Long life | 1 December 2016

Most people who die in Britain are now cremated — more than 70 per cent of them — but there is often uncertainty among the bereaved about what to do with the ashes. When dead bodies aren’t burnt, it is straightforward: they are buried in coffins. But the options for the ashes of the dead are various. They may be interred in a churchyard or a cemetery, they may be planted among the roots of a new tree, and they may be scattered in the countryside, in a river, or at sea.

But these are just the conventional choices. Lots of exotic alternatives are also offered. One website about the disposal of ashes offers 27 options: launching into space, using in firework displays, floating up into the atmosphere in helium balloons, making into diamonds, mixing in paint, turning into pencil fillings, pressing into vinyl records, and so on. Two stranger choices are using the ashes in a hourglass (‘Though the glass won’t be a reliable timepiece, it will be a beautiful item on the mantelpiece’), and putting them into bullets (‘Your body may be gone, but you don’t have to miss next year’s hunting trip’).

One of the dangers with having such a range of choices is that you can end up doing nothing at all. Both my parents were cremated. My father, who died in 1989, had his ashes buried in the family plot in Lanarkshire, but those of mother, who died nine years later, have still so far to find a resting place, having been in the custody of one and then another of her devoted children. Uncertainty about when and where to bury them is to blame for the delay.

The rules are pretty lax about what you may do with the remains of a cremated body, but there was a catastrophic misjudgment recently reported from New York.