Leroy "Sox" Bachman and his wife, Linda, disagreed about what should happen to their bodies after death.

"Sox" is opposed to cremation for himself, at least. "I would rather have mine rot away," he said.

Linda, who had been a well-known hairdresser in Columbia, wanted to be cremated. "She didn't want anyone to make a fuss over her as far as a viewing was concerned," Sox said.

With a chuckle, Bachman said differences of opinion were a way of life for them during their 50 years of marriage. This disagreement, though, had a solution.

They agreed that Sox would be buried with Linda's ashes enclosed inside his casket.

So when Linda died in February, her husband honored her wishes and had her body cremated. He held a memorial service in her honor at St. John's Lutheran Church in Columbia.

An urn with Linda's cremains sits on the fireplace mantel.

"Whenever I do anything bad, I go and watch to see if there's smoke coming out," he joked. Linda was the one who kept him in line, he explained.

All kidding aside, he was glad they could reach a compromise and that he could honor her wishes. "(Cremation's) definitely a matter of opinion," he said.

Linda's opinion is one that is shared by an increasing number of people in Lancaster County, according to Millersville funeral director Andy Scheid.

"Cremation is a growing, growing, growing trend," Scheid said.

As the popularity of cremation grows, the questions of what to do with the ashes and how to resolve family conflicts about the remains become more common.

According to funeral director Kevin Kraft, the most common way to dispose of the cremains is to bury them.

Catholic tradition calls for the cremains to be kept together and to be buried, either in the ground or in a columbarium, Kraft said.

At Kraft Funeral Home in Columbia, urns for burial are as simple as a cardboard or wooden box or as elaborate as a container of marble, cast bronze or pewter.

Numerous churches in Lancaster County have memorial gardens where ashes can be kept, including First Presbyterian Church, Trinity Lutheran and St. James Episcopal, all in the city.

The next most common thing for people to do with their loved one's ashes, according to Kraft, is to keep them at home.

Florence K. Sumpman's ashes are in an urn at her son Patrick's house — mostly. Her son Paul Sumpman of Columbia remembers her saying, " 'I am not going to be in that (burial) hole.' " Instead, she asked her children and a close family friend to take some cremains with them to be scattered at places of natural beauty or cultural interest.

Paul Sumpman and his sister, Emi Sumpman of Idaho, both have ashes taken from the urn and kept in plastic bags at home. They will take the cremains to scatter when they are going someplace they think their mother would have enjoyed.

In 1998, Florence had arranged to have the ashes of her late husband, Russell S. Sumpman, scattered over Pearl Harbor.

As a World War II Navy vet who survived the attack on Pearl Harbor, Russell wanted his final resting place to be at this historic spot where he and his comrades' lives were threatened and sacrificed.

"The kinship he experienced with those people, I can't even imagine," Paul Sumpman said. His father was also an accomplished musician, Paul Sumpman said, but it was his military experience he turned to for burial.

Emi Sumpman accompanied her mother in 1998 to Pearl Harbor for a military ceremony and official spreading of his cremains.

"There's a tremendous amount of satisfaction knowing that his wishes were fulfilled," Emi Sumpman said. Florence Sumpman passed away two years after her trip to Pearl Harbor.

Not all families are so agreeable about how to handle the cremains, Scheid said. For example, he knows of a family in which the stepmother refused to share her husband's ashes with his daughters.

And, he said, a surprising number of people never come to claim their loved one's ashes at all.

Scheid recommends that anyone who is going to cremate, especially those who keep the ashes or scatter them, keep a public and permanent marker somewhere with a person's birth and death information. It gives friends and family a place to go when they want to mark an event and preserves information for future generations.

He also advises people to think twice about where they want their ashes to be spread. "What may be sacred today may be a Wal-Mart parking lot tomorrow," Scheid said.

The same idea applies to burying ashes or scattering ashes at your home. When the house sells to someone else, will you want to ask the new owners to visit grandma's final resting place?

There aren't any limitations on where you can scatter ashes in Pennsylvania, according to Kathleen Ryan, general counsel for the Pennsylvania Funeral Directors Association.

"You can do anything you want with the ashes," Ryan said. "They can be buried, scattered, you can take them home and put them on your mantel."

Joyce Murry of Columbia honored the wishes of her son, Danny Hinton, by having a memorial service on their 11-acre property. His ashes were scattered around the chair Hinton had carved from a fallen tree. Hinton had spent many hours on that chair enjoying the nature around him.

It wasn't hard for Murry to honor her son's wish to be cremated and have his ashes scattered, she said.

"We just respected his wishes," Murry said. "I'm at peace with it."

E-mail: lespenshade@lnpnews.com