The abandoned ashes are stacked floor to ceiling in the basement of the Graham, Putnam and Mahoney Funeral Parlors, tucked neatly on wooden shelves and tables and in an unused dumbwaiter.
Someone loved the people once, enough to have their bodies cremated, and then promptly forgot or decided they didn’t want them. “The fact is, if no one claims them, there’s nothing you can do with them,” said funeral director Peter Stefan of Worcester. “You can’t throw them away. They could be Uncle Freddy’s ashes. They could come and sue you.”
Storage or disposal of abandoned ashes is a growing national problem as the number of cremations is on the rise. Even in states that allow the burial or scattering of abandoned ashes, some funeral homes store them for years, hoping one day to place them in the hands of a relative.
Funeral directors worry that the regulations don’t carry the protections of a law, so they have been holding on to the ashes, just in case.
Although some of the forgotten ashes in the basement of his funeral home date to the 1890s, some are more recent, Stefan said.
He recalled cremating the remains of a stillborn baby and giving the small brass urn to the mother. When the mother moved, she left the urn behind. The new tenant discovered it and returned the urn to Stefan, who was able to track down the mother.“I told her what happened; she said, ‘I’ll call you back,’ ” Stefan said. “That was four or five years ago.”
Though people prate about “putting the dead to rest” – fact is, they’re putting their own minds to rest.
The dead are completely extinct, folks. Ain’t nothing you can do about that. If you subscribe to one or another superstition, you can find a ritual to satisfy the part of your brain that has you thinking something more is required.
Remains not picked up within 3 days of cremation will result in substantial storage charges. 😉
Why not a policy of “ashes disposed if not picked up in 1 year” ? Not sure why this is such a big issue.
isn’t burying the dead something of a sign of human culture though? or using them to make soyent green?
When given ashes make concrete.
It’s a scam put on by the families. They conveniently forget about the ashes for a few years, then they go back to to pick them up. If they have been discarded, they have a lawsuit.
Typical American thinking.
#5 Probably.
I can’t reason the logic of ashes… Ashes are not your loved ones. It’s just chemical remains of a combustion, and might even have more matter from the coffin or the fuel than of the deceased. The greater part of the corpse escapes through the exhaust into the atmosphere, actually.
There should be legislation demanding the family to pick up the ashes within a week. Failing to do so, the ashes would be delivered to the municipality cemetery in a container with only the name of the deceased, and put in a common repository.
Locally ashes are bulk scattered in the ocean by airplane for a nominal fee, or buried in a common area of a cemetery. People think they want the things, but later just can’t deal with it. I was contacted last year by a funeral home that wanted to release an Aunt’s ashes to me. In this case there was a balance of $200 her grandchildren hadn’t paid. Call me cheap, but let her sit in a basement.
#5, Person,
It’s a scam put on by the families. They conveniently forget about the ashes for a few years, then they go back to to pick them up. If they have been discarded, they have a lawsuit.
Read the effen article. The problem is the families haven’t picked up the remains after YEARS. Some going back over 100 years.
#6, gq,
And you’re still an idiot.
*
Maybe the funeral home needs better contact information, but after a couple of days, they should send a friendly reminder to the family. After a month they should sent another, more forceful reminder complete with storage fees. After one year, they should send them to their local police as lost and found.
>>The dead are completely extinct, folks.
>>Ain’t nothing you can do about that.
So I guess you have no problem digging up the sacred Native American burial grounds to put up a McMansion development, or a strip mall with Hooters and Wal*Mart, eh, Mister Eideard?
What’s the big deal? Just throw away the ashes after a year. If they come looking after that, just have to keep a trashcan full of the stuff to quickly fill an urn in the back office and give it to them. Will they notice? Of course not! The dead are dead, why perpetuate an idiotic cult of combustion leftovers?
How would they know if they came back 5 years later? It’s not like they are going to open the box to find out it’s a wooly mammoth. It’s ashes FFS.
I think this is just some more anti-cremation propaganda by the funeral industry. Who makes a lot more money selling and burying caskets, than ashes in urns. Instead of the old FUD that your soul will somehow suffer, if you’re not properly buried whole (but what about burn victims?) and intact. Now they’re guilt tripping us about abandoned ashes. Like that happens so often, it rates a news story. I don’t believe that.
Here’s a solution. Mix the ashes with cement, to make bricks, to build an extension to the funeral home, to hold more of these abandoned ashes. Problem solved. NEXT!