Keeping Memories Distinct

In life, Scott Springer was a popular figure in his tidy Westlake Village neighborhood. In death, he’s a genuine fixture.

Friends greet him every day. His wife, Debbie, chats at him when she’s feeling down. His son throws off a cheerful “Hi, Dad” to a tree stump while mowing the frontyard.

“He always wanted to be the center of attention,” Debbie says, eyeing the stump affectionately. “And now he is.”

For a few hundred dollars, Rock & Water Creations of Fillmore will deposit the dearly departed in stumps, fake boulders or rocks -- even in a sleeping bear or a leaping dolphin. Each hollow monument has a plaque and a discreet pocket to hold the ashes -- or cremains -- of a loved one.

The memorials, of concrete reinforced with glass fiber, can be arrayed around the yard to be admired or meditated on, whether survivors are gardening or grilling hamburgers.

“Our motto is: ‘Keeping your memory close to home,’ ” said Stephen Hartmann, marketing director of the company. “A lot of people find an urn on the mantel creepy. We did research and discovered that people liked the rocks much better. It’s a place to go, and it looks good in the yard.”

As cremation rates climb nationwide, more people are finding creative ways to display the ashes of their loved ones and commemorate their lives.

Funeral directors say aging baby boomers find traditional urns grim and old-fashioned. They want something befitting their personalities and lifestyles: a bronze-and-gold King Tut mask perhaps, or an enormous, fiberglass toad.

“It’s not your mom and dad’s funeral practice anymore,” said one funeral director. “People want variety.”

The trend is largely driven by a national cremation rate that’s risen from 9% in 1982 to about 26% as of 2001, according to the Cremation Assn. of North America. The Chicago-based group consists of 1,500 funeral homes, crematories, casket makers and cemeteries.

“People are always asking us about interesting things to do with cremated remains,” said its executive director, Jack Springer.

In the last few years, he’s seen urns shaped like golf bags, cowboy boots and lifelike busts of the deceased. A New Zealand woman makes them from hollow ostrich eggs, which she fills with ashes, decorates with semiprecious stones and sells for about $1,200.

By 2010, the association said, nearly 40% of all Americans will be cremated. The ancient practice owes its newfound popularity to an increasingly transient population, a loosening of religious strictures, more environmental awareness and simple economics, Springer said.

“People are dying older and dying away from home,” he said. “There aren’t as many family plots. With cremation, you can take the remains with you when you move.”

Batesville Casket Co., one of the nation’s largest manufacturers of urns and coffins, has a full-color catalog with more than 100 models of vessels, ranging from mule deer to starfish.

“We did a generational study ... and found the older generation still preferred tradition, while the baby boomers wanted something different and personal,” said Joe Weigel, head of communications for the Batesville, Ind., company.

“We found they still wanted to honor the dead,” he added. “But they ... want to celebrate the life, not just mourn the death. And there is a growing movement to bring those cremations home.”

The company broke with tradition and created an urn with three dolphins on top in 1993. Sales soared, and the dolphin is now a staple in funeral homes across the country. “That’s still the most popular urn, and the one that put us on the map,” Weigel said. “When we saw the sales, we said, ‘Wow!’ ”

The Clausen Funeral Home in Ojai recently opened an urn showroom that features some wooden urns etched with mountain and sports scenes.

“If a person is a golfer, we have a golfing motif. If they are a fