My grandpa is still alive. He lives in a nursing home in Victoria. But as he get's older, more and more of his friends, acquaintances, and former neighbours and coworkers pass. A few years ago, my grandpa's friend Herman passed away, and Herman's family chose to have his remains cremated. My grandpa reacted to this with visceral horror. He's still talking about it years later. "They burned him," he says, "like an animal." He insists that it isn't what Herman would have wanted, and he made my mother and my aunt promise that they wouldn't cremate him when he died.
My grandpa grew up in a very small town (honestly, I don't know if it meets the population requirements to be called a "town", but that's beside the point) in northern Manitoba. His family was made of 2nd generation German-Russian immigrants, and (at least as long as they'd been in Canada) they were all farmers. I suppose that if any farm animals died of disease or were attacked by wild animals and killed, their meat could not be used and they were burnt, so that's why he equates cremation with the treatment of animal bodies instead of humans.
His family was raised in the Lutheran church, too, but I'm not sure if that helped to shape his views on cremation. According to Wikipedia, "...in Finland, the Helsinki Lutheran Parish Union built its first modern crematorium in 1926" [source]. Even so, decisions made in European cities about the morality of cremation may not have had much effect on the opinions and beliefs of those in, say, farming communities in northern Manitoba. It would be interesting to see what the people who still live in my grandpa's hometown think of the practice of cremation today.
In contrast, I've grown up in cities, and I've had access to a high school education and beyond. I don't have a problem with cremation... in fact, it seems almost "polite" to take up the smallest amount of space possible once you are no longer living. My husband and I have a friend who died overseas, and returning his body to Canada would have been prohibitively expensive, so his ashes were at his funeral along with a Power Point presentation full of pictures of his life projected onto a big screen.
As an interesting aside, my grandpa and my late grandma had photo albums full of pictures of funerals... including pictures of bodies in open caskets. Apparently this was a normal thing to do where they lived and at that time. I can't even imagine bringing a camera to a funeral today! I think I'd be squeamish about having pictures of my loved ones' corpses on my digital camera.
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