The Whole Death Catalog

by Harold Schechter

  Laurens’s motivation in seeking cremation, however, was very different from De Palm’s. The latter was part of a burgeoning late-nineteenth-century reform movement promoting cremation as a scientifically superior alternative to earth burial. Laurens, on the other hand, was prompted by something far more primal: fear of being buried alive. As Prothero explains, “His daughter had been pronounced dead after being stricken with smallpox and was close to being interred when she suddenly sprang back to life.” Traumatized by the event, Laurens insisted that his own corpse be incinerated as a surefire way (so to speak) of avoiding premature burial.

  The powdered cremains can then be disposed of in any of a growing number of ways: placed in an urn and ceremonially installed in a columbarium, buried in a grave, or displayed on the living room mantel; scattered at sea; turned into a synthetic diamond; launched into deep space; incorporated into a “memorial reef;” or (for the cost-conscious) stored in a cardboard box and kept on a closet shelf.

  CANA

  Founded in 1913 as the cremationist counterpart of the National Funeral Directors Association, CANA—the Cremation Association of North America—was the brainchild of Hugo Erichsen (1860–1942), a tireless worker for the cause of human corpse incineration. Known for the first six decades of its existence as the Cremation Association of America, the organization—which originally consisted of fifty-two crematory owners—now numbers fifteen hundred members. In Erichsen’s day, cremation was touted by its supporters as a superior means of corpse disposal—cheap, scientific, and supposedly more sanitary than earth burial. Nowadays, CANA chooses to stress the more ceremonial aspects of the practice, requiring members to sign the following declaration:

  In the practice of cremation, we believe:

  In dignity and respect in the care of Human Remains, in compassion for the living who survive them, and in the Memorialization of the dead.

  That a Cremation Authority should be responsible for creating and maintaining an atmosphere of respect at all times;

  That the greatest care should be taken in the appointment of crematory staff members, any of whom must not, by conduct or demeanor, bring the ceremony or cremation into disrepute;

  That cremation should be considered as preparation for Memorialization;

  That the dead of our human society should be memorialized through a commemorative means suitable to the survivors.

  Like the NFDA, CANA operates a website (www.cremationassociation.org) that includes a crematory directory, career advice center, and consumer information, along with links to such informative articles as “The History of Cremation,” “Getting Creative with Cremains,” “Ten Steps to Ensure Safe Cremation of Obese Individuals,” and “Why Cremated Remains Cannot Be Sent by Express Mail.” Membership in the association—which is open to anyone in the death care industry who “recognizes that cremation is impacting their professional future and wants to be proactive in turning this into a positive rather than a negative force”—includes a subscription to the quarterly magazine the Cremationist.

  Every cremationist must be a missionary for the cause, and embrace every suitable occasion to spread its gospel, the glad tidings of a more sanitary and more aesthetic method of disposing of our beloved dead.

  —HUGO ERICHSEN

  Ashes to Art

  Thanks to the growing trend in cool customized burial containers, your corpse can now spend eternity in anything from a handcrafted folk-art coffin from Ghana in the shape of a crocodile to a fancy bronze casket adorned with the logo of your favorite sports team. But why should slowly decomposing cadavers have all the fun? What about people who choose cremation instead of burial? Shouldn’t their ashes have a stylish place to reside, not just some boring old urn or a shoebox shoved away on a closet shelf?

  Title: Anubis Artist: Jack Thompson Medium: Painted ceramic Copyright © 2003 Jack Thompson

  Maureen Lomasney clearly thinks so. An artist and photographer dedicated to the proposition that beauty “can help to heal a troubled heart,” Lomasney is the founder of Art Honors Life, a unique gallery in Sonoma County, California, specializing in original handcrafted cremation vessels. Priced from $800 to $1,900, these one-ot-a-kind funerary objets range from the elegant to the playful: a ceramic prayer wheel etched with autumn leaves, an earthenware jar made to resemble a lichen-covered rock, a Flash Gordon-style rocket ship of glistening aluminum, a delicate angel-adorned box of glazed porcelain clay, an exquisite “cinerary vessel” of black walnut and gold leaf, even a vintage vacuum cleaner (the “Urn-a-matic”) that can play “Seasons in the Sun” at the push of a button. Each is so sheerly beautiful that you may want to buy one for yourself and display it on a shelf even if you aren’t quite ready yet to store your ashes inside it.

