Self storage for your loved ones’ ashes

Traditional storage

In West Norwood Cemetery in South London, one of the great Victorian metropolitan cemeteries, there is a “columbarium” ‒ a large room with niches in the walls on which cinerary urns have been placed. The term comes from the Latin for a dovecote, which has similar (if smaller) niches for nesting doves. After the 1880s, when cremation began to take off in the UK as a permissible (and fashionable) alternative to burial, the columbarium was the modern equivalent of a catacomb for coffins (there’s one of those at West Norwood too) ‒ a public place where the remains of the dead could be stored with dignity and occasionally visited.

Columbaria still exist. There is a one in St John’s in Norwich, the Catholic Cathedral of East Anglia, for instance; and small, modern family-size columbaria are available from stone masons, and can be installed at certain graveyards and crematoria. But they are rare.

What to do with the ashes?

Habits have changed over the last 40 years or so. These days the majority of ashes are removed from the crematoria to be disposed of by the family, usually by burial or scattering. They may end up on a mantelpiece, in a cupboard, on a football ground, in the sea, in fireworks, or even in jewellery. There is actually no legal restriction on how ashes may be treated.

For some people, disposing of ashes can be extremely hard, emotionally ‒ especially if the deceased left no instructions. They end up clinging on to the ashes, failing to make a decision, and possibly failing to achieve closure that may alleviate the sense of bereavement.

Self storage: good

Pending a decision, some cremains are placed in self storage. This is not necessarily a bad thing.

An article in the Daily Telegraph, by Elizabeth Day, published in January 2006, told of a man who had created a kind of shrine for his mother’s ashes in a self storage unit in North London. It was a place of peace, where he could visit and pay his respects: “There are no mobile telephones, no colleagues asking awkward questions and no sound other than the shuffle of footsteps or gentle piped music. This, for Terence, is the beauty of the self-storage unit.”

Self storage: not so good

Ashes in self storage units are all well and good if the storage is temporary, and they are eventually removed by the owner.

But they can pose particularly difficult dilemma for storage managers if the owners default and cannot be traced. It is one thing to dispose of abandoned junk, but human remains seem to call for greater caution and sensitivity.

Everything is bigger in the USA (including its self storage industry). In December 2009, 96 boxes of cremated remains were discovered in a self storage unit in Atlanta, placed there by a funeral company that had since gone bankrupt. The trustee of the funeral company was left with the task of tracing family members ‒ not easy, given that some of the cremations had taken place 25 years earlier.