Comments

1
That's a beautiful idea. Damn.
2
It's pretty amazing when you're on board and one takes place. The ferry slows down almost to a stop, and the purser requests silence from everyone on board to respect the occasion. Then the horn blows and the ferry gets underway. It's a wonderful reminder that life ends and then goes on.
3
Never been a guest of one, but have been on more than one ferry that has stopped so people can spread ashes. It's a nice idea.
4
We were very tired, we were very merry, we had gone back and forth all night on the ferry...
5
I officiated a wedding on the Bainbridge run one summer on the West end pickle-forks with the Olympics in the background - beautiful service, and random ferry riders got to witness the whole thing.
6
I'm an infrequent ferry rider, but I've seen three memorial services since 2010. I think it's been on the Bainbridge-Seattle ferry all 3 times. The captain makes an announcement that the ferry will stop for a few moments, and the group of mourners went to the back of the boat (twice the mourners wore all black, once they were in plain clothes). They took a moment of silence, threw the urn overboard, and stood in a group talking, hugging, crying for a bit on the auto deck before going in. The last one I saw was very touching (I was on the back deck above the group, despite intending to avoid them to give them space), but then the honking ferry horn nearly knocked me off the boat.
7
We had one for my brother on the Edmonds-Kingston route (his request). Everyone from the crew to the other passengers were very kind.
8
We did this with my grandmother, and will be doing it again with my mom's ashes when we can get all of our family members together (at the moment they sit in a box under my dresser...thankfully mom was a pretty forgiving person). It's really a lovely way to say good-bye, and I appreciate the ferry system's willingness to allow this ceremony, and to even take part in it.
9
My husband and I were married on the back of the Bainbridge ferry a little over a year ago. It was a couple weeks before marriage equality was a thing, but we had decided we wanted to do this before it was ever on the ballot. The ferry folks were super sweet. I had called them months prior and they just made a note of the day that they would be expecting us. They let us board first too so we could get to the back of the boat. We were a small-ish party of around 30. Pictures with the city skyline, a short ceremony (married by his grandfather), and it was done! We got off at Bainbridge and walked to the waterfront park for coffee and pastries. It was pretty fucking cute. Later that day we had a big open-house reception back in Seattle.
Moral of the story: get married on the back of a ferry. Because then you can say you were ferried. And also have some pretty great pictures.
10
As a funeral director, I help organize these scatterings from time to time. They can be done on most any route, but they prefer Edmonds-Kingston. You even can do it on some San Juan routes in the summertime. It can also be done on the Coho between Port Angeles and Victoria. There it's a bit more private, too. Sometimes they'll blow the horn, sometimes not. They don't check if you have a biodegradable urn or not, really. But it's better to have, due to wind concerns. But yes, it's beautiful, & I'm grateful they do it.
11
Since fishing on Puget Sound was one of my dad's favorite things to do, that's where he wanted to end up. Seattle-to-Bremerton run, family gathered at the stern with champagne in plastic cups, the Captain blew the horn and I scattered dad's ashes over the side (they let you do that twenty years ago).

Yes, I checked wind direction first.
12
Nothing wrong with being underground, and everything ends up there eventually, between erosion and subduction.
13
12-- except everyone is different, with different wishes that they tend to be pretty passionate about. If not them, the ones they leave behind. Even though I agree with you, as I want to be underground myself. One with my beloved city. More specifically the cemetery near the Dick's in Ballard :)
14
If the idea of being in public doesn't suit you, there is the Skansonia as well. I got married on it.
15
@12

That's really short, short-term thinking.

In the longer short term, a mere billion years from now, the oceans will evaporate; there will for a short while be a lot more atmosphere; a lot more stuff in the sky, rather than on or under the ground. The stuff in the sky will be inexorably escaping into space, and at an increasing rate.

Another short billion years after that, the earth's metallic core will freeze, shutting down the magnetic field which protects it from the solar wind, and the atmosphere, including no small number of atoms formerly comprising humans, will begin to blow off into space in earnest.

Another short billion years after that, the Milky Way will be colliding with Andromeda-- which most likely won't affect our lifeless solar system, but who knows? And then it's just another billion years after that that the sun exhausts its hydrogen and begins the rapid expansion into a red giant, which, odds are good, will strip off earth's crust (i.e. the continental cratons, which are quite a bit lighter than extruded seafloor, and thus *not* reabsorbed into the mantle at plate boundaries). The mantle might be vaporized and blown off into space in this phase; the core might do the same. No-one will ever know, because no living thing will be there to observe it.

Long before this, the notion of "underground" will be rendered comical, as the surface of the planet will be a viscous molten material rather than a solid, and even longer before that, the last living terrestrial species capable of any notion of "good" or "bad" will have been extinct for aeons.

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