Go Out With a Bang: Cutting-Edge Tombstones in a Theme-Park Setting

E-Ticket Afterlife: Graveyards and roller coasters usually don’t mix, but that could change in the near future, courtesy of a company called the Final Curtain.

Hoping to revolutionize the funeral industry, Final Curtain wants to build a chain of theme park cemeteries featuring rides, shops and outlandish tombstones designed by artists. The ideas for gravestones (which can be viewed at https://www.finalcurtain.com) include:

* A giant Etch-a-Sketch filled with cremated ashes mingled with iron particles. This would allow visitors to create drawings using the large knobs at the base. However, it’s unclear whether the big monument could be shaken to erase it.

* A massive ant farm tombstone made from a combination of soil and cremated remains.

* A monument guarded by talking gargoyles and chia pet statues.

* A coffin containing a video camera--so visitors could watch the corpse decay live or via a time-lapse recording.

* A working Wurlitzer jukebox gravestone with a 10-foot-by-10-foot dance floor.

Other amenities at this “Coney Island for corpses” would include mausoleum roller coasters, phone booths built from upright caskets, drinking fountains flowing with “nondenominational holy water” and restaurants called Dante’s Grill and Heaven’s Gate Cafe.

Although much of it sounds tongue-in-cheek, Final Curtain officials insist the proposal is real. “Until now, the handling of death has been regimented and boring,” says a company prospectus. “At the Final Curtain, we are throwing away all the rules . . . [to create] a place where life can be immortalized with irreverence and humor rather than by the morbid display of funereal pomp.”

To drum up interest, the company recently bought ads in the Village Voice and L.A. Weekly that said: “Death got you down? At last an alternative.” Potential clients are urged to design their own tombs, or they can sign up for the Final Curtain’s “time-share program,” a traveling exhibit of urns that will move from city to city inside a UFO-shaped mausoleum.

The time-share option enables the dead to “spend autumn in New York, summer in California, spring in Paris and winter in Florida,” says a company brochure. Each cemetery would also have an amphitheater for concerts and poetry readings, assorted retail stores and a museum and gift shop that sells reproductions of the most popular tombs.

Currently, only artists are being accepted as clients, in order to achieve “a higher-quality product that will set new standards for the death-care industry.”

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