Final Farewell – Page 55 – The Amateur's Guide To Death & Dying

June 3, 2016June 2, 2016

Why the First Cremation in the U.S. Was So Controversial

It was a scandalous topic before Dr. Francis Julius LeMoyne in 1876.

“Things were a little ghostly,” wrote a reporter for the Philadelphia Times, setting the scene for a morbid public spectacle. The press had been invited to the first “modern” cremation performed in the United States. It was December 6, 1876.

The Times reporter was among a crowd of journalists and townspeople gathered at the top of a hill in Washington, Pennsylvania to witness the first run of a new crematory built by Dr. Francis Julius LeMoyne. The furnace, designed by LeMoyne and built on his own property, was based on a working model presented at the Vienna Exposition in 1873. The remains to be cremated were those of Joseph Henry Louis Charles, Baron de Palm, a Theosophist who was fascinated by “Eastern” philosophy, and besides that had once known a woman who had been buried alive, and was terrified by the prospect.

Burning the dead is an ancient practice, and in some cultural traditions, it’s a thousands-year-old norm. Today, cremation in the U.S. is soaring in popularity; by 2018, the Cremation Association of North America predicts that over 50 percent of Americans will choose to have their bodies cremated.

But in late 19th-century America, cremation was a radical, tradition-bucking idea. LeMoyne and other cremation advocates believed that burying the dead in the ground allowed germs to seep into the soil, thus contributing to the spread of diseases like cholera, typhus, and yellow fever. Cremation promised to sterilize human remains and bypass the altogether slow and icky process of decomposition. When performed in a state-of-the-art indoor furnace, it was a sanitary and high-tech alternative to burial.

Cremation was also a solution to an urban problem. As cities expanded, they surrounded burial grounds that had once been miles away from town—and rested on prime real estate. “In and about New York, Brooklyn, and Jersey City, 4,000 acres of valuable land are taken up by cemeteries,” wrote Hugo Erichsen in his 1887 pro-cremation treatise The Cremation of the Dead. “It is calculated that with the probable increase of population in the next half a decade, 500,000 acres of the best land in the United States will be enclosed by graveyard walls. … It is an outrage!”

But cremation didn’t catch on with the masses right away. LeMoyne had first approached a local cemetery with an offer to build the crematory on their land; they dismissed him with disgust. The Times reporter who witnessed the de Palm cremation was horrified: “If [de Palm] could have foreshadowed the startling scenes his poor bones would have to go through he would have thought twice before he jumped into the fire.” Anti-cremationists put aside their religious discomfort with cremation to argue that burning bodies would encourage crime—you can’t exhume a cremated corpse!—and dismissed the public health claims of cremationists as unfounded fear-mongering. (They weren’t wrong; there’s no evidence that in-ground burial encouraged the spread of epidemics.)

Inside the Detroit Crematorium columbarium at Woodmere Cemetery.

Throughout the 1870s and ’80s, as debates about cremation raged in the papers, local cremation societies were organized to argue their case and — more importantly—to raise funds to build crematories. The first public crematory in the U.S., at Lancaster, Pennsylvania—funded by the Lancaster Cremation and Funeral Reform Society—was built in 1884. By 1887, Cincinnati, Buffalo, Los Angeles, and Detroit had all built crematories, many of them designed to look like chapels, with stained glass and stonework. These crematories operated independently of cemeteries, which saw cremationists as competitors.

A few of these early crematories still exist; in Cincinnati, the building is hiding behind deceptive new construction.

The opening pages to 1887 book The Cremation of the Dead.

Sometimes the dead traveled hundreds of miles to have their last wishes fulfilled. When Barbara Schorr died in Millersburg, Ohio in 1887, her family honored her wish to be cremated by sending her body to the Detroit Crematorium—nearly 200 miles away, it was nonetheless the closest crematory. But it was still under construction, so Barbara Schorr lay in state for several weeks while it was completed.

Today, a portrait of Barbara Schorr, commissioned by her sons, hangs in the columbarium at Woodmere Cemetery, honoring her as a pioneer of the cremation movement in Detroit.

A stereoscope view of Lancaster Crematorium, Pennsylvania.

Because cremation was a moral crusade for the betterment of public health, it attracted sympathizers from other moral causes to its ranks, including no small number of women activists. The suffragist Lucy Stone was the first person cremated at the Forest Hills Crematory in Boston in 1893. Frances Willard—suffragist, temperance activist, and avid bicyclist—was also a vocal advocate of cremation. In 1900, the New York Times ran a satirical news item about the cremation of Willard’s cat: “Each of Toots’s human friends will sprinkle a little myrrh or frankincense over the body, and while it is being consumed the incense will counteract any odor which might be emitted through the furnace chimney.”

By the early 20th century, the sensationalism of cremation had waned, and the practical case for cremation was winning minds. After all, cremation, which requires no elaborate monument marker or plot purchase, is significantly less expensive than in-ground burial. Eventually, cemetery directors realized they might be better off joining the cremationists than trying to beat them. In 1899, Mount Auburn Cemetery—famously one of the original rural cemeteries in the U.S.—hired an architect to renovate an existing chapel on the grounds into a crematory. It was the first cemetery crematory in the state of Massachusetts, and it marked a turning point in the history from what was once a “ghostly” spectacle to an agreeably American way of death and burial.

Complete Article HERE!

June 1, 2016May 31, 2016

Adults can help children cope with death by understanding how they process it

It’s important to have age-appropriate dialogue with children about death.

