October 2008 issue
Death of the (traditional) Funeral?
George Swanson had a love affair with speed. Naturally, he owned a
Corvette. Actually, he owned two. Swanson, a beer distributor in
Hempfield Township, Westmoreland County, enjoyed his white, 1984
Corvette convertible so much that he later bought a matching one for
his wife, Caroline.
Out here in this rural county east of Pittsburgh, the terrain is
good for zipping around in a sports car - about as good as it gets in
the snowy, traffic-choked Mid-Atlantic region of the United States. The
air is crisp and clear. Long, narrow roads course through tree-covered
hills. Imagine Swanson slicing through the wind in his Corvette, the
fallen leaves crunching beneath its shiny wheels. Right now, right as
you're reading about him, Swanson is behind the wheel of his favorite
automobile.
There's only one strange twist to this tale. He's dead.
A little explanation is required. Swanson's cremated remains remain
in the driver's seat of his Corvette, which is buried in a cemetery
that sits high on a hill in Hempfield Township. Beside the simple
graves of a Pittsburgh physician and his two parents sit 18 contiguous
cemetery plots that house the car and Swanson, who died in 1994 at 71.
This was no easy feat, as Caroline Swanson explains. It was a challenge
that she long saw coming. In fact, on the day George Swanson bought his
Corvette, he announced to her, "I will be buried in it."
You're probably thinking this quirky anecdote is no more than that -
a bit of off-beat news unlikely to be repeated or imitated. Wrong. Just
ask funeral directors, mortuary-science students, mourners, academics
and others who address themselves to the topic of death and dying.
They're likely to tell you that personalized funerals are a growing
trend here and across the country - one that threatens, for good or
ill, to revolutionize a long-unchanged industry.
Roland J. Coston-Criswell, owner and
director of Samuel E. Coston Funeral Home in Pittsburgh's
Lincoln-Larimer neighborhood, made national headlines in 2005 when he
accommodated Denise Smith's request to send her late husband, James
Smith, who died at age 55, off in style. For the man whose family
dubbed him "one of the greatest Steelers fans in the universe," only a
football-themed viewing would do. Coston-Criswell dressed the deceased
in black-and-gold pajamas, draped a Steelers blanket across his legs,
sat him in his favorite recliner and positioned him in front of a
television screen showing an endless loop of Steelers highlights. The
undertaker even placed a remote control in one of Smith's cold hands.
Sitting on a table beside him was a can of beer. After a public viewing
for family and friends, Smith was buried in a casket wearing his
Steelers pajamas.
All across the country, people are talking about the advent of
personalized funerals - some of them dramatic, some subtle and others
just plain funny. When "Meet the Press" host Tim Russert died earlier
this year at 58, his friend and NBC News colleague Tom Brokaw
remembered him at his funeral by drinking a bottle of Rolling Rock beer
pilfered from Russert's office refrigerator. It also was reported that
instead of the traditional organ music, songs from Russert's own iPod
were played for the assembled mourners, including the decidedly
unsacred "Free Bird."
The phenomenon extends to burials, too. Like Swanson and his
Corvette, Fredric Baur, of Cincinnati, Ohio, asked his family to bury
his ashes in a Pringles potato-chip can. According to his children,
Baur, a chemist and food-storage technician, was so proud of his design
for the packaging of the curved, stacked chips that he left specific
instructions for part of his ashes to be interred in one.
Sound bizarre? Not to Patti Oliver, another Ohio resident and the
mother of Pittsburgh attorney Tyra Oliver. She also has left special
instructions to her children on how she wishes to shuffle off this
mortal coil. Simply put, she wants to be late to her own funeral. "As
long as I can remember, people have been telling me that I'll be late
to my own funeral. I began to think, 'Hey, that's an idea; I think I
will be,'" Oliver explains. Here's the plan: "Everyone will be inside
the church waiting for me. I then want them to push my casket in fast,
like I'm late. I want to go in like I'm in a hurry."
