open-air cremation

The Natural Death Centre, veteran pioneer of the better, greener funerals movement, passionately and vocally campaigns for open-air cremation on sustainably sourced wood pyres. If you want to find out why, be patient, I’ll give you the link in a minute.

Where do you stand on funeral pyres? Do you embrace them or would you stamp them out? 

The NDC would like to know. You can tell them with one easy click of your mouse by doing the online poll on their website. Hang on!

The GFG, of course, expresses no view on this matter. We like to represent all of the people all of the time.

If you want to register a no, close your eyes now.

If you want to register a yes, go to the foot of this page here.

Crestone Colorado is a bit like Totnes on steroids. It is home to all manner of nice folk and all sorts of religious communities. Alternative. (To capitalism on steroids).

Crestone is home to one of only two legal open-air cremation sites in the US. That’s two better than the UK, where open-air cremation was declared legal on 10 Feb 2010 – but that doesn’t mean to say it’s going to be easily legalisable. There are very few campaigners for it. Chief of them are Carl Marlow (who actually performed an outdoor cremation in 2007), and Rupert and Claire Callender.

The Crestone site could well be instructive to those who would like to create an open-air cremation site in the UK.

If you’ve ever wondered how you’d feel if someone you were close to was cremated in this way, hear this from Tessa Bielecki:

My father, Dr. Casimir Bielecki, was cremated on July 19, 2008 at the Crestone End-of-Life Project’s open-air site. This was my first open-air cremation, and I was so profoundly moved, I’m already working on the documents that will enable me to choose this kind of cremation for myself.

CEOLP supports simple, natural and humanizing end-of-life choices. We were able to bring Dad’s body directly home for the hospital in our own car only two hours after he died and put him back in his own bed, giving us ample time to complete our farewells.  He wasn’t whisked away from us to some gloomy funeral “parlor” and polluted with smelly embalming chemicals.  He wasn’t confined, as poet Emily Dickinson pur it, “Safe in [his] Alabaster Chamber – Untouched by Morning – And untouched by Noon [under] – Rafter of Satin – And Roof of Stone.”  Instead, he was consumed cleanly  and purley out in the open air by what Carmelite mystic John of the Cross called the “Living Flame of Love.”

Everyone present laid green boughs of pinon pine and bright red and yellow carnations of over Dad’s body on the pyre, and as an afterthought, we added his old straw golf hat.  Thick dark smoke billowed out to the west towards the full moon setting over the San Juan Mountains, then cleared, whitened, and rose heavenward, a symbol of Dad’s rising from the dead, as we Christian’s believe.

The cremation was no abstract theology or philosophy about death, but a profound existential experience of it:  a falling away of the flesh and soaring of the spirit in roaring flames and sparks spinning into the sky.  Gathering the ashes and bits of bone 24 hours later continued our family’s deep meditation on passing from this world to the next.  As St. Paul wrote to the Corinthians, “Behold, I tell you a mystery.  We shall not all fall asleep, but we will all be changed, in an instant, in the blink of an eye.”  The fire took more than the blinking of an eye to burn, and that was part of its beauty and healing.

All the Abrahamic traditions were represented, and Buddhism as well.  My sister Connie sang the splendid Exsultet from the Roman Catholic liturgy for Easter Sunday.  We said traditional Christian prayers for the dead.  Shahna Lax prayed the Jewish Kaddish.  Roshi Steve Allen and his wife Angelique chanted the Buddhis Heart Sutra.  And then William Howell faced east and cried out the Muslim Call to Prayer as the sun rose of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.  There were long reverent periods of silence and, quiet loving exchanges between family and friends.  The fire tenders went about their tasks unobtrusively.  Fireman Steve Anderson stood by, tall and stalwart, in case the surrounded desert might beckon an unwanted spark.  All our senses engaged.  And all the elements were there:  earth, air, fire and water.

Everything about the cremation was personal, intimate and meaningful.  We took care of Dad’s body ourselves.  We cut the evergreen boughs from our own land.  We created our own altar to express the uniqueness of Dad’s life and included his black medical bag and stethoscope, his wedding portrait, and the last photo taken of him four weeks earlier with the nephews (and lobsters!) he loved.  We chose his shroud, one I’d brought for him a year ago from the ancient city of Jerusalem.  (It’s traditional for Orthodox Christians to bring their own shrouds home after making pilgrimage to the Holy Land.)