By Linda Goldman

Our society is death-phobic, a particularly harmful trait when it comes to helping children process the death of someone close to them. Adults often feel uncomfortable discussing death with children. They might consciously or unconsciously inhibit tears or other emotions, assuming they are protecting those too young to understand the weighty concept.

But age-appropriate discussions about death allow children to share thoughts and feelings they inevitably have when someone they know dies. Helping them normalise these can best be done by understanding children’s perceptions of death at varying developmental stages.

Understanding death

As children develop, their understanding of death changes and expands. In 1948, psychologist Maria Nagy presented a pioneering study that found a relationship between age and a child’s comprehension of death. The study showed three distinct stages.

Children between the ages of three and five, she argued, tended to deny death as a final process but associated it with a journey from which someone would return.

In the second stage, between the ages of five and nine, children understood that death was final but kept the knowledge at a distance. They also thought if they were clever about it, they could trick death and avoid it.

The third and final stage was when children were nine and ten. At this point, they understood death was inevitable and affected everyone, including themselves.

Children’s understanding of death expands as they grow and develop.

Nagy’s study relates well to clinical psychologist Jean Piaget’s work, which is drawn on by many child psychologists and educators.

Piaget explained children’s understanding through the following developmental stages:

Sensorimotor (0-2 years): death is “out of sight, out of mind”.
Preoperational (2-7 years): Magical thinking and egocentricity are predictable attributes of grief that predominate this stage, meaning children feel responsible for what happens to them and the world around them. When five-year-old Olivia screams at her sister Sophie, “I hate you! I wish you were dead!” and the next day Sophie is killed in a car crash, magical thinking can make Olivia feel she caused this death. She may then need an outlet for her overwhelming guilt.
Concrete Operations (7-12 years): This is an intermediate stage when children’s thinking matures, becoming more logical. This stage is characterised by curiosity, which could explain why children this age love reading books and watching films about zombies and skeletons.
Formal Operations (13 years and up): An adolescent perceives death as distant, at the far end of a long life. But when someone they know dies, they will seek support from peers.

Helping children process death

Research exploring how bereaved children maintained connection to their parents in the year following their death found that, out of 125 young people in the study, 92 (74%) believed their parents were in a place called heaven.

Tasks such as drawing a picture of heaven can help comfort children.

The findings underscored the importance of helping children put their relationship with the deceased in a new perspective, rather than encouraging them to separate from it. Supporting a child’s reconstruction of a dead parent includes strategies of connection such as locating the deceased, experiencing the deceased, reaching out to the deceased and using linking objects.

An example of maintaining this connection was a story 11-year-old Michelle wrote and a picture she drew about heaven after her mum died in a car crash. These made her feel comforted and safe as she was able to hold a positive image of where her mother was. Michelle’s vision was illustrated like this:

There are lots of castles where only the great live, like my mum … My mum loved to dance. I think she’s dancing in heaven.

Adults can follow a generic model to support bereaved children. First, they should tell children the truth about death, considering their developmental stage and understanding.

Children must be considered as recognised mourners and allowed to attend funerals and memorials.

This could mean using phrases such as:

Usually people die when they are very very old or very very sick, or their bodies are so injured the doctors and hospitals can’t help, and a person’s body stops working.

When it comes to very young children, it is useful to use concrete language and images while avoiding cliches that can inhibit

the grief process. If we tell little Johnny that grandpa went on a long journey, he might imagine grandpa coming back or ask why he didn’t say goodbye.

Second, we must let children be recognised mourners, attending funerals and memorials. Research shows attending funerals helps children acknowledge the death and honour their deceased parent.

It is helpful to become aware of common signs of grieving children, such as: wanting to appear normal, telling and retelling their story, speaking of the loved one in the present and worrying about their health or the health of others.

Adults can encourage kids to use rituals to work through grief. They can say a prayer, send off a balloon, sing a song, plant a flower, write a poem or bury a dog bone. Grieving children can express themselves through memory books, memory boxes, photos and even memory emails.

Rituals can help children work through grief.

Girls and boys may have a restricted verbal ability for sharing feelings and a limited emotional capacity to tolerate the pain of loss, but they can communicate their feelings, wishes and fears through play. Play therapy can include using imagination and interacting with toy props. A toy telephone can stimulate a child’s dialogue with a loved one.

Childhood grief and loss cover the gamut of life issues but we can empower them by offering age-appropriate language and grief interventions that open safe exploration and communication of feelings.

Complete Article HERE!

May 27, 2016May 27, 2016

Pets Get Send-Off Wit A Very Human Touch

By Yves Herman and Meredith McGrath

Pets are getting a high-class send-off at Animatrans, a funeral home that claims to be the first in Belgium to cater exclusively for pets.

Chantal Detimmerman weeps at the funeral parlour as she spends a last few moments with her beloved Chico who has been prepared for cremation and laid out in a dog basket.

That is no disrespect for Chico.

Curled up as if asleep, with a garland of flowers around one paw, the Chihuahua is getting a high-class send-off at Animatrans.

“I loved him so much that I decided to keep his ashes, to always have Chico next to me,” Detimmerman said.

Other customers choose to turn their dead pets into an even more tangible reminder.

“Arthur was a special duck,” said Myrian Waeles, who nuzzles her nose against the mallard’s green head as she poses for photographs at her home in nearby Lennik, a town west of Brussels.

