Families that want to celebrate and remember their French heritage choose the fleur dis lis symbol to represent. This pendant can be engraved on the back and contains a chamber for a trace amount of storage for ashes or lock of hair.
Family Business and Junk Jewelry
During the interview on the memorial service in Colorado, Donnas’ caring philosophy for her aging parents really made me think about some of the families we’ve served that don’t have the stellar communication skills that her family has. The fighting, resentment, and confusion manifests and creates a taxing environment that spills out and splashes everyone around them. This theory of discussing family business without spouses involved seems to simplify a complicated conversation. Eliminating the distance also helps, she’s lucky in that most of her siblings are in the area.
Donna also mentioned the friend that crafted necklaces and bracelets from her mother’s collection of costume jewelry to give to the granddaughters as a personal memorial.
My friend Susan recycles junk jewelry into brooches that are a small reminder of the person that wore them. She’s created beautiful memory jars using found objects like stray game pieces and interesting bits of metal.
Here she’s mounted a photo to an old eyeglass lens. I believe the trendy term is “up-cycled”. I call it trash to treasure.
Ceramic Cremation Urns: The Time to Buy is Now
The time to buy a ceramic cremation urn is when you see one that catches your eye. Each urn is a one of kind piece and often families that are shopping for an urn online, see a ceramic or pottery style cremation urn and bookmark it, only to come back at their time of need and the item has sold. We can always create an urn similar to the one they saw or a custom work of art, but the family needs to be prepared to wait two to four weeks.
This happened to a West Coast widow who wanted a Raku urn for her terminally ill husband. She saw the urn, liked it, but when she came back to buy a couple of weeks later, it was sold.
She ordered two gingko leaf urns for her husband who spent his final days in a room with a view of a gingko tree outside the window. The family held a memorial service at the golf course and filled one of the urns with his favorite cigars, golf balls and tees and other remembrances. The other urn was used to bury his ashes.
Forged from natural materials and fire, ceramic is a time-honored material that can be used to craft an array of fine art items. This includes ceramic cremation urns. If you are looking for a way to hold your loved one’s remains in a tasteful work of art, you may want to choose a ceramic cremation urn as your solution.
Shovel by Shovel, We Committed our Parents Ashes
This past weekend, my friend Donna and her family buried her parent’s remains in the beautiful Sangre de Cristo Mountains in Colorado. It was a beautiful goodbye. Donna has been an inspiration to me through the years and she was kind enough to answer questions about planning a memorial service for two sets of ashes.
Were both of your parents cremated?
Yes, both parents were cremated following their funerals. We had open caskets in the foyer of the church, and we escorted the closed caskets into the ceremony at the church where they worshiped. We chose very special urns for each of them. Cremation took place the same day as the funerals. We received their urns the next Day.
How long did you wait after their passing before scheduling this ceremony?
Because our Dad passed away suddenly on Christmas Day, at the age of 88, our Mom was cared for by all eight of us siblings in their home of 64 years. At 90+ years, Mom was sometimes confused, about where he went. We took pictures of her saying good bye to him at the funeral and had to gently remind her he was in heaven and shared the pictures of her saying goodbye. His urn was kept in her China cupboard until she passed away in their home 1.5 years later.
With 8 kids in the family, was it hard to get everyone to agree on the idea, or was this preplanned by your parents?
My Dad always told us to bury him in Tercio, CO. Mom didn’t want to be buried there because she says it gets too cold and far from home. She wanted to stay closer to ‘home’. After some inquiry about the cemetery there in Tercio, where my Dad grew up, we decided they both should be buried there. At first, I felt sad to leave their remains out there, but it is such a beautiful place and they had a ranch not far from there that they visited and loved for 20 years after my Dad’s retirement.
Was this in a cemetery or private land?
It is a very old cemetery and most folks buried there are local families.
My brothers worked with the folks that managed the cemetery. They requested that we not drive on the property but keep vehicles outside the fence.
One week before the burial, all 6 brothers prepared the site and brought the beautiful granite marker and base. Then the day before the burial , our youngest brother, dug the 3′ X 3′ hole and later in the day, we all watched as our brothers laid their urns in an urn vault and sealed them. The next day, the ashes were transported to the cemetery. At the cemetery, the urn vaults were wrapped in a white sheet next to the hole where they were buried.
After a familiar church song and prayer and scripture reading led by my sister who is a licensed Minister, four of the oldest nephews lowered the sheet in to the hole and wrapped the sheet around the urn vaults. Each of us, shovel by shovel committed our parents ashes to the beautiful mountains.
There was so much peace and strength from each other. Every one who wanted to share their appreciation to our parents, did so. Very warm and caring with tears and laughter. One special person, took all of our Mom’s costume jewelry, necklaces, beads, earrings and fashioned bracelets and necklaces for all the female survivors, daughters, daughters in law, grand daughters, grand daughters in law…each picked something they would treasure.
Anything else you’d like to add?
Because there are so many of us surviving siblings, we always met or included each other in any decisions by meeting in person or texting. We made decisions by only meeting with the siblings and not our spouses. We knew our parents, and we knew how they expected us to be respectful of each other with love and dignity. We were taught to love God, despise evil and make good choices. We are very close to each other. I am glad I moved back here to help with our parents.
The Last Word on Infant Urns
Because it’s too horrible to think about. Last night I was catching up on some blog reading and I got sucked into the Funeral Sauce. He describes a trip to pick up a dead baby at the hospital:
“and she wasn’t in the morgue yet, so i brought a regular baby carrier so that i could inconspicuously carry her through the hospital with a blanket over it because they won’t let you just carry a dead baby through the hospital obviously…omg it was so terrible…we looked like brand new gay dads and everybody was staring. we were totally dressed the part.” Read more at Funeral Sauce.