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Ashes to ashes: Rising number choosing cremation over burial |
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Written by DeadGirl
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Tuesday, 10 August 2004 |
BY MATT STILES
The Dallas Morning News
DALLAS - (KRT) - Married more than 65 years, Thomas and Phyllis Harris had five kids, moved around the country together and died 18 months apart at Texas retirement communities.
Like increasing numbers of Americans, the Harrises were among about one in three who now pick cremation over traditional burial - up from about one in 20 three decades ago.
They were reunited this month when family members scattered their cremated remains together from a hill overlooking spirelike rock formations in Custer, S.D., where the couple fell in love decades ago in high school.
"It was their little spot, their special place," said daughter Janine Phillips of Irving, Texas. "Both of them understood dust to dust, ashes to ashes - that the body is just a very temporary thing."
Experts predict that, by 2025, about half of all Americans will choose cremation.
Influenced most by a price tag that often is thousands of dollars less than buying a cemetery plot, more forgo casket burials today because of land-use concerns, cremation's flexibility and softening religious objections. Americans too are more likely to move away from their birthplace, where in generations past a family plot might have been a final resting place.
The taboo has faded.
"There used to be a strangeness," said Jack Springer, executive director of the Cremation Association of North America, a 1,500-member trade group based in Chicago. "There isn't an aversion to it anymore, because it's really becoming acceptable."
People who choose cremation, according to surveys, tend to be wealthier, more educated and more liberal, Springer said.
Some regions are cooler to the idea than others, 2002 statistics compiled by Springer's association show. Alabama, a state where traditional values are strong, has the lowest rate in the country: about 5 percent. Contrast that with Nevada, with its influx of residents born elsewhere, at about 63 percent.
Texas' rate was below the national average - at 18 percent - in 2002, according to the Texas Department of Health. But because of the state's large population, it ranked sixth in the country in total cremations - more than 26,000 - in 2001.
Some, like Gill and Harold Giddens of Aria Cremation Service in Dallas, see this as an entrepreneurial opportunity.
Their company, which also has a Web site at 995cremation.com, offers customers direct, no-frills cremations for $995. Fancier options cost more.
A cremation with no funeral, casket or urn costs $4,335 at Dallas' historic and well-known Sparkman/Hillcrest Funeral Home. Its general manger says quality and staff experience inflate prices.
The Giddens brothers say they hope to capitalize on a market in which people can pay, on average, as much as $10,000 for a burial plot. The average cost of a traditional funeral is about $6,000, according to the Federal Trade Commission.
The brothers, who opened in May, plan to offer funerals at homes or other locations, such as sporting facilities. They already provide house calls for what is often a difficult time for customers: the initial consultation visit.
"When you read all the information and studies that have been done, cremation families are saying we want something different," Harold Giddens said.
Costs were overwhelming for Debbie Allen of Kenai, Alaska, when her mother, Barbara Hussey, died in March in Reno, Nev.
Allen said her mother didn't mind the idea of cremation. But Hussey wanted to be buried across the state line in Ogden, Utah.
The family organized a funeral, but an inurnment - where cremated remains are buried in a small plot or placed in vaults or niches - is cheaper than buying a casket-sized plot, she said.
"My sister and I were financially responsible for my mother's cremation and burial, so cost did come into it," said Allen. "Not everyone has $10,000 or more sitting around waiting to take for a funeral."
The convenience and low cost helped Patti Hodges of Garland, Texas, whose father, James Driver, was cremated after he died in November.
"I really think that's why he said he wanted to be cremated," Hodges said, "instead of putting us through the expense of getting a casket and everything."
Although burials and traditional services generate more profits, funeral homes are changing, offering a variety of services and options, from cheap caskets that allow for a less-expensive service with the body present to keepsake or personalized urns.
Some make it clear to customers that they can have a traditional funeral - during which friends and loved ones gather, oftentimes as a religious rite - and then have a cremation.
Religious attitudes toward the procedure have softened, though some - such as Jews and Orthodox Christians - generally don't approve. For Hindus, cremation is standard practice.
Springer said Southern Baptists have been slower to embrace cremation. Catholics relaxed a ban in the 1960s. In 1999, the church began allowing a funeral Mass with cremated remains present.
Karen Mason of Tyler, Texas, said her mother, Katherine Irons, an 86-year-old devout Catholic who died in January, insisted on cremation.
"She would certainly never have done it had the church not sanctioned it," Mason said.
Her late husband, former Dallas attorney David Irons, died in 1991 before the church's stance changed. He had a traditional burial at a cemetery in Fort Worth. Katherine Irons' cremated remains were inurned next to him, Ms. Mason said.
Although most of Sparkman/Hillcrest's customers are more traditional and wealthier - a large majority request full services and casket burials - its general manager said he can't "ignore the trend."
"It's had an effect over the last 15 or 20 years," said George Rohrer. "The funeral industry ... has tried to develop merchandise catering to the cremation customer."
Jon Roeder, president of 90-year-old Roeder Mortuary in Omaha, Neb., agrees. His company advertises cremation on its Web site and offers a variety of urns. He also sells keepsakes in which a small amount of the cremated remains can be stored, including a statue of a golfer hitting from a sand trap.
Some companies even incorporate remains into fireworks displays, send them into the air on high-flying balloons or insert them into jewelry.
"We're going to do more and more cremations," said Roeder, a graduate of what is now the Dallas Institute of Funeral Service. "It would probably concern me if I ran a cemetery."
At one of the nation's most hallowed burial grounds, Arlington National Cemetery, where space limitations restrict burial qualifications to a select group of veterans, officials have had to adapt to a spike in requests for acceptance of cremated remains.
"We have gone up every year," said John C. Metzler Jr., superintendent of the 624-acre cemetery just outside Washington, D.C.
In 1980, the cemetery saw 427 inurnments. Last year, there were 2,342. Of the about 6,000 funerals it handles each year, more than half are of cremated remains, he said.
To keep pace, the cemetery has erected seven columbarium structures - where cremated remains are sealed in niches - since 1980, each one a little larger than the first. Their latest open-air, limestone building, which has a fountain and meditation area inside, has more than 7,000 niches.
Jeanie Hendricks of Mesa, Ariz., a retirement-friendly state with a high cremation rate, manages a cemetery that focuses on those customers.
Mariposa Gardens Memorial Park, which has a serene environment of fountains, rock formations, plants and palm trees, has freestanding columbariums.
The park sells family shrines and benches for cremated remains. They even have boulders with a cored-out center that can accommodate several cylindrical urns.
"There probably isn't another cemetery like it in the nation," Hendricks said.
Phillips said that after the Harrises' ceremony, in which more than 30 children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren attended, the family attended an inurnment at a small cemetery in Custer, S.D.
She said she is grateful her parents were clear about their wishes for cremation, freeing their loved ones of making the decision.
"It was more joyous than it was grieving," she said of the weekend ceremony. "We knew this was what they wanted."
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Reasons people choose cremation, according to a 1999 survey of 1,000 people by research firm Wirthlin Worldwide:
_Less expensive: 24 percent
_Uses less land/environmental considerations: 17 percent
_Simpler, less emotional, more convenient: 13 percent
_Preference: 11 percent
_Body not in earth: 7 percent
_Ashes can be strewn: 4 percent
_Religion: 2 percent
_Tradition: 1 percent
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