(no subject)
She still remembers the first funeral she went to: her great-aunt’s, when she was nine. As her mom helped her brush her hair out after the service, before she went to bed, she squeezed Bekki’s shoulder and said, “When I die, I don’t want an open coffin, honey. I want to be cremated.”
Not exactly something you should probably tell your nine-year-old, especially your nine-year-old with a tendency for morbidity.
“Why, Mom?”
“Well, I don’t want people to see me when I’m dead,” she said, as if this was a perfectly normal conversation. “I don’t think that’s necessary.”
As she grew up, Bekki learned that in some forms of Christianity, they believed cremation was wrong because at the judgment day you’d need your body again and without it you couldn’t go to heaven. Descriptions of this event sounded less to her like a holy experience and more like a zombie apocalypse, which - though granted, she believed in heaven - was probably more likely.
For a while she thought, “I’d never want to be cremated, that’s icky.” Someone might spill your ashes on their carpet or something, and then you’d just get vacuumed up and thrown away. But she didn’t like the idea of her body decaying over hundreds of years, either.
“Remember when you first told me you wanted to be cremated?” she asked her mom, some years later - home from college, for her grandmother’s funeral this time. “It scared the crap out of me.”
“I didn’t mean it to, honey.”
“Of course not, but seriously? You don’t tell your nine-year-old to start planning her mom’s funeral. It like… scarred me. I obsessed over burial for ages after.”
“I’m sorry,” her mom said, mildly perturbed. “C’mon, now. Get dressed; we have to leave for the church in a few minutes.”
Bekki St. James
original character
299 words