Arthur stares ahead with the same expression he has had for the last eight years, since he died and Waeles took him to Animatrans to be stuffed. The company also makes death masks, casting an impression of an animal’s face in long-lasting resin.

“Having Arthur, stuffed next to me, comforts me.”

“He was always waiting for me at the door when I came home, walking next to me in the living room,” Waeles said of her duck.

Patrick Pendville set up the funeral service after seeing first-hand what animal disposal often looks, and smells, like.

Dropping a dead dog off at an animal rendering plant, a guard instructed him to unpack the carcass, remove its collar, and throw the body into a two-metre-high (7-foot) container swarming with flies, among other animal remains.

Pendville says his company – which charges between 35 and 350 euros for a cremation – provides a humane way for people to say goodbye to animals they feel were part of the family. But by law it is classified as a processor of hazardous waste.

“I totally refuse (that) name,” he said. “I eagerly wait for when a pet is considered to be sentient and not an expired common commodity when it dies.”

Cathy Vertongen, a taxidermist, works on a dead dog at her workshop

he stuffed body of Moukys, a barbary macaque, is seen at its owner Chantal Bauchez’s home.

Monique Kroonen-Dupont poses with her stuffed Yorkshire, named Doudou, at her home.

The stuffed body Doudou, is seen at its owner’s home.

The body of Charlie, a Jack Russell terrier, lies in a decorated basket.

The body of Bianca, a Canadian shepherd, lies in a decorated basket.

Paolo Presti reacts next to the body of his dog Bianca.

Graves of pets are seen at a cemetery for animals.

Complete Article HERE!

May 22, 2016May 20, 2016

Meet the Woman Who Cared for Hundreds of Abandoned Gay Men Dying of AIDS

By David Koon

“Who knew there’d come a time when people didn’t want to bury their children?” says Ruth Cocker Burks.

Between 1984 and the mid-1990s, before better HIV drugs effectively rendered her obsolete, Ruth Coker Burks cared for hundreds of dying people, many of them gay men who had been abandoned by their families. She buried more than three dozen of them herself, after their families refused to claim their bodies. For many of those people, she is now the only person who knows the location of their graves.

It started in 1984, in a hospital hallway. Ruth Coker Burks was 25 and a young mother when she went to University Hospital in Little Rock, Ark., to help care for a friend who had cancer. Her friend eventually went through five surgeries, Burks said, so she spent a lot of time that year parked in hospitals. That’s where she was the day she noticed the door, one with “a big, red bag” over it. It was a patient’s room. “I would watch the nurses draw straws to see who would go in and check on him. It’d be: ‘Best two out of three,’ and then they’d say, ‘Can we draw again?’ ”

She knew what it probably was, even though it was early enough in the epidemic for the disease to be called GRID — gay-related immune deficiency — instead of AIDS. She had a gay cousin in Hawaii and had asked him about the stories of a gay plague after seeing a report on the news. He’d told her, “That’s just the leather guys in San Francisco. It’s not us. Don’t worry.” Still, in her concern for him, she’d read everything she could find about the disease over the previous months, hoping he was right.

Whether because of curiosity or — as she believes today — some higher power moving her, Burks eventually disregarded the warnings on the red door and snuck into the room. In the bed was a skeletal young man, wasted away to less than 100 pounds. He told her he wanted to see his mother before he died.

“I walked out and [the nurses] said, ‘You didn’t go in that room, did you?’” Burks recalled. “I said, ‘Well, yeah. He wants his mother.’ They laughed. They said, ‘Honey, his mother’s not coming. He’s been here six weeks. Nobody’s coming.’”

Unwilling to take no for an answer, Burks wrangled a number for the young man’s mother out of one of the nurses, then called. She was able to speak for only a moment before the woman on the line hung up on her.

“I called her back,” Burks said. “I said, ‘If you hang up on me again, I will put your son’s obituary in your hometown newspaper and I will list his cause of death.’ Then I had her attention.”

Her son was a sinner, the woman told Burks. She didn’t know what was wrong with him and didn’t care. She wouldn’t come, as he was already dead to her as far as she was concerned. She said she wouldn’t even claim his body when he died. It was a curse Burks would hear again and again over the next decade: sure judgment and yawning hellfire, abandonment on a platter of scripture. Burks estimates she worked with more than 1,000 people dying of AIDS over the years. Of those, she said, only a handful of families didn’t turn their backs on their loved ones.

Burks hung up the phone, trying to decide what she should tell the dying man. “I went back in his room,” she said, “and when I walked in, he said, ‘Oh, momma. I knew you’d come,’ and then he lifted his hand. And what was I going to do? So I took his hand. I said, ‘I’m here, honey. I’m here.’”

Burks pulled a chair to his bedside, talked to him, and held his hand. She bathed his face with a cloth and told him she was there. “I stayed with him for 13 hours while he took his last breaths on Earth,” she said.

Since at least the late 1880s, Burks’s kin have been buried in Files Cemetery, a half-acre of red dirt on top of a hill in Hot Springs, Ark. When Burks was a girl, she said, her mother got in a final, epic row with Burks’s uncle. To make sure he and his branch of the family tree would never lie in the same dirt as the rest of them, Burks said, her mother quietly bought every available grave space in the cemetery: 262 plots. They visited the cemetery most Sundays after church when she was young, Burks said, and her mother would often sarcastically remark on her holdings, looking out over the cemetery and telling her daughter, “Someday, all of this is going to be yours.”

