusting things they do that are neither respectful to the body nor kind to the environment. I recently read the book Grave Matters, which is a very interesting look at the way we handle our dead. One very interesting thing to me is how people are fixated with "preserving" the body, when our bodies were made to decompose and help nourish the earth and all that lives in it.

When I die, it is my hope that I die at home, be kept at home and taken care of by those who love me, and buried in an green cemetery that I hope will be built before that time. Of course, whether those things happen depends on many things, not the least of which is the co-operation of the people making the decisions!

Liz said...

ick. I don't really want to think about it. But cremation, perhaps partly scattered over somewhere nice, sure beats having everyone look at your dead body.
This does remind me of a couple of amusing stories....I was reading seventeen magazines "most embarassing stories" and this girl was babysitting and supposedly knocked a vase off the mantel, which turned out to be Grandma's urn.She didn't know what it was and vacuumed up the "dirt". They didn't ask her to babysit again. Who knows if it's true. But its sort of like the champagne scene in Meet the Parents. And did anybody see "Death at a Funeral"? I guess you just have to make such a gruesome subject funny to get through it.....

SC