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Aug. 10 (Bloomberg) -- In ``Remember Me: A Lively Tour of the New American Way of Death,'' Time magazine writer Lisa Takeuchi Cullen takes an anthropological field trip through the varied ways that baby boomers are rejecting the solemn funeral traditions of earlier generations.
We learn of a tango devotee whose last rites have her pals dancing to a sexy bandoneon and downing Argentine-style empanadas and sangria. We attend a New Orleans jazz funeral conducted by New Jersey Jews, whose rabbi conveniently plays brass. We listen to ukeleles at the Maui memorial of a man who loved the Hawaiian Islands.
But just when we fear we're in for 200 pages of quirky anecdotes, the realization hits: The American way of death has a new model. ``Remember Me,'' which combines solid business acumen and colorful obits that Cullen penned along the way, is really about the massive changes confronting the $20 billion funeral industry.
Credit the boomers, whose passing will swell the national rate from 2.3 million to 3.2 million deaths per year, topping out at 4.1 million by 2040. You'd think funeral directors and casket makers would find such news cheering. But no.
``Decades of unrivaled, unquestioned, set-in-granite tradition are meeting this sonic force called the baby boom,'' Cullen writes. ``Undertakers can't ignore the rumble of change.''
Costco Caskets
What does that change comprise? For starters, there's less religious influence. From 1990 to 2001, adults identifying themselves as ``nonreligious'' nearly doubled in number, to 14 percent of the population. Then there's the style of funeral: In 2005 the National Funeral Directors Association reported that 62 percent of baby boomers surveyed preferred ``personalized'' funerals. Of these, 14 percent wanted the bereaved to throw ``a party in my honor.''
The central item at that party may be different as well. Twenty-five percent of Americans who died in 2003 were cremated; by 2025 that figure will be 48 percent, says the Cremation Association of North America. For families who do choose caskets, the average, beautifully appointed $2,000 model now faces competition from Costco Wholesale Corp.'s 2004 entry into the market, along with cut-rate Chinese manufacturers.
There are new lines of caskets for the obese, caskets that double as sofas and pool tables, and caskets elaborately carved to resemble the deceased's favorite pastime -- beer bottles for bartenders, a 1958 Corvette for auto fans.
Dust to Diamonds
Cullen is at her best explaining how some new trends are moneymakers. Eight ounces of human ashes, for example, can make a human diamond, yours for $2,500 to $14,000 from Chicago-based LifeGem. Its owners hoped for 100 orders a year, Cullen reports; they're making 100 a month, with revenue of $3 million to $16.8 million, the author estimates.
The chamber of commerce in no-stoplight Nederland, Colorado, had an annual budget of $7,000. Then it gained the body of an elderly Norwegian, whose grandson is a budding entrepreneur in cryonics. The dead guy is preserved on ice. So, since 2002 Nederland has mounted its annual Frozen Dead Guys Festival, boosting the chamber's budget to $125,000.
In Westminster, South Carolina, Dr. Billy Campbell tends the beautiful Ramsey Creek preserve, the nation's first ``green'' cemetery. For $1,950 Campbell buries bodies in cardboard caskets without obvious markers; he plans on expanding to 1 million acres by joining with environmental organizations and using their easements on donated lands.
In the Atlantic Ocean, off the New Jersey coast, Cullen helps a pilot scatter ashes, then returns to the waves by boat to witness the burial at sea of cremains sealed inside concrete beehive sculptures. These companies are making real money; what's more, the sculptures are state-sanctioned as an addition to New Jersey's artificial reef. Interested? Contact Eternal Reefs Inc. of Decatur, Georgia.
`End-Trepreneurs'
There is lots more about biodegradable urns, the 6,500 folks worldwide who've signed up to have their corpses ``plastinated'' for public view, and florists failing because of all those obits stating ``in lieu of flowers.''
America's rituals are changing. ``End-trepreneurs'' are emerging -- as death midwives, as ``life story'' biopic filmmakers, as funeral planners. How many of us know that funeral planners only came into being after 9/11 because 45 percent of the bereaved families had no remains to bury and needed to plan appropriate memorial events?
Cullen records all this in her reporter's notebook, observing that the survivors she met on her odyssey ``did not grieve any less because they chose to celebrate a life even as they mourned death.'' Their grief actually seemed more intense, she writes, ``because it was not cordoned by stiff tradition and regimented ceremony.''
It's enough to give a reader pause. It may even prompt some of us to cancel the family plot and schedule a lovely last tango instead.
``Remember Me'' is published by Collins (218 pages, $24.95).
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