  Title: Koa Artists: Carol Green and Lynn Hayes Medium: Cast bronze Copyright © Carol Green and Lynn Hayes

  Title: Urn-a-matic Artist: Darin Montgomery Media: Vintage vacuum cleaner, Plexiglas, home video and audio featuring the song “Seasons in the Sun” Copyright © Darin Montgomery

  Besides her gallery, Lomasney sponsors an international “Ashes to Art” exhibition showcasing the work of her clients and runs a website called Funeria (www.funeria.com), where you can view examples of their work.

  The Perfect Final Resting

  Place for Snack Lovers

  Fancy-shmancy art urns are all well and good for the chardonnay-sipping, sushi-eating, NPR-listening crowd. But if you’re more of a beer, pizza, and NASCAR type, you’ll want something a little more down-to-earth. Thanks to Fredric Baur, the perfect solution is no farther away than your nearest supermarket.

  A Cincinnati organic chemist and food storage technician, Baur was the inventor of the iconic Pringles potato chip package—the tall, tube-shaped canister with resealable plastic lid and tinfoil lining. According to a widely published report from the Associated Press, Baur was so proud of his creation that when he died on May 4, 2008, his ashes—as per his request—were buried inside a Pringles can.

  Conveniently preprinted with such touching sentiments as “Ingredients: dried potatoes, maltodextrin, mono-and diglycerides, and dextrose,” the Pringles can makes a perfect final resting place for your loved one’s cremains, particularly if your loved one happened to resemble a hard-boiled egg decked out with walrus mustache, parted bangs, and bow tie. Plus, each of these handy-dandy burial containers comes packed with a supply of yummy “potato” chips in case you get hit with a bad case of the munchies during the memorial service!

  Fly Me to the Moon

  Whether you’re a die-hard Trekkie who has always yearned to explore the “final frontier” or just a normal person who thinks it would be really cool to take part in a space mission, a company called Celestis can make your dream come true. Sort of. You won’t exactly be whizzing around the solar system on a sightseeing trip. But for prices ranging from a mere $500 all the way up to $67,500, a small portion of your cremated ashes can hitch a ride on a rocket ship into outer space.

  Based, appropriately enough, in Houston—home of NASA—Celestis offers four different types of “memorial spaceflight.” In the least expensive—the so-called Earth-Return Service—a few grams of your cremains are packed into a small capsule resembling a lipstick holder, which is then launched into space. After experiencing the thrill of the “zero-gravity environment” (in the words of the online advertising brochure), your ashes then return to earth, where they are handed over as a keepsake to your loved ones.

  If you’d like to enjoy something a bit more adventurous when you’re dead, you can sign up for the Earth Orbit Service, which allows your cremains to “ride alongside a commercial or scientific satellite” as “part of a real space mission.” After orbiting the earth for anywhere from 10 to 240 years, the spacecraft will reenter the atmosphere, “harmlessly vaporizing like a blazing shooting star in final tribute.”

  For those who have always dreamed of replicating the exploits of the Apollo astronauts, Celestis will place a thimbleful of your as
hes on a rocket that will either put you into permanent lunar orbit or actually land you on the surface of the moon. Finally—for the true aerospace enthusiast or any boomer who watched 2001: A Space Odyssey one too many times while under the influence of mind-altering drugs—the company offers the ultimate trip, a spot on a Voyager mission that will propel you on “a permanent celestial journey” into “deepest space,” where you will have the “opportunity to be at one with the cosmos.” Groovy!

