Blakely Funeral Home Director Ashby Blakely opens a refrigeration chamber used to keep bodies chilled while waiting to be cremated. Blakely Funeral Home recently became the first Cherokee County funeral home to offer cremation services. (Ledger photo / JOE L. HUGHES III) Simply put, local funeral home director Ashby Blakely likes to consider himself an old-fashioned type of guy.

A true Southern gentleman, Blakely adopted many of the beliefs and traditions passed along by previous generations. Like his love for Christ and the taste of homecooked meals, through the years he has come to prefer to allow the dead to return to the dirt from whence they came after their time on Earth has come to an end.

“I grew up in these parts, and there were a lot of things I grew up with that I’ve carried with me into adulthood,” Blakely said. “One of them is to present the dead with a proper burial. God doesn’t say it’s wrong for families to want other ways for their loved ones to rest, it’s just what I prefer.”

Believing he is simply a steward placed in the position to run family-owned Blakely Funeral Home, he is willing to let go of what he prefers in the effort to provide quality service comforting families during their time of grief.

“I don’t own this business, it’s all God’s,” Blakely said. “He simply made me a steward to offer comfort and support for families after the death of a loved one. Whenever He tells me to move, that’s what I do. Being obedient has definitely contributed to the funeral home’s success.”

Following the will of God and wanting to extend more services to customers, the funeral home recently became the first in Cherokee County to offer families the option of cremation.

“Previously, when a family wanted to have a loved one cremated, we had to take the body to a crematory in Spartanburg,” Blakely said. “That funeral service does a good job, but we do not like having the body too far out of our sight. Being able to cremate bodies here now allows us to do a lot of things in-house.”

Families have become more receptive to the notion of cremation in recent years, boosting Cherokee County’s cremation rate close to 20 percent, Blakely said.

“We’ve had two so far, but it’s still far from the norm here,” Blakely said. “Economics I believe has a hand in the reason many people are at least looking into cremation as a potential option.

“Spartanburg’s numbers are not much higher than ours at 25 percent. Locations like Florida and California are a different story though, with their cremation rates around 50 percent.”

The process of cremation is much different from that of a traditional burial, as the body is not required to be embalmed. Instead, it is placed in a cremation chamber heated up to 1650-degrees, where most of the body is reduced to ashes.

Portions not able to be reduced to ashes during the burning process — primarily bone fragments — are then put in a processing machine where they are ground into dust, enabling virtually every part of the body to be placed in an urn or other container that is presented to the deceased’s family.

“The goal is to return virtually every part of the body back to that person’s family,” Blakely said. “Every family wants their loved one’s remains to be treated with the utmost respect, and that’s our goal too.”