Grand Finales

Think of it as the afterlife equivalent of a personalized license plate.

Introducing . . . the vanity tombstone.

More and more corpses are now spending eternity under granite slabs customized with laser-etched photographs, homespun poetry and illustrations of everything from B-1 bombers to beer cans.

A few go even further, such as the Vermont clothespin baron who has a one-ton sculpted clothespin over his grave site, and the Indiana wag whose headstone is flanked by two parking meters that read “Expired.”

“People want to leave something distinctive,” says Eileen Mueller of the Monument Builders of North America. “In life, maybe they were just a Social Security number and ZIP code, but for eternity they can have a more personal statement.”

Technology makes it all possible.

Before the 1980s, special-order grave markers were too expensive for most cemetery shoppers. Epitaphs had to be paid for by the letter and unusual artwork required costly hand-chiseling.

Now, thanks to computers and automated sandblasting, prices have tumbled.

At Santa Ana’s Fairhaven Memorial Park, more than half of all new grave markers are personalized, says cemetery vice president Nancy Brinker: “A few years ago, we offered 12 designs. Today, the possibilities are limitless.”

The most popular option is the photo tombstone. For about $200, a snapshot can be cut into granite with remarkable clarity, using chemicals, lasers or sandblasting.

For more exotic tastes, there’s the solar-powered tablet. According to Ned Philips of Las Vegas’ Palm Memorial Park, the headstones come equipped with solar panels and variously designed acrylic insets that light up at night.

But the vast majority of personalized burial markers follow more traditional themes.

“When you need me, just whisper my name in your heart [and] I will be there,” reads the custom inscription on an infant’s sepulcher at Fairhaven.

Other tombs are engraved with religious messages, poems, genealogies or artwork reflecting the deceased’s career and hobbies. Among the images found in Southern California cemeteries: slot machines, dolphins, space shuttles, tennis rackets, airplanes, pigs, sewing machines, poker hands, Ninja turtles, Mormon temples, city skylines and Disneyland.

Not to mention a host of offbeat epitaphs:

“The reptilian form stepped from the shadows, often stalked and bit me. Finally it did not let go, so now I am here,” says a 1994 message at Fairhaven.

Another, from 1995, depicts a surfer and reads: “Caught the wave to heaven.”

A Hollywood memorial for Mel Blanc, former voice of Bugs Bunny and Porky Pig, is stamped with the sign off, “That’s All, Folks.”

And Forest Lawn’s collection of final words ranges from “Having a Wonderful Time--Glad You’re Not Here” to “Off to Greener Fairways.”

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Not everyone welcomes the trend.

“We live in a time when there is a trivializing of death,” says Msgr. Lawrence Baird, a spokesman for the Catholic diocese in Orange County. “This kind of thing just continues that.”

Although church authorities have no problem with photographs of the dead on gravestones, they generally frown on secular symbols and cutesy epitaphs.

“We regard cemeteries as a sacred place,” Baird explains. “The ambience of peace and tranquillity [and] the sense of our own mortality should not be disrupted.”

In Connecticut, the family of a man whose favorite saying was “Boop Boop Ba Doo” reportedly considered suing the archdiocese of Hartford for refusing to allow a marker containing that phrase.

But Catholic officials refused to back down. Certain things simply aren’t appropriate in a religious cemetery, Father Arthur Dupont told the Associated Press: “Sometimes it’s a [tough] call. But Boop Boop Ba Doo didn’t even come close.”

L.A.’s final resting places are a bit more lenient. The Catholic grave of singer Richie Valens, for instance, is inscribed with musical notes from the song “La Bamba”--and even Boop Boop Ba Doo might make it past cemetery censors, church representatives say.

But when families have asked for satanic emblems or things like “666,” it’s a no-brainer, says archdiocesan cemetery executive Jerry McAdams: “Absolutely not.”

Jewish cemeteries have also grappled with questions of what is spiritually appropriate.

Some Orthodox Jews believe putting a person’s photo on a tomb creates a graven image contrary to that faith’s tradition.

“We try to discourage it,” says Manashe Hyam, director of the L.A. Monument Co. “But it’s a custom among Russian and Ukranian Jews.”

In nonreligious cemeteries, however, almost anything goes, especially back East, where graveyards favor the more spacious upright tombstone. MB News, the Illinois-based trade magazine of the Monument Builders of North America, reports on some of the most unusual burial spots.

One spells out the life, death and hobbies of its occupant on a giant cemetery Scrabble board. Another features a full-sized granite Mercedes. And dozens have headstones carved in the shape of diesel trucks, jukeboxes, soccer balls and other items.

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Some craftsmen have turned the tombstone into a veritable art form. One Iowa artisan uses scribing tools to etch intricate scenes into blocks of Indian jet black granite. His headstone canvasses include a scene from the movie “Backdraft” (for a dead fireman), a ghostly farmer alongside a grain elevator and Jesus in the clouds, reaching toward a little girl who spent her life in a wheelchair.

Clyde Chamberlin of East Lansing, Mich., has a touring slide show and quarterly newsletter devoted to weird tombs and epitaphs. His favorites include a Georgia monument shaped like a giant Coke bottle, an intact car engine mounted over the tomb of a stock-car racer and a life-size, sculpted baby elephant on the grave of a circus owner.

It’s a dramatic departure from the send-offs of earlier eras.

The Puritans, for example, believed in simple markers, perhaps adorned with a skull to remind the living of God’s Final Judgment, says Bob Swacker, a New York University education professor who lectures and writes for gravestone-industry trade groups.

The Shakers were even more austere. In one Tennessee cemetery, their headstones display nothing more than the three initials of the deceased. The sect reasoned that God knew the dead person’s identity and that was all that mattered, according to MB News.

Ornamentation increased after the Great Awakening, a religious revival that swept Colonial America during the mid-1700s, Swacker says. Winged cherubs, crowns and sunbursts became common.

During the 1800s, monuments turned into status symbols, replete with Bible verses, poetry and sculptures of angels draping themselves over stones.

Creative epitaphs followed.

Among the classics: “I told you I was sick” (which also has begun popping up in California lately) and Tombstone, Ariz.’s “Here lies Lester Moore. Four slugs from a .44. No Les. No Moore.”

During the Depression, however, memorials shrunk in size and substance. The brevity continued through the 1970s, thanks in large part to the advent of power lawn mowers. Forest Lawn and other graveyards moved away from upright tombstones to small, uniform, flush-to-the-ground markers that allowed for easier upkeep of cemetery landscapes.

But the current boom in personalized tombs has some cemeteries rethinking their policies, Mueller says. A number of flat-marker graveyards are now opening sections for upright monuments.

And others are feeling pressure to accept epitaphs that were heretofore deemed inappropriate, such as this one turned down by a Los Angeles graveyard: “He was quite a salesman. This was his last deal.”