Posted: 2/9/2007 12:01:17 PM EDT
| Someone told my wife that they use acid now to cremate people. Could that possibly be true? Sounds like BS to me. |
Then they take the little bits of bone and teeth etc and put them in a device that looks like a blender and crush them further because if a family decides to spread the ashes, it is disturbing to see teeth etc. Most funeral homes do this with the ash. My dad was cremated and is resting an a lovely box on my living room shelf. I wanted to keep him in my home, rather than spread him. Got an education when I had to make arrangements. Nowadays in Texas they also attach a metal tag that wont melt to the body so that the remains are less likely to be mixed up with another persons "cremains" (I had asked at funeral home, because there was that story in the news at the time of the guy in GA or somewhere that wasnt really cremating remains etc) |
Yep, nothing left but a couple pounds of ash. My grandfather was a mortician and funeral director from the time he got home from the war until his death in 1998, but for about the last 6 years before his death he just sold monuments, I spent a many of days after school wandering and snooping around a 3 story funeral home. All but the basement were all the embalming and the cremations took place, but only because it had a push button lock on the door and elevator. 
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NO! All of the Retorts that I have seen will burn away everything and leave ash and large brittle chunks of the bigger bones. When the burning process is completed and cooled, the ash and bone fragments are put into a large blender/grinder and reduced to a very fine ash. 556mm |
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No, all that is left is the mineral component of bone and teeth. All organic material is burned away. I opened the shipping container when my dad's cremains arrived in the mail -- it looked like the poster above mentioned, like cement without aggregate, or mortar mix. Acid is not used, but tissue digesters are used for dead livestock, and have been proposed for people. In a digester, the body is boiled in a lye solution. Everything is dissolved except minerals in the bones. The liquid portion is flushed into the sewer, the bones are easily crumbled and can be treated like cremains. Somehow it seems disrespectful to flush your loved one's dissolved flesh into the sewer insteading of sending it cleanly up a chimney. 
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