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."
Geoffrey W. Melada is a trial lawyer in Pittsburgh and an award-winning former Philadelphia news reporter. He is a frequent contributor to Pittsburgh magazine. You can e-mail him at gmelada@alum.haverford.edu.