What Do We Do With Mom's Body?
pg 2
by Jon Sweeney

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My brother is a professor of church history at a midwestern seminary and it often seems that he knows just about everything there is to know about the history of Christian thought. As it turned out, his objections to the idea of cremating my mother were based on an analysis of the opinions of the early church fathers and Christian tradition. He mentioned a few examples of what our theological forefathers thought of the idea. His arguments made good sense.

My opinions were much less rational. "I just don’t like it," I began. "It would seem wrong to incinerate your body when you die."

Mom said, "But, I will be gone. You know that, of course. What was me will be departed."

"Yes and no," I said, still unsure of what I was saying. "Even if you accept that the body and the soul are completely distinct, and when the body stops functioning the soul lives on somewhere else, it is still wrong to obliterate the body of a person. Yours are the cheeks I have kissed, the hands I have held. There is a connection of some kind between our love and our bodies. Isn't that also the reason why organ donation is so precious, not just because someone else might be able to see with your eyes, but because your eyes are a remarkable gift to give, even after you have stopped using them?"

Mother was surprised that we would object. As it turned out, my parents had been discussing this issue with many of their longtime friends--spiritual/political conservatives, all of them--and they had all come to this decision together. One of their older friends, in fact, had recently passed away after a long illness and had delighted (literally) in planning his own cremation.

My parents' parents, who were young adults during the Great Depression, would never have considered cremation as an option. Much like my brother's opinion, my grandparents would have objected to cremation on traditional grounds. You just didn't do it if you were a Christian in America. Cremation was something done by atheists and Hindus, they thought.

Times have changed. My own conservative parents don't want anyone visiting their gravesites. And they desperately don't want open casket funerals.

"Dust to dust, that is what seems right," Mom said at dinner.

My parents are of a generation that has already watched its parents die. They didn't like the nursing home dirtiness of it, and they quietly vowed to try and take care so that--when their own time came--not only would they not bother their children as slow-dying financial burdens, but they would clean up the mess they left. A tidy urn.

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