Girlfriend wants to flush dead dad down the shitter.

Xix

My girlfriend's dad passed away recently. They did not have a good relationship together. NOW she will be in possession of his ashes, and she wants to flush them right down the shitter (toilet).

Is this at all a good idea? On one hand, I guess she really hates her dad that much, but on the other... God damn, you live your whole life, experience all its joys and struggle through all its hardships, only to end up flushed down a fuckin toilet in the end? I never met her dad, so I don't really have an opinion either way, but holy fuck this seems kind of fucked up...

If anything, will this fuck up our toilet? Is this even legal? I don't know shit about plumbing neither does she.

Ethically, what do you guys think? Could we be haunted forever by her dad? HELP!

WhiteZinfandel

Ethically, it's her decision. Someone else will have to answer the part about plumbing.

Nana

That is pretty sad.
If she really doesn't care at all I think it would be better to just throw the ashes out versus flushing them down the toilet.
I think the ashes may clog your toilet and there are also small bone fragments which should probably be kept out of the sewer system. (I don't know too much about plumbing honestly.)
I don't know if either of you have dealt with cremains before but it can be a bit messy. There will be some super fine powdery ashes that will likely get all over everything in your bathroom, along with the more normal ashes and the tiny bone fragments. Seeing the small pieces of bones can be upsetting for someone who was expecting just ashes.

If having the ashes in her possession is bothering her greatly perhaps you can offer to dispose of them for her? If she does not have the cremains yet you can contact the company that cremated him and ask that they dispose of the ashes.

Best of luck.

ceres

If he has another family member to whom they would mean something giving them to that person would probably be ideal, but I guess she'll do what she wants.

I would not let someone do that in a toilet I had to use, though. If she were that dedicated she could find someone who didn't care and use their toilet.

Siska

If it's legal or not depends on where you live. But yeah, flushing it down the toilet has the risk of getting very messy. I would suggest finding some other way to dispose of the remains.

Elin

Xix wrote: »

My girlfriend's dad passed away recently. They did not have a good relationship together. NOW she will be in possession of his ashes, and she wants to flush them right down the shitter (toilet).

Is this at all a good idea? On one hand, I guess she really hates her dad that much, but on the other... God damn, you live your whole life, experience all its joys and struggle through all its hardships, only to end up flushed down a fuckin toilet in the end? I never met her dad, so I don't really have an opinion either way, but holy fuck this seems kind of fucked up...

If anything, will this fuck up our toilet? Is this even legal? I don't know shit about plumbing neither does she.

Ethically, what do you guys think? Could we be haunted forever by her dad? HELP!

I promise this is a serious answer. I know how your girlfriend is feeling, and I'd have the same inclination. That being said, don't clog up your own toilet, use a port a potty that won't be clogged. Symbolically, same thing. Legality ... I don't know, I suppose it counts as depositing human remains which is a no-no I think.

Gaddez

The answer is simple: find a really crappy bar and flush the ashes there.

The Ender

Is this at all a good idea?

No, it is a terrible idea, for reasons everyone has already stated. At the very least, with no other ethical considerations, you will clog your plumbing and leave a nasty mess in the bathroom. At worst, other family members hear about this and you get to ride out The Great Year of the Urn Flushing Drama.

If she really can't stand the remains being in her home, give them to a different family member or pour them outside (and if she does the latter, be prepared for an emotional eruption. It is not usually easy to watch all that fine dust & bone dump out, even if you didn't like the person).

Grunt's Ghosts

I had a similar case. My dad destroyed my childhood, almost killed my mom and sister, and the effects of the abuse he cause can still be seen in my family to this day. My father died from a drug overdose. I had said for years that I would piss on his grave (like many people have said before me). When the moment came, I stood there, dick out. And I couldn't drop a drop.

I just cried.

I still haven't done it, almost 5 years later. Nor have I gone back to his grave. But I'm glad I didn't stoop to such a childish level to seek revenge against someone who isn't even here to receive it. If I knew you all, I would tell her that it doesn't help to give into your emotions. Her father is dead. The stuff he did don't matter anymore. What horrible things he did to her (if its like that) will never happen again and she's free of him.

Then she needs to take the ashes to another person who cared about him or do the Hollywood throw them out into the wind. She is better than her father. Stay that way.

Quid

I know how she feels but it very possibly would just clog the toilet.

If no one else wanted the remains I'd probably just toss them in to the trash and be done with it.

EclecticGroove

Don't do this. Don't do this in your toilet, don't do it in someone elses.

Note, that I don't say not to get rid of them. If it was really that bad, having them around is going ton be one hell of an ugly reminder of things she doesn't want to be reminded of every time she comes across them.