  Whatever option you choose, your “memorial spaceflight” includes such amenities as an invitation to the launch for your loved ones, a professional-quality DVD of the event, an inscription on a special name plaque included on the spacecraft, a “personalized online memorial” placed on the company website, and a handsome, suitable-for-framing postlaunch certificate.

  For more detailed information, go to the Celestis website, www.memorialspaceflights.com.

  Sleeping with the Fishes

  Have you ever gone snorkeling during a tropical vacation and then, when it was time to head back to the boat, thought: “Boy, this is nice. Wish I could stay out here longer”? Well, thanks to a company called Eternal Reefs, you can stay there longer. A lot longer. Like, forever.

  Eternal Reefs (www.eternalreefs.com) is an offshoot of the Reef Ball Development Group, the brainchild of Atlanta businessman Don Brawley During spring-break diving trips to the Florida Keys in the mid-1980s with his college roommate, Todd Barber, Brawley was struck by how quickly the coral reefs were deteriorating, largely as a result of the usual manmade causes: pollution, discarded debris, the destructive effects of dropped anchors, motorboat propellers, et cetera.

  Determined to do something about the problem, the pair went on to found a company that produces environmentally sound artificial reefs. The literal building blocks of the enterprise are uniquely designed “reef balls”—hollow domelike modules resembling perforated concrete igloos. Deposited on the ocean floor, these structures provide a suitable habitat for the various forms of marine life—sponges, anemone, sea fans, and so on—that thrive in natural reef formations. To date, the oceans have been seeded with nearly a half million reef balls worldwide, helping to restore teeming life and diversity to once-moribund underwater environments.

  It was a comment by Brawley’s father-in-law, Carleton Palmer, that put the company in the body disposal business. After being diagnosed with liver cancer in the late 1990s, Carleton, a devoted deep-sea fisherman, asked his son-in-law to take his cremated ashes, mix them into a reef ball, and sink him underwater. “I’d rather spend eternity down there with all that life than in a field full of dead people.” As to location, Carleton wasn’t fussy—as long as the spot “had lots of red snapper and grouper.”

  Not long after his death, Carleton got his wish when his cremains were added to a load of concrete that yielded the raw material for thirty reef balls, which were then ferried six miles off the Florida coast and dropped into the blue waters of the Gulf. When word of Carleton’s unique sea burial spread, others began contacting the company to ask if their own departed loved ones could be “reefed.” A new memorial enterprise, Eternal Reefs, was born.

  For prices ranging from $2,500 to $6,500, depending on which model you choose, the company will incorporate your ashes into a small, medium, or large “memorial reef” at its casting facility in Sarasota, Florida. You can also choose a lower-cost option, a “community reef,” in which your ashes are mixed together with a bunch of other cremains. And if you want Fido to join you in Davy Jones’s locker, a mini-reef designed specifically for house pets is available for just $695.

  Survivors can participate in the process by adding their loved one’s ashes to the fresh concrete as it’s poured into the mold and leaving a handprint on the module while it’s drying. Once the reef has hardened, it is transported by boat, with family members on board, to its final resting place, where it is dropped into the waters to form a permanent habitat for the local sea life. Prices include a bronze memorial plaque affixed to the module and a handsome certificate that gives the precise longitude and latitude of the reef’s location. Sites are generally close to resort areas, so survivors can combine a yearly visit to their loved one’s final resting place with a fun beach vacation!

  A more recent entry in the rapidly growing, highly competitive area of subaquatic cremains disposal is Great Burial Reef, a company founded by former Wall Street trader Jason Rew. As befitting an ex-investment banker, Rew offers a slightly more upscale version of the experience. For $7,500, customers receive a maple urn made by artists in New Mexico. After being filled with ashes, this handcrafted receptacle—which, given its ultimate purpose, is almost gratuitously beautiful—is placed by scuba divers into an artificial concrete reef two miles west of Sarasota, Florida, in the Gulf of Mexico. For more information, go to www.greatburialreef.com.

