Perhaps it was the almost unending threat of contracting COVID-19, or maybe because I had just turned 67 with my wife close behind at 66, but the two of us decided it was time to write our wills. “This’ll be easy,” I thought. And to some extent it was. If I died, she got everything, the reverse being true as well. And if we both unexpectedly exited this world for the next at the same time, our kids would each get half. There. That’s done. But then, things got difficult. What to do with our earthly remains? For my wife, the decision had been made years before she met me. She wanted a traditional casket and funeral, interred near her parents where they resided, a cemetery in a suburb of Chicago. Aside from which music to play, a task which consumed the better part of three days (she decided upon What a Wonderful World by Louis Armstrong) the decision of how to repose on her final doze was easy. Myself, on the other hand … not so much. I had always planned on being cremated and having my ashes dumped in the ocean off the coast of San Diego’s Del Mar. This was how my parents had exited and I wished to follow their lead. The only difference would be that in their
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3rd Act magazine | fall 2021
Making a will was easy. But deciding about my earthly remains, well…
case, we chartered boats. Too expensive and not at all like me, I told my kin. Just paddle my ashes out on a boogie board and heave-ho. But now as I prepared to formally make my preferences known, I discovered something BY DAVE BACHMANN that put a bit of a damper on my plans. Namely, it’s illegal. Yep, according to the federal Clean Water Act, ashes must be spread three nautical miles from shore. And while I didn’t know how far a nautical mile was, I was pretty sure it was further than you could paddle on a boogie board. Which got me to thinking: How many legal ways are there to depose of one’s remains? Quite a few, I discovered. And some of them are pretty cool. On the esoteric side, you can have a vial of your ashes shot into space for $2,500. But if you want them to stay up, you’ll have to pay a little more, otherwise they’ll be coming back as a shooting star. You can have your ashes transformed into a living reef, complete with bronze plaque and GPS location. You can
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