When someone gets cremated, their bodies are burned with dozens of other dead people. Addie told me this three days after her grandmother died.

            “So that urn sitting on my parent’s mantelpiece in Alabama—the one holding my great aunt—that’s not just my great aunt?” I asked, scraping my fork across my plate to grab the last pieces of scrambled eggs.

            “Nope, who knows how many dead Alabamians are mixed up in there.”

            “It’s still seems like less of a hassle than burying, don’t you think?”

            Taking a bite of peanut butter toast, Addie shrugged and held up her right index finger—a sign she had well-informed answer. Addie was never one to answer something she hadn’t already heavily Google researched hours beforehand. Whereas I preferred to ruminate on questions for hours until I decided I’d never figure it out, Addie always turned to books or the internet.

            Finger aloft, she swallowed and cleared her throat with mock authority.

            “Neither way is cheap, that’s for sure. Cremating costs a fortune, but you know what else costs a fortune? Caskets. Tombstones. Funeral services.” She paused to take a sip of coffee, wrapping both hands around her thick, clay mug. “The tombstones and services I get, but why pay a fortune for a piece of wood you see for 30 minutes before it’s shoved underground forever? Take that money, and use it to pay off my debt when I’m dead. Don’t throw it away on my rotting carcass.”

            I set my fork down on my empty plate, and leaned back on the wobbling wooden chair we bought off Craigslist.

            “So what would your family do with your body?” I asked, unable, or maybe just unwilling, to think of an alternative on my own.

            “I’d still be cremated, I think, but I don’t want them to save my ashes. If I’m gone, I’m gone. Leave me in the furnace. No need to throw me across an open field with dozens of other burned grandma and grandpas.”

            Nodding my head, I watched her finish her toast and clear her throat. I sensed there was more, so I waited.

            “They got my grandma’s name wrong on her casket, by the way,” she said. “No one even noticed until after the funeral, and the funeral home was so embarrassed they said they would be sure to change it that afternoon.”

            “They put names on caskets? I guess I only thought tombstones had names.”

            “They both do…think about how unnecessary that is.”

            She set her plate aside and shook her head.

            “Why on earth does it matter if the name is wrong? No one’s gonna see it once it’s buried. Completely pointless.”

            “It might add to closure though,” I offered, thinking about my recent re-watching of Coco. Addie continued to shake her head.

            “Funeral homes make a shit-ton of money, though, that’s for sure. They play their customers like pros….if you’re grieving, you don’t have time to think logistically about how much money you’re paying for a beautifully made casket that literally no one will ever see after the funeral.”

            “True. But I feel like people like knowing their relatives are enclosed in something they picked out and chose specifically for them.” I thought back to a Whitman poem I’d read junior year of college, about a soldier holding a dying boy in his arms, wishing for a service and a crowd of people to honor the small body he would have to walk away from in just a few moments time. The narrator didn’t understand how he’d later come to terms with this one death. If there was no funeral, would that boy be forgotten?

            A thousand-dollar casket probably wasn’t what he was wishing for, but it might have helped.

            The conversation initially started when we found out our neighbor’s cat was cremated. Addie had never heard of cremating animals.

            “It is absurd that someone would spend that money on burning a pet when you can just shove it in the ground in your backyard,” she said. Setting her coffee down, she picked up her toast and brushed burnt crumbs from her lap before taking a bite.

            “What if you live in an apartment?” I asked.

            “You can find a park,” she said through her toast.

            I didn’t argue, but I suddenly remembered that my parents had cremated our first dog, a golden retriever named Nellie. When I told Addie this, she didn’t skip a beat.

            “Think of everything else your family could have used that money for!” She shrieked.

            “We scattered the ashes in the Frio River in West Texas–it was really nice….I think.”

            I hadn’t actually been there, but I liked the idea of Nellie drifting down the river until an inevitable drought came and she then would sink into the algae covered rocks to then be eaten by discolored catfish.

            “All of our pets are at the base of our barn. One on top of another. Boom–done.” She snapped her fingers for emphasis.

            I sat in silence, taking a sip of lukewarm coffee as she became more and more aggravated thinking about all the money wasted in the world on cremating animals. I pictured a sacrificial mountain of animal carcasses.

            “Maybe we should bring back funeral pyres. Worked for people in medieval times,” I said, not knowing if medieval times was right, but remembering a pyre scene from Game of Thrones that felt like what you’d call medieval. “Throw everyone, humans and animals alike, on a big ass raft of logs, push it out towards the ocean, problem solved!”

            I reached down to scratch my foot, and noticed a dead beetle under the table. I made a mental note to sweep the floor after breakfast.

            Addie tilted her head to one side, considering my idea.

            “I’d feel bad for the fish.”

            “Yeah….but wouldn’t it be more food for them?”

            “Not once it’s burned. They’d think they were getting a full on meal, but it would all turn to ash once they go their little fish mouths on it.”

            I nodded, wondering why I hadn’t already thought of that. I ran my finger around the edge of my empty plate, my mind wandering back to the caskets.

            “Do you believe in ghosts?” I asked.

            “Definitely not.”

            “Me neither, but—“ I stopped, watching a spider web blowing in the wind from the air vent in the corner. Addie looked at me and raised her eyebrows.

            “But?”

            I shifted in my chair and pulled my eyes away from the web. Do spiders leave their webs during the day, or did it fall into the vent? Remembering the dead beetle, I realized the spider probably died, leaving the web to float for days, maybe weeks, before falling apart.

            “Walking across a graveyard is still eerie. You’re outnumbered everywhere you walk.”

            “Oh yeah, it’s creepy as shit, don’t get me wrong. There are countless people stacked one on top of the other….” She trailed off, and I could see her wondering how many people there are in the average graveyard.

            She reached for her phone to check.

            “Did your grandma get buried by other family members?”

            Eyes still on her Google search, she shook her head.

            “Not that I’m aware of….I wonder if you get discounted on cemetery space if you do that.”

            Another Google search.

            I shuffled my feet around and felt the beetle’s bent legs with my pinky toe. I thought about the two funeral services I’d been to—Margy and Bones, my mom’s parents. I only remembered the church services, not the burial part. Did we cremate them, or have them buried? I couldn’t remember. I hoped they were burned. Even if they were mixed up with other body parts, I preferred that to decaying organs.

            “I want to be cremated and buried,” I decided. “Plant me in the ground in a field next to an ant bed and let the ants build a colony with my burned legs and another person’s great uncle’s arms.”

            “Maybe a groundhog will burrow through your ashes and breathe in your body parts while it sleeps.”

            “I hope it’s a rabbit, they’re softer.”

            We sat in silence, Addie scrolling through her phone while I leaned my head back and looked around for more abandoned spider webs.

            “Roughly 2,500,” she said.

            “Roughly 2,500 what?”

           “Roughly 2,500 bodies per acre in a cemetery. If ghosts were real and you were walking around a graveyard, you’d join them. Quickly.”

            “If ghosts were real, I doubt they’d stick to just the graveyard,” I replied, standing up and walking to the closet.

            “If ghosts were real, I bet they’d be angry at their families for trapping them in a smelly box made of entirely too nice wood.”

            I muttered in agreement and grabbed our broom. Sweeping up the beetle under the table, I looked over at our candles and wondered if he’d want to burn slowly, turning into ash that smelled of Tahitian Vanilla.

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