Desecration is in the eye of the beholder

It looks as though the baby boomers, through popularizing the personalized funeral, might finally be the generation that starts treating these tired rites like the potentially stylish social events they are.

Though we're probably still a ways off from seeing "Mortuary Makeover" or "Pimp my Wake" on TLC, when you think about it, it's only natural for upscale party planners to start including requiems in their repertoires–these days, what besides a funeral can compel the average citizen to dress up?

This is also rather encouraging news for my million-dollar idea/midlife crisis entrepreneurial fantasy: the combination contemporary funeral home/cigar and martini bar.

Funerals are for the living, after all–and if given the choice, who would choose to mill about among generic, geriatric decor dotted with tacky photo boards, mismatched memorial bouquets and multimedia slideshows set to crappy country songs when they could gather to reminisce over a fine cigar or a spot of gourmet spirits in a stylish lounge space actually crafted by someone with an eye for form and color?

The whole point of modern art and design, responding to the chaos of World War I with its Mondrian grids and Bauhaus lines, is evoking visual order, elegant simplicity and mathematical harmony to instill a sense of rational, intellectual comfort in its experiencers; wholly future-looking and bereft of referents to a painful past. What could be more perfect for a funeral?

Of course, it would also be perfect to moonlight as a delightfully morbid hotspot after dark.

So, if any dashing, wealthy young morticians out there want to go into business, let me know. Just be aware you'll have to look good next to me in the Vogue photoshoot titled something snappy like "Haute couture goes six feet under" or "And the corpse wore Dior" that follows when this inevitably becomes freaking huge (and what luck, they wouldn't even have to do my makeup).

For as I mentioned a while back in the now-deceased paper that used to actually pay me to ramble on for 1,500 words about such things, I suspect funeral homes are going to have to evolve, and I want to get in on the subterranean floor.

And because it's relevant, I'm lazy and I recently cleaned out my clip file and decided this deserved a resurrection, here's said article, "The death factor," published in Coreweekly Dec. 1, 2005:


Death does strange things to us. Turn on the local news on any given day and you'll find at least one inconsiderate prick who has suddenly, by simple virtue of expiring, transformed into a "really great guy who was always smiling and always helped anyone in need."

We also do strange things to death. Our departed public figures lie in state before lined-up tourists and television cameras, yet photos of our military dead, already sealed in flag-draped coffins, are officially censored and deemed tasteless by many viewers.

American attitudes toward death are as varied and American attitudes toward sex, politics or religion–a key difference being that we actually talk about those other issues, not just hear about them.

Death may be the closest thing to a practical, cultural reality we all share: It frames our news, it scripts our entertainment, it defines our values and it charts the courses of our lives.

Like anything else, death also has its trends. Life expectancy has continually climbed over the years, with the latest Centers for Disease Control figure projecting the average American can expect to live 77.6 years. Death rates are also declining, particularly relative to increasing birth rates–for every American who dies each year, 1.6 are born.

This impacts not only how we define dying and prepare for it, but how accessible we have to make it in our more immediate spheres. Modern medicine allows us to stave off death, but it also draws it out, protracting it into a kind of overlooked gradualism, hidden from view in hospitals and hospices at its end.

At the same time, popular culture is alive with death of every twisted, vivid persuasion. On television, "CSI" makes it a solvable mystery, "Crossing Over" makes it temporary and "Six Feet Under" made it sexy. Death-evocative imagery abounds in advertising, from the humorous to the high fashion. We resurrect dead celebrities to endorse contemporary products, or cast live ones into glib death pools. We strive to simulate death as realistically as possible on film and in binary, even making it interactive.

We create our virtual death, we select to experience it–and thereby we feel like we can command it. But we don't want the everyday, cold death we cannot ensnare hanging around reminding us of our own fragility. When we see it, we're shocked and repulsed, and we ask whomever is showing it to us to stop, out of respect or good taste. Sometimes. Like so many things in our culture, it's complicated.

One facet of this country's markedly ambivalent aversion to corpses is the rise of cremation relative to traditional burial. The Cremation Association of North America recently released a survey that revealed nearly half of all Americans plan to choose cremation to dispose of their mortal remains. In Wisconsin, roughly a third of all deaths are cremated, a hair above the national average.

Cremation's flaring popularity inspires all sorts of meditations on its meaning, from returning ash to ash to re-igniting the symbolic immortality of the spirit. Somehow, it just seems a less morbid, less unsettling alternative–one that many people would be drawn to for reasons grounded in everything from existentialism to environmentalism.

Unfortunately, we may give our fellow mortals a bit too much credit: The most-cited reason for choosing cremation, according to the Cremation Association, is actually saving money. A view of cremation as a simpler, less emotional and more convenient alternative to casket burial comes in a distant second, with less than half the votes won over by the lower price tag subtracting the coffin affords.

