What happens when a member of the Bali royal family dies? 

A couple hundred thousand people take time off of work and build huge funeral pyres, like the one seen below, and host a gigantic cremation service for 70 bodies.

Even more amazing is that this 90+ foot tall pyre is mobile!  The pyres were moved to the location by hand.  Along the way, the handlers twisted and spun the pyres to confuse the “spirits” in the bodies from knowing which direction was home.  That way, when the cremation set the “spirits” free from the bodies, they would have to move on to the afterlife rather than return home and, I guess, haunt their families.

Click here to read the full story (also here and here) and here to see some more amazing pictures.

Link courtesy of Pastyme with Good Companye.

Just when I’m about to fall victim to the “direct cremation will kill us all!!!” rant spouted by some funeral industry folks, I read or hear stories like this one from England:

Yesterday I went to the funeral of Ralph Brown at St Peter and St Paul′s Church in Wem, Shropshire. 

The service itself was a good one and was quite light, nothing to heavy.

Ralph′s coffin was covered in the paddock sheet of the horse he used to look after who was called “Call It A Day”. It was the sheet that the horse had worn when he finished 3rd in the 1999 Aintree Grand National.

The cortege moved from Wem and on to the Emstrey Crematorium at Shrewsbury where Ralph was cremated.

You can read the entire story by Richard Bevin on the Sports News website.

The Funeral of Shelley by Louis Edouard Fournier (1889)

I point this out because England has been dealing with high cremation rates for much longer than the United States.  And it’s comforting to know that even with cremation as a viable option, folks are choosing more than just disposal.

Unfortunately, the reaction of funeral professionals to requests about cremation (”You want to do WHAT?”) or the practice of flat-out ignoring a client’s interest in cremation have done more to harm the higher-paying traditional cremation services than the public’s move toward it.

For too long, the folks who championed cheap cremation at the detriment of traditional funeral providers were the only ones speaking out about cremation.  And where there is silence, people often see guilt.

Funeral consumer groups and direct cremation providers have accused funeral directors of jacking up prices and exploiting guilt for a profit, with no rebuttal offered by the accused.

Interestingly, most of the folks I talk to about cremation only know the “cheap” half of the story.  They have no idea that cremation can include viewing or embalming; they don’t realize that caskets can be rented or that their family can attend the cremation process.

It’s time you make an effort to educate your community about ALL the options regarding cremation.  It’s the only way you’re ever going to make money from what is the biggest trend in funeral service in our lifetime.

A friend and I went shopping at Wal-Mart last week, when I pointed out all the people who carry six-packs of Gatorade, soda or water on the edge of their shopping cart and marvelled at how wide that particular “meme” had spread.

He was confused and had a question and a comment.  First, he hadn’t seen the practice of putting the bottles on the cart, but he liked it.  Second, what’s a meme?

If you don’t know about the bottle placement on a shopping cart, here’s a simple diagram.

By wedging the six-packs over the top edges of the cart, the user frees up space for other groceries.  I’ve seen folks pushing carts where the top edges were completely covered with six-packs.  Made the cart look like a boat with too many bouys and bumpers!

But back to his question.  A meme is an idea that gets passed from human to human.  First described by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, a meme is anything (song, joke, religion, tool or process) that gets passed around the culture either by conscious transmission (”Check out this cool new song!”) or non-deliberate transmission (like wearing your collar turned up).  You can read the full Wikipedia entry for meme here.

When I was a teenager, the cool kids wore their pants folded over and rolled at the bottom.  I have no idea why, and when I see it now, I wonder about the collective mental health of my generation. 

But pegged pants were a meme, even if we didn’t know what the word meant.  Other examples?  How about beehives, The Macarena or Who Let the Dogs Out?

There are even memes in funeral service.  Direct cremation is a meme.  How many times have you heard “just bury me in a pine box” from a potential client?  That’s a meme.  Color photo memorial folders?  A meme made possible by the advent of cheaper color printing.

We can recognize memes pretty early, if we’re looking for them.  But let’s face it:  most funeral professionals haven’t even figured out that a memorial tribute video is NOT a strange request!  (one of the biggest firms I know still forces their 12+ firms share a single flat screen television and DVD player for services!)

So take advantage of your competitors’ blindness and let your community know how in tune you are with their “memes.” 

If you need a hint, here’s a partial list of new(er) funeral industry memes and some potential ones:

Memorial videos
Cremation jewelry
Online memorial tributes
After-funeral receptions
Attended cremations
Funeral home concierge services
Pet memorialization services from funeral homes
Video tombstones

It’s fascinating to watch different generations answer important questions about death.

Say, for instance, that you want to pre-plan Uncle Fred’s funeral.  And say he’s a big trout fisherman (he’s big, not the trout).

And now let’s say Fred wants to know if they make urns with fish painted on them because that will help him decide whether he wants to be buried our cremated.

