Taking the grim out of reaper

Baby boomers are putting a new, often merrier, spin on last rites

By Joseph P. Kahn, Globe Staff, 9/29/2002

Elaine Sliney died last November at age 53 after a lengthy battle with cancer. A schoolteacher and mother of four, Sliney grew up in the 1950s, reached adulthood in the late 1960s, started a family in the 1970s, resumed her career during the '80s and '90s, and left behind a wide circle of friends and loved ones. Outgoing and passionate, Sliney adored gardening, music, and painting. Her Hingham house was filled with her colorful artwork. Like many of her generation, the baby boomers, she was creative and - at times - unconventional.

So when family members approached Keohane Funeral Service in Hingham about handling Sliney's funeral arrangements, it was made clear that her service should not look or sound like any other. That it reflect, in ways large and small, the individual who Elaine Sliney was.

"A lot of it was really healing for our souls," explains her husband, George Sliney.

All of the furniture in the funeral home was taken out and replaced with pieces that Sliney had hand-painted. The walls were papered with her artwork. "We're going to Mom the place up," one of her sons vowed, and that is precisely what happened. Messages from Sliney's fifth-grade students in Norwell were displayed outside the viewing room. A floral arrangement arrived with a Jimmy Buffett-inspired Parrothead motif. Family members brought in CDs from her personal stash - Buffett, Dave Matthews, Billy Joel - and played her favorite cuts as mourners filed in.

"People were a little surprised at first hearing rock music, because you don't expect that," says Dennis Keohane, who coordinated the event for his family's funeral business. "We posted a note in the lobby saying this is what Elaine's family wanted, though. People grasped what was going on pretty quickly."

So did Keohane. At 31, he epitomizes a new breed of death-care professional operating in a marketplace being reshaped by the no-longer-young boomers, a generation facing intimations of its own mortality and doing what boomers have so often done in the past: their own thing.

The signposts are there. A generation long into self-actualization and self-expression is now processing death on a gut level as it moves through middle age, as illustrated by the recent departures of boomer heroes George Harrison and Ken Kesey. Kesey, a pillar of the '60s counterculture, commanded a parade of his compatriot Merry Pranksters in his honor. Harrison, the "mystical" Beatle, sought eternal rest in the Ganges River. Neither was wheeled to the local funeral home for embalming and pancake makeup, followed by a few brief words about the deceased. One left noisily, one quietly - but both left on their own terms, befitting their personalities and stature as pop-culture heroes. And don't think impressionable fans were not paying attention.

"If you want to put the corpse on top of a psychedelic bus these days and drive it around with Jimi Hendrix music blaring, there are funeral directors who'll do it," says Steve Prothero, a religion professor at Boston University and author of a book about the history of cremation. "Their advertising to boomers is all about choices and options, because that's what boomers want."

And why not? Boomers marched on Washington and toked at Woodstock, grew up with The Bomb and The Pill, plastered swooshes on their sneakers and Starbucks logos on their T-shirts, and embraced all points on the cultural compass, from Western movies to Eastern religion. They're the generation that made fetishes out of irony, brand names, alternative realities, and "thinking outside the box," a particularly apt phrase in this context. It is highly unlikely they will go quietly - or conventionally - when their time comes.

Already, in a preview of boomer attitudes regarding last rites, Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry and LSD guru Timothy Leary had their ashes rocketed into outer space, while John F. Kennedy Jr.'s were dispatched in the opposite direction: to the bottom of the ocean, after a shipboard ceremony attended by a small gathering of Kennedys and not a churchful of mourners.

Baseball legend Ted Williams may have preferred the ocean floor, too, when he died in July - a Florida court is still mulling over his reputed last wishes - but two of his children had Williams's body cyrogenically frozen instead, turning his death into a Popsicle-joke, new age-y circus sideshow. In America's vast and resourceful service economy, there are companies that will pack one's ashes into shotgun shells, fireworks displays, flying Frisbee-style disks, diamond jewelry, or even artificial reefs - so that loved ones can scuba dive in for a graveside visit.

"My first thought? That my whole life has been devoted to my land and to the water, so I'd want to be buried there in some form," says Gloucester resident Gordon Baird, 52, a high school drama teacher, musician, cable-TV-show host, and avid sailor. His father died five years ago, after asking to be cremated with a minimum of fuss. While Baird suspects his views may grow to mirror his father's as he gets older, at this juncture he foresees a "combination of tradition and something that's individualized" when he dies.