If there is no other family member around, or they all hated him just as much and don't want them. Do something else... take a drive somewhere, give her some space, let her dump them somewhere or release the whole thing out. Then you can toss the urn, and let her have as long as she wants. If she wants to talk, then talk, if she wants to not talk, then just be quiet. Whenever she's good to take off, then leave.

Then you can hopefully move on, go get some iced cream or something, head out to a good meal... whatever, just be done with it.

SmokeStacks

Cremated remains aren't "ashes" in the sense you would think they would be. Modern cremation burns the soft tissue and leaves nothing but the skeleton, which is then pulverized by a machine. Any remaining nonhuman material (jewelry or medical implants too large to remove before the cremation) are then filtered out.

The result is something more akin to fine sand with occasional bone fragments than traditional ashes, and the average adult male leaves around six and a half pounds of it.

This will absolutely fuck up your plumbing. If she's dead set on putting her father in a toilet tell her to dump them in a porta-potty.

She might think that by dumping his ashes in a toilet she is 'getting back' at her father for being a terrible parent, but the best thing for her to do would be to get rid of the ashes (either give them to another family member, or just throw them away), and 'get back' at her shitty father by putting him out of her mind and out of her life, and then moving on. The best revenge is and always will be living well.

I know how she feels, my father wasn't worth the air he breathed, and when I got his ashes I thought about throwing them away, partially to spite him, partially to spite my mother, partially to spite his family, but eventually I just stopped caring. I left the box in my mother's garage and as far as I know it's still in there somewhere, I don't know or care. Try and talk her into waiting a little while. A week, a month, six months, whatever. If she puts some time in between her and her current feelings she might change her mind.

But if she is determined to desecrate the ashes in some way to make herself feel better than all you can do is let her do her thing and then comfort her down the line if she ever comes to regret it.

Australopitenico

Go to some field, dig up a hole, put the ashes in there, plant a tree, wait lovingly until it grows and take solace in that even an awful man could help create something good, extra philosophical points for comparisons to your girlfriend.

Or when the tree grows just get a chainsaw, cut it and then burn that motherfucker.

Deebaser

Flushing someone's remains down a toilet is a pretty awful thing to do. Just take them to a park, scatter, and grow as a person. It's small.

Pantshandshake

Oddly enough, I can answer the legal part of the question, at least as far a Connecticut is concerned. A body itself needs to be taken care of by trained, licensed professionals. I think it fits into the hazmat category. However, once the cremation is performed, the remains are no longer 'human remains' and you can do whatever you want with them. (Obviously things that are illegal to do with other substances remain illegal. Please don't throw your deceased loved ones off a bridge into traffic.)

joshofalltrades

Agreed with everybody who says this is a terrible idea, even if she has no ethical qualms with it. Your plumbing will be fucked, and does she really want the last thing she remembers of her father to be that she tried to desecrate his remains and he ended up shitting up her plumbing from beyond the grave?

Instead she should do the mature thing and be a bigger person. I have no doubt that there are people who will not have fond memories of me after I go. I used to be an immature child and wanted everybody to like me, but it's not possible to go through life and not make enemies unless you are some sort of sedentary and catatonic golem, and even then I think you could probably piss off the nurse who has to change you every day. Personally, I feel like no matter how terrible a person is, they don't deserve desecration postmortem.

My own father was a jackass among assholes, and when he dies, I don't believe I'll be getting his ashes because I am pretty sure he's going to be buried somewhere. But if by some weird coincidence I did get them, I wouldn't keep them. In the event that there was no living person who would care about having them, I'd go out to a remote location and scatter them. I mean, I came from that guy, whether I like it or not, and in the same way that we can't help but piss people off, it's really tough to not have at least one good memory of somebody, no matter how much you dislike them. I owe a lot of my strategic mind to my father, I owe my love of video games to him, and even if he wasn't a role model to emulate, I learned what I don't want to carry on from him. Experience is the best teacher. Basically, I would try and think of the good things that came about because he was my dad (precious few things, but still).

It's tough to be the bigger person. But that's something to take comfort in, and a much better memory than fucking with a person after they die. Twenty years down the road after desecrating the memory of someone, I would likely only be haunted by, "What the fuck was wrong with me" thoughts than any kind of solace.

jhffmn

Dump her she sounds crazy.

joshofalltrades

jhffmn wrote: »

Dump her she sounds crazy.

Sorry, I disagree with this.

This is a normal reaction for people who have gone through severe emotional trauma caused by a family member, and even though I don't think it's the right way to cope, I understand the sentiment.

People who have been victims deserve happiness too.

Cog

jhffmn wrote: »

Dump her she sounds crazy.

