DID YOU KNOW THAT YOU COULD DECORATE THE CREMATION CASKET?

People struggle with how to personalize cremation. Death occurs. The funeral director arrives. The deceased is lifted, covered, and rolled away. Then a smooth plastic box containing milled cremated remains (actually bone fragment) is presented two or three days later. Of course a service is possible with the body before cremation, or with an urn afterwards, but did you know that you could pay your funeral director (or a home funeral guide) to bring the cremation casket to your home so that you and your family members could decorate it? Check out Olivia Bareham's Sacred Crossings website and see what one California firm is helping families do in and around Los Angeles. The photographs of children at work with their designs and notes are gorgeous. You'd think a family's amateur efforts might not be consistently excellent, but miraculously, these home decorated boxes are always terrific and families feel like they're healing themselves by partaking in efforts so artistic and different. Thanks to Olivia, Char Barrett, Jerrigrace Lyons, Beth Knox, Lee Webster, and Peggy Quinn--all stalwart members of the The National Home Funeral Alliance for directing me to this remarkable concept. In the past six months, I've introduced the idea of decorating the box to several families who've written ardent messages of farewell on simple cremation caskets in Green-Wood Cemetery's crematory chapels in Brooklyn, New York.

Photos at top, right and left, courtesy of Olivia Bareham of Sacred Crossings in Los Angeles

A pine casket decorated in the crematory chapel at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn.

This is how you turn a simple, inexpensive cardboard casket into a loving vessel.