  If you’re looking for something even more splashy (so to speak) in the way of a memorial reef—a permanent resting place that resembles an underwater theme park or the submerged lobby of a Las Vegas hotel—you might want to explore the glories of Atlantis Memorial Reef (www.atlantisreefproject.com). Located off the coast of Miami, in the emerald waters just east of Key Biscayne, this sprawling aquatic site is a fanciful reconstruction of the lost city of Atlantis as it might be imagined by a Disney designer. There are various options for perpetual residency in Atlantis, all of which involve placing your cremains in a special container and installing them in one of the architectural features of the enchanted underwater city: the foundation of an ancient palace, say, or the horizontal lintel spanning two columns in the ruined temple of the sea god Poseidon. Judging from the publicity material, it actually looks like a fun place to spend eternity. The only real drawback is that you’ll be dead the whole time.

  Ashes Aweigh

  Sea burial is a venerable corpse disposal method, dating back to ancient times and practiced by sailors throughout the centuries. Nowadays, having your body consigned to Davy Jones’s Locker is rare for civilians, though a few companies offer the service as an environmentally friendly alternative to earth burial.

  Nature’s Passage, a company headquartered in Amityville, Long Island, markets a range of watery interments, including “full body/casket submersion,” in which the embalmed, encoffined cadaver is submerged in the open ocean at depths exceeding 100 fathoms, and “sail-cloth wrapped submersion,” in which an unembalmed body is wrapped in weighted sail cloth and similarly disposed of. Veterans are qualified for a “full military honors” ceremony (complete with commemorative American flag provided to the family at no additional cost as a handsome souvenir of the occasion). Civilians who opt for full-body sea burial can choose from various options, from elaborate on-board funerals with full religious services to more secular affairs designed for die-hard unbelievers (the company’s website declares that “we are proud to offer burials that are sanctioned by the American Atheists, Inc.”). For further information, go to www.naturespassage.com.

  Far more common than full-body nautical burial is having your ashes scattered at sea. A growing number of companies (including Nature’s Passage) offer this service, The best-known is the Neptune Society founded in 1973 by California chiropractor Charles Denning. A dapper, goateed gent whose resemblance to KFC’s Colonel Sanders earned him the nickname “Colonel Cinders,” Denning enjoyed heaping scorn on funeral directors, deriding them as purveyors of “tin boxes that rust in the ground. pink gowns and booties, and scenic plots overlooking freeways.” Specializing in low-cost, no-frills cremations, Neptune will pick up a body at the place of death, handle all the necessary paperwork, transport the corpse to a refrigerated holding facility, incinerate it in a simple container, place the cremains in an urn, and either return them to the family or (for an extra fee) scatter them at sea. Though some of Neptune’s business practices have recently come in for criticism by activists such as Lisa Carlon of the Funeral Consumers Alliance, it continues to provide simple, affordable cremations in various states around the cou
ntry. For more information go to www.neptunesociety.com. Other companies that have sprung up in Neptune’s wake (as it were) include Pacific Coast Ashes at Sea (www.cremainsatsea.com), Maritime Funeral Services (www.maritimefuneralservices.com), Sea Services (www.seaservices.com), and Sea Burial (www.seaburial.com). Besides the standard cremains-scattering option, some of these outfits offer other types of nautical disposal. Sea Burial, for example, will have a diver carry an ash-filled urn to the seabed floor and bury it in the sand, while Sea Services offers a trademarked “seashell urn” that begins to biodegrade as it descends through the water until it “respectfully deposits the remains in their final resting spot at the ocean’s depths.”

  DEATH QUIZ

  All but one of the following dead celebrities had their ashes scattered at sea. Who is the sole exception?

  A. Steve McQueen

  B. Humphrey Bogart

  C. Vincent Price

  D. Jerry Garcia

  E. Robert Mitchum

  F. Rock Hudson