"It should be idiosyncratic but not outlandish," says Baird. "Nothing that would make a mockery of my loved ones - or me, for that matter." Still, he says, "ours is a generation that thinks some offbeat, oddball way of going will make a difference in how we're remembered."

Solemnity? Tradition? According to one survey, 41 million boomers say they want "a party" thrown when they check out. Forty percent of all funerals now incorporate some aspect of "personalization," according to another survey. In a society seemingly more attuned to celebrity worship than organized religion, these symbols and numbers matter. A lot.

And Dennis Keohane is one death-care professional who is paying attention to them. A former film student, he joined the family business full time seven years ago. Not because of pressure from his father, he says, but because he genuinely likes it. He's a third-generation mortician (his grandfather founded the business in 1937), with a Generation Xer's outlook. At home on the Internet or in the embalming room, Keohane uses marketing tools like full-service Web sites to cater to people who want something different from cookie-cutter funerals.

At the firm's Quincy headquarters, Keohane takes a visitor into his casket showroom and points to a top-of-the-line, all-bronze model that costs $7,000 - a bargain compared with some that retail for $20,000 or more. "Even I wouldn't buy one of these" more expensive models, he says, with a candor that would make old-line funeral directors blanch.

Keohane admits to being a fan of the HBO series Six Feet Under, a sentiment not widely shared among his more conservative peers. The show - a darkly comic series about a family of postmodern morticians in Los Angeles - "demystifies the business," he says. He finds nothing morbid, either, about leading high schoolers on field trips to his embalming room. Keohane and his brother John, 34, belong to a group of under-40 funeral directors who swap ideas and track consumer trends. The two are currently overhauling their Web site to include online obituaries and recently installed a state-of-the-art sound system in their Quincy facility. If cremation is the family's choice, an increasingly popular one these days, Keohane can arrange to scatter the ashes along a nearby beach or charter a boat for interring what are called cremains at sea. "A lot of funeral directors try to distance themselves from their work," he says. "For me, it's just the opposite. This is a people business."

Today, it's the greatest generation that's headed en masse toward the hereafter. Tomorrow, it's the Me Generation's turn, all 78 million of them. The US mortality rate is predicted to reach 4.1 million annually by 2040, nearly double the current figure of 2.3 million. For boomers, "When I'm Sixty-Four" is no longer just a Beatles oldie. It's a looming reality.

If death is a growth industry, moreover, it is big business, too. Very big. And that also has death-care professionals and industry analysts increasingly fixated on the boomers.

Americans spend $11 billion a year on death-care-related products and services. US casket sales total 1.8 million units annually and $1.5 billion in sales. Funeral costs now average $5,400, according to some industry figures, up from $4,700 in 1995. Meanwhile, cremation is gaining steadily as an alternative to burial, rising from 7 percent to 25 percent of all funeral choices over the past 25 years; in 2001, there were 600,000 cremations. An influx of immigrants, changing religious beliefs, the AIDS epidemic, environmental concerns, and the small-is-beautiful aesthetic are among the factors making cremation an increasingly popular option, experts say.

"There's been a change in how we think about spiritual matters," says BU's Prothero. "Since the 1960s, fewer people believe in hell and the literal resurrection of the body, two beliefs that historically work against cremation." Inasmuch as cremation lends itself to customization, he continues, it serves boomers - who are mistrustful of authority anyway - as they search for rituals that help define them as individuals. And because cremains are divisible, unlike bodies, Prothero notes, they can be scattered or preserved in a variety of locations, not just one.

Indeed, beyond the statistics and industry earnings lies this shifting notion of death and dying, a yearning to find meaning and individuality in last rites.

"To me, it's the other end of the natural childbirth phenomenon," says Lisa Carlson, founder of the Funeral Consumers Alliance in Vermont, a consumer recource and advocacy group. "This is the generation that's into recycling, home schooling, and blended families. It's an information generation. They want more information and more choices, and they're finding them out there."

Over the past 60 years, says Carlson, who's written a how-to book on home funerals, death has become increasingly depersonalized as it has moved from the family home to the funeral home. What's old is now new again: If not the deceased literally on view in his living room, then on display in the funeral home surrounded by mementos of a life well lived: everything from sports trophies and military artifacts to a favorite movie of the departed playing beside his open casket. On widescreen TV. With, yes, fresh popcorn for mourners paying their last respects.