Here’s how each generation (typically) approaches this:

The Greatest Generation - Tell Fred that the family always get’s buried and that you’ll make sure he has a nice service.  If pressured, call the funeral director who’s handled every funeral in your family and ask for his direction.

The Baby Boomer Generation - Call a few funeral homes and ask friends who’ve recently handled a cremation.  Listen to the evening news or read magazines for more details.

Generation X (and the lesser known Generation Jones) - Search online for “trout urn” or “trout cremation urn.”  Check out websites for funeral homes and cremation societies.  Forward an email to Uncle Fred with several links included.

Generation Y (and the Boomerang Generation) - Blog about the need for a trout urn.  Get feedback from friends about urns they’ve used and the different options they’ve seen online.  Check out an urnmaker’s MySpace page.  Watch YouTube videos about hows urns are made.  Buy they urn from Amazon or another site.

Many funeral directors are fortunate enough to still be dealing with the “Greatest Generation” customers.  But the recent push toward more “personalization” and cremation means we’re finally seeing Baby Boomers make the majority of the funeral decisions.

And while this has put pressure on directors to be better at navigating their customers’ habits, it also signals that the next generations are getting closer to making the decisions.

As industry experts, we’ve told funeral directors that cremation is inevitable, but that you can make up the difference with urn and memorial service sales.  (I’m including myself in this criticism, as I’ve been a big proponent of up-selling cremation services)

But when products that were once hard to get (old conversation - him: ”Where do you buy an urn?” her: “From a funeral home, I guess.”) are moved into the open market of the Internet, prices drop and profits go down.

So while an older person will take whatever the funeral director offers that looks like a fisherman’s urn, a Gen-Y or Gen-X customer has already bought this urn:

urn featured on Fly Fish Magazine blog

Even better (for the customer) it cost only $189 and was shipped right to their house.  And now Uncle Fred can sleep well, knowing that his urn is safely on the mantle, waiting for the day he’ll occupy it.

Only, the funeral home is out a nice profit and the online urn seller (who was probably wearing his pajamas when his client’s credit card was processed and the order logged) helps to turn the funeral industry from a commodity-based or product-based one into a service industry.

Where are we headed?

This article was inspired by a blog post that popped up in my Google Alerts.  I got the info about the different generations from the online encyclopedia, Wikipedia.  Uncle Fred is NOT based upon a real person.

Some local governments in England are considering whether to have crematories use the waste heat (created by burners to cremate bodies) to fuel the systems that provide heat to the rest of the funeral complex.

There’s a full article here.

Interestingly, the response on the Internet has been split, based mostly upon how the idea is presented.  When the headline reads more like “Cremated bodies to provide warmth” people write angry responses and demand a change.  When the headline is more cautious, like “Excess Heat from Crematory Spurs Green Push” you get a more reasoned response.

 The fact remains, the heat is created not by the body being cremated (which requires energy and fire to burn) but by the burners in the crematory.  The heated air would not be cycled into the building (ewww!) but allowed to rise out of a stack, at which point it would contact pipes filled with cold water.  The heat would be transferred to the water and piped to another area where the heat would be used to power a heating system.

We release HUGE amounts of energy into the world when we burn remains.  It seems to me that recapturing some of that energy (without trapping any of the cremated remains or any of the minute particles that are expelled into the air) is a very smart idea. 

If you plan to be cremated with the cavities in your mouth filled, don’t go to Larimer County, Colorado. 

Dental fillings, or, more pointedly, the mercury included in them, is the topic of discussion between regulators and the Colorado funeral home owner who wants to relocate his family-owned crematory to Larimer County.  Health officials, concerned about mercury emissions from the dental work in question, want Rick Allnut to either outfit his crematory with an expensive filter to block the minimal emissions or extract the offending teeth before cremation.

You can read the entire Tribune (Northern Colorado) article here.

The article goes on to say that mercury from cremation accounts for less than eight percent of the annual mercury emissions in Minnesota (where one of the experts cited in the article works).  And while CANA and others question whether that’s even accurate, I can only wonder, “What about the other 92+ percent?”

And I applaud Mr. Allnut for making his stance clear when he told the regulators that he would not be pulling any teeth from his deceased clients.

It’s a pretty absurd suggestion, probably made by a health official who wasn’t thinking about the sensitve nature of the funeral business.

For years, I’ve heard funeral directors lament the coming wave of cremation.  “It’ll ruin our bottom line!” they moan.

But that’s just the hardline “forever burial” view of some funeral professionals.  When the public thinks about cremation, they certainly aren’t thinking about your profit margin.  In fact, they wouldn’t even know that cremation is something you don’t embrace unless you told them.

 Why then, do so few funeral directors ever talk about cremation in a positive way?

