How Not to Cremate a Body

 When we lived in Indian River, back in the 1970s, I used to burn our trash every day because we were using disposable diapers on our daughter and didn't want to keep them around until dump day.  We used to put the non-burnable stuff in a separate can, the dogs got the bones and food scraps, and everything else went into the burn barrel.  To help the used diapers burn, I would dump a pint or two of fuel oil on them before I lit the fire.  Fuel oil works better than gasoline as a fire starter because it burns hotter and slower.  It's safer too, I never even got my eyebrows singed using fuel oil. 

One of my dogs died in midwinter, when the frozen ground would have made it difficult to give it a proper burial, so I decided to cremate it instead.  I placed the body on top of the day's garbage, soaked the whole pile with a larger than usual amount of fuel oil, and lit the fire.  The dog's hair burned off right away, but the rest of the dog just charred a bit.  More fuel oil didn't help much, so I repeated the process every day for what seemed like a long time.  The charred carcass eventually disappeared, but my wife refused to go anywhere near the burn barrel for the rest of the winter.  This was probably for the best because it didn't smell good around there and my wife, being a non-smoker always did have a more sensitive nose than I did.

I found out later that a human, and I suppose a dog body, is about 90% water.  Before it will burn, all that water has to be cooked out of it.  What they do in India is build a big pile of carefully stacked firewood and put the body on top.  The firewood burns all night, and they sweep the ashes into the river the next morning.  They use natural gas in the US, and the only thing left is the human ashes, which go into an urn that you can put on your mantel piece or wherever you want.  

I read somewhere that, before Hitler committed suicide, he left instructions for his body to be cremated.  His staff tried to do it by just dumping gasoline on the body and touching it off, which didn't work any better than my experiment with the dog.  They didn't have time to repeat the process for days, so they buried the remains of the remains in the courtyard.  The Russians found it, but they didn't tell anybody for decades and accused the US of keeping Hitler alive in some secret location.  They finally came clean about it after the Cold War officially ended, but nobody believes anything the Russians say even unto this day.