In England cremation is now the usual way of doing things.
Relatives must then decide what to do with the ashes, which would fit in a
shoebox. Very often they are scattered in the grounds of the crematorium; that
is what my sisters did recently with our mother’s. Her sister, however, said
shortly before she died some years ago (well she would hardly have said it
afterwards) that she would like them scattered in the garden of the French
painter Claude Monet, which are large and beautiful and open to the public:
that is where he painted the huge water-lily pictures that are among the finest
or at least most impressive things in London’s National Gallery.
Ashes are of course legally still a corpse, and so there are
regulations about what one may do with them. Taking them home is all right, but
taking them out of the country needs all sorts of permissions and papers. As
for scattering them in someone else’s garden, that would certainly need special
permission, and in the case of Claude Monet’s garden this permission proved impossible
to get. (Incidentally it is typical of my aunt that even after death one of her
whims should cause others difficulties.)
My uncle got round the problems with the directness of a
Yorkshireman raised in a poor part of Hull. He tipped the ashes out of the
fancy container in which he had been given them at the crematorium to take
home, and into a supermarket carrier bag. Then he drove down to Dover and took
the car ferry to France, drove to Monet’s garden, paid his few francs entry
and, carrying his innocent-looking plastic bag, found a nice spot, looked round
to make sure he wasn’t being watched, and emptied the bag into a flower bed.
Job done.
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