Dear Judy,
My live-in partner and I are having the most ridiculous ongoing quarrel, and maybe you can help. He says he’ll read what you have to say, anyway.
The issue: When I die I want to be cremated (He was born Baptist, and wants all the costly hideious trimmings including embalming).
My friend says cremation is for paupers. Normally he isn’t that ridiculous is all I can say. We are both working, which is good in these hard economic times, but we aren’t wealthy, and I don’t know how long he’ll be able to keep his job anyway.
I say cremation is cheaper, sensible, and when I die I sure as hell know it isn’t my corpse that’s going to make it into heaven, if there is one. Can you convince him somehow that I’m right?
Tess
Dear Tess,
Maybe this will help. Tell your partner that cremation is becoming more and more popular, even in places where most people are pretty conservative.
Of course in the state of Washington, which is by no means conservative, 68 percent of all the deceased are cremated. And the price of cremation is, as you suggest, very modest: from around $500 to $1,000 nationwide.
But even Texans in the most recent statistics chose cremation 20 percent of the time; Arkansans, 58 percent of the time; Hawaiians 61 percent of the time, and British Columbia 75 percent of the time. (My thanks to the FCA — www.funerals.org — for those statistics).
So maybe you can push the cremation-is-chic argument. But even if you can’t — what business is it of anyone’s how you choose to dispose of your dead body? The best way to end the argument, in my opinion, is not to utter a word.
Let your partner make whatever provisions he chooses for his corpse at whatever cost. And you, smart woman, do the same.
Thank you for writing
Judy