Although Oliver says her children are (forgive the pun) dead-set
against her plan, she thinks the effect will be to provide a little
levity at just the right time. "I don't want people to be sad and
dreary. It's going to be funny when I come in late. They'll shake their
heads and say, 'I can't believe this nut left this in her last
wishes.'" Understand, she adds, "I grew up in the late-1960s and went
to Kent State [University]. I'm a little weird, and I want to be that
way until the very end." Oliver insists that she would never devise
anything that would be "really embarrassing" for her family, and she
cautions that there will be (apologies again) grave consequences if her
last wishes go unheeded. "I told my kids that if they don't do this for
me, I'll come back and haunt them."
For the record, Oliver has already checked with the MacLean Funeral
Home in her hometown of Wellsville, Ohio, about an hour's drive from
downtown Pittsburgh, to inquire if it has any problems with her
request. "They said I can do anything I wanted," Oliver reports.
All of this brings us to this question: When did the funeral
industry, that last bastion of conservatism in American business,
suddenly become so flexible? What is happening to the solemn, scripted
affair that we're used to seeing?
Jon Austin, an American social historian and director of the Museum
of Funeral Customs in Springfield, Ill., confirms that in the past
"seven to eight years, maybe even more so in the last five years,"
there has been a "dramatic shift" away from the "traditional,
predictable, vanilla environment" of American funerals - a setting he
describes as "a casket in front of rose-colored draperies" - and toward
more individual expressions of mourning. What makes the change so
dramatic, Austin stresses, is just how long some of these traditions
have endured. What the historian calls the "American model" of funerals
can be traced back to the first Colonial settlements in this country.
The donning of black clothes started even earlier, in the late-1400s in
Europe. After that, "[the American model] just stuck," he says.
Bryan Hanks, an anthropology professor at the University of
Pittsburgh who teaches a course on death rituals called Archaeological
Approaches to Death and Burial, sees the trend toward personalized
funerals as a "deeper reflection of American culture today." He
explains it this way: Unlike their parents, who survived war and the
Great Depression by making personal sacrifices and adopting a group
mentality, the baby-boom generation, now starting to make its
end-of-life plans, exemplifies individual expression and independent
thought. Baby boomers are, he says, the original "Me" generation, the
material girls (and guys). It only makes sense that these folks want to
be buried behind the wheels of their exotic sports cars or, as depicted
in an episode of the HBO comedy "Curb Your Enthusiasm," with their
favorite golf clubs.
Some might consider these stories strange or even sacrilegious.
Hanks disagrees. He argues that personalized funerals enable people to
remember the dead more clearly and thus to grieve more successfully.
"The old, staid funerals, where mourners hold back tears and the dead
are buried in suits they didn't wear, are not real to people," he
stresses. On the other hand, funerals that incorporate something
strongly associated with the deceased - something tangible, like a
varsity letter jacket or a hunting rifle or even a motorcycle - allow
people to reflect on who the deceased really was in life. "People say
it's helpful to them," says Hanks.
Tammy Boyd understands just what the professor is talking about. She
felt a certain kind of pleasure - not happiness, perhaps satisfaction
is more accurate - after she gave husband Joseph ("Joe") Ehland the
kind of personalized funeral he always said he wanted. Sadly, neither
of them expected his death would come so soon into their marriage.
Ehland was only 42 years old when, in October 2001, the Washington
County resident died in a motorcycle accident en route to Seven Springs
Mountain Resort. "Both of us rode cross-country on motorcycles," Boyd
explains. "We knew we were involved in something potentially
dangerous."
They both had made pre-arrangements with Beinhauer Funeral Home in
Peters Township for the display of photo collages of key moments in
their lives - the most popular form of personalization, says funeral
director Aaron Beinhauer. But, the night before her husband's memorial
service, Tammy Boyd imagined doing something more ambitious. She called
all of her husband's motorcycle-riding pals, a group she affectionately
dubbed "the meanest biker gang in data processing," and asked them to
come to her McDonald home and put his bike, a pearl-white Harley
Davidson Electra Glide Classic, back together. It took the group of a
dozen friends until 3 a.m. to reassemble it.
