Death of the (traditional) Funeral?
Personalized funerals are a growing trend here and across the country--one that threatens, for good or ill, to revolutionize a long-unchanged industry.
By Geoffrey W. Melada
Illustration by Juliette Borda
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.