Don't listen to this goose.

Jam Warrior

All these rational arguments can come later as they might come across as holding her back or something in her current emotional state. For now the absolute best thing you can try and do is convince her to do nothing she might regret later in the heat of the moment.

Don't try and tell what she could/should do. Just convince her to not do anything until time has cooled the emotions on this a little and everyone can look at it a bit more rationally.

Gaslight

It hardly needs to be said at this point but from a purely rational/pragmatic perspective, do not put them down the toilet. The plumbing will get fucked up and any pleasure she gets out of it will be short-lived; when you guys have to call the plumber and pay through the nose to fix the resulting mess, she will just feel silly.

Now obviously the emotional side of this is much more complex. I think it's important to realize that whatever one may believe about the afterlife (or whether there even is one), your girlfriend's dead father is past caring what happens to his earthly remains. She may feel like she's getting some kind of final "revenge" on her father for whatever wrongs he's done to her or the rest of the family, but that revenge is ultimately completely hollow. Her father is gone and she can't get back at him or hurt him. On the bright side, he can't hurt her anymore either...unless she allows him to with the way she deals with his death and moves on with her life.

With that in mind I agree that this isn't a decision that she should make quickly while she's still in a highly emotional state. She is not going to somehow "stick it" to her dad by desecrating his remains, and the issues she surrounding her relationship with him that she's still going to have to work through later will probably be bad enough without making it worse by doing something pointless she'll later regret.

ceres

Break up or don't break up is thankfully off-topic for this godforsaken thread.

azith28

Look, dont hold it against your GF that she hated her dad. You may know some of the why, but likely not all of it. The best I can think you can do is:

1) Suggest she pass it on to another relative.
2) offer to dispose of it yourself then bury the urn or scatter them somewhere decent. Don't tell her what you did with them unless she asks. If she does, then shes having doubts and you can tell her that you scattered them somewhere respectable so she will have some release of any guilt she might have.
3) Let it go. If there is some deep dark reason for her hatred and its valid and she doesnt want to tell you the real reason then her actions will have some kind of release for her. If its not valid then your GF may just be a very bad person, and you will discover that on your own sometime eventually, hopefully before it gets too serious.

Djeet

Not sure if the cremated remains would clog up the toilet. If I wanted to dispose of such I'd probably add water and make a slurry and flush it down in multiple flushes. To me it sounds disgusting and petty, but also I simply cannot relate to the idea of flushing someone's ashes down the toilet.

If she wants a less dramatic way of disposal, trash them. I'm reasonably sure in the US ashes are not considered human remains (e.g. you don't need a license to transport them). IANAL.

RichardTauber

I imagined Ben Stiller doing it while reading the OP. It's not a great idea. Especially if it's not legal?

SmokeStacks

Djeet wrote: »

I'm reasonably sure in the US ashes are not considered human remains (e.g. you don't need a license to transport them). IANAL.

They aren't. Pulverized bone doesn't decompose and isn't considered a biological risk. It's no different from sand. Scattering ashes isn't disseminating a body, it's littering, so keep that in mind if you scatter them on public land I guess.

I got my dad's ashes via Fedex, for example.

Iruka

Even if the ashes don't immediately clog the toilet, the fine dust is going to make a gross, sooty mess, and I feel like it will suddenly turn from "triumphantly flushing her dad" to "Her dads last revenge was turning her bathroom into a saga of trying to clean him off of every surface in the bathroom."

If you want evidence of this, buy some powdered charcoal from an art supply store and try and get that shit on or off anything with ease. (Hint: It gets everywhere and its terrible)

Enc

As far as the plumbing goes, that will destroy your works unless you are slowly dumping only about a cup of ashes per flush on a normal flush toilet (and even then, the sediment will likely build up somewhere). While It might not tack up in the U bend, its pretty likely to cause some sort of buildup somewhere in your pipes before it hits the sewer/septic and ash can turn into the consistency of a fine plaster when mixed with water.

If tossing it into a sewer is your go-to, just use a storm drain. Don't use some poor bastard's public restroom just because it isn't your jakes. Then the father will be fucking up someone else's life who had done nothing but provide a public place to poop.

Xix

Thanks for the advice guys, the dad's remains were dumped in a landfill. I guess that will be his place until this world ends.

Don't know how I feel about it, but that's the way she wanted it. It's over.

JohnnyCache

If it's any comfort, a nice tomb in a cemetery might get plowed under someday and the landfill will probably end up as a park. In the eternal sense, it's all pretty cyclical

tinwhiskers

If in the future, there's a relative whose ashes you want to dispose of in a more glorifying way.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-eRFRvRfts

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4z-hYki7E24