Hey Dad, when someone gets cremated, does everything get cremated with them? Yes, basically anything they put in the casket will get cremated. Obviously the deceased themselves, but also their clothes, if you put in books and particular trinkets, the casket itself gets cremated because you do need something to actually put them into the cremator, which is a pretty hot unit. The only thing we don’t like in a cremation is glass, because glass is stone, so literally the cremator will melt it where it can and it will end up as chunks of horrible stone in the bottom of the cremator, which is really annoying for our floor.
One of the things is glasses, because glasses traditionally are made of glass. Some of the new ones are made of composite materials like resins and so forth, and they will melt. But the real glass ones, we prefer not to have those.
So we say to a family, can we take the glasses off? And often a family don’t know what to do with them. So what we say is, if we take them off, can we give them to the Lions Club, who will collect them and take them to the islands. And people over there who can’t afford prescription glasses or even reading glasses, they can have some glasses free.
So like these for example? Here’s our collection of glasses. So once the box is full, we actually ring the Lions Club and they come and pick them up. And these particular glasses are not all just from one person.
They’re obviously from lots of people. But sometimes we say, can we take the glasses off? And we take them off and put them in the box. And then a family will say, actually mum had three other pairs that she doesn’t use.
Can you give those to the Pacific Islands as well to be used? So really neat thing to be able to do. Those are mine, so I’ll take them out of the box. Really lovely thing to be able to do.
And if you want to know more about cremation and the process, ashes, etc., we’ve got a whole series of videos on that.