“I always wondered what I was going to do with a cemetery,” she said. “Who knew there’d come a time when people didn’t want to bury their children?”

Files Cemetery is where Burks buried the ashes of the man she’d seen die, after a second call to his mother confirmed she wanted nothing to do with him, even in death. “No one wanted him,” she said, “and I told him in those long 13 hours that I would take him to my beautiful little cemetery, where my daddy and grandparents were buried, and they would watch out over him.”

Burks had to contract with a funeral home in Pine Bluff, some 70 miles away, for the cremation. It was the closest funeral home she could find that would even touch the body. She paid for the cremation out of her savings.

The ashes were returned to her in a cardboard box. She went to a friend at Dryden Pottery in Hot Springs, who gave her a chipped cookie jar for an urn. Then she went to Files Cemetery and used a pair of posthole diggers to excavate a hole in the middle of her father’s grave.

“I knew that Daddy would love that about me,” she said, “and I knew that I would be able to find him if I ever needed to find him.” She put the urn in the hole and covered it over. She prayed over the grave, and it was done.

Over the next few years, as she became one of the go-to people in the state when it came to caring for those dying with AIDS, Burks would bury more than 40 people in chipped cookie jars in Files Cemetery. Most of them were gay men whose families would not even claim their ashes.

“My daughter would go with me,” Burks said. “She had a little spade, and I had posthole diggers. I’d dig the hole, and she would help me. I’d bury them, and we’d have a do-it-yourself funeral. I couldn’t get a priest or a preacher. No one would even say anything over their graves.”

She believes the number is 43, but she isn’t sure. Somewhere in her attic, in a box, among the dozens of yellowed day planners she calls her Books of the Dead filled with the appointments, setbacks, and medications of people 30 years gone, there is a list of names.

Burks always made a last effort to reach out to families before she put the urns in the ground. “I tried every time,” she said. “They hung up on me. They cussed me out. They prayed like I was a demon on the phone and they had to get me off — prayed while they were on the phone. Just crazy. Just ridiculous.”

After she cared for the dying man at University Hospital, people started calling Burks, asking for her help. “They just started coming,” she said. “Word got out that there was this kind of wacko woman in Hot Springs who wasn’t afraid. They would tell them, ‘Just go to her. Don’t come to me. Here’s the name and number. Go.’…I was their hospice. Their gay friends were their hospice. Their companions were their hospice.”

Before long, she was getting referrals from rural hospitals all over the state. Financing her work through donations and sometimes out of her own pocket, she’d take patients to their appointments, help them get assistance when they could no longer work, help them get their medicines, and try to cheer them up when the depression was dark as a pit. She said many pharmacies wouldn’t handle prescriptions for AIDS drugs like AZT, and there was fear among even those who would.

She soon stockpiled what she called an “underground pharmacy” in her house. “I didn’t have any narcotics, but I had AZT, I had antibiotics,” she said. “People would die and leave me all of their medicines. I kept it because somebody else might not have any.”

Burks said the financial help given to patients — from burial expenses to medications to rent for those unable to work — couldn’t have happened without the support of the gay clubs around the state, particularly Little Rock’s Discovery. “They would twirl up a drag show on Saturday night and here’d come the money,” she said. “That’s how we’d buy medicine, that’s how we’d pay rent. If it hadn’t been for the drag queens, I don’t know what we would have done.”

Burks’s stories from that time border on nightmarish, with her watching one person after another waste away before her eyes. She would sometimes go to three funerals a day in the early years, including the funerals of many people she’d befriended while they fought the disease. Many of her memories seem to have blurred together into a kind of terrible shade. Others are told with perfect, minute clarity.

There was the man whose family insisted he be baptized in a creek in October, three days before he died, to wash away the sin of being gay; whose mother pressed a spoonful of oatmeal to his lips, pleading, “Roger, eat. Please eat, Roger. Please, please, please,” until Burks gently took the spoon and bowl from her; who died at 6 foot 6 and 75 pounds; whose aunts came to his parents’ house after the funeral in plastic suits and yellow gloves to double-bag his clothes and scrub everything, even the ceiling fan, with bleach.

She recalled the odd sensation of sitting with dying people while they filled out their own death certificates, because Burks knew she wouldn’t be able to call on their families for the required information. “We’d sit and fill it out together,” she said. “Can you imagine filling out your death certificate before you die? But I didn’t have that information. I wouldn’t have their mother’s maiden name or this, that, or the other. So I’d get a pizza and we’d have pizza and fill out the death certificate.”

Billy is the one who hit her hardest and the one she remembers most clearly of all. He was one of the youngest she ever cared for, a female impersonator in his early 20s. He was beautiful, she said, perfect and fine-boned. She still has one of Billy’s dresses in her closet up in the city of Rogers: a tiny, flame-red designer number, intricate as an orchid.

As Billy’s health declined, Burks accompanied him to the mall in Little Rock as he quit his job at a store there. Afterward, she said, he wept, Burks holding the frail young man as shoppers streamed around them. “He broke down just sobbing in the middle of the mall,” she said. “I just stood there and held him until he quit sobbing. People were looking and pointing and all that, but I couldn’t care less.”

Once, a few weeks before Billy died — he weighed only 55 pounds, the lightest she ever saw, light as a feather, so light that she was able to lift his body from the bed with just her forearms — Burks had taken Billy to an appointment in Little Rock. Afterward, they were driving around aimlessly, trying to get his spirits up. She often felt like crying in those days, she said, but she couldn’t let herself. She had to be strong for them.

