Bound for Glory: NFDA 2011
by Kevin Nance
NOVEMBER 1, 2011 TAGS:
The wares on offer in the vendor booths at the 2011 National Funeral Directors Association Convention & Expo, which unfolded last week at Chicago’s sprawling McCormick Place convention center, fell into two categories.
The first and still dominant category might be called Old School Funeral. There were somber gun-metal caskets, granite headstones and Victorian-looking urns, sleek black hearses designed to cruise like battleships toward stately cemeteries. There were the massive backhoes that for all their newfangled bells and whistles still perform the ancient task — alas, poor Yorick — of digging six feet under. There were new products and technologies for morticians working with corpses, such as something called ThanoSeal (Eliminates Leaks — Seals Skin Slip — Seals Incisions — New and Improved!) and the PrepArm, which “extracts formaldehyde fumes from the breathing zone of the embalmer.” But these, too, were ultimately aimed at preserving what has always been done — done, one might almost say, to death.
The second category, a scrappy minority, might be called New School Funeral, representing the fresh breezes wafting through the staid and stuffy atmosphere of the funeral industry. There were, for example, coffins made of Enviroboard, a super-lightweight, 97-percent-recycled fiber-board with “micro-honeycomb technology” and 66 percent fewer emissions than conventional coffins.
“The funeral industry used to be very wary of environmental products like these because they never performed the same as the traditional products — by which I mean functional, able to be carried by the handles and so forth,” explained Nicole Verdon, co-founder of LifeArt International (www.lifeartcoffins.com), which sells the featherweight coffins. “We wanted to make sure they were made to the same standards as the traditional wooden coffin, and they are. They can carry up to 550 pounds.”
Verdon’s outfit, based in Sydney, Australia, is also among those at the vanguard of the burgeoning field of personalized coffins, which are printed (with eco-friendly ink, of course) with photos and other graphics of places, themes and activities associated with the deceased: flowers, landscapes, surfboarding, motorbikes and the like. “For us it’s all about celebration and remembrance, and anything that creates a good memory for the family and makes them feel better, that’s what you should offer them,” Verdon said.
“At first people say, ‘I don’t know what to do,’ and you say, ‘Just tell me about the person.’ Then it’s like, ‘Well, Dad did love his bikes,’ and just like that, the design comes to them. We can do it in four hours. As we say, we don’t cut down the tree; we just take a picture of it.”
A few booths away, another kind of customizing was going on. Robert Feste of Last Rodeo Casket Co. (www.lastrodeocaskets.com), out of El Paso, Texas, specializes in Western-style coffins suitable for cowboys setting out on their final cattle drive to that great green pasture in the sky. The models include “Bound for Glory,” with side panels decorated with rich hand-tooled leather of the type associated with ornate saddles; “Spirit Walker,” with geometric Native American blankets; “Lady of the West,” with a dainty row of cow-gal fringe; and most striking of all, “Cattle King,” splendid with panels of fluffy white-and-black cow hair and silver-and-turquoise buckles characteristic of Southwestern concho belts. “Cowboys don’t work by the hour, they work by the acre, and the real cowboy, I don’t think he likes the traditional casket and all that,” Feste said. “They’ve lived this life, a whole different life, and they want to go out the same way.”
Elsewhere, other vendors were surfing another wave lapping at the shores of the funeral business: the Internet. Web-based mortuary sites are materializing all over cyberspace, pointing the way not toward virtual funerals per se — though videoconferencing is increasingly an option for those who can’t get back home for the memorial service — but at least to virtual cemeteries, memorials and monuments.
On I-Postmortem.com, for example, you can have an I-Tomb, where visitors can view photos and videos of your life, read your obituary and other tributes, and leave one of their own in text and/or video (vetted, of course, by your survivors — no flaming the dead!). “Our company is about the preservation of the digital memory, over the long term, of the deceased,” said CEO Jacques Mechelany. “Virtual tombs will become a natural complement to traditional gravestones, creating a space where basically you can bring back to you, on your computer or your iPad, the memory of the deceased, and share it for future generations.” If this sounds like a fabulous idea, you can get started now — via I-Memorial.com, where you can build your own virtual memorial, plan your funeral service, organize your affairs, post your will, and leave posthumous messages to your loved ones (or, conceivably, to those about whom you’re not so crazy — talk about having the last word!).
