As a jewish person (I have always spelled it with a small J for reasons that I don't think need exploring at this juncture) I have personal 20th-century visceral objections to cremation that I admit have nothing to do with Torah, Talmud, Halacha, or any of that. I think my father did, too. Meanwhile my mother intends to donate her body to science and have cremated whatever science doesn't want. They couldn't agree on this; they finally arrived at, if he died first, she'd carry out his wishes for his remains, and if she died first and he couldn't bear to have her cremated, he'd bury her whole, and how would she even know? Which, all my other issues with my mother aside, I think was very big of her to end the conversation on that note. Then when my father was dying, and he told me he intended to be — is it interred? lodged? placed, anyway — in a crypt, as my aunt had been, and I surprised both of us by bursting into tears and all I could say was I didn't want to put him in a drawer. And as stubborn as he'd been about not being able to bring himself to do what my mother would want (moot, by that point, anyway), he revised his own plans and allowed us to bury him in the ground. (In, as it happens, a plot that can by local regulation take one coffin and up to four cremains, so they can be buried together even in their disparate states, because my brother and I do intend to do as Mom asks when the time comes.)
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As a jewish person (I have always spelled it with a small J for reasons that I don't think need exploring at this juncture) I have personal 20th-century visceral objections to cremation that I admit have nothing to do with Torah, Talmud, Halacha, or any of that. I think my father did, too. Meanwhile my mother intends to donate her body to science and have cremated whatever science doesn't want. They couldn't agree on this; they finally arrived at, if he died first, she'd carry out his wishes for his remains, and if she died first and he couldn't bear to have her cremated, he'd bury her whole, and how would she even know? Which, all my other issues with my mother aside, I think was very big of her to end the conversation on that note. Then when my father was dying, and he told me he intended to be — is it interred? lodged? placed, anyway — in a crypt, as my aunt had been, and I surprised both of us by bursting into tears and all I could say was I didn't want to put him in a drawer. And as stubborn as he'd been about not being able to bring himself to do what my mother would want (moot, by that point, anyway), he revised his own plans and allowed us to bury him in the ground. (In, as it happens, a plot that can by local regulation take one coffin and up to four cremains, so they can be buried together even in their disparate states, because my brother and I do intend to do as Mom asks when the time comes.)