“He was so depressed. It was horrible,” she said. “We were driving by the zoo, and somebody was riding an elephant. He goes, ‘You know, I’ve never ridden an elephant.’ I said, ‘Well, we’ll fix that.’” And she turned the car around. Somewhere, in the boxes that hold all her terrible memories, there’s a picture of the two of them up on the back of the elephant, Ruth Coker Burks in her heels and dress, Billy with a rare smile.

When it was too much, she said, she’d go fishing. And it wasn’t all terrible. While Burks got to see the worst of people, she said, she was also privileged to see people at their best, caring for their partners and friends with selflessness, dignity, and grace. She said that’s why she’s been so happy to see gay marriage legalized all over the country.

“I watched these men take care of their companions and watch them die,” she said. “I’ve seen them go in and hold them up in the shower. They would hold them while I washed them. They would carry them back to the bed. We would dry them off and put lotion on them. They did that until the very end, knowing that they were going to be that person before long. Now, you tell me that’s not love and devotion? I don’t know a lot of straight people who would do that.”

Ruth Coker Burks had a stroke five years ago, early enough in her life that she can’t help but believe that the stress of the bad old days had something to do with it. After the stroke, she had to relearn everything: to talk, to feed herself, to read and write. It’s probably a miracle she’s not buried in Files Cemetery herself.

After better drugs, education, understanding, and treatment made her work obsolete, she moved to Florida for several years, where she worked as a funeral director and a fishing guide. When Bill Clinton was elected president, she served as a White House consultant on AIDS education.

A few years ago, she moved to Rogers to be closer to her grandchildren. In 2013, she went to bat for three foster children who were removed from the elementary school at nearby Pea Ridge after administrators heard that one of them might be HIV-positive. Burks said she couldn’t believe she was still dealing with the same knee-jerk fears in the 21st century.

The work she and others did in the 1980s and 1990s has mostly been forgotten, partly because so many of those she knew back then have died. She’s not the only one who did that work, but she’s one of the few who survived. And so she has become the keeper of memory.

Before she’s gone, she said, she’d like to see a memorial erected in Files Cemetery. Something to tell people the story. A plaque. A stone. A listing of the names of the unremembered dead who lie there.

“Someday,” she said, “I’d love to get a monument that says: This is what happened. In 1984, it started. They just kept coming and coming. And they knew they would be remembered, loved, and taken care of, and that someone would say a kind word over them when they died.”

Complete Article HERE!

May 19, 2016May 18, 2016

Dying traditions, and new life, in the funeral industry

By Katie Johnston

Vice president Arthur DeFilippo prepared a headstone at Woodlawn Memorials in Everett, a family-run business where sales have been declining for a decade.

Death is inevitable, but, increasingly, traditional burials are not.

From diamonds made from cremated remains to eco-friendly interments, the $20 billion funeral industry is being reshaped, creating opportunities for the entrepreneurially minded — and financial hardship for those with business models more set in stone.

Consider:

At Rockland Golf Course a few years ago, a kayaker paddled to the middle of a pond with the cremated remains of a golfer who had hit many an errant ball into the water. As the rower released the biodegradable container and the ashes dispersed, a bagpiper played “Amazing Grace” and 75 members of the man’s golf league chipped shots into the water.

A Great Barrington woman wrapped her mother’s body in a cotton sheet and laid her in a cardboard coffin lined with dry ice. The family then held a three-day vigil at her home dance studio, inviting people to play music and see and touch her face for the last time.

In Woburn, a carpenter with a degenerative brain condition is set to be buried in a suit embedded with mushrooms, which will neutralize the toxins in his body as it decomposes into the earth.

In Seattle, plans are underway for a facility to turn corpses into compost; in Italy, a pair of designers is working on a biodegradable burial seed pod that will allow a person’s decaying body to provide nutrients for a tree planted on top of it.

But the number of alternatives to caskets and cemeteries is making life tough for undertakers and monument makers.

At Woodlawn Monuments Inc. in Everett, sales have been in a “freefall” over the past 10 years, said co-owner David DeFilippo. His family has been making tombstones since his great-grandfather opened a shop in 1907, but DeFilippo, 50, said the company – which also employs his mother, aunt, and uncle — is likely to end with him.

“People always say to me, ‘You’re set, people are always going to die,’” said Jeff Hardy, of the Chelmsford burial vault company Hardy Doric Inc. “Well yeah, it’s what happens to them after that keeps changing.”

Death rates are rising as America’s population ages, but with some estimating that cremations surpassed burials for the first time last year, and other cheaper alternatives becoming more popular, profits are being tamped down.

Lewis Funeral Home on Nantucket closed its doors in 2013 after 135 years in business, citing the rise in cremation as a cause. Families who opt for cremation spend 42 cents on the dollar compared with those who have traditional burials, said Teresa Gyulafia, strategic communications director at Batesville, a funeral product manufacturer in Batesville, Ind. — “a big economic burden to the industry.”

Interest in cremations has risen swiftly in recent years, particularly among the growing ranks of the nonreligious. In the 1960s, less than 5 percent of deaths resulted in cremations, according to the Cremation Association of North America. But after the Catholic Church lifted the ban on cremations in 1963 and started allowing cremated remains at funeral Masses in 1997, the practice has become more common. In Maine, which has one of the country’s highest cremation rates, 73 percent of deaths resulted in cremations last year. In Massachusetts, it was 45 percent.

