In the southern Colorado town of Crestone, a woman gets an old-fashioned funeral.
Belinda Ellis’ farewell went as she wanted. One by one, her family placed juniper boughs and logs about her body, covered in red cloth atop a rectangular steel grate inside a brick-lined hearth. With a torch, her husband lit the fire that consumed her, sending billows of smoke into the blue-gray sky of dawn.
People do still occasionally light funeral pyres. The Pagan Book of Living and Dying (1997) describes one such in Texas. When I read that chapter, I suddenly understood references in Classical texts to “funeral games.”
It takes hours for the pyre to burn down, so what do you do in the meantime? Race your horses? Play volleyball?
But disregard the next-to-last paragraph in the Yahoo article—the legendary stuff. Crestone is a quirky place—and people work to keep it that way—but overall there is more “fakelore” generated about the San Luis Valley than about anywhere else in Colorado. People even say that I was born there.
Wonderful way to go.
As bonkers as I generally think Crestone people are, I’m very sympathetic here. It’s always nice to see folks taking back some control over death and its rituals from the funeral industry. Our Orthodox parish here is fighting that fight as well, building our own pine boxes, people wash and sit vigil over the dead, everything in house till they go in the ground. There’s even some space available on the grounds of the tiny monastery west of Abiquiu.
Of course, as we’ve discussed before, I’d still like to be left to mummify in a cliff in the desert.
That’s EXACTLY how I want to go.
I mean really!! Wouldn’t it be wonderful!