Cremation’s popularity is changing death’s rituals

The nation is fast approaching a cultural milestone that says as much about life as death.

Within a year or two, more than half of Americans departing this world will be cremated.

You might imagine past generations spinning in their graves.

No viewing the body? No family burial plot? In many cases no funeral, even?

At funeral homes everywhere, “people are coming in and saying, ‘I don’t want the service. Just cremate my loved one, and I’ll take the ashes and go,’ ” said Jimmy Radovich, general manager of Kansas City-based Charter Funerals. The family business runs four funeral homes and three cemeteries around the metro.

The reasons are well known. They range from the high costs of what morticians call a traditional “full body” funeral, to the blurring of religious convictions, to the geographic fanning out of U.S. families.

“We’re a scattered nation,” said Julie Walter Davis of the Kansas City office of the Neptune Society, a cremation provider.

Our great-grandparents would be mortified that the final resting places of most people cremated aren’t scribbled in a cemetery ledger or published in the local newspaper.

In fact, in the hubbub of modern life, ashes of the dead can be forgotten, lost or given out for others to handle.

Countless quantities of cremated remains — call them “cremains” if you wish — sit for years in urns on the garage shelves of relatives of the deceased, say area funeral directors and cemetery superintendents.

Cremains are tossed illegally from thrill rides at Disneyland, dropped legally (with a permit) from planes over the Grand Canyon and packed into fireworks to be exploded in a brilliant spectacle, as the late gonzo journalist Hunter Thompson chose.

A smidgen will be worn as jewelry or even embedded in the paintings of a Grandview artist who does memorial portraits.

Only about 40 percent of the nation’s cremains wind up buried at gravesites or placed into formal columbaria at churches and cemeteries, said Barbara Kemmis, executive director of the Cremation Association of North America.

So what happens to the remaining 60 percent, the remnants of perhaps 700,000 Americans each year? Kemmis said there is no way of accounting for it.

“People take them home and that’s perfectly legal,” Kemmis said. “But there’s a lot of urns in closets and on mantels, with no plan for them.

“I think most people intend to scatter the ashes at some point. But do they do it? We don’t know.”

Families often just need time, which cremation certainly provides.

For Yvonne Dirkson of Overland Park, the loss of husband Mike, 60, was traumatic enough. His cancer prognosis took a sudden turn for the worse, and death came in his sleep on a Saturday in mid-September.

“Over the next three days, people were asking, ‘When are you going to do something? Where’s the funeral going to be?’ ” and what day should they take off work, she said. “You have days to decide, and there’s grief to deal with” and expenses to consider.

“All of that just wore on us, especially the kids.”

Mike had made it easier by letting Yvonne and their three adult children know he favored cremation.

Pocketbook issues sealed the decision. The family paid $1,500 rather than the typical $8,000 or higher that’s charged for embalming, full-body casket, funeral service and conventional burial — not counting the expense of the cemetery plot.

The Dirksons’ costs included preparation of an obituary that closed with a phrase that’s become common: “Services will be held at a later date.”

It wasn’t much later — eight days after Mike’s death — and the services were called a memorial, not a funeral. More than 100 friends and family converged on Shawnee Mission Park, a favorite spot for Mike, and balloons were released from a tower.

As for his remains, they rest in a container behind the TV in Yvonne’s living room.

The grieving family has all the time it needs to decide what to do with the ashes.

“There’s no rush,” Yvonne noted.

The Kansas City area has been slower than other parts of the country to embrace alternatives to traditional funerals and burials, data show.

Preliminary figures for 2014 show that 46.7 percent of all U.S. deaths led to cremation, up from about 31 percent a decade earlier, according to the Cremation Association of North America. Cremation rates in 2014 were lower in both Missouri and Kansas — 38 percent and 37 percent.

Still, around the region, more seniors and their offspring are choosing cremation without blanching, said Karen Hubbard, bereavement coordinator for Village Hospice, a service of the John Knox Village retirement community.

