When considering firing as an ash dispersal method I came across Holy Smoke, a company based in Alabama, USA who offer a service to put cremated ash into bullets.
The idea of shooting ash into the air has it’s Roman Signer-style appeal. Though all my work in this area has focussed on the slow distribution of ash as a way to bypass the pressure of the ‘event’, I can see the allure of the exact opposite effect: the fleeting spectacle, the whimsical and going out with a bang.
Alarmingly Holy Smoke say that the bullets offer a way to ‘continue to protect your home and family even after you are gone’, ‘by turning ashes into fully-functioning bullets’. As DNA is destroyed with high temperature there would be no chance of the ashes being traced back to your deceased name, except for the engraving of your initials on each bullet shell of course.
Primarily though Holy Smoke market their bullets to the ‘outdoorsperson’. So your grieving family can take their grief hunting. Something resonates here with how grief is juxtaposed with killing at S21 and the Killing Fields in Cambodia. When I visited the site in 2000 evidence of the death toll was palpable, not in the air but in the blood stains that adorned the prison floors, the bones emergent on the surface of the soil and the dents on the tree trunk that was used for killing children rather than ‘wasting bullets’. Cambodians quietly sobbed whilst Westerners looked on and took holiday snaps. The whole experience was packaged up with the opportunity to contemplate the trip with an AK47 and a cow. It was disturbing and disorientating, like I’d walked into a zoo of human tragedy. How are people able to suspend their feelings about the dying of one thing and the killing of another?