For boomers, such totems can be deeply symbolic. "The idea of death hits them especially hard," says sociologist Michael Kearl of Trinity University in San Antonio, "because they're the first generation . . . that basically expects to make it to old age, the first that demonstrates an inherent longing for immortality." Kearl, author of Endings: A Sociology of Death and Dying, teaches a popular course on thanatology and maintains a vast Web site on the subject (www.trinity.edu/~mkearl/death.html). As with sex, says Kearl, longstanding cultural taboos around death and dying are breaking down as boomers grow up and grow old.

Fascination with the afterlife is surging, as reflected in new-age-flavored Hollywood films with life-after-death themes (Sixth Sense, Ghost). The huge transfer of wealth to the postwar generation is underway, encouraging boomers to "think about their post-selves," as Kearl puts it. And high-tech tools like the Internet are proliferating, making online casket shopping and submit-your-own-obit Web sites only a mouse click away. In some cases, far-flung friends and relatives can now share in a funeral or memorial service by going to a cyber site and watching the proceedings via Web cam.

"The name of the game is to be remembered," says Kearl, "and it's harrowing for boomers to think they won't be. Using new technologies to preserve their memory is an obsession of theirs."

As a result, people like Darby O'Brien, publisher of a trend-spotting quarterly called The Gut, sees a host of tantalizing possibilities on the horizon. "Baby boomers want to go out having as much fun as they had when they were here," says O'Brien. "The boomers live like there's no tomorrow, like they were never told they'd have to grow up and get old." Published obituaries will mimic the New York Times' abbreviated entries for the victims of the September 11 attacks, with their pop-culture references and anecdotal informality, O'Brien says. Black will be out - black suits, black cars - as "a general loosening-up takes place," he asserts. The Big Chill generation will go for "Stairway to Heaven" over "Amazing Grace."

"Everything the boomers move on, they shake up," he says. "Everything they do becomes a style statement. The way they bury their parents is just a tuneup."

It's late April in Orlando, home to Disney World, Universal Studios, and other escapist theme parks. Gateway to southern Florida, future home to millions of soon-to-be-retired boomers in search of their earthly Valhalla. In a resort hotel across from Sea World, 800 members of the International Cemetery and Funeral Association have gathered for their annual convention.

Founded in 1887, the ICFA comprises 5,800 funeral homes, cemeteries, and related businesses. Over four days of workshops and panel discussions, there will be much talk here about the future of that industry, not unlike that of any trade association focused on the trend-driven American consumer.

The only difference between this convention and others is what's on display in the hotel exhibit hall: decorative burial urns and hand-carved memorial slabs; hydraulic winches for noiselessly lowering caskets into the ground; a wide selection of merchandise by Batesville Casket Co., the nation's largest casket supplier, their polished lids propped open like the trunks of expensive cars; a colorful array of embalming fluids, each advertising its specialized function ("plasma flo," "premium jaundice"); and dozens more funerary artifacts.

Also noteworthy is the number of businesses adapting to the mortuary market from other areas of commerce. Messenger Inc., for instance, has been making cards and stationery for 80 years. Its newest product line? Decorative funerary urns like the Wildflowers model, hand-painted and signed by the artist. Each urn is made of full-lead crystal ("handmade by Bohemian artists") and comes with its own velvet bag and cremation certificate folder.

In a nearby booth, James Rinard is hawking top-sealing, nonbiodegradable burial vaults made of polypropylene - "the first with an eternal warranty," fliers boast. Rinard's firm started out making home building products. It still does. As he greets old friends at an opening-night reception, however, Rinard notes that funeral products, unlike building products, are a stable business in an unstable economy. "And I like stable businesses," smiles Rinard.

The buzz around the Batesville booth is the company's LifeSymbols line of embroidered panels and add-on casket ornaments. The ornaments feature military, religious, nautical, and sporting themes and can be removed as keepsakes, if desired. Should Dad have happened to be an avid golfer, he can now spend eternity gazing up at the 18th-hole flagstick. Was Mom a boat lover? There's the Cape Hatteras lighthouse panel, available in champagne, eggshell, or light blue. Loved ones can also stow personal items inside a "memory safe" casket drawer.

Brochures offer handsomely lit pictures of casket models and colorful add-ons - a leaping bass, an Angel of Color - plus elaborate sets that can be replicated in the funeral home itself. Such sets would include the Hunter Room, replete with fishing rods, lures, snowshoes, and duck decoys.