“The options are exploding, and that will continue,” Hubbard said. “It’s all changing rapidly with younger generations.”

Baby boomers and younger Americans are rare visitors to cemeteries, she said, and their elders recognize that. So many families are weighing inventive ways to memorialize loved ones such that their remains are a mobile, tangible reminder of the departed.

Just off Interstate 49 in Grandview, artist Adam Brown, 34, is mixing cremains into original works of art.

His clients seek to hang on their walls remembrances of the deceased — personalized with accents of their own ashes. On request, Brown can either paint their portraits or depict landscapes and images of their favorite things.

Holding a monochromatic rendering of a pretty woman from Slovakia, Brown pointed out the coarse texture of her pearls and granular shadows framing her face.

“That’s actual bone fragment,” he said.

Not all of Brown’s work is what he calls “art from ashes.” But cremation-related commissions are a growing niche for him. Using latex gloves and a special adhesive to apply cremated particles to canvas was at first unsettling, he said.

Now he’s come to regard cremains as just another mixed medium. And he said he is especially touched when dying persons contact him to arrange a gift for the families they’ll leave behind.

“An urn on a mantel shows that someone died,” Brown said. “But to me, ashes in a painting show that they lived.”

Sociologist Laurel Hilliker is familiar with Brown’s work.

Recently she left Park University to join the University of Michigan School of Public Health. On the Parkville campus, Hilliker directed the Center to Advance the Study of Loss, pairing students with hospice patients to document life stories of the dying.

Because of the ubiquitous scattering of cremains, “dead people are everywhere,” whether we know it or not, she said.

In some ways that’s always been so. But until the latter decades of the 20th century, American bodies were hidden underground or laid into mausoleums. Fewer than 5 percent were cremated in 1970.

“We still find ways to create that ritual for the deceased,” Hilliker said. “We’re just doing it differently in the 21st century.”

Instead of burying someone in a casket below a headstone, or just visiting graves on special days, younger generations honor their elders with a memorial page on Facebook.

Recognizing a need for cremains to have a place where families can gather, the city of Olathe two years ago opened a cremation garden at the 150-year-old Olathe Memorial Cemetery. The spot features columbaria, small burial vaults and memorial benches that hold urns.

Near a fountain stands a community ossuary, containing the ashes of people all mixed together in an enclosed limestone vat. For $750, cremains can be disposed there and a bronze plaque identifying the deceased is affixed to the wall.

Elsewhere at local cemeteries and churches, containers of cremains can appear like newborn pups — dropped off anonymously by people hoping to find a permanent home.

Dozens of surrendered urns are stored together in full-body crypts at Resurrection Catholic Cemetery in Lenexa.

Many wind up there after being unclaimed from University of Kansas Hospital, where dying patients had donated their bodies to medical research. Area funeral directors help gather up and deliver to cemeteries remains without owners.

“By law, you can do anything,” including throwing remains in the trash, said Rick Wiseman of Porter Funeral Home and Crematory. “We believe they deserve to be treated with dignity.”

For all its convenience, the cremation culture comes with drawbacks. Some experts say it’s made death and loss seem more fleeting than forever.

Harold Ivan Smith, a local author of books on bereavement, said too many people who choose cremation for its low cost often rule out a memorial service.

Within his own family, a decision last year to forgo such a gathering caused distress.

The wife of Smith’s nephew’s died and was cremated. A visitation and funeral were declined, sparing the bereaved the need to notify friends and relatives.

For five months, Smith’s sister was unaware of a death in the family. She was upset to finally find out.

“There was a time most of us remember when you knew, after someone’s death, there was going to be a funeral three or four days later and people were going to attend,” Smith said.

“Now after someone passes it’s ‘How is everyone going to get in one place?’ The family members may be from several states, and they need time to arrange for cheap airfares,” said Smith. He is a state-licensed “celebrant” who conducts celebrations of life for the Speaks family chapels in eastern Jackson County.

