From the notorious* Undertaker’s sketch, Monty Python’s Flying Circus, Episode 26 [YouTube]:
UNDERTAKER [Graham Chapman] 
: …If we burn her [customer John Cleese's dead mum], she gets stuffed in the flames, crackle, crackle, crackle, which is a bit of a shock if she’s not quite dead, but quick. (the audience starts booing) and then we give you handful of ashes, which you can pretend are hers…
*Wikipedia: “The BBC were cautious about the sketch, and reluctantly agreed to let it go ahead on the condition that the studio audience were heard to protest loudly, then invade the set at the sketch’s conclusion. This was poorly-executed: the audience began booing and shouting too early (those who weren’t heckling were laughing), and because of studio fire regulations, only a limited section of the crowd were allowed to rush onto the studio floor – the rest of them just sat there looking awkward. (As Roger Wilmut pointed out in the book From Fringe To Flying Circus, a genuinely shocked audience would have reacted with an embarrassed silence.)”
This NYT report on a grand Royals/Commoners cremation gala in Bali (“At Royal Balinese Funeral, Bodies Burn and Souls Fly”), perhaps the last of its magnitude, echoed Chapman’s jaunty “crackle, crackle, crackle” with filial fidelity:
As a wooden bull burns, Balinese tradition says, the body within returns to earthly elements and its soul flies up in sparks.
As the bull fell away, the iron bars that formed its frame remained, and within them hung the burning skeleton, its skull tilted downward, its right foot spurting flames.
Acting with ritual disrespect for the now-useless body, workers poked and prodded at it with long bamboo poles to stoke the fire, and it swayed slightly in the flames.
The body disintegrated into its five earthly elements: earth, wind, water, fire and ether. Its soul disappeared into the night sky.
One of Mr. Suyasa’s [just-transmigrated head of the royal family of Ubud] sons, Indrayana, sat on the ground nearby, dressed in ritual gold, holding his hands in prayer toward his father. Then, fire to fire, he put a match to a cigarette, looked up, and inhaled.”
You know, I know cremation is supposed to be entirely rational and certainly far more economical, but that consequence, being consumed by fire, just somehow remains creepy to me no less than if my family were to present my body to bears for posthumous rendering and consumption. Oddly enough, being digested by worms and microbes underground seems quite comforting by comparison.
My mother-in-law had a wicked sense of humor. She asked that she be cremated with one caveat; that I not be allowed to tie her to a stake and dance in circles while she burned. I think she was just mad at me because I stole her broom. We had our cats cremated when they died and bury their ashes under trees when we plant them.
Steve