My son passed away and we had him cremated. We wish to split his ashes. Half to stay here with us in our family plot and the other half to be interred in his grandmother’s grave. Is this possible in the Catholic religion? He was Catholic.
I’m very sorry for your loss and pray that God will grant you comfort, strength, and healing.
While the Church does not permit ashes to be scattered, I do not know of any prohibition against burying some of the ashes in one plot, and the rest in another. Nonetheless, as a prudential matter, I urge you not to do this solely out of understandable but misplaced sentiment. Human beings have inherent human dignity and should not be treated as the personal possession of another, which is the implication of your plan to bury your son in more than one location of importance to you, rather than recognizing that he should be given the dignity of his own grave.
It might help to meditate on the resurrected Christ’s meeting with Mary Magdalene. Many have puzzled over why he told her not to touch him for he had not yet ascended to his Father (John 20:15-17). I like to think that he was telling her that she should not cling to him, he’d be around for a while before the Ascension. But the larger spiritual point we can take from this is that there is no need to cling to a loved one’s body as a source of comfort, but instead we should rejoice in their anticipated reunion with their Father in heaven and our hope to join with them there someday, knowing that by that point it won’t matter where bodies are buried.
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