By 2030, the national cremation rate is expected to be 71 percent.

The movement toward cremation and natural burials harkens back to the way things used to be done. Cremation was big during the Roman Empire, before the practice became associated with pagan rituals. Embalming arose during the Civil War as a way to preserve the bodies of fallen soldiers being shipped home from the battlefield.

In response to a shifting market, traditional funeral providers are branching out, offering more custom products and personalized service. To counter a drop in domestic sales, Dodge Co. in Billerica, the world’s largest supplier of embalming fluid, has been selling more sports-themed urns and video tributes. New England Casket Co. in East Boston, founded by an Italian cabinet maker in the 1930s and now run his grandson, makes a casket with a camouflage lining and a rifle holder, among other unique offerings, and has started making more oversized caskets for an increasingly larger clientele.

At Magoun-Biggins Funeral Home in Rockland, owner Bob Biggins offers concierge services: making arrangements with caterers, helping plan dinners at country clubs, and arranging bereavement rates at hotels for out-of-town guests.

Biggins coordinated the golf course memorial. He also put together a funeral procession for an ice cream man led by his iconic truck, complete with popsicles for guests at the grave site, and had a body shop paint a casket to look like a school bus for a local driver.

“You have to adapt to meet what your clients’ needs are,” Biggins said, “and it’s not the old-fashioned cookie-cutter funeral.”

As death becomes less of a taboo topic — at “death cafes” the end of life is discussed over tea and cake — people are also increasingly looking for unique ways to memorialize the dead. Off the coast of Florida, a manmade reef serves as an underwater mausoleum for cremated remains. The Daytona International Speedway considered creating a place to house urns, known as a columbarium, to accommodate NASCAR fans who had been scattering ashes inside the track.

The burgeoning natural burial movement is also changing the industry. The Green Burial Council, which certifies environmentally friendly providers, started with a single funeral home in New Mexico in 2006; today, there are more than 300.

When Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge held a workshop on green burials two years ago, on a sunny Saturday in June, 150 people showed up. “It was the first beach day of the summer, and all these people came to hear about death and disposition,” said Candace Currie, director of planning and cemetery development.

Mount Auburn has sold about half of its 50 natural grave sites in the past two years, and the nonprofit Green Burial Massachusetts Inc. is working to establish the first all-natural cemetery in the state. Mourning Dove Studio in Arlington has seen a sharp uptick in demand this year forbiodegradable caskets made of recycled paper, woven banana leaves, cardboard, and pine.

The process of alkaline hydrolysis, in which bodies are dissolved in a lye-like solution with the help of heat and pressure — seen as a more environmentally friendly alternative to cremation — is legal in a handful of states, including Maine and Vermont.

Some question the movement toward scattered ashes and unmarked graves as too ephemeral.

“How are we going to record our existence?” said Jacquelyn Taylor, a former professor of funeral service education at Mount Ida College in Newton who works as a data analyst for the Dodge Co.

But just because people want a natural burial doesn’t mean they don’t want a place to be remembered.

Dennis White, the Woburn carpenter with a degenerative brain disease, will be the first person to be buried in a Coeio mushroom suit. White, 64, liked the idea of returning his body’s energy to the earth, free of toxins, but wanted a plaque to mark his final resting spot. In Limington, Maine, he and his wife found a cemetery that would let them do both.

Ann-Elizabeth Barnes, the Western Massachusetts woman who held a home funeral for her mother and helps others do the same, said the experience helped bring her closure.

“The first day she looked like herself. She had a little smile on her face. She looked quite peaceful,” she said. “The next day she was just a little bit caved in. The next day she was definitely a cadaver.”

At that point, Barnes knew, “It’s time, she’s gone, we can really say goodbye.”

Complete Article HERE!

May 10, 2016May 10, 2016

Final resting place: 11 celebs you might not know are buried in Las Vegas

By Chris Kudialis

Tony Curtis sits for a photo in the art studio of his Southern Nevada home Friday, Nov. 30, 2001. Curtis was buried at Palm Eastern Cemetery in 2010.

What do Sonny Liston, one of boxing’s all-time best, and Pat Morita, the Japanese-American actor who played Mr. Miyagi in “The Karate Kid,” have in common?

Both are buried in Las Vegas area cemeteries. So are many other notables.

Here’s a list:

Tony Curtis — The Bronx-born actor, who died in Henderson in 2010, appeared in more than 150 films spanning more than six decades. Curtis, who was married six times, was buried at Palm Eastern Cemetery’s “Garden of Legacy” in October 2010 in a memorial service attended by his daughters, Jamie Lee and Kelly Curtis, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Kirk Kerkorian, Kirk Douglas and Phyllis McGuire, among other celebrities.

Redd Foxx — A stone’s throw from Curtis’ grave, in Palm Eastern’s “Garden of Devotion,” is the grave of Redd Foxx, a 1960s standup comedian. Fox, whose real name was Jon Elroy Sanford, was best known for his role as Fred Sanford on the TV sitcom “Sanford and Son,” which ran for six seasons from 1972 to 1977. He died in Los Angeles when he suffered a heart attack on set while rehearsing for a sitcom.

Rick Fabroski, a groundskeeper at Davis Memorial Park on Eastern Avenue, stands by Sonny Liston’s grave, Feb. 18, 2008.