Many of these new ideas have not been embraced, precisely, by funeral directors, who are by nature a cautious bunch. “Funeral directors are less likely to experiment with new things because of the very nature of death and grief and loss,” Patrick Lynch, president of the National Funeral Directors Association, told Obit at a press briefing during the convention. “There are many families we serve that find safe harbor in that which they’re familiar with — traditional prayers and so on, things that for generations have anchored them and brought them comfort. At the same time, society is always changing. The nature of funeral services has always been to be prepared to meet the needs and wants of those who call upon us, and to respond when that includes something new — not necessarily to push it, but respond to it. So if we’re slow, it’s because folks are slow asking us to do this. We don’t just put things out there to test the waters.”
The funeral business is more than comfortable, then, following rather than leading. “Funeral directors are resistant to change,” Verdon says flatly. “The reality is that we are consumer-driven; it’s really the families who pick it up first and say, ‘This is what we want now.’ The industry looks at us and says, ‘This is the future.’ We say the future is now.”
In the funeral industry’s defense, it has in fact adapted to many of the new realities of the past two decades. The once-overwhelming popularity of metal caskets, for example, has eroded steadily in recent years as consumers — less and less concerned about protecting the remains of their loved ones from the incursions of nature — have shown an increasing preference for caskets made of wood. Cremation is ever more prevalent, with cremation rates in America rapidly approaching 50 percent — a fact that the NFDA acknowledged this year by holding its annual convention in association with the Illinois-based Cremation Association of North America.
The biggest change, perhaps, is the increasing transparency and therefore the intrinsic fairness of funeral pricing structures — the word “ethical” was a mantra at the convention, particularly at the press briefing — because of the shopping around now possible on the Web. “The consumers are coming in the door armed with information like they never have been, just because of the Internet,” says CANA president Mark Matthews. “They know what their options are, and they know what the guy down the street may be charging.”
Kevin Nance is a Chicago-based freelance writer and frequent contributor to Obit.
The first and still dominant category might be called Old School Funeral. There were somber gun-metal caskets, granite headstones and Victorian-looking urns, sleek black hearses designed to cruise like battleships toward stately cemeteries. There were the massive backhoes that for all their newfangled bells and whistles still perform the ancient task — alas, poor Yorick — of digging six feet under. There were new products and technologies for morticians working with corpses, such as something called ThanoSeal (Eliminates Leaks — Seals Skin Slip — Seals Incisions — New and Improved!) and the PrepArm, which “extracts formaldehyde fumes from the breathing zone of the embalmer.” But these, too, were ultimately aimed at preserving what has always been done — done, one might almost say, to death. The second category, a scrappy minority, might be called New School Funeral, representing the fresh breezes wafting through the staid and stuffy atmosphere of the funeral industry. There were, for example, coffins made of Enviroboard, a super-lightweight, 97-percent-recycled fiber-board with “micro-honeycomb technology” and 66 percent fewer emissions than conventional coffins.
“The funeral industry used to be very wary of environmental products like these because they never performed the same as the traditional products — by which I mean functional, able to be carried by the handles and so forth,” explained Nicole Verdon, co-founder of LifeArt International (www.lifeartcoffins.com), which sells the featherweight coffins. “We wanted to make sure they were made to the same standards as the traditional wooden coffin, and they are. They can carry up to 550 pounds.”
Verdon’s outfit, based in Sydney, Australia, is also among those at the vanguard of the burgeoning field of personalized coffins, which are printed (with eco-friendly ink, of course) with photos and other graphics of places, themes and activities associated with the deceased: flowers, landscapes, surfboarding, motorbikes and the like. “For us it’s all about celebration and remembrance, and anything that creates a good memory for the family and makes them feel better, that’s what you should offer them,” Verdon said.
