Why Cremation?

My 17 year old daughter and I recently attended the funeral of her classmate’s father.

During the ceremony, I began to wonder why some people choose cremation, though this man did not. Sites that promote cremation argue for lower cost, convenience, a smaller burial ground, or more options for a final resting place, or places. But I wonder if some people choose cremation to avoid the process of decay. It is disturbing, even devastating to imagine the decaying body of a loved one or one’s own decaying body. Cremation advances that body to its final physical state, like decay, except quickly and deliberately.

Perhaps in this way cremation feels like care. When a loved one dies, we begin caring for the deceased’s body in so many ways—respecting what bodily integrity remains, transporting it, preparing it for burial, placing it at the center of ritual celebration and then carrying it to the place of burial. The pallbearers carry a beautifully lined casket in which their loved one’s body will decay. But cremation bypasses decay, and the deceased’s body quickly returns to dust.

The Christian tradition, offering its witness to the Resurrection, resists cremation. Disintegration is not the body’s final state. When the Apostles and other disciples recognized the resurrected Jesus, they saw a person whose body they assumed to be decaying in the grave. But there he was bearing the wounds of the crucifixion along with all his familiar features.

Decay and cremation both destroy a loved one’s familiar features, but cremation’s destruction does it by a chosen act, even though destruction is not the intent. The practice of cremation involves us in death’s destruction, in spite of ourselves. If the resurrection of the dead is true, cremation acts against our final end.

I still think cremation’s destruction of the body is disturbing, but I can see why some people choose it.