With 40 percent of the US market (1,000 caskets a day), Batesville is to the postmortem consumer what General Motors is to the nation's car buyers.

Sales executive Mike DiBease shows off one of the company's newest products, a Floral Reflections Biodegradable Urn made of cast paper and designed for burial at sea. "For years, people selected caskets based on color and price," he says. "By adding personalization features, now everybody has a life story to tell."

For a Harley-Davidson executive, he says, Batesville's customizing shop made an all-black casket with bright orange interior. Overnight delivery is guaranteed, too, says DiBease, a consideration crucial to another ICFA exhibitor, TransWorld Benefits Inc.

For a prepaid fee of $500, the company's Above and Beyond Service promises that should you die more than 100 miles from home, your body will be flown back for burial by private jet. No riding home in a Delta cargo hold or Amtrak luggage compartment. No need for family members to deal with foreign governments or overseas consulates. Not only will TransWorld do the requisite paperwork, they'll even reclaim your vehicle and ship it home. For a generation accustomed to limos and valet parking, it's another embraceable extension of the service economy.

"We're putting everything on a more dignified basis," says company executive Ron Robertson.

While that may be debatable, the trend toward individualization is obviously not. A Thursday morning presentation titled "Meeting the Challenge of Today's Information-Minded Cremation Culture" is led by David Daly, a former corporate headhunter. Daly's message: The cremation trend reflects a larger impulse to make each funeral "an event." And if you're not attuned to that change, he suggests, you may not stay in business much longer.

Offering a brief history of the modern funeral business, Daly describes how Jessica Mitford shocked America in the early '60s with her book The American Way of Death. Consumers were outraged by the greed and high-pressure sales tactics Mitford described, he says, until John F. Kennedy's televised funeral restored a sense of reverence in mainstream America. He adds that John F. Kennedy Jr.'s death in 1999 was equally symbolic - of the newer trend toward cremation.

Daly yields the stage to an Illinois funeral director, who announces a series of awards for innovation. One goes to Wade Funeral Home in St. Louis for its themed sets for viewings by the bereaved, including one called "Big Momma's Kitchen": a Sunday family-dinner tableau complete with a loaf of Wonder Bread on top of the refrigerator and a platter of real fried chicken on the stove. Slivy Edmonds Cotton, who owns Perpetua Inc. of Tucson, a corporate partner of Wade's, says later that the St. Louis firm has found customer reaction "overwhelmingly positive."

The sets are "constantly in use," says Cotton. "People walk in and call their friends, saying, 'You've got to come over and see this!' "

If the death-care industry is all about offering choices, then some qualify as truly unusual, if not bizarre.

You can sign up with the Celebrate Life Program, for instance, which turns cremated remains into what the company calls "part of a personalized, private fireworks celebration." In short, have your ashes hand-packed into fuse-ready ordnance - and go out with a bang, not a whimper.

Or order a casket from WhiteLight, a Texas-based company appealing to diehard college sports fans. Among its line of caskets are models with the colors and logos of big-time jock schools like the University of Kentucky and Texas A & M. Another two dozen institutions are on the company's target list for licensing rights, according to WhiteLight, giving "Be true to your school" a more literal, and everlasting, meaning. For Civil War buffs, you can now be buried - complete with Johnny Reb or Yankee bluecoat plaque - in a Fredericksburg, Virgina, cemetery located near the Battle of Chancellorsville site. More than 1,200 purchase contracts have already been signed. Options range from reinforced concrete vaults (for less than $500) to bronze burial vaults costing $4,500. "Choose a final resting place that will connect with your life's passion for the War between the States," a sales brochure counsels.

Do stately hearse rides seem so . . . yesterday? Biker Burials of Wrightsville, Pennsylvania, hopes to lure motorcycle enthusiasts with its custom-built hearse attached to a 2000 Harley-Davidson Road King, sidecar style. It's the "ultimate ride" for "those in search of an extraordinary farewell," the company promises.

At LifeGem, they'll scrape carbon from the departed's ashes and fashion it into a high-quality stone. "A diamond that takes millions of years to occur naturally," says the company, "can now be created from the carbon of your loved one in a matter of weeks." A .75-carat memento costs $17,000. Hunting enthusiasts might check out an Iowa company that packs your cremains into shotgun shells and lets friends stage their own 21-gun salute. Elsewhere and everywhere, human ashes are being scattered over golf courses, sprinkled over lakes and rivers, packed into wearable jewelry, blown into glassware, or consigned to the hands of companies like Eternal Reefs.

