| Tessa Bielecki for her Father, Dr. Casimir Bielecki |
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My father, Dr. Casimir Bielecki, was cremated on July 19, 2008 at the Crestone End-of-Life Project’s open-air site. This was my first open-air cremation, and I was so profoundly moved, I’m already working on the documents that will enable me to choose this kind of cremation for myself. CEOLP supports simple, natural, and humanizing end of life choices. Everything about the cremation was personal, intimate, and meaningful. We brought Dad’s body home from the hospital in our own car and took care of him ourselves, giving us ample time to complete our farewells. He wasn’t whisked away from us to some gloomy funeral “parlor” and polluted with smelly embalming chemicals. We cut the evergreen boughs we laid on the pyre from our own land. We created our own altar to express the uniqueness of Dad’s life and included his black medical bag and stethoscope, his wedding portrait, and the last photo taken of him four weeks earlier with the grandsons (and lobsters!) he loved. We chose his shroud, one I’d brought for him the year before from the ancient city of Jerusalem. Everyone present helped put the green boughs of pinon pine and bright red and yellow carnations over Dad’s body on the pyre, and as an afterthought, we added his old straw golf hat. Thick dark smoke billowed out to the west towards the full moon setting over the San Juan Mountains, then cleared, whitened, and rose heavenward, a perfect and healing symbol. The cremation was no abstract theology or philosophy about death, but a profound existential experience of it: a falling away of the flesh and soaring of the spirit in roaring flames and sparks spinning into the sky. Gathering the ashes and bits of bone 24 hours later continued our family’s deep meditation on passing from this world into the next. As St. Paul wrote to the Corinthians, “Behold, I tell you a mystery. We shall not all fall asleep, but we will all be changed, in an instant, in the blink of an eye.” This whole experience was a gift for our family and friends, for the earth, which is left undisturbed, and for Dad himself, who knew we were going to do this and liked the idea. We are so blessed to have open-air cremation in Crestone. The End-of-Life Project helps to make the experience of death natural, human, reverent, and above all, sacred.
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