Bye Bye Boomers

MAY 7, 2007 TAGS: BOOKS, BOOMERS, BURIAL, ENVIRONMENT ADD A COMMENT

By Amy Meyerson

Today's death industry offers options ranging from traditional burials to shooting your loved one's cremains into space. A surprisingly inventive variety of funeral services have become available. Although some options, such as mummification or cryogenic freezing, may appear grotesque if not borderline eerie and bizarre, having an array available is part of what makes us American. In an era where options surround us everywhere from the toothpaste selection at the grocery store to a hundred versions of white paint at the hardware store, it's natural that our choices regarding the dead be equally complete and equally reflective of the individual consumer.

The turn towards personalized funerals is more than a trend. It is a cultural re-orientation in the face of evolving expectations of what funeral rites should be. As a generation, the baby boomers broke the boundaries and called into question tradition as well as politics. Now that they are dying in increasing numbers, it's a logical progression that they would challenge conventions surrounding their funerals. Michelle Cromer's Exit Strategy and Lisa Takeuchi Cullen's Remember Me document this new phenomenon and display the various opportunities available to the grieving. While both books try to touch on a subject that has been largely avoided in mainstream publications, both books seem to be missing a crucial central focus. Remember Me and Exit Strategy provide a needed catalog of the procedures available to the grieving, but they do not ask what this means about our society's relationship with death.

Forty-three years after the publication of Jessica Mitford's The American Way of Death, the groundbreaking investigation of the exploitative practices of the funeral industry, there must be something greater that Cullen and Cromer can say about how these practices shape our grieving and acceptance, or lack thereof, of death. Both books provide examples of the providers and Remember Me details the survivors, yet each example is treated discretely, preventing both authors from creating a dialogue between the different facets of the death industry. While providing readers with an understanding of the possibilities is no small feat, surely there is more that can and must be said about what the reader should draw from the texts.

In Exit Strategy, Michelle Cromer interviews several entrepreneurs in the death industry. She explains that her own experiences with death made her realize that "there was something unique about each ceremonyâ€¦my friends were taking more of a hand in crafting the ceremony, giving each loved ones send-off an individual flair and personal meaning." She hadn't greatly considered death until her son was born prematurely and everyone thought he was going to die and consequently set out on a mission to unearth the scope of the death industry. Cromer details everything from turning your loved ones into man-made reefs, jewelry and diamonds to cryopreservation clinics. While reading Exit Strategy, the reader has the distinct sense that he or she is invited to discover the different options with Cromer. She tries to maintain an upbeat, non-judgmental tone throughout the book in order to document the options to the reader. Her voice in response is a bit jovial and seems to gain its momentum from puns instead of a message that these examples provide a celebration of death. In her examples of Summon, a contemporary religion based upon practices of mummification and Alcor, a cryopreservation facility, it is obvious that Cromer disdains these practices and finds them a bit weird. It is unclear whether she wants to relay her personal opinions on the subjects and why she shouldn't express her thoughts on the various practices she encounters. Cromer's text would be richer if she utilized her experiences to display how they affected her opinions on death.

The people behind each of the companies detailed in Exit Strategy are as unique as their professions. Like Cromer, they all have a personal reason for contributing to the changing death industry and believe that their contributions will help other people cope with death. Beth Menczer started making clay artifacts with cremated remains after her mother asked her to turn her father into a flute while Rena Fregosie started Creative Cremains, a company that packs the deceased's ashes into his or her favorite object, after losing several loved ones. While some of the providers are described lovingly, there are others like Corky Ra, who appear wacky. She lets the descriptions of the individuals speak for themselves and through these examples we see just what kind of people founded these new death industries, and how most of them are really not that different from us. While the examples of the providers allow the reader to see who are the members of the death industry, Cromer fails to describe who the people are that rely on these services. Instead, she concludes chapters with historical notations, statistics and arbitrary facts about the death industry, which seem unrelated to the focus of the book. She has lists of Hollywood's greatest funeral scenes and the best eulogies. At one point, she even has a list of websites to find discount caskets and ways to broadcast your ceremony online. This, combined with wittily crafted rules on funeral etiquette and tales of Hunter S. Thompson, belittles the hard work and information in the text. While it does contribute to a lightness on a subject most people struggle to find entertaining, it also makes Exit Strategy feel juvenile and haphazard, and prevents the text from having a cohesive, overarching message.