He said such gatherings needn’t be somber. But they fill a psychological need of loved ones, friends and co-workers to acknowledge that something important and painful has altered their world.

The world doesn’t make such events easy to attend, Smith allowed: “Not all companies are excited about giving time off for funerals. And if they do, you may not take it because you’re a loyal team member or afraid of losing your job.”

Back when family members lived close together, rounding up everyone for a burial on short notice was less difficult.

In cemeteries, prepaid family plots were common because most people were expected to die close to where they grew up.

But baby boomers spread far from the nest. Their parents invested in second homes and winter retreats. And cremations became practical if not necessary.

They took off fastest in Sun Belt states, where retirees relocated or leased winter homes, Smith said. Upon their deaths, “it was easier to cremate and have their remains FedEx’ed” back to the places they spent most of their lives.

Fast forward to now: Across the country, landlords who discover cremated remains left in the apartments of evicted tenants have been given the legal green light to flush them.

“We get calls from thrift shops about boxes of donated items, and Grandpa’s remains would be in the midst of it,” said Jeanette Ford of the Cremation Society of Kansas and Missouri.

Lee’s Summit is home to the International Scattering Society, a two-person operation that offers to deposit remains for those who can’t do it themselves.

The Grand Canyon, Normandy beach and Stonehenge, among them.

Often the costs are covered by surviving family members who are physically or economically unable to travel to a destination requested by the deceased, said Kelly Murtaugh, who owns the service.

“We’ve dealt with folks who kept cremated remains in their homes for four, five, eight years,” Murtaugh said. “Sometimes they’re getting ready to move to a new place and they realize Uncle Al is still in the garage.”

On occasion a surviving spouse finds a new relationship and cremains in the home become an issue for the lover moving in, Murtaugh said: “I know of a fiancee who made it clear she didn’t want an ex-wife hanging around.”

The key to avoiding the pitfalls of a cremation culture, experts say, is to discuss the disposition of remains with family members before death strikes and quick decisions have to made amid grief.

That’s especially important given the many options that nobody considered a half century ago.

Area grief counselors and hospice workers say many family members come to regret scattering remains at a faraway site, leaving survivors feeling distanced from their loved ones.

Others may wish years after a close death that they’d been able to attend a funeral to view somebody one last time.

Many funeral homes now provide rented caskets to allow for a viewing, followed by cremation. (Local funeral operator Radovich said that while consumer interest in caskets for rent is trending up, it remains an uncommon practice because costs can approach the expense of a traditional funeral and burial.)

“A lot of people are skipping the funeral services altogether,” said Vickie Mears of Crossroads Hospice in Kansas City. “But without having that opportunity for ritual, that’s when our bereavement can get complicated.

“Everyone reacts to death so differently, even within the same family,” she said. “One person can find (the handling of cremated remains) creepy and another finds it comforting.”

Said Cathy Boomer, owner of Signature Funerals in Prairie Village: “The most important thing is for the public to be educated on the process and for families to talk about it” before death strikes.

Walter George’s family did just that.

“He did not like funerals,” perhaps because George as a boy attended his father’s funeral after a suicide, said widow Betty George of Independence.

“Walt made no bones about it. He wanted a direct cremation” without the pomp or cost of a funeral parlor gathering or cemetery burial, said Betty George, who was married to him for 72 years.

Walter George, a World War II combat veteran, “passed away peacefully on his own terms” in March, according to his obituary. He was 94. His widow, three grown children, four grandchildren and five great-grandchildren — spread from Missouri to Florida to California — know where his remains will go.

Some are to be sprinkled in his hometown of McLouth, Kan. “And when I’m gone,” said his widow, “the family is going to take both of our remains to the mountains.”

Rocky Mountain National Park, to be precise.

The Georges vacationed there every year back when the kids were little.

See, not all traditions die.

This story was originally published October 29, 2015 at 8:22 PM with the headline "Cremation’s popularity is changing death’s rituals."