Cremation Nation
by Kevin Nance
APRIL 24, 2009 TAGS:
The first time I heard about cremation was in one of the highly informative schoolyard conversations I used to have with my best pal in the sixth grade. Dave liked to clue me in to certain exotic fields of knowledge, such as the fact that condoms came in different sizes; you had to pick the right one to match your equipment, which in his case he assured me was extra large. One day after lunch, after making sure no one else could hear us, he told me that his uncle, a heavy smoker who’d recently died of lung cancer, had been cremated. As a 12-year-old in eastern North Carolina in 1972, I didn’t know what that meant. “They burn you up,” Dave said, keeping his voice low. “They stick you in an oven and whoosh! Nothing left but the ashes.”
I was shocked. I’d accidentally seared my fingers more than once on my mother’s pots and pans, which hurt like hell; I couldn’t picture allowing my own carcass to be burnt to a crisp. It seemed that Dave’s uncle, who had gone to Duke and picked up a lot of odd notions from his Northern friends there, had left strongly worded written instructions on the subject with his lawyer. This had boxed in Dave’s aunt, a hard-shell Baptist who had gone through with this Yankee nonsense because she couldn’t think of a good enough way to get out of it.
Creepiest of all, Dave’s uncle had asked to have his ashes scattered on his favorite golf course in Myrtle Beach, but that was where his widow had drawn the line. If his ashes were scattered, how would his body manage to resurrect itself, as it certainly would, on Judgment Day? A golf course? Over her dead body. Instead, Dave said, she kept the ashes in a vase that looked sort of like a cookie jar, which turned me off cookies for a day or two.
Dave’s aunt was a woman of her time, of course, and in her attitude toward cremation squarely in the mainstream. In 1972, the practice was rare throughout the United States — less than 5 percent of the dead were cremated — and all but unheard of in the South. Even a decade later, not quite 12 percent of deaths in America resulted in cremation. Catholics, who viewed the body as the temple of the soul (and who tended to share a vestigial horror of cremation as a pagan rite associated with the Romans), were disproportionately shy of the practice; the church had allowed it since 1963, while maintaining a strong preference for traditional burial. Even more anti-cremation were Baptists, especially Southern Baptists, who had that resurrected-corpse business to shiver and obsess about.
Times change. The percentage of deaths in the United States resulting in cremation rose from 14.9 in 1985 to 33.6 in 2006, according to a report released in 2008 by the Chicago-based Cremation Association of North America (CANA). If current trends persist, the group says, the cremation rate will be 41 percent by 2011; by 2025, it will hit almost 59 percent. (Canadians, as usual, are ahead of us here; as of 2007, most provinces had cremation rates above 50 percent. British Columbia cremated almost 80 percent of its dead, and Quebec 87 percent.) Crematories are a growth industry — even Catholic cemeteries are beginning to build them — and so are columbaria, where cremated human remains are interred. Increasingly, even churches are setting aside spaces in which their members’ ashes can be literally on the shelf in perpetuity.
Why the change of heart? According to a 2005 survey by the Wirthlin Group, the popularity of cremation has increased primarily because it’s cheaper and simpler than traditional burial; it saves land, which in densely populated urban areas is becoming ever more coveted and expensive; and it doesn’t leave the body in the earth to be consumed by bugs and worms, which still ranks up there with spiders, snakes and Tax Day on the list of things that creep people out.
Several other major trends are also helping to make cremation the personal disposal method of choice, CANA notes. People are dying older, often in retirement locations far removed from their birthplaces; if your friends and family are dead and/or distant, the reasoning seems to go, they aren’t likely to come visit your grave, so why bother with one?
Regional and religious biases against cremation are also fading, though they’re far from gone. It’s worth noting that the five states with the lowest cremation rates, as of 2006, are in the South: Mississippi (9.5), Alabama (11), Tennessee (12.1), Kentucky (12.3) and Louisiana (16.1). (My home state of North Carolina was up to just over 25 percent — go, Tar Heels!) The five states with the highest cremation rates are Nevada (68.2), Washington (67.5), Hawaii (65.6), Oregon (65.2) and Arizona (59.6). Yes, I know what you’re thinking: Do we smell a political correlation here? After all, the five low-cremation states were all red states in the 2008 presidential election, while four of the five high-cremation states were blue. (Some political junkies would argue that if the Republican candidate had been anyone but John McCain, Arizona would have gone for Obama.)
There might be something to that line of thinking, but it’s safer for now to link cremation trends to culture and religion, which probably have the most direct influence. Simply put, the South is the least cremation-friendly region of the country because it’s the most bound to tradition and, just as important, home to the largest percentage of Baptists, about a third of whom object to cremation primarily because it “destroys the body,” according to the Wirthlin survey. (Other Protestant denominations are notably more copacetic with cremation. One Buffalo-based company building columbaria told USA Today that 85 percent of its sales were to Episcopal churches, followed by Presbyterian, Methodist and Lutheran congregations.)
