Trotte Bay lies on what the Swiss call their Gold Coast - ten miles of villas owned by the rich and famous - bankers, European royalty and celebrities like Tina Turner. Not far from Ms Turner's magnificent mansion, an underwater cemetery has been discovered. Hundreds of brown urns filled with human ashes have been found on the bottom of the lake.
Each urn bears the emblem of a lion with a raised paw - the logo of the Nordheim Crematorium in Zurich. The suicide clinic Dignitas sends all their bodies to Nordheim for cremation. People from all over the world come to Dignitas to end their lives - they swallow a lethal cocktail of Nembutal and die peacefully within half an hour.
Ludwig Minelli is a Swiss lawyer and human rights activist founded Dignitas in 1998. One of his nurses Soraya Wernli 53 has caused a sensation by saying that she was actually with Minelli when he took urns out of the boot of his car and put them in the lake. When she asked him why he said the clay urns would eventually dissolve in water over time.
Most of the relatives from countries outside Switzerland usually leave as soon as their loved one passes away and receive a small box of their ashes in the mail a few days after cremation which could take up to a week. Naturally, a large urn would be too big to send through the post so a small box makes sense. But what do they do with the rest of the ashes, do they go into an urn and end up in the lake? It seems that Dignitas has lost some of its dignity.
It makes me wonder what happens at Australian crematoriums, do they give you all the ashes to take home or just a small amount, and what do they do with the rest?
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