Are my lungs haunted?

My dad’s memorial is tomorrow (THANK GOODNESS I JUST WANT TO GO HOME TO KENTUCKY AND SLEEP IN MY OWN BED I AM SO TIRED), and one of the final preparations my sister and I had to make was transferring his cremains from the basic crematorium urn to the Frank Lloyd Wright urn.

The Frank Lloyd Wright urn isn’t actually related to or licensed by the famous architect—please don’t sue me, Wright estate. But my dad was an architect, and he was a fan of Wright’s, so I googled “Frank Lloyd Wright urn” until I found something that evoked the Prairie School.

This is a good time to reiterate that you do not have to use an urn from the crematorium! You can get an inexpensive urn from them (or no urn at all) and later transfer the cremains into basically whatever you want. Lots of urns available online, of course, but you can even use a pretty jar from the thrift store if you prefer. However, urns are designed to be more difficult to open so that you don’t get any leaks—random thrift store jars, not so much.

Another thing to know is that even inside an urn, cremains are usually kept in a plastic bag. It’s much less messy that way and makes future transfers easier. The bags are often zip tied, and have a tag from the crematorium for reference.

Of course, in order to move Dad from one urn to the other, we had to snip those zip ties and dig in.

Cremains are very soft and chalky—sort of like talcum powder—and they have little shards of bone that didn’t quite grind down all the way. When I say little, I mean little—you’re unlikely to find a patella in there. And they’re not really ashes! The crematorium fires are too hot for that. They’re literally bone dust.

Anyway, my sister and I found that the easiest way to transfer the cremains was to use a Solo cup—please don’t sue me, Dart Container Corporation. Though the Solo cup is more commonly used for swigging cheap beer, we found that its flexibility made it an ideal scooping device. We could easily squish it into the correct shape to avoid spills.

I do think I inhaled some bone dust, though, so my lungs may be haunted.