While cremation is a good and economical alternative to a traditional burial funeral, many loved ones are left wondering what to do with the ashes afterwards. A few common solutions to this problem include displaying the ashes in an urn in the home, putting the urn in a columbarium, or spreading the ashes in a person's favorite spot. If you're looking for something a little more unique and memorable, however, here are three things you can do with cremated remains.
- When you attend a funeral, your priority is to offer your condolences to the family grieving the loss of a loved one. A few words of sympathy, a thoughtfully worded card and a kind hug can all help the family know that you care, but you can extend your caring approach by also offering your assistance with matters in the days following the service. Attend the funeral service armed with some ways you can help; while your interaction with the grieving family members is typically brief, you can use it to share some ideas about how you can lend a hand.
- If you've been putting off planning for your final journey because you want cremation and think that it should be easy to arrange at the time it's needed, think again. Cremation can be simple to arrange, of course, but if you have anything like gold teeth that you want returned to your family, you need to have a plan in place that the crematory agrees with. Dental gold can be somewhat controversial, because there are two different schools of thought regarding what happens to it during cremation.
- For some, the holidays are an enjoyable and exciting time of the year. For those that are grieving the death of a loved one, the opposite is often true. While there is nothing you can ever do to replace or even fill the void of a loved one who has passed, there are things you can do to help cope with your loss during the holidays and make this time of year more enjoyable.
- Planning a funeral is not something that most people would call enjoyable, but that does not mean that you cannot get a little creative with your own choices and end-of-life details. This is especially true when it comes to picking out the headstone that will be used to mark your burial plot in a cemetery. If you want to make a different type of impression than just the typical granite stone and block lettering, there are a few clever modern ideas that you can use for your headstone that you likely did not know were a possibility at all.