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Our passing conversation has stayed with me over the last year or so. And so, I composed the following letter to my mother and father.

Dear Mom and Dad,
These are the reasons why I don’t want to cremate you when you die. These are the reasons why I want to bury you in a simple way.

First, bodies are sacred.
We agree that life is fleeting—and I know that the older you become the more sensitive you become to this—but it is exactly because life is fleeting that our bodies are sacred. What you do with yours is much of what you leave here when you die. Our actions are sacred—or, have the potential to be sacred—as much as our meditations and prayers are so. Too often, I think, we assume that what we do ‘in our heads’ is more valuable than what we do in our bodies. What you do with your body is what you know to be true.

One of the many poignant stories from the 9/11 World Trade Center disaster is the story of the death of a New York City Fire Department Chaplain, a Franciscan. In the midst of the terror, while performing Last Rites to the dying, he was struck by flying debris and killed. When his body was discovered, the fire fighters draped his body in a sheet and carried it to the nearby church where he lived. They placed him on the altar and gathered around to pray. His body was meaningful because what he did in it was also full of meaning.

Mom, when you take the hand of the old woman at the soup kitchen, and Dad, when you sing out strong your love for God, you are showing your bodies to be sacred places. Can you see, then, why your physical body remains meaningful to me after you are done with it—why I would like to at least show it respect as one might a holy book (by burying it)? You created a lot of meaning in there.

Medieval Christians were fanatical on this point. Holy relics of the saints were big business. Pilgrims would travel for months on foot to reach a cathedral or some other holy place where they could see, or even touch, one of the bones of the martyrs, or a drop of the Virgin Mary’s blood, or some other piece of physical remembrance of someone’s body. A few years ago, I saw an exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum in New York of marble icons from a monastery in Egypt. I was struck when the tape-recorded guide pointed out the portions of the marble that appeared to have been rubbed off by hundreds of years of caressing and kissing the images. What devotion! I thought.

I don’t want to keep your bones around so that I can touch and kiss them, but I can understand—and even admire—the emotion and passion behind these actions.

I like to have icons around our house. I also like to have pictures of your parents and grandparents around. I keep many books around, too—books that, in many cases, I read years ago and may not read in detail again. But I like to be around people like Kierkegaard, Teresa of Avila, Dostoevsky, and Flannery O’Connor. Who wouldn’t? The people behind our images are reminders of who we want to be. After you are gone, I want to be around you when I can. I want to be reminded—not of who you were—but of who you are—because our lives here are fleeting, and like a work of art, we live on in ways that we do not know or even understand.

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