“At first people say, ‘I don’t know what to do,’ and you say, ‘Just tell me about the person.’ Then it’s like, ‘Well, Dad did love his bikes,’ and just like that, the design comes to them. We can do it in four hours. As we say, we don’t cut down the tree; we just take a picture of it.”
A few booths away, another kind of customizing was going on. Robert Feste of Last Rodeo Casket Co. (www.lastrodeocaskets.com), out of El Paso, Texas, specializes in Western-style coffins suitable for cowboys setting out on their final cattle drive to that great green pasture in the sky. The models include “Bound for Glory,” with side panels decorated with rich hand-tooled leather of the type associated with ornate saddles; “Spirit Walker,” with geometric Native American blankets; “Lady of the West,” with a dainty row of cow-gal fringe; and most striking of all, “Cattle King,” splendid with panels of fluffy white-and-black cow hair and silver-and-turquoise buckles characteristic of Southwestern concho belts. “Cowboys don’t work by the hour, they work by the acre, and the real cowboy, I don’t think he likes the traditional casket and all that,” Feste said. “They’ve lived this life, a whole different life, and they want to go out the same way.” Elsewhere, other vendors were surfing another wave lapping at the shores of the funeral business: the Internet. Web-based mortuary sites are materializing all over cyberspace, pointing the way not toward virtual funerals per se — though videoconferencing is increasingly an option for those who can’t get back home for the memorial service — but at least to virtual cemeteries, memorials and monuments.
On I-Postmortem.com, for example, you can have an I-Tomb, where visitors can view photos and videos of your life, read your obituary and other tributes, and leave one of their own in text and/or video (vetted, of course, by your survivors — no flaming the dead!). “Our company is about the preservation of the digital memory, over the long term, of the deceased,” said CEO Jacques Mechelany. “Virtual tombs will become a natural complement to traditional gravestones, creating a space where basically you can bring back to you, on your computer or your iPad, the memory of the deceased, and share it for future generations.” If this sounds like a fabulous idea, you can get started now — via I-Memorial.com, where you can build your own virtual memorial, plan your funeral service, organize your affairs, post your will, and leave posthumous messages to your loved ones (or, conceivably, to those about whom you’re not so crazy — talk about having the last word!).
Many of these new ideas have not been embraced, precisely, by funeral directors, who are by nature a cautious bunch. “Funeral directors are less likely to experiment with new things because of the very nature of death and grief and loss,” Patrick Lynch, president of the National Funeral Directors Association, told Obit at a press briefing during the convention. “There are many families we serve that find safe harbor in that which they’re familiar with — traditional prayers and so on, things that for generations have anchored them and brought them comfort. At the same time, society is always changing. The nature of funeral services has always been to be prepared to meet the needs and wants of those who call upon us, and to respond when that includes something new — not necessarily to push it, but respond to it. So if we’re slow, it’s because folks are slow asking us to do this. We don’t just put things out there to test the waters.”The funeral business is more than comfortable, then, following rather than leading. “Funeral directors are resistant to change,” Verdon says flatly. “The reality is that we are consumer-driven; it’s really the families who pick it up first and say, ‘This is what we want now.’ The industry looks at us and says, ‘This is the future.’ We say the future is now.”
In the funeral industry’s defense, it has in fact adapted to many of the new realities of the past two decades. The once-overwhelming popularity of metal caskets, for example, has eroded steadily in recent years as consumers — less and less concerned about protecting the remains of their loved ones from the incursions of nature — have shown an increasing preference for caskets made of wood. Cremation is ever more prevalent, with cremation rates in America rapidly approaching 50 percent — a fact that the NFDA acknowledged this year by holding its annual convention in association with the Illinois-based Cremation Association of North America.
The biggest change, perhaps, is the increasing transparency and therefore the intrinsic fairness of funeral pricing structures — the word “ethical” was a mantra at the convention, particularly at the press briefing — because of the shopping around now possible on the Web. “The consumers are coming in the door armed with information like they never have been, just because of the Internet,” says CANA president Mark Matthews. “They know what their options are, and they know what the guy down the street may be charging.”
Kevin Nance is a Chicago-based freelance writer and frequent contributor to Obit.
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