Short answers, pulled from the story.
Cremation is the final disposition of a corpse through burning, used as a funeral rite or an alternative to burial. In modern times it is carried out in a closed furnace called a cremator at a crematorium, which generates temperatures of 871 to 982 degrees Celsius. The average cremation of an adult body takes about 90 minutes.
Cremated remains weigh an average of 2.4 kilograms, with adult males averaging about a kilogram more than females. They are not true ash but dry bone fragments, mostly calcium phosphates with minor salts of sodium and potassium, which are pulverised into a sand-like texture by a machine called a Cremulator.
Cremation dates from at least 17,000 years ago in the archaeological record. The earliest evidence is the Mungo Lady, the remains of a partly cremated body found at Lake Mungo in Australia.
A movement to reintroduce cremation began in Europe in the 1870s, made possible by new furnace technology and the miasma theory that burning would reduce disease-causing bad air. Sir Henry Thompson, a surgeon and Physician to Queen Victoria, founded the Cremation Society of Great Britain in 1874, and the first Western crematorium opened in Milan in 1876.
The Roman Catholic Church forbade cremation in 1886 and incorporated the ban into the 1917 Code of Canon Law, partly due to its association with groups seen as enemies of God. In 1963 Pope Paul VI lifted the ban at the Second Vatican Council, recognizing cremation was generally sought for practical purposes, and in 1966 allowed priests to officiate, on condition the ashes are buried or interred rather than scattered.
Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism practice cremation, and Hinduism prescribes it for a dead adult. Islam, the Baha'i Faith, Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox Churches, and traditional Judaism forbid or strongly disapprove of it, while traditional Zoroastrianism disavows both cremation and burial in favor of ritual exposure in a Tower of Silence.
Japan reported a cremation rate of 99.97%, among the highest in the world, while Romania reported a rate of 0.5% in 2018. The United Kingdom rate rose from 34.70% in 1960 to 78.10% in 2019, and cremation became more common than burial in the United States in 2016.