What's Left After We're Gone?

     Speaking, as I was Friday in the blog, of California's killer wildfires, I reminded myself of a noun met often enough in the news accounts of those horrific events, "remains," a body after death.

     Terrible as it is to contemplate someone's death of suffocation, or any other mortal blow, what it is that remains of the body after a racing inferno takes the living person in one's tracks a few steps from one's own front door is a totally consumed body, just ashes.

      And for that common enough occurrence in the town of Paradise, CA., during the wildfire, there is now the word (since 1947) "cremains," the blending of the words "cremation" and "remains," though "blending" seems just too inexcusably mellow a term to describe this particular neologism.

      For those who choose cremation, the harshness disappears.