I will commit my father not to the ground but to the flames

8 August 2024

On Thursday 15th August 2024 I will accompany my father for one last short journey. Together with my son we will carry his body the short journey from the hearse to the crematorium chapel and there his body will be burned to ashes. My Dad, like Abraham, knew that his body is nothing but dust and ashes (Gen 18:27) and so dust and ashes he will become.

Less than a month ago I was talking with some relatives about my Dad’s prospects for recovery and I was hopeful. A long road lay ahead for sure but his chances were reasonable. He was weak but he could get stronger. A week later he was dead.

At the beginning of May while he was in a coma my mother’s prayer was, “I just keep asking God to tell him that he is loved.” Now God has answered that prayer and told my Dad to his face that he is loved. My Dad who when he regained consciousness struggled through every day and in his extreme weakness they seemed to him like a thousand years is now enjoying the reverse experience: “But perhaps one of the joys of heaven will be that we will revel in the slowness of time because there is so much to see, so much to feel, so much to absorb that we will delight that a day is like a thousand years.”

My grandparents and great-grandparents were all buried and I think I expected my Dad to choose the same. Perhaps it was the lack of a family plot, perhaps it was something else but I admit to being slightly surprised upon learning that both my parents have chosen cremation upon their death.

When relatives of mine died back home, they were taken away by a paid undertaker we didn’t know, to be embalmed and then put on display in some small, cold room in the undertaker’s commercial premises, before being taken in a long black car to a newbuild crematorium on the outskirts of a suburban town. In this bland and passionless place, in a pre-booked thirty minute slot, there would be a short service with some recorded music and some brief eulogies, perhaps delivered by a priest we had never met and who had never known the ‘deceased’. Then the body was taken away to be burnt by an anonymous crematorium employee who we never saw. A few weeks later, we would receive an urn full of grey dust, which it was illegal to scatter in most places without a licence.

Die Before You Die

If my Dad’s cremation is anything like the one Paul Kingsnorth describes above, and I suspect it will be, I’m expecting to hate the whole experience. I’d rather take my son to some field where my father worked with his father as a young man and dig a hole until my arms ache and my hands blister and I’m sweating and tired until a hole is deep enough. Then I want to stand there with my family and commit him to the earth he so loved to work. My Dad deserves more from me than merely taking a plane ride but he never wanted to cause any bother and he certainly would have felt my idea to be far too much trouble. But as Kingsnorth says my ideas are just fantasy anyway in contemporary soul-less Britain. There’s too much bureaucracy, we are all too busy, everyone too rushed. We need convenience, fast food, next-day delivery and half-hour cremations.

I happen to think that burial fits a Christian better than cremation. Dry bones rising, the perishable putting on the imperishable, the dead rising from the tombs, to be buried as Jesus was buried, to rise as Jesus rose. But ashes to ashes, dust to dust and into His hands we commit our spirits whether in the ground or through the flames.