Monday, August 11, 2014
I just learned something!
Most news articles are sources of negative knowledge. You learn nothing true, and often a truth is sucked out of your mind and irresistibly replaced by a lie.
Here's an article that taught me something! Headline: Remains of 5 Jonestown victims were found in a Delaware funeral home.
Background: The military cleaned up Jonestown and took the bodies back to Dover, just as it does with dead soldiers. From there the remains were quietly returned to families and friends. A few were cremated and kept in a funeral home in Dover, with no claimants for 44 years. The funeral home closed last year, and the bank just now got around to checking the inventory.
The AP reporter tried to make it seem scandalous but failed. It's just sad.
Now the positive learning:
It's not unusual for families to authorize cremation and then leave the ashes unclaimed at funeral homes, said Torbert and other Delaware funeral directors. "I'm going to say most all funeral establishments have cremains in storage that people have not come to collect," said Harvey Smith, secretary of the Delaware State Funeral Directors Association.Think about that. Mortuaries are willing to spend money on maintaining and organizing containers of ashes, potentially forever, because respect is their stock in trade. Nice to see a business focusing on respect and reliability, and thinking beyond the next microsecond, in this cold hard derivative world. Almost serious sidenote: Since funeral directors are the only businessmen who still have the proper attitude for banking, and since bankers are no longer in the banking business, maybe undertakers could sort of sidestep into banking. Offer prepaid funeral accounts with optional interest-bearing surplus, and offer loans for cemetery plots with optional house on separate lot. The former could be called Certificates of Death-posit, and the latter already has the right name. (Look up the etymology of Mortgage.) ¶ 5:52 PM
