Find Out What Happens To Your Body During A Cremation

Sep 14, 2018

No one wants to think about death, but we will all eventually die. At some point, people plan out their funeral arrangements. You want your family members to have a chance to grieve, so you take care of all the arrangements in advance. One of the first choices you have to make is whether you want to be buried or cremated.

Everyone has a different idea about what their funeral and burial will be liked. If you end up getting cremated, your body is basically put into an incinerator. Before you make this choice, learn more about what cremation actually entails.

There are many myths about what actually occurs inside a crematorium. Some people think that the coffins are resold. Another myth is that the ashes all get mixed together. Both of these myths are just not true.

The entire process starts by making the body ready for cremation. While you might believe that a crematorium immediately incinerates the body, this is actually not true. The crematorium is given three days to incinerate the remains, but they generally try to finish the cremation in just 24 hours.

Before they can cremate the body, they make sure that there is nothing left behind in the casket. They also check to see if the deceased had a pacemaker. If a pacemaker is placed in the incinerator, it causes a massive explosion that lifts the heavy incinerator seven inches into the air.

The next step is to wheel the body up to the machines. The first machine uses a gas-fueled flame. It heats up to a whopping 1,000 degrees Celsius. The incinerator is so hot that it will still be at 300 degrees on Monday if you used it on Friday afternoon.

Sometimes, people donate their body or individual body parts to science. If there is an incomplete body, the body parts will be burned on their own. Individual parts of one person are never burned with anyone else's body.

Once the body is placed in the incinerator, the entire process takes just 90 minutes. A spy hole is installed on the side so that staff members can see if there are visible flames left in the incinerator. When there are no more flames, the process is done.

Waste particles are sucked out of the incinerator during the cremation process. This is done to filter out any mercury from teeth fillings. The goal is to keep mercury from going into the environment.

Now that the body has been reduced to ashes, they are raked together. The sand-like ashes are allowed to cool for an hour. These ashes may weigh more or less depending on the person's bone density, but they generally weight about as much as the individual did when they were born.

After the ashes have cooled, they are placed in a different machine. This machine sifts through the ashes for things like hip replacements or jewelry. Each stage of the process requires another form to be filled out. By doing this, the crematorium prevents any mix-ups or missing remains.

Later on, the deceased''s relatives come to the crematorium. They can take the ashes with them to distribute, or they can leave the ashes at the crematorium.

Now that you know what happens during a cremation, do you want your body to go through it? Find out what your friends think about the cremation process.