Harry James — Born to circus performers in a rural Georgia hotel, James became one of the most well-known trumpet players of the 20th century and has two songs in the Grammy Hall of Fame. James, who was married three times and had five children, died July 5, 1983, in Las Vegas, the same year he was diagnosed with lymphatic cancer. He was buried in Bunkers Eden Vale Memorial Park in Las Vegas, where former colleague Frank Sinatra gave his eulogy.

Pat Morita — A native of Isleton, Calif., Morita was best known for his acting roles in “Happy Days” and as Mr. Miyagi in “The Karate Kid.” After nearly dying from spinal tuberculosis as a toddler, Morita went on to have one of the most successful careers of any Japanese-American actor in the 20th century. He died of kidney failure on Nov. 25, 2005, at age 73 and was cremated at Palm Eastern Cemetery five days later.

Sonny Liston — One of the best boxers of all time, Liston compiled a 50-4 record in the ring before dying mysteriously in 1970. Still fighting through the year of his death, Liston was found dead in his bedroom by his wife, Geraldine, when she returned home from a two-week trip on Jan. 5, 1971. While the Clark County Sheriff’s Department ruled Liston’s death a heroine overdose, then-County Coroner Mark Herman said the amount of heroin found in his system was not enough to have caused his death. Authorities listed Liston’s official date of death as Dec. 30, 1970, and his birthdate is still unknown. He was estimated to be from 38 to 42 years old when he died. Liston is buried at Davis Memorial Park on Eastern Avenue, with a headstone bearing: A Man.

Pancho Gonzales — A 17-time men’s singles champion who won two U.S. Championship tournaments in 1948 and 1949, Gonzales is considered one of the best men’s tennis players of all time. Married and divorced six times, Gonzales fathered nine children and lived in Las Vegas for the last two decades of his life. Even after 16 years as tennis director at Caesars Palace, Gonzales was broke and out of a job when he died of stomach cancer in July 1995. He is buried at Palm Eastern Cemetery.

Albert Collins— Known for an uncanny stage presence, which often resulted in him leaving the stage to chat with the audience, or on one occasion order pizza, blues musician Collins was one of the 20th century’s most revered electric guitarists. Known for his mastery with the Fender Telecaster, Collins produced 10 studio albums and six live albums during his storied 30-year career. Ranked in Rolling Stone Magazine’s list of “100 Greatest Guitarists,” Collins died of lung cancer at his Las Vegas home on Nov. 24, 1995, and is buried at Davis Memorial Park.

Danny Gans — The “Man of Many Voices” on the Las Vegas Strip, comedian and impressionist Gans was once named Las Vegas’ entertainer of the year. An aspiring baseball player before he took up comedy, Gans had his own show on Broadway in the early 1990s before moving to Las Vegas in 1996. After stints at the Stratosphere, Rio, Mirage and Encore, Gans died in May 2009 due to a toxic reaction to hydromorphone, a common pain medication, according to the Clark County Coroner’s Office. He’s buried at Palm Eastern Cemetery.

Zakes Mokae — Born in Johannesburg, South Africa, in 1934, Mokae moved to Great Britain in 1961 and the United States in 1969. The star of “The Blood Knot” and “Master Harold … and the Boys,” among 16 feature films, Mokae won the 1982 Tony Award for Featured Actor in a Play. A Las Vegas resident at the end of his life, Mokae died on Sept. 11, 2009, after suffering a stroke. He’s buried in Palm Northwest Cemetery.

Liz Renay — A one-time girlfriend of Los Angeles mobster Mickey Cohen, Renay served more than two years at Terminal Island federal prison in California on perjury charges from 1959 to 1962. She played a starring role in John Waters’ 1977 film “Desperate Living” but was best known for her relationship with male celebrities. In a tell-all book about her relationships, Renay’s “My First 2,000 Men” claimed affairs with Joe DiMaggio, Regis Philbin and Cary Grant, among other celebrities. Renay was married seven times, divorcing five times and widowed twice. She died from cardiac arrest in Las Vegas on Jan. 22, 2007, and is buried in Bunkers Eden Vale Cemetery.

Dolores Fuller — A one-time songwriter for Elvis Presley, Fuller was known for acting roles in 1950s films “Glen or Glenda,” “Jail Bait” and “Bride of the Monster.” Born in South Bend, Ind., Fuller first appeared onscreen at age 10 in an acting and songwriting career that lasted nearly 50 years. Twelve songs written by Fuller and recorded by Presley include “Rock-a-Hula-Baby,” “Steppin’ Out of Line,” “Do the Clam” and “I’ll Take Love.” Fuller died in May 2011 at age 88 and is buried in Palm Eastern Cemetery.

Complete Article HERE!

May 8, 2016May 8, 2016

Her secret history: I discovered my mother’s digital life after her death

The contents of my mom’s laptop were like a breadcrumb trail: her interests, her hopes and her plans for the future, even those that would never come true

‘I wondered about the clues I found: were they hints for how I should live my life? Suggestions for places I should go? Ideas to discover?’

By Kate Brannen

Not long after my mother died in 2014, less than eight months after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, my dad and I performed a ritual familiar to anyone who has lost someone they love: we went through her closet to decide what to hold on to. We kept her favorite pieces, like the cozy purple cardigan in which her scent still lingered, a few items of jewelry and her scarves.