You should follow the lead of the funeral home cited on ABC News 13’s website in an October 21st article titled More People Choosing Cremation Over Burial in Western N.C.:

For funeral homes across the region, the trend toward more cremations has also presented a chance to expand services. In January 2006, Anders-Rice Funeral Home moved a 26,000-pound brick-lined crematorium into its building.

Cremation is presented as an opportunity for the funeral home, not an unpleasant process done by direct disposers.

By mentioning that a funeral home has expanded services to include cremation, the news story tells it’s readers that the funeral home respects the choice for cremation.

 It’s not a lot - just a small news story on a website.  But it has wider implications.  It means that, unlike price-driven “consumer reporting” or exposés, positive stories about funeral homes and cremation are possible.

My philosophy?  If a family chooses cremation and you’ve done everything you can to distance yourself from cremation (because it’s cheap, or because you’re trying to hold on to only burial calls), how can you get mad when they choose a direct disposer?

And once that first person in the family has chosen a low-cost, direct cremation with a family-led memorial service, the rest can fall like dominoes, since the familial prohibitions have been lifted.

How long before that family that you turned away out of spite has transformed from a “we’re all going to be buried in the family plot” clan into a “we’ve always had our loved one’s cremated and scattered in the lake” kinda group?

Before I became a funeral director, I was a journalist. The nature of the job was one in which I had to very quickly become an expert on a wide array of topics, so I could then write intelligently about them for the next day’s paper.

I worked for a small funeral home out in New England before I started school, and that’s when I first started to become indoctrinated into the way funeral directors think.

First and foremost, I learned that if you haven’t been in the industry for at least 20 years, you don’t know anything about funeral directing.

As I became more and more indoctrinated into the industry, I began to share that point of view. I made it my job to figure out exactly how each person I worked for ran their funerals, because they were the experts, not me. If I saw an area that needed an improvement, it was obviously naiveté on my part- if it could have been improved upon, it would have been done already.  Things were done the way they were, because that’s the way it had always been done, so that must be the way families wanted it. The basic process never wavered, and the ad in the yellow pages had been the same for the last 10 years because that’s the way we do it. End of story.

For a while, I followed that mindset. Even if I knew the answer to a specific question that a family posed to me, I quite often referred them to an elder employee. After all, they had been in the industry longer, so they would give a better answer than me.

Now I realize how silly that is. Don’t get me wrong- I’m not in any way implying that I somehow know more than those who have been in the industry longer. However, is there any other industry where things are so stagnant? If a car dealership opened in 1980, and in 2007 only sold model year 1980 cars, would they still be in business?

I’m amused at the reaction people have had to BT Hathaway’s blog post about Wilbert’s new marketing strategy at the NFDA convention. I’m certain there must have been funeral directors who were turned off to that display simply because it was different from the way it had been in the past. I wonder how many were turned off because they actually shared BT’s point of view that Wilbert had given up on their own product.

However, there’s an even bigger issue here than how Wilbert is marketing itself. The issue is that there is a funeral director who had the audacity to actually speak out against one of the big manufacturers. How often does that ever happen?

We all have families that want something different. They want caskets that are less expensive but are still of good quality. They want caskets that are better for the environment. Just because one of dad’s many interests was golf, does that mean they want him in a golf-bag urn?

As funeral directors, we want better prices. We want to be treated equally, even amongst bigger competitors.

But how often do we, like BT, stand up and demand what we want? When was the last time a funeral director stood up to Batesville and demanded the same discount that that SCI gets? Too often, we just roll over and say, “well, that’s just the way it’s done,” and deal with it. We may even switch distributors, and just hope that we get as close to the same level of discount as the slightly bigger guy up the street. We may say something to our local salesman, but we’ll give him the same sympathetic look he gave us, when he tells us its out of his control.

What other industry does business like that? Most manufacturers and suppliers do what they can to make a product that will keep the customer happy, rather than demanding the customer be happy with whatever they get. Products and prices are usually determined by what the customer desires- not by what the manufacturer decides they should be.

And by the way, when we see a funeral director who offers all sorts of discounts based on how quickly families pay or how much they spend, we usually say there’s something wrong with his pricing structure if he can afford to give discounts like that. But we see nothing wrong with casket/vault/fluid/etc. companies who do the same thing?

It makes me wonder. Is the public’s view of the funeral industry changing really changing that radically, or have we just been so slow to evolve, that now we can’t keep up with reality?

I couldn’t even tell you how many times a colleague has bemoaned how cremation is going to drive us all out of business, or talked about how different things were before Jessica Mitford’s book was published—16 years before I was even born. But you know what? There are still funeral directors in England turning a profit, even with a cremation rate of more than 70%. And not one of my contemporaries has a clue who Jessica Mitford is.

Through her company, New York Center for Transition, she provides counseling for those who have recently been diagnosed with diseases, grief counseling for those who have experienced a death and funeral consulting to families in need.

Michelle is working toward opening her own funeral home.