Ashes to Ashes, to Ashes, to Ashes . . .

You say everyone wants a piece of you? No problem. There’ll be plenty to go around after the final liftoff.

Take Allen Ginsberg, the bard who met his makers last week. His remains were to be cremated, then divided in three parts, each being sent to a separate resting place--in Buddhist centers in Colorado and Michigan and one in a Jewish cemetery in New Jersey.

The parceling out of one’s ashes is increasingly common, funeral directors say, a trend that has naturally followed the rising preference for cremation over burial.

“They used to want a lock of the hair. That was it,” said Phill Hunt, general manager of the Valley Funeral Home in Burbank. Now, he said, for each cremation he stocks up to 12 containers of various sizes for possible “division.”

His theory is that some people have emotional problems with scattering and need to keep at least a few tablespoons of the crushed bone as a reminder that their loved one existed. Or it could be the result of today’s multi-generational, blended, mobile families that may also include a long-term live-in companion, none of whom knows each other that well but each of whom has a claim and an opinion.

“Everybody would like a little bit of Mom or Dad,” said Jean McIntosh, a family representative at the Omega Society, a cremation service based in Santa Ana. “There are families who will say, ‘She will like the mountains.’ Others say, ‘She liked the ocean.’ So, they’ll divide it up.”

Some moms or dads want everybody to have a piece of them. “It may be a way to preserve their memory and maintain a power in people’s lives that maybe they wouldn’t have if they were dumped in some urn and put in some cemetery,” said Dr. Mark Goulston, a Los Angeles psychiatrist. “Or maybe, this is a reaction to the fact that two and three generations of families are not buried together in the same cemetery anymore. ‘If we cannot be buried in the same place, let’s divide ourselves up and sort out the pieces among us.’ ”

Not all religions are keen on the trend. The Catholic Church, for instance, which has sanctioned cremation only since the 1960s, bans the dividing of remains, insisting that they be buried in hallowed ground.

Of course, there are those families who can’t share anything, even a few cups of remains. One funeral director recalled a case in which two adult siblings, still carrying on an intense childhood rivalry, felt each one alone should possess the mother’s ashes. “They didn’t want the other to get away with anything,” he said. “We had to get a lawyer involved to decide who the ashes belonged to.”

One reason for holding on to at least some ashes is to take advantage of new technology and ideas that may come along. Survivors of “Star Trek” creator Gene Roddenberry and LSD guru Timothy Leary are hoping for a more celestial finale. They hope, by using the services of a Houston company, to have part of their loved ones’ remains orbit the Earth for as long as six years and then be brought back home. Launch is scheduled for April 19.