Based in Georgia, Eternal Reefs is one of several businesses aggressively exploiting a new niche in creative death-care service: underwater, eco-friendly interment. After mixing human cremains with concrete, Eternal Reefs fashions the mixture into dome-shaped, 6-inch-thick "reef balls." The balls are then submerged, where they become the living habitats of sponges and ocean coral. Costs for the service range from $850 to $3,200.

Predictably, the trend toward self-expression has drawn the attention of social commentators like Joe Queenan. In his book Balsamic Dreams: A Short but Self-Important History of the Baby Boomer Generation, Queenan ridicules boomers for having "transformed the traditional funeral service into a ludicrous stage show," as he puts it, "a slapdash mixture of performance art, stand-up comedy, and karaoke." No longer somber rituals, writes Queenan, funerals are becoming "cabaret."

Jay Murphy is 53. He designs computer circuit boards for a living and resides in Melrose with his wife and two kids. His hobby is restoring old wooden boats. There was a time, however, when like many boomers Murphy heeded the call to tune in and drop out - in his case to Cape Cod, where he became a commercial fisherman. It was 1969, the year of Woodstock and the continuation of the war in Vietnam. The sea got into Murphy's blood. He fished there for 10 years, until foreign competition drove him out of fishing and back to school.

The sea never lost its romance for Murphy, however. And so three years ago, he bought himself a banged-up Grand Banks trawler, christened it the SunseT, and parked the 32-foot vessel at a Winthrop marina. He dusted off his Coast Guard-issued captain's license and, inspired by friends whom he'd help to scatter a relative's ashes at sea, came up with a domain name (www.buryatsea.com), which he registered on the Web.

Just like that, Murphy became a part-time functionary in the modern death-care industry. A wily entrepreneur serving cremation nation. A boomer boat captain on the River Styx.

"My heart belongs offshore," explains Murphy, a stocky, mustachioed man with a ready laugh and twinkle in his eye. He's sitting in a deck chair aboard the trawler on a late-May afternoon, watching the jets screech overhead on their descent into Logan Airport. "I nearly died at sea several times," he says over the noise of the plane engines. "I knew I needed another boat in my life, but I had to find a way to make it pay for itself." He considered charter fishing as a sideline, Murphy goes on, or conducting harbor tours. Then came the friends' request to do an offshore interment. Why not, Murphy thought, turn that into a business? "A lot of my friends were seeing their parents die," he reflects, swigging on a bottle of soda. "Cemetery plots are costly and hard to find. . . . It wasn't hard to put this together." Murphy charges $500 to take a party of six out.

After JFK Jr.'s death three summers ago, he says, his phone "started ringing off the hook." He now averages two or three trips a month, weather conditions permitting. He hears from people who are interested in low-cost alternatives to burial, he says, and those who favor cremation for cultural or personal reasons. He wears a captain's uniform, usually crisply pressed khakis. His wife, Barbara, helps out with refreshments and other amenities. Normally he'll motor to Graves Light, 4 miles out of Boston Harbor, to perform the service.

When he nears the interment site, Murphy asks members of the party, "Does this place feel right to you?" Which really means, he says, "Are you emotionally prepared to do this?" Flowers are usually tossed overboard in a circle around the interment site, followed by the decanted remains of the deceased. Murphy is careful to keep the trawler pointed upwind, lest the ashes blow back on board. On occasion, others onshore join in the ceremony by cellular phone. He has interred military officers and college students. Family members are encouraged to give readings, recite prayers, or perform music during the ceremony. They get a keepsake chart showing where the remains were deposited. A "concert of movement and emotion" is how he describes the process. "I make it clear at the outset that I want one decision maker in each group," says Murphy. After scattering the ashes, he adds, "I might do a figure eight or circle around the site so everyone can shoot pictures. The women usually go below, they tend to get more teary and emotional. The men want to stay on deck and talk fishing."

In five years, says Murphy, he expects this business will be big. Very big. "You look at how hippies used to get married on the beach, in tie-dyed shirts," he says. "It's the same thing. People our age are taking control of these things. It's a cultural shift, and I'm a vehicle for that." How does he want to go? Murphy grins. "At sea," he answers softly. "But hopefully, not too soon."

Joseph P. Kahn is a member of the Globe staff.