Remember Me serves as a better organized and focused compilation of the death industry. This is in part because the book is as much about the survivors as the people behind the industry. Cullen began writing Remember Me after doing an article for Time Magazine about funeral trends amongst the baby boomers. As a journalist, Cullen utilizes her professional writing and interviewing skills to create an authoritative as well as interesting text on what she describes in her subtitle as "the new American way of death." This title, taken from Jessica Mitford's The American Way of Death, implies Cullen's appreciation of the legacy and a promise to provide a contemporary analysis of the changes in the death industry. She discusses each subject from various angles, detailing the roll and lifestyle of the merchants as well as individuals who have died. Cullen ends each chapter with examples of the people she met who benefited from the documented practice. She discuses Ken Simpson, a lover of the sea whose family made him into a reef, as well as Valerie Sefton, the first human to be made into a diamond. The reader sees how these practices helped the survivors.

In addition, Remember Me begins with four individuals who died and the parting ceremonies to commemorate them. This reminds the reader that, from the first page, Remember Me is about individuals. Cullen provides historical and factual backgrounds for her subjects, creating a deeper observation in Remember Me than in Exit Strategy. While both texts express the scope of possibilities for remembering the dead, Remember Me provides the reader with a complete and provocative sense of the options available. Even within these examples, Cullen fails to connect the different options beyond discrete examples of a changing industry. She needs to address what these examples say about "the New American Way of Death" and what these new ways indicate about people's relationship with their own impending end.

Because Remember Me and Exit Strategy cover the same businesses, they lend themselves easily to comparison. There are several cases in which they even interview the same people. Both texts discuss LifeGem, a company that will turn your loved ones into diamonds. In Cromer's chapter "When a Diamond Really Is Your Best Friend," she opens with an example of her love for diamonds. This combined with the trite title sets up the chapter to be superficial and bordering vapid. She continues with an interview of Greg Herro, the CEO of LifeGem and discusses why he works at the company and how it has grown. After briefly discussing the cut of the diamonds and how many diamonds you can make from one's remains as well as reactions to Greg's profession, she concludes with the idea of turning her husband into a diamond. At the end of the chapter there is a section discussing Hunter S. Thompson and his funeral. Like several other places, this vignette has nothing to do with the chapter at hand. The distance between the two subjects is not reflexive, instead it is confusing and appears arranged in an afterthought.

Contrastingly, Remember Me provides a thorough account of LifeGem. She begins "Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Diamonds," another disappointingly hackneyed titled chapter, with the details of visiting Peggy Atkinson on the day her husband is returning home as a set of diamonds. Cullen describes the death of Don Atkinson and the eloquence of his funeral, which goes beyond just becoming a diamond. She then shifts gears to her trip to the National Funeral Directors Association convention in Nashville. There she met Greg Herro and saw her first human diamond. She interviews Rusty Vanden Biesen, who created LifeGem and Greg Herro about the process of turning ashes into a diamond. With a brief description of the scientific process as well as a detailed step-by-step explanation of how the diamonds take form, the reader is left with an understanding of how this process works as well as the initial responses to their company. She then switches to LifeGem's first costumer, Valeria Sefton. Through a combination of interviews, personal stories and hard information. Cullen enables the reader to have a complex understanding of the human-diamond industry and how it has helped specific mourners.

The contrast between these two chapters serves as an example of the primary difference between the two texts. Remember Me is organized and thorough while Exit Strategy is airy and jocular. While both texts serve as a personal study of a new interest, Cromer struggles to advance her text past a personal endeavor. She poses the question of what does this mean for society and its view on death but never divulges an answer to this. Her chapters, as well as the writing, are choppy and, as the book progresses, it becomes increasingly harder to understand her intent. Remember Me evades this problem. Because Cullen shows multiple sides of each topic and relies on the common practice of footnotes, her ideas are fuller. She states in the beginning that she set out to answer "what kind of person turns their loved one into jewelry" and answers this as well as other questions on the significance of being able to turn your loved one, for example, into jewelry. In both texts there is, however, a consistent complication with language. Because the subject is innovative the appropriate vernacular has yet to exist. This could be a place where both books address the question of what does this mean for our changing relationship to death. Instead, they rely on the language of "parting ceremonies" and "reinventing" death, which creates a euphemistic quality to both books that overshadows the greater significance of the subject. Language is an important tool of intent and without a discussion of the language, how can either Cullen or Cromer adequately convey their message?

Exit Strategy and Remember Me set out to present the diverse possibilities available to the grieving and do so with a wide variety. While both books touch on the idea that American culture's view of death is changing, surely there is something more definitive that can be drawn from these examples. If you aren't the type to want to mummify your mom, then why should you care about trends in contemporary mummification? Is the idea to offend and shock the reader or to create a dichotomous divide between the type of person that mummifies their dog and the type of person that is horrified at the idea of it? An increased focus on the reader and what the uninformed reader should do with all the information presented in the texts would add a needed depth to both Exit Strategy and Remember Me. That being said, both books do serve as an introduction for the unexposed reader to what possibilities are out there and who the people are behind them. For those of us who still think that remembering the dead functions only in funerals and traditional memorial services, Exit Strategy and Remember Me are a great beginning to personalizing death.