McCauley Funeral Home

McCauley Funeral Home Obituaries

From green burials to tree urns; after-life options - Cherry Hill Courier Post

It’s the ‘if you build it, they will come’ analogy.”Greg Herro, CEO of LifeGem, examines a blue diamond made from the carbon remains of an animal at the Bollingbrook-McCauley Funeral Home in Bollingbrook, Ill., Oct. 18, 2002. By extracting the carbon from cremated human bodies, the Chicago-based company is giving the dearly departed a chance to sparkle forever as a synthetically produced diamond. (Photo: Aynsley Floyd)About half of the burials Freitag oversees are traditional funerals, with cremation making up around 45 percent. What the family does with the cremated remains can vary.Sometimes ashes get left at the funeral home, never to be picked up, though Freitag hasn’t had that happen. Cremated remains can be divided between family members, transformed into something else, buried or scattered.“I’ve had people charter a boat and scatter them in the ocean,” Freitag said. “I’ve had people scatter them from an airplane. I had a man who requested his cremated remains be put in a wine bottle and dropped into the Aegean Sea.”After conventional burial and cremation, the remaining 5 percent are either green burials or body donations. Organs can be used for transplant or research purposes or the whole body can go to medical schools for instructional purposes, th...