Boyd then approached Beinhauer about taking it into the funeral home
for the memorial service. She recalls what Beinhauer had once told her
about bringing in personal effects. "If you can get it through the
double doors, you can have it."
How did it all turn out? Says Boyd: "It was great, although that's a
horrible thing to say about a funeral." The bike, with its loud pipes,
roared into the funeral home. People stayed for hours, looking at all
the photos of Ehland's high school and college days and his motorcycle
trips. "People were going around laughing the whole time, saying, 'I
remember that!' It wasn't the draining, emotionally horrible thing it
could have been."
Some, however, did not share Boyd's vision.
"The hard part was dealing with the naysayers. Some older family
members who were used to the traditional funeral asked me how I could
break from tradition, reminding me that this was not how a funeral was
supposed to be done." But, she adds, "Those who knew us knew we were
going to do it our way. It was his life, and part of ending that life
was doing what he had planned."
Caroline Swanson recalls that even though her late husband had made pre-arrangements with Brush Creek Cemetery in Westmoreland County for
the Corvette burial, the cemetery's board of directors later fought
with her about how and whether to inter her husband's remains in his
car. "It was quite a battle," she recalls, and it ended with her having
to acquiesce to the cemetery's demands that she hire her own crane to
hoist the vehicle into the ground and encase the car's wheels in cement
to prevent vandals from stealing it. Their final demand hit her the
hardest. To guard against turning the cemetery into a media circus
during her husband's grave-side service, Swanson was told to limit her
attendance to 20 close friends and relatives. It didn't work. A
reporter for a German magazine crawled through poison ivy on her hands
and knees to crash the service. News helicopters noisily circled
overhead.
"George got what he wanted, but I went through a lot," Swanson
remembers. Her advice to others hoping to fulfill their loved ones'
unusual last requests? "If you love somebody and you really care for
them, you'll do what they want." Still, she adds, "Why people want
funerals like this, I don't know. If you're dead, you're dead."
Enough people apparently want personalized funerals that the topic
dominated a recent national conference of funeral directors and
educators held in Pittsburgh at the Sheraton Hotel in Station Square.
One funeral director went so far as to predict that if funeral homes do
not start embracing the idea of a funeral as a "life-cycle event," not
unlike a wedding or a bar mitzvah, then they will lose business to
hotels such as Hilton and Disney.
Aaron Beinhauer agrees. "You are going to see the closure of funeral
homes that don't offer some form of personalization. It's becoming more
mainstream. People are seeing funerals more as celebrations of a life
lived." While he acknowledges that he's met many funeral directors
"over the age of 45" who are reluctant to offer customized services,
his own family-run funeral business embraces the change. "The reason
we've been around since 1860 and have lasted six generations is because
we've never been out of touch," he notes.
Meanwhile, a debate rages in the classrooms of schools such as
Pittsburgh Institute of Mortuary Science in East Liberty. Katie
Crawford, 20, a recent PIMS graduate from Webster, N.Y., says that her
class was evenly split between supporters and foes of personalization.
For her part, she says, "I want to re-instate the value of a funeral
service. I want to give people as much meaning as possible. I don't
want them to leave a funeral I've worked on and say, 'Thank God that
stuffy thing is over.'" Her classmate, 22-year-old Devin Frame agrees,
adding that "when people are paying as much as they are [for a
funeral], they should get exactly what they want."
Kirk Freyvogel, co-owner of the venerable John A. Freyvogel Inc.
funeral home in Shadyside, isn't embracing every aspect of the
personalization trend. "Pittsburgh is very traditional," he explains.
"We are doing [personalization], but not everyone wants it." While his
business has, for example, set up a television set for a grieving
family to watch a Steelers game together during the viewing, he draws
the line at providing food and beverages. "The trend is to turn funeral
homes into cafes," he complains. "I'm not selling sodas. If you want a
Coke, go around the corner. Call me a dinosaur, but there's a line that
shouldn't be crossed."
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