It was a one-small-step-for-man, one-giant-leap-for-mankind kind of week last week. We finally found the most elusive of them all.

No, no, I’m not talking about Sai Mizzi. I’m referring to Pluto, of course. Humans – read, Americans – have now reached all nine planets of our solar system.

On Tuesday Nasa’s New Horizons spacecraft made contact with Earth, confirming its successful flypast of Pluto, after a nine-and-a-half-year journey to the far reaches of the solar system, some five billion kilometres away.

When the spacecraft ‘phoned home’, scientists were jubilant and in tears and aptly called it a historic day for space exploration.

I have always been fascinated by Pluto, this freezing lonely dwarf planet, there at the tail end of a line of eight huge glorious planets, always trailing behind, not even sure of its planet status.

However, what intrigued me most about this mission was the small container affixed to the inside upper deck of the Pluto mission spacecraft.

The container was carrying the ashes of Clyde Tombaugh, who discovered Pluto in 1930. Before dying in 1997, he requested that his ashes be sent to space. Nasa obliged, and the container bore the inscription: “Interred herein are remains of American Clyde W. Tombaugh, discoverer of Pluto and the solar system’s ‘third zone’, Adelle and Muron’s boy, Patricia’s husband, Annette and Alden’s father, astronomer, teacher, punster, and friend: Clyde W. Tombaugh (1906-1997).”

What a creative way to go, I thought.

I’ve been fascinated by cremation and ashes since I was seven years old. That year, my grandmother’s friend, who lived in Florida, came over to stay for a while after her husband had died. With her she brought Uncle Joe. In an urn.

I was fascinated and spent hours looking at the bronze container on the bedside table and watched as Aunty Mary pottered in granny’s spare room and spoke to the urn. It was very hard indeed to reconcile in my brain that there was a human in a jar.

But by the end of the week, when she had buried the urn in our family’s grave, I was decided. No bug, no creepy crawly was going to get to him in that urn. It’s the way forward, I concluded.

I only had to sort out the little matter of where I’d want the ashes to be scattered. A matter which three decades on, still has not been sorted. Not least, because there is still no crematorium in Malta. There’s nothing for it until we get one, I’ll have to try and die abroad. But then, what instructions would I leave for my ashes?

My initial thought was to get my loved ones to scatter them on the Riviera beach: my most favourite spot on the island, the place I spend my summers. What better eternal view would one want?

But then, I got cold feet. Visions of children playing on the beach and making a sand castle out of me, um, sort of made me twitchy. Also, the North West wind can really blow strongly over there – would I end up as bits of sand in people’s eyes? Would beach-goers end up at the health centre with watery eyes because of me? Would they have to be comforted by a nurse saying: “There, there, we’ll get that Kristina ash out of your eye, in a minute.” No, it won’t do.

So I then considered giving instructions to scatter me at sea. But to end up with half of me inside a gurbell, and another half in the belly of an awrata li ħarbet mill-fish farm? Over my dead body.

As always, Google comes to the rescue. Where do other people scatter ashes? In the UK, where 70 per cent of all deaths are cremations, staff at the Jane Austen House Museum in Hampshire constantly discover piles of human ashes scattered around the novelist’s home and gardens.

Other favourite remembrance spots are the mountains of Scotland and Wales. But the Mountaineering Council of Scotland and Welsh conservationists are not very keen: the phosphate added to the soil from the cremated bones can overstimulate plant growth on mountain tops. If we weren’t taking about human dust, I’d say that maybe this is what we need on Magħtab biex iwwarad.

Other spots: Manchester City, along with many European clubs, have now built a memorial garden to save their grass. Other football clubs, including Manchester United, have stopped the remains of fans being put on their pitches. I thought about it, but I’ll spare Hibs the hassle.

There are other more environmentally beneficial things you can do with ashes. For music lovers, for example, there’s an option to have your remains pressed into a vinyl; for a more bling bling approach, a jewellery company uses carbon from cremains to create diamonds. Tattoo artists can sterilise cremains and then mix them with tattoo ink, so the dearly departed is always under your skin. Another company can turn your ashes into a set of 240 pencils (!).

But I decided that I’d like to follow the late footsteps of writer Hunter S. Thompson. It’s the absolutely perfect solution – not just for me, but for the whole of Malta. He was memorialised in 2005 as… fireworks. The UK company Heavenly Stars Fireworks transforms ash scattering into a pyrotechnic extravaganza.

What better way to go out with a bang?

krischetcuti@gmail.com
Twitter: @KrisChetcuti

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