A tattoo on a bereaved wife’s collar bone, a memory ring worn by a young widower and a line of gritty powder snorted in a spiritual moment of respect — each is a treasured memory of a life departed.
In a world where “traditional” is often being redefined, how people are choosing to remember the dead has transformed into a highly personal — sometimes quirky, sometimes heartwarming — affair, particularly when it comes to cremated remains.
Eugenia Erlston, 65, had a very unusual idea when she was wondering about how to memorialise her recently deceased husband, Harold — an IT lecturer she met on Dating Buzz in 2011. They chatted online for a month, and it was love at first sight when they eventually met. They moved in together 11 months later.
“It was a phenomenal relationship,” she said.
They were married in the garden on April Fool’s Day in 2017, and two weeks later headed to Egypt on a trip that was both Harold’s 60th birthday present and their honeymoon. They stayed in a hotel that overlooked the pyramids and went scuba diving in the Red Sea.
“It was a place where we both felt electric — we would literally burn each other holding hands. We went back twice after that — it was our favourite place,” she said.
A very young guy approached me a few years ago after he lost his mom. He wanted me to tattoo her portrait onto his chest and use her ashes in the ink
— Geoff Squires, tattoo artist
When Harold died in July after a period of illness and terrible pain, Eugenia was devastated. Unwilling to let him go, she decided to have his ashes mixed into ink used to tattoo an Egyptian ankh onto her collar bone.
The piece was done by tattoo artist Geoff Squires — based in Edenvale, Johannesburg — who says that, while he doesn’t get many requests to tattoo ashes into skin, he has done it before.
“A very young guy approached me a few years ago after he lost his mom. He wanted me to tattoo her portrait onto his chest and use her ashes in the ink. I figured ashes must be fairly clean, so I got him to sign a waiver saying he wouldn’t hold me accountable for anything that went wrong, and then I did it with no problems,” Squires said.
Photographer Sherene Hustler, who has been “fascinated by death since I was little”, started experimenting with wood and stone and crystals in her workshop during lockdown “to keep myself busy and not go insane”.
“I watched a documentary about a woman who ate her husband’s ashes by sprinkling them into her food every day for about a year,” she said.
When Hustler was approached by a mother who had lost a very young child and wanted a jewellery keepsake incorporating the ashes and some hair, Hustler was on board.
“I thought about it for a while, and I figured ashes would be like the other things I was working with — shells, sand and crushed stones,” she said, explaining what led to a sideline gig in which she makes custom creations — such as rings, pendants, key rings, artworks and pods — containing cremated remains.
“I’ve made quite a few different pieces using all kinds of things, and some of the stories are terribly sad,” she said.
One of her clients, industrial real estate specialist Pierre Bezuidenhoudt, lost his wife Margarita Karvouniaris in 2020. She was the marketing manager for Game and only 45 when she died of Covid pneumonia. Their son, Saolan, was three years old.
“After she was cremated, I took her ashes to Sherene. She put them into three pendants for Margarita’s mom, Cornelia, her sister, Irene, and her caregiver, Precious, and she created a wooden memory ring for me,” he said.
A Joburg businessman — who asked not to be identified for reputational reasons, and because he did not want to be judged for his actions — described how he snorted a line of the ash remains of his best friend.
“I was a big drug addict a long time ago when I met my best friend who was 15 years older than I was. He just understood me and helped me get clean and stood by me for years.”
When his best friend died, he asked his wife for some of his ashes which, in what he describes as a spiritual moment, he snorted up his nose.
“At the time, I felt his presence, and it came to me as something I could do for my friend. A little moment of deep respect,” he said.
Futurist and trend analyst Dion Chang, who is also a trained death doula, said the ideas all related to legacy and ritual and “though some might be bizarre, it’s also important and helps with grieving and coping, [because] it helps people to process [death]”.
“It’s all the same human need, just with an evolution of methodology,” he said, referring to known famous cases such as gonzo journalism founder Hunter S Thompson, who had his remains cannon-blasted into the sky in an irreverent fireworks farewell, and renowned chef Julia Child, whose remains lie in Neptune Memorial Reef, an underwater mausoleum for cremated remains where people sleep with the fishes.
Another offbeat memorial is mixing the deceased’s ashes into gunpowder and loading it into bullets — a popular salute among hunters and gun enthusiasts in the US, where Holy Smoke in Alabama creates ammunition out of cremated remains.
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