She sleeps with the fishes
February 28, 2009 by cynthia
For $6,495, you can be the marine equivalent of a Christmas tree topper.
Eternal Reefs will take your cremated remains, mix them with concrete, pour them into a mold, add a bronze plaque and sink it into the sea. Voila! A coffin that’s also a coral reef.
They’ll carefully add the reeflet–which kinda looks like a whiffleball on steroids–to its fellows and the little coral beasties will get busy. In 50 years or so some scubatourist will break off a piece of you to gather dust in his curio cabinet.
Your loved ones not only get to help mix and pour you into your new home, they can also make handprints on you. (I think faceprints would be cooler). They get a GPS reading so they can find you later, if they want to visit.
Pets aren’t neglected: For $895, Fido can become a “pearl” next to his master (although he’s not allowed on the human reef). And soldiers are welcome, too, or at least they offer a picture of soldiers trying to drape an American flag over a concrete whiffleball.
There’s a heady synchronicity in this for glass casters: After all those years of making molds, you finally get to BE one.
I’ve always thought that glass artists were missing a bet not ending up in their own kilns; eerily, process temperatures for a dead body and industry-standard fusing glass are almost identical. And, according to a funeral director’s handbook I perused, “low and slow” firing is recommended as strongly for people as glass.*
Putting on my serious hat for a sec, this isn’t actually a bad idea, although I’m not sure it really solves much from an oceanic perspective: Coral beasties don’t lack for things to use in building reefs, they lack the ability to escape the torments of man.
Yet with prices starting at $2,495 (plus the cost of cremation and shipping the ashes to Eternal Reefs), this is probably a neat answer to horrendously overpriced funerals. You can pay more for a bigger whiffleball or preferential positioning: An extra $4k makes you that tree-topper I mentioned.
Price does not included stuffing other loved ones in the same whiffleball. And keepsakes–T-shirts, whiffleball replicas, duplicate bronze plaques and certificates, are extra.
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*Come to think of it, there’s more than one coincidence here. I once took a week-long glass class in a beautiful new facility. Every day, right before lunch, the smells of absolutely wonderful barbecue would drift through the classroom.
I love great BBQ, so each day I searched the neighborhood for that BBQ shack. No luck. On Friday I frustratedly asked an employee for directions, and he nearly burst a blood vessel laughing. “I think what you’re smelling,” he gasped, “is the crematorium next door.”
Put me off BBQ for months.
Raise the price even more to hire a fishing boat to visit the burial site occasionally with those GPS coordinates.
Honey, I have to buy a new fishing boat to visit grandma!
Speaking of BBQ smells, there is a large buiding that went up last year near the Clackamas DEQ with a huge smoke stack. When inquiring I was told it is a large animal crematorium. Guess years back when the zoo lost an elephant thay had a hell of a time properly disposing of the remains.
Your started this Cynthia, Ed
Why were you perusing a funeral director’s handbook is what I want to know!
Linda, rotflmao (or something like that!)
I hadn’t thought of the boat angle, Ed. Most of the boating people I know come up with some amazing ways to justify their addiction (kinda like us glassists, I guess), so this certainly will be a help.
Linda, the handbook was all in the name of research. Saw this Eternal Reefs stuff, got to thinking about it and wondered what temperatures are used in crematoriums. Next thing I knew I’d found what amounted to the user manual for a funeral home, online. Amazing what you can come across on the Web these days, and I now have a completely different perspective on bondo and taxidermy. (Don’t ask)
Overlooking the little barb about “scubatourists” (as a diver, I can assure you that 99% of us don’t break off bits of coral reef for souvenirs because we are the folks who really do love the reefs and wish to protect the living thing that coral is), I’d like to relate a deeply personal experience of leaving ashes on a reef. A very close friend, originally from Puerto Rico, was tragically killed a few months ago and I was one of four people who traveled from the Continental US to take some of her ashes “home.” She had always told me she wanted to be “in the ocean” and because she had been a diver, I knew she did not mean floating around on top of the sea foam. So in addition to the scattering of the ashes at various important (to her) places on land, I volunteered to take her down and put her on a coral reef. We found the perfect rock: heartshaped with a naturally occurring hole about the size of my thumb, and put some of her ashes inside and sealed it with a small cork–her life partner was uncomfortable with sealing the ashes inside with concrete. We found a cooperative dive operator who agreed to us taking over his entire boat for an afternoon and, since I was the only diver, to diving with me while I placed the rock as the others snorkeled above. We imagined they could watch from up there, but the viz was only about 15 feet that day, so that part didn’t work as well as we’d hoped. Our destination was an extraordinary coral reef, about 25-30 feet down. I took the rock down on the second dive. On board the boat, the snorkelers all passed the rock from one to another, each saying a silent good-bye. I put the rock into one of my bc pockets and the dive master and I headed down, with the understanding that when I found the perfect spot, I would place the rock in a protected area at the base of the reef where the coral would eventually grow onto it. The spot I located was spectacular, a small outgrowth of several different coral and sponges, framed by a huge sea fan, and close to the main reef, which it will soon grow into. I tucked her rock into the sand, with the cork facing down so as not to attract any curiosity seekers, should anyone ever come upon it (unlike coral, manmade things like corks are fair game as souvenirs or trash to be collected), pushed sand around it, said a silent good-bye to my dear friend and finished the dive. I don’t do underwater photography, so I was delighted to see a picture of a small outgrowth of coral, almost identical to the one where my friend’s rock was placed, on the cover of a tourist magazine, so her life partner could envision where she is. When we surfaced, I asked the dive master to point out where she was so we’d all have a general idea should we go there again. As he was pointing out the spot, a shaft of light fell across it, as a spectacular Caribbean sunset began. I could feel my dear friend smiling. I have no opinion about commercial operations doing something like that, although I am concerned about tossing pieces of concrete onto fragile eco-systems that are easily damaged. I doubt the dive industry thought this up. It was a wonderfully meaningful moment for us all, and one I will not soon forget. Our friend is at peace. The ceremony brought closure for me and I hope for others who loved her.
Hey, Nisa. I’m sorry for your loss, and I’ve known of several people who’ve had their ashes scattered at sea. Yours is a beautiful story and a wonderful way to find some closure, or at least some peace.
And as a diver myself, I know that it’s extremely bad form to disturb the underwater environments we visit, much less take a bunch of it home with you, but I also know it happens. And it’s a continuing problem in heavily traveled areas like Caribbean reefs, where you can get your “scuba” certification in a matter of hours. Hence “scubatourist.”