Over the years, as you might have guessed by now, I’ve changed my own tune about cremation. After living through the burials of two parents and a brother, not to mention various friends, I have no wish to lie beside any of them for eternity; the fire will do me just fine. Dave’s aunt, on the other hand, probably wonders what the world is coming to — or she would, if she were not already snug in her own grave now, awaiting her Lord’s return.
I was shocked. I’d accidentally seared my fingers more than once on my mother’s pots and pans, which hurt like hell; I couldn’t picture allowing my own carcass to be burnt to a crisp. It seemed that Dave’s uncle, who had gone to Duke and picked up a lot of odd notions from his Northern friends there, had left strongly worded written instructions on the subject with his lawyer. This had boxed in Dave’s aunt, a hard-shell Baptist who had gone through with this Yankee nonsense because she couldn’t think of a good enough way to get out of it.Creepiest of all, Dave’s uncle had asked to have his ashes scattered on his favorite golf course in Myrtle Beach, but that was where his widow had drawn the line. If his ashes were scattered, how would his body manage to resurrect itself, as it certainly would, on Judgment Day? A golf course? Over her dead body. Instead, Dave said, she kept the ashes in a vase that looked sort of like a cookie jar, which turned me off cookies for a day or two.
Dave’s aunt was a woman of her time, of course, and in her attitude toward cremation squarely in the mainstream. In 1972, the practice was rare throughout the United States — less than 5 percent of the dead were cremated — and all but unheard of in the South. Even a decade later, not quite 12 percent of deaths in America resulted in cremation. Catholics, who viewed the body as the temple of the soul (and who tended to share a vestigial horror of cremation as a pagan rite associated with the Romans), were disproportionately shy of the practice; the church had allowed it since 1963, while maintaining a strong preference for traditional burial. Even more anti-cremation were Baptists, especially Southern Baptists, who had that resurrected-corpse business to shiver and obsess about.
Times change. The percentage of deaths in the United States resulting in cremation rose from 14.9 in 1985 to 33.6 in 2006, according to a report released in 2008 by the Chicago-based Cremation Association of North America (CANA). If current trends persist, the group says, the cremation rate will be 41 percent by 2011; by 2025, it will hit almost 59 percent. (Canadians, as usual, are ahead of us here; as of 2007, most provinces had cremation rates above 50 percent. British Columbia cremated almost 80 percent of its dead, and Quebec 87 percent.) Crematories are a growth industry — even Catholic cemeteries are beginning to build them — and so are columbaria, where cremated human remains are interred. Increasingly, even churches are setting aside spaces in which their members’ ashes can be literally on the shelf in perpetuity.
Why the change of heart? According to a 2005 survey by the Wirthlin Group, the popularity of cremation has increased primarily because it’s cheaper and simpler than traditional burial; it saves land, which in densely populated urban areas is becoming ever more coveted and expensive; and it doesn’t leave the body in the earth to be consumed by bugs and worms, which still ranks up there with spiders, snakes and Tax Day on the list of things that creep people out.
Several other major trends are also helping to make cremation the personal disposal method of choice, CANA notes. People are dying older, often in retirement locations far removed from their birthplaces; if your friends and family are dead and/or distant, the reasoning seems to go, they aren’t likely to come visit your grave, so why bother with one?
Regional and religious biases against cremation are also fading, though they’re far from gone. It’s worth noting that the five states with the lowest cremation rates, as of 2006, are in the South: Mississippi (9.5), Alabama (11), Tennessee (12.1), Kentucky (12.3) and Louisiana (16.1). (My home state of North Carolina was up to just over 25 percent — go, Tar Heels!) The five states with the highest cremation rates are Nevada (68.2), Washington (67.5), Hawaii (65.6), Oregon (65.2) and Arizona (59.6). Yes, I know what you’re thinking: Do we smell a political correlation here? After all, the five low-cremation states were all red states in the 2008 presidential election, while four of the five high-cremation states were blue. (Some political junkies would argue that if the Republican candidate had been anyone but John McCain, Arizona would have gone for Obama.) There might be something to that line of thinking, but it’s safer for now to link cremation trends to culture and religion, which probably have the most direct influence. Simply put, the South is the least cremation-friendly region of the country because it’s the most bound to tradition and, just as important, home to the largest percentage of Baptists, about a third of whom object to cremation primarily because it “destroys the body,” according to the Wirthlin survey. (Other Protestant denominations are notably more copacetic with cremation. One Buffalo-based company building columbaria told USA Today that 85 percent of its sales were to Episcopal churches, followed by Presbyterian, Methodist and Lutheran congregations.)
Over the years, as you might have guessed by now, I’ve changed my own tune about cremation. After living through the burials of two parents and a brother, not to mention various friends, I have no wish to lie beside any of them for eternity; the fire will do me just fine. Dave’s aunt, on the other hand, probably wonders what the world is coming to — or she would, if she were not already snug in her own grave now, awaiting her Lord’s return.
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Zarek Hu wrote on March 9, 2010 1:29am
Cremation rate is over 90% in some large cities in China [Report Comment]
