WHAT THEY COULD HAVE BEEN SAYING IN NEW YORK CITY THIS WEEK, HAD I BEEN THERE TO OVERHEAR THEIR CONVERSATIONS AND JOT DOWN NOTES TO MYSELF ON WHAT THEY HAD JUST SAID:

---"This trend toward cremations robs me of the opportunity to visit a friend or relative's tombstone and pay my respects whenever I'm here in the Big Apple. The tombstones are dying away; all that's left are the ashes that get scattered all over Central Park and into the Hudson River as food for the fish there."

--"I personally hope that some of the bad guys who get turned into ashes are eaten by the most disliked fishes in the entire Hudson River. I don't know which fish would rank dead last in popularity of all the fishes that swim in the Hudson River. I will need to do some research on that point."

---"Maybe there should be an annual prize for the funeral home service with the very best professional cremations guy in our entire city. I wonder what the criteria should be for awarding him as Outstanding Cremator of the Year."

--"The trouble with cremations is that they remind so many of us of Auschwitz. Maybe we should use a different term for 'cremations' today, to make it clear this is NOT Nazi Germany when human beings here get cremated after they die. All of these deaths were from natural causes; none of them  were in concentration camps."

---"Actually, many of the cremations here are on crime victims who were murdered or who died a month or two after they were severely injured by an assailant. My biggest objection to cremations is that they deny NYPD the crime evidence they need that the deceased was victimized by one or more assailants---possibly including relatives of his. And if the deceased was also himself a violent criminal, destroying the body denies NYPD  and FBI the DNA evidence they could have obtained from a corpse that could have linked the deceased to 20 rapes on Long Island he himself had committed 10 years before. I am very sure that many of the surviving relatives are rushing these cremations here because they're terrified that NYPD and the FBI might otherwise get a chance to do DNA testing on the deceased's body--and possibly even on his groin area. No one wants to wake up in the morning and stare at a 'New York Daily News' headline on their kitchen table about a recently-deceased relative of theirs so sly and diabolical that no one ever suspected him of having committed any of those 20 brutal rapes that occurred over a multi-year period on Long Island."

--"I'm very sure the head of the NYPD Cold Cases Unit is infuriated by the fact that thanks to the cremation craze here, he is denied access to human corpses he could have otherwise dug up from the cemetery and then done DNA swabs on to identify a suspect in dozens of unsolved violent crime cases that occurred here in the most recent 50-year period!"

--"Personally, I support a DNA swab on anyone in New York who looks suspicious. The odds are high that if they look suspicious to you today, they'll look like a convict to a judge and jury at some future date. So by all means, let's get their DNA in the meantime so we can do a posthumous arrest on them, if need be, in order to set the record straight about their being an overlooked villain in our city's history."

---"I find it a bit eerie how talk about the shape of a person's body---and so many here have nice physiques when they pass away---gets turned into talk about the shape of the vase that the surviving relative chose for holding the deceased's ashes. Some ash-holding vases are more elegant and beautiful than others, and the vase takes on a life of its own. 'At least he died elegantly', you tend to think when you admire the vase."

---"But we shouldn't forget that many of the most boorish and physically repulsive of our city's rich persons drive around in elegant Cadillacs during their lifetime. So before they pass on, they acquire a public reputation for elegance and beauty from their choice of automobile they drive around town."

---"Maybe there should be a new state law that delays cremations of dead persons' bodies until NYPD and the FBI have both agreed 100 percent without any doubts about it that the deceased was neither the victim of any felony crime nor the perpetrator of any felony crime during his or her lifetime. This might be one way to protect crime evidence that can help solve cold cases, as NYPD puts it."

---"Now I'm getting worried about all the cold cases that aren't getting solved because the perpetrator or one of the victims has gotten turned into ashes and sharks have already devoured those ashes in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Jersey. And even if you could catch those sharks and recover the ashes from their bodies, there is no way the DNA evidence could be obtained from the deceased human being who had turned into ashes that got devoured by that shark."

---"I never have figured out where the urns and vases go after the ashes are deposited in them. Is there a special 'Ashes to Ashes Crematorium Museum' where you pay a fee in order to enter that trendy new museum and inspect the pretty vases there and try to recall what you can about the individuals who had suddenly and very abruptly turned into ashes?"

---"I find it very eerie that after a person dies, the ashes tell you they have nothing more to say. Even the most verbose person in our entire city suddenly turns into a vaseful of sand, so to speak, and there are no words to be found anywhere in that vase. New Yorkers take pride in being very, very verbal and articulate. But the ashes-filled vases suggest that in the final analysis, we are shockingly silent and can't even say the word 'misanthropic' anymore."