Ways to Honor Cremation Ashes
Something we get asked a lot by our clients is what they should do to honor the cremated remains of their loved ones. There’s one size fits all way to honor your loved one’s remains, since they were a unique individual with preferences, beliefs, and emotions specific to them. However, there are a few options that appeal to a broad section of our clients that you should be aware of.
Choosing the Best Vessel For Your Loved One
We offer a wide range of urns and vessels that are a good way to respectfully house your loved one’s cremated remains (sometimes called “cremains”). This is a very traditional way to honor your loved one’s remains, yet it offers a lot of unique options.
Different families choose different ways to care for their vessel. Some place them in a place of honor like a mantle. Others keep their loved ones more privately in their bedroom, or even in a closet if seeing the loved one often is too difficult. What you choose to do today doesn’t limit what you can do in the future. Even if you store your loved one in a vessel for years, you can still choose to scatter them or pursue any of the other options below later.
Make a Memorial Gems
In recent years it has become popular to turn the cremated remains of your loved one into an artificial gem. This can be quite expensive to accomplish this, but it creates a family heirloom unlike any other. These gems can stand alone or be set in jewelry, or otherwise used as a unique and powerfully symbolic adornment.
Commit Them To a Memorial Reef
There are a few projects building artificial reef memorial monuments at sea. Perhaps the best-known example is the Neptune society’s reef. The idea here is that our honored dead become the foundation for a whole living ecosystem. This is especially appropriate if your loved one was concerned about the environment and especially the oceans. Reefs have been receding around the world for decades, and efforts like this help the ocean to stay healthy, even if in a small way.
Plant a Memorial Tree
There are biodegradable, earth-friendly urns and vessels available that can be buried safely and accessed by the roots of plants for nutrition. This lends itself to the planting of your loved one’s favorite tree in their honor over their final resting place and allowing a tree that will shelter their home in life, and progeny, for generations to come. This is a beautiful way to keep a lost loved one involved in your life every day.
Scattering Cremated Remains
Scattering a loved one’s cremains can be a deeply symbolic and beautiful act, connecting and dedicating them for all time to the places they most loved in life. Choosing the right place, or places to spread their ashes can be very challenging, even overwhelming. You might want to choose several places that mattered to them, especially if it is proving very difficult to choose just one.
There are also less common options that are of potential symbolic value, depending on the preferences and passions of your loved one. For example, have you considered scattering their ashes in the sea? From a plane in the air? These are entirely viable possibilities and are very appropriate expressions of a person’s passions in many cases. There are too many ways to honor your loved ones by scattering their remains for us to list them all.
The Rules About Scattering Ashes
Rules and regulations around scattering ashes vary from state to state. You can find the rules for Maine summarized by an actual attorney here. We do not provide legal advice as a crematorium, however, there are a few things you should keep in mind about the legalities around spreading ashes in Maine.
Private Land
Generally speaking, if you own private land, you are permitted to spread ashes there as you please without worrying about violating regulations or ordinances. If you do not own the land, you should get permission from the landowner, but there aren’t further limits.
Municipal Public Land
If you’re planning to spread ashes on local public land, such as in a public park, make sure you check local ordinances as this can vary by the county, town, and even district within a town.
Federal Public Land
Some national parks have guidelines around scattering ashes available on their websites. You should get permission if there isn’t already a clear policy in place.
The Ocean
The Environmental Protection Agency has some specific rules around cremated remains. You need to scatter the ashes at least 3 nautical miles from shore, and not near or on the beach, tide pools, or shallows. If you have a non-biodegradable container, you must not dump the container into the ocean with the remains. You must also notify the EPA within 30 days of scattering the ashes.
The Sky
Federal guidelines do not prohibit spreading cremated remains by air. Note, you cannot drop anything that is considered hazardous, so you cannot drop a vessel or urn, only the actual remains, from a plane.
Regarding Freshwater
Avoid contaminating any freshwater with cremated remains. This could be detrimental to humans and wildlife in the area. There are specific restrictions around this under the clean water act, and you may need a permit from the agency that protects an associated waterway if your inland ceremony might affect a waterway. Try to avoid scattering ashes in areas with heavy or frequent foot traffic, as this can not only lead to interruptions but to upset pedestrians. If you’re in a semi-wild space, like a park, consider going a little off-trail to avoid this issue.
Scattering ashes by air
While there are no state laws on the matter, federal aviation laws do prohibit dropping any objects that might cause harm to people or property. The U.S. government does not consider cremains to be hazardous material; all should be well so long as you remove the ashes from their container before scattering.