No discussion of American attitudes on any subject would suffice without a nod to capitalism and the mighty bottom line. Though death is commonly referred to as the grand leveler, studies have repeatedly shown life's material and social inequities transpose onto death. Those on the lower rungs of a society die more frequently, die earlier and are laid to rest under different circumstances.

In the death industry, billions of dollars pump through just the funeral business each year. According to the National Funeral Directors Association, traditional burial services, not counting cemetery costs, have ascended to average in excess of $6,500.

Dying has become a major, planned-for investment, joining ranks with buying a car or a spot in a retirement condo, and is increasingly precluded by years of costly medical treatments and "end-of-life" care.

Accordingly, trust has remained vital to the funeral industry. The average funeral home in America has been in business for more than 60 years, and the vast majority are owned by individuals, families or small, private corporations. Unless Wal-Mart starts offering one-hour embalming and volume-discounted cremations, it's safe to say Americans prefer to trust their treasured carrion to 'Mom and Pop.'

Americans also cling to the funeral tradition itself, even as casket burial declines in popularity. Nine out of 10 people who want to be cremated also want some type of service held in their remembrance, meaning their customer base is not likely to desert funeral homes any time soon.

The funeral home also remains consistent, a virtual time capsule of interior design. Meant to evoke the familiar comfort of Grandma's house, in actuality it issues an unnerving, distinctive ambiance far more laden than the sum of its paisley fabrics, muted chandeliers and Thomas Kinkade prints. Funeral homes aim to provide spaces as utterly non-threatening and unobtrusive as possible to mourners. Whether they will one day have to "modernize" in look and feel to accomplish that end remains to be seen.

The old axiom that funerals are for the living still seems to hold–but funerals are increasingly being directed by the dead. Pre-planning funerals has become standard operating procedure for many older Americans (some of whom actually seem to enjoy it), both to alleviate burdens on loved ones and exercise post-mortem control over the circumstances and the economic aftermath of death.

Seeking figurative immortality by leaving some kind of tangible legacy or influence on mortal life has been a dominant theme since the beginnings of Western culture, instantiated in the modern world in everything from organ donation to ghost lore to compulsively journaling or scrapbooking one's memoirs.

Others are making more innovative, some might say more unnerving attempts at immortality. There are actually Web sites out there where you can store messages and multimedia content to be e-mailed to your surviving loved ones upon your death. One company, LifeGem, makes synthetic diamonds out of cremains. Another markets "memory medallions," which are computer chips embedded into ordinary cemetery tombstones that transfer digital data about the deceased to a visitor's PDA or laptop.

The flourishing of death in contemporary life raises questions over whether death and grief have become more public as a result. A notable cultural moment in this regard occurred in March with the Terri Schiavo case, which during its 15 minutes in the 24-hour news spotlight, thrust end-of-life issues into public discussion.

The Schiavo case demonstrated that death remains intensely personal and intensely unpleasant. Public opinion polls revealed government intervention in Schiavo's death to be among the George W. Bush administration's most substantial public relations misfires, with most Americans viewing it not as a noble attempt to save a life, but as an insulting, meddling and moralizing political stunt.

But following a flurry of news reports on the "right to die" debate and a reported rush to write living wills, death once again dropped out of the national consciousness. It has not, however, gone to sleep.

In October, the Supreme Court took up the Bush administration's challenge to the state of Oregon's "Death With Dignity Act," which allowed doctors to prescribe lethal doses of drugs to competent, terminally ill patients who wished to end their lives. The act was approved twice by state voters and more than 200 residents ended their lives under the act before it was challenged in 2001 by then Attorney General John Ashcroft.

The Court's ruling, expected sometime before June 2006, will have serious implications for how all Americans are allowed to live and die–yet the case barely made news.

The case is also John Roberts' first as the Supreme Court's new chief justice, but during his confirmation process, attention remained focused largely on how he might steer the Court regarding abortion rights. This other life-and-death issue, with the potential for wider reach into the lives of ordinary people, did not even enter into the discourse.

So continues our culture's awkward dance with death, drawing it near yet holding it at arm's length. As we gain increasing control over all arenas of our lives, we naturally seek to have that control over our deaths.

More than ever, death is viewed almost as an inconvenience, disrupting our schedules and disrespecting our feelings for a while, but ultimately receding into the cultural background behind more pressing matters.

It's not economical to think too seriously about death in our day-to-day lives, as any conclusions the living reach are by nature unverifiable.

Of course, that doesn't stop anyone from attempting to give death reason, order and purpose. In the process, we as a culture reveal what we think about life: Whether too short or too hard, it's at least better than nothing.