![]() Ellis, 48, died of a massive heart attack Jan. While Belinda Ellis "did not have a religious bone in her body," according to her husband, Randy Ellis, she had attended a Crestone funeral pyre and told her family it was what she wanted. It also can be a protest against traditional funerals, which some view as a denial of death, Weddle said.Įllis' ceremony and others seem somehow fitting for Crestone, home to an eclectic mix of spiritual and religious groups that include Zen and Tibetan Buddhists and Carmelites, said Stephanie Gaines, director of the nondenominational Crestone End of Life Project, the volunteer group that performs the cremations. It can be seen as honoring a natural cycle, reducing the body to ash and the elements of which it is composed. The pyre harkens to references in the Christian and Hebrew Bibles equating rising smoke with the ascent of the soul, said David Weddle, a religion professor at Colorado College. But the practice is largely taboo in the U.S. A Buddhist temple in Red Feather Lakes, Colo., conducts a few funeral pyres, but only for its members.Īncient Vikings lit funeral pyres to honor their dead, and it is accepted practice among Buddhist and Hindu religions. Funeral and cremation industry officials say they are unaware of any other place in the nation that conducts open-air cremations for people regardless of religion. The outdoor funeral pyre in this southern Colorado mountain town is unique. "It's hard to breathe, it's hard to see and it's hard to think about anything but you." "Mommy, you mean the world to me and it's hard to live without you," called out Ellis' weeping daughter, Brandi, 18. When the smoke subsided, a triangle-shaped flame flickered inside the circle of mourners, heavily-dressed and huddling against zero-degree weather. With a torch, her husband lit the fire that consumed her, sending billows of smoke into the blue-gray sky of dawn. One by one, her family placed juniper boughs and logs about her body, covered in red cloth atop a rectangular steel grate inside a brick-lined hearth. (AP) - Belinda Ellis' farewell went as she wanted.
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