Ashes Two Ashes

In the news today, there seems to be a matter of father's ashes. There are, indeed, two weird news stories that hit the same day, about unusual treatment of father's ashes.

A young woman from Germany had the intention of turning her father's cremated remains into a diamond. Apparently this has been going on since the 1950s; in Switzerland, there is a company that creates synthetic diamonds from (carbon) ashes. They use a process in which the ashes are put into a press, and with extreme heat and pressure, a diamond is formed. It resembles the natural processes that create diamonds, and the process takes about several months.

However, the nineteen year old daughter lost in a court case brought about by her eighty six year old grandmother in Wiesbaden in the matter of her father's ashes. Though the matter of the remains was truly the right of the daughter to decide, and not the deceased mother's, the court decided that there was no evidence to prove that the father would have wanted his remains pressed into a diamond. They said that the daughter could not provide proof that this was his wishes, and that they had in act in agreement with his expressed wishes.

Keith Richards, guitarist of the Rolling Stones, the longest continuously performing rock band in American history, is openly honest about all of the illegal substances that he's inhaled, smoked, and digested in his time. In fact, it was an intricate part of his lifestyle. This was so much the case that when his father, Bert, died at the age of eighty four in 2002, Keith Richards could not resist. He took the cremated ashes and mixed them with cocaine, and snorted them.

This news came out in a recent interview with the British music magazine NME. He was asked what the strangest thing was that he had ever tried to snort. "The strangest thing I've tried to snort? My father. I snorted my father...He was cremated and I couldn't resist grinding him up with a little bit of blow. My dad wouldn't have cared." Richards commented. "It went down pretty well, and I'm still alive."