Pinkcat, what countries have you traveled to? Odd as it seems, cremation is illegal in some Catholic countries.

Brasil is weird - you can't be cremated until 3 years after death unless a judge signs off on a will, usually for foreigners. Twice I've had friends - US ones who died in Rio - be interred in a cemetery for 3 years. After that, they don't seem to care. You return to the cemetery and they put the bones in a paper box for you and you carry it out like leftovers from a picnic. You can then have the bones cremated, bury them, put them in a vault, deposit them in random locations on the beaches in a macabre joke, hand them to a little kid and say "here's a present for you", throw the box in a corner and forget about it, etc.

I have experience with dead gringos in Rio de Janeiro, in case anyone's wondering