The late Lord Avebury memorably wanted to leave his body to Battersea dogs’ home, but the director thwarted his environmental aspirations. The withered corpse of an aged peer would not, he suggested, give much nourishment to the pooches in the charity’s care. Avebury’s next suggestion, a burial without a coffin so that vegetables could be grown atop the grave, also fell foul of regulations.
Ashes, however, are easier to scatter, and in recent years there has been a huge demand for ever more inventive ways of turning one’s bodily remains into something useful or memorable. One person wants to have his ashes run through an egg-timer, allowing his relatives not only to reflect edifyingly on the shortness of our human span, but also to time their eggs to perfection with the help of his powdered remains. A keen angler was delighted with his friend’s suggestion that his ashes could be moulded into fish bait — and would have seen divine providence in the result: his friend, using the bait on a lake in Thailand, hooked the largest carp ever caught in the lake.
Some have wanted their ashes to be blasted into space, landed on the Moon, scattered from mountain tops, spread over the oceans or forked into the soil around their favourite flowers. Companies are cashing in to offer ash-scattering boat trips on popular lakes, or incorporate remains into pyrotechnic displays. There are drawbacks: the herbaceous borders at Jane Austen’s house were groaning with piles of reverently offered ashes. Mosses and alpine plants on Ben Nevis risked dying from the calcium and phosphate in human ash.
The more challenging the use, the more some people are pleased. Turning ash into diamonds may be chemically possible, but it would take a vast sum to allow Uncle Fred to be worn on one’s ring. Surely the best is the still simplest: scatter the ashes over the soil or to the winds and remember.