A few months later, my father gave me her laptop. I needed a new computer and was grateful to have it. But its contents – photos from trips, a draft of her thesis from divinity school, Van Morrison albums in her iTunes – kept pulling me down rabbit holes. Whenever I sat down to do some work, I’d find myself lost in her files, searching for ways to feel close to her again.

Her computer activity was like a breadcrumb trail through her inner life: her interests, her hopes and her plans for the future, even those that would never come true.

The bookmarks in her Safari browser served as a compass on a journey into my mother’s mind. She used them like sticky notes, saving articles to return to, museum exhibitions to attend and beautiful hotels to visit. She bookmarked things like EssentialVermeer.com, a Wikipedia entry for Theological aesthetics, How to Dress Like a Parisian, and endless recommended reading lists.

As I scrolled through them, I wondered about these clues: were they hints for how I should live my life? Suggestions for places I should go? Ideas to discover? The very first bookmark was “Resources for a Spiritual Journey.” Was that a little nudge from her? I explored each site methodically, not wanting to miss a word or a photograph, just in case I overlooked something from my mom: here’s what you need to know, here’s what I really loved, here’s how much I loved you.

Of course, not all bookmarks were treasure troves. Her health insurance company, for example, and some links no longer work. One took me to the old site of the Opera National de Paris. “You are looking for something?” the 404 error message read in broken English. “Yeah, my mom,” I think. “You seen her?”

Each bookmark corresponded to a time in her life. I pinpointed when she moved to London (places to stay in Cornwall and upcoming shows at the Tate) and when I got married (my wedding website). And there, toward the end of the list, a YouTube video of Kenneth Branagh delivering the St Crispin’s Day Speech from Henry V marked when cancer entered her life: my little brother sent it to the family when her chemo began, preparing us for the battle ahead.

A month later, she sent us Mel Gibson’s “Freedom” speech from Braveheart. I clicked on the bookmark and re-watched Gibson in his blue face paint, yelling: “They may take our lives, but they may never take our freedom!” That was my mom, the William Wallace of chemo: our fearless chief, bravely leading us into a gruesome battle.

But walking in mom’s online footsteps was also like crossing a field riddled with landmines. Without warning something would trigger my grief and my heart was ripped open again. The most painful were those that came just before the cancer battle speeches, before she knew she was sick. There, plain as day, were her plans and hopes for a future she thought stretched out before her.

“15 Ideas for a Children’s Discovery Garden,” read one bookmark from not long ago. This was my mom looking for ways to make her house magical for her grandchildren. At the time she had just one, my one-year-old daughter Maeve, and I could see that being a grandmother was going to be the defining role of the rest of her life.

Recently, I stumbled upon her bookmark of a CS Lewis quote: “We do not want merely to see beauty, though, God knows, even that is bounty enough. We want something else which can hardly be put into words – to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it.”

This is what my mom sought throughout her life, and was more successful than most at finding it. For me, the quote also evokes the day she died and how I’ve come to understand her death. She died on 15 December 2014, eight months after she was diagnosed.

The days and weeks in late November and early December that preceded my mother’s death had been dark, overcast and cold. The grim scenery seemed to reflect the sorrow and fear that had overtaken my family. I kept taking photos at twilight of the dark silhouettes of tree branches set against the purple sky.

But the day my mom died was different. I came downstairs early that morning to relieve my older brother who had kept vigil by her bed all night. I sat alone with her as sunlight flooded in through the windows, filtering through the pink orchids that lined the windowsill.

As I sat there, I remembered what my mom had told me about the day I was born. The hospital had been busy that August morning but soon after she gave birth to me, my mom and I were left in a room alone. When she told the story, she always emphasized how wonderful it was to be on our own, just the two of us, how peacefully we slept. That’s how I started my life.

And that’s how the last day of my mom’s life began: just the two of us. I held her hand and watched her labored breathing. Looking at her, I thought about how I must have slept on her chest as a baby, taking in her warmth and feeling so safe in her arms.

That afternoon, my mother took her final breath. My two brothers and I left my father sobbing next to her hospital bed, which had been set up in the living room, and sat next to each other on a bench outside, watching the day’s final rays of sunlight bathe the front yard. After days and weeks of grim winter darkness, the scenery was radiant.

I couldn’t help but think my mom had become part of the beauty around us. The light seemed more intense, the beauty more vibrant because she was there in it. I was surprised that such a feeling of peace could be felt in the midst of that horrifying loss. I still cling to it and try to revive it in my memory.

My mom’s very last bookmark is for the Phillips House at Mass General Hospital, a place where she could get medical care and maybe spend her final days. The bookmark signifies to me that it was an idea she wanted to return to – an option to consider.

But her decline accelerated so fast. She died in hospice care at her home on Martha’s Vineyard.

The next bookmark is mine. I created it eight months after she died. It just says “Life Begins,” and it’s for the program for expectant mothers at New York Methodist Hospital in Brooklyn, where my son was born 14 months after my mom died.

When I first noticed these bookmarks back-to-back it took my breath away, like I’d stumbled on an essential clue to some mystery. Sitting right there was my mom’s disappearance from the world and then my son’s miraculous entry.

I’ve kept adding my own bookmarks to my mother’s list: 99 “essential” restaurants in Brooklyn, 25 weekend getaways from New York City, places where Maeve could maybe take dance lessons. Now my daydreams and thoughts for the future are piled onto my mom’s. From my mom’s happy life to its tragic ending to me trying to figure out how to be a person in the world without her, it’s all there.

Complete Article HERE!