Dressing Up Death

This morning I read a news tidbit about a woman who is outraged because her son's ashes were returned to her in a Wal-Mart shopping bag. The funeral home director, in his own defense, explained that he had been asked to divide the ashes into four parts for family members to share, and was hard-pressed to find enough plastic bags, so he cut up a large one from Wal-Mart, being careful not to use the logo. But the woman, a regular shopper at the store, recognized the bag anyway.  She was devastated, claiming it was "disrespectful to her son's memory."

Now here is my question: Would she rather they had used a Neiman Marcus bag, or maybe a pretty blue Tiffany box? Was it the fact that Wal-Mart is a discount mill that bothered her, or was it perhaps the fact that her son died of a heart ailment at age 17? And really, dividing up the ashes so everyone could have some seems really rude to the dead person, in fact much worse than the Wal-Mart bag if you ask me.

My mother was cremated and her remains arrived, via UPS, in a paint can. Ditto my father. My sister and I transferred them into two nice porcelain urns, but we certainly kept them all together. In fact, now they are literally together, since one day my sister got angry remembering her abusive childhood, and so combined their ashes into one container, declaring, "Now they can fight for eternity!" But that's another story. The fact is, they were both pretty dead--they were ashes. I doubt I would have felt better if they showed up in nicer containers. This is something that not many of us truly understand. They should teach Death in grade school--okay, junior high--instead of algebra. Algebra is used by just a few people in later life, whereas death comes to everyone.