My father died believing he would be buried under the earth, and return over time to the soil at the foot of the Welsh hills he had loved so much during his life. Over time he would have become elemental, in the most basic of forms.
A simple belief, yet denied to him by a second-choice wife who believed his spiritual soul had been taken up by Jehova, and had him cremated instead.
His ashes, or rather a convincing amount of the gray stuff that consisted of whatever was left from the coffins and other bodies that were burnt that week, were buried under a tree hundreds of miles away from the land that warmed his heart. To this day I have no idea what tree it was.
That was what happened when he died.