New trends in burials

Baby boomers go against tradition PHOENIX - Inside his Phoenix funeral home, Craig Hansen has re-created a casino where mourners, in honor of the departed, played slot machines. Money dropped into the machines is donated to the deceased's favorite charity. At another farewell, the funeral director simulated a campsite because the deceased had loved to camp. He pitched a tent and brought in a faux fire. And recently, when an armored truck wouldn't fit through the door of the funeral home, the truck was parked in the driveway with a banner that read "You can't take it with you." Hansen and funeral directors like him have a unique window into the 21st-century culture of mourning and loss. In this modern multimedia age, funeral services are produced and staged. PowerPoint presentations, slide shows and video clips are edited to tell the story of a person's life. A funeral is no longer a day in the life, said Hansen, who runs Hansen Desert Hills Mortuary and Memorial Park. "It's a lifetime in a day. They're well-thought-out, well-planned. We see more humor," he said. "Of course, there is remorse and sadness. We have laughter and tears." Technology is part of the shift. But many funeral directors say the baby-boomer generation is driving the evolution. Instead of traditional funerals, boomers are planning "celebrations" and services that memorialize personalities, forgoing Amazing Grace played on the organ for the Rolling Stones' music through a sound system. Shelli Netko of Mesa was devastated when her husband, Don, 54, suffered a sudden heart attack at a restaurant and died in her arms. But Netko, 45, said, "A funeral with the sadness and church music and black attire and stuffiness was never an option. I wanted to show everyone that life had meaning to him." An event planner, Netko called on her children and a crew to produce a "Celebration of Life" for her husband at an Arizona Biltmore Resort ballroom. The Netkos' 22-year-old daughter, Angie Loucks, created a website about Don's life. The site features a biography with links to a photo gallery and e-mail condolences. For the celebration, guests were asked to wear white as a symbol of peace. The infamous Rolling Stones tongue logo was printed up for guests to stick on clothing. Don's favorite music by the Stones, Bob Dylan and Bob Seger vibrated through the sound system. Outside the ballroom, Shelli filled tables with the things that helped chronicle her husband's life. After his death, she sifted through his belongings. She discovered the cake-topper from his first Holy Communion. His draft card. His college hockey stick. And plenty of other mementos: a Bob Dylan scrapbook; a book of quotes that he depended on to enrich his life and those of his children and friends. And because he wore Acqua di Gio and always smelled like it, she placed a tiny bottle of the Giorgio Armani cologne among the pieces of his life. While Shelli eulogized her husband from a podium, three Ferraris, a symbol of his passion for the engineering under the hoods but not the flashiness, were parked in front of the stage. Two gigantic movie screens flanked the stage, and hours of home videos and dozens of photographs were edited to memorialize Don's life in three and a half minutes. "It's for Don, but it's not really for Don," said Gene Michael Best of the production crew. "Don's gone. It's for the people that are here. You're celebrating but grieving." The rise in personalization and cremation is historically significant. "We're in another one of those shifts in the way we think about funerals and the way we conduct them," said Jason Meyers, curator at the Museum of Funeral Customs in Springfield, Ill. The resurgence of embalming during the Civil War was a watershed moment in American funerals. Then, in the 1920s, the modern funeral home came along. For much of the 20th century, the mourners picked out a casket, and the funeral director took care of the rest. In those days, cemeteries were filled with people who grew up and died in the same community. Changing attitudes about death and dying have also contributed to how a person is remembered. "Death is the last frontier," said Sherwin B. Nuland, author of How We Die and a Yale University professor. "Up until the 1960s, sex used to be the last frontier." - AP