This whole experience was a gift for our family and friends, for the earth, which is left undisturbed, and for Dad himself, who knew we were going to do this and liked the idea.  We are blessed to have open-air cremation here in Crestone.  Many thanks to the Crestone End-of-Life Project for helping to make the experience of death so natural, human, reverent and, above all, sacred.

There are some superb photos of open-air cremations at Crestone here.

Washington Post article here.

Here’s a lovely story about how they did things in a braver and more beautiful age. The occasion is the unveiling of a memorial on Patcham Down to the 53 Indian soldiers who died in the first world war. It stands just yards (metres for younger readers) from the Chattri Memorial, which stands on the site of the ghat on which the bodies of those soldiers who died in the hospital in Brighton Pavilion (made available to the Indian soldiers because it would remind them of home) were ceremonially burned on a proper pyre.

All this happened ninety years ago. It has taken ninety years of progress and multiculturalism to produce a Home Secretary, Jack “Man Of” Straw, with the liberality to greet renewed calls for open-air cremation with the humane and progressive retort that people would be “upset and offended” and “find it abhorrent that human remains were being burnt in this way”. What is the rudest thing you can think of saying about anybody? Mutter it now.

I can’t whet your appetite with pics cos they’re all copyrighted. So here’s the signpost to lots of happy info and a Flickr site: Go!

In the light of yesterday’s Court of Appeal judgement in favour of Davender Ghai and anyone else who wants to be cremated on a funeral pyre, Rupert Callender of the Green Funeral Company, and a Trustee of the Natural Death Centre, has this to say:

The verdict this Wednesday from the High Court accepting the legal arguments presented by The Anglo-Asian Friendship Society and supported by The Natural Death Centre in favour of outdoor funeral pyres is as cheering as it is unexpected. It seems that underneath its musty periwigs and robes, British justice can still feel its way to the spirit of an issue and move radically in favour of the individual.

Of course, this is only a battle that has been won, not the war. The next impenetrable ring of defence, our Orwellian and inscrutable planning system and our perversely selective Environmental Health department will no doubt dig in for a long siege. For those of us who dream of blazing hilltops lighting up the night sky and illuminating dancing crowds, we still have miles to go before we sleep.

The media have predictably missed the point, with all of the major papers failing to grasp the concept that this is a right won for us all, not just those whose religious edicts prescribe it.

The strength of feeling on this matter that I have encountered from ordinary middle class Devonshire folk is incredible. It seems our ancestral memory has been stirred and will not lie down. Only this morning I encountered a woman who railed against not being able to cremate her mother in this way, and the spiritual paucity of what she had to settle for, the ubiquitous twenty minutes in a council run crem.

This is what has really cracked today, the one-size-fits-all funeral box that we have been squeezed into for so long. The people who manage our death rituals, particularly big funeral chains and crematorium consortiums, can be left in no doubt that the fundamental template no longer fits. Convenience can no longer dictate the ritual.

It is of course the crematoriums that are best placed to effect any changes; they solve many of the planning issues by existing already. Crematoriums are divided into those that are privately run, some by big players, and those that are managed by the council. Despite being heavily subsidised with our council taxes, it is the municipal ones that are shabby and run down. In one of our local urban ones, you are locked into a Victorian chapel for twenty minutes, so woe betide any latecomers, and the end of the service is marked by a noise reminiscent of the opening scenes of “Porridge.” The privately run ones, while still being deep in the belly of the capitalist beast at least are open to the whiff of consumer concern. We at the NDC have done our best to tempt them with new technologies, specifically Cryomation and Resomation, but we have also tried to sow seeds of change about how the ritual itself is managed, not just the mechanics of body disposal.

Integrating an area for outdoor cremations would be easy in a practical sense, and show that they do indeed “get it.” It is not quite the showy druidical theatrics of Dr Price that so many of us long for, but it is the beginning of something profound.

Ed’s note: Quoting the Press Association story: “the judgment goes on to state that the difficulties which may be thrown up by planning and public health legislation, should an application be submitted, have not been considered as part of this judgement.

“Furthermore, the method of burning associated with funeral pyres is not covered by any regulations which currently only apply to cremators powered by gas or electricity which are designed to maintain environmental standards, in particular air quality.

“Following the judgment, all local authorities will await further guidance from the Home Office and Defra as regards any proposed regulations or legislation which may control the proposed manner of cremation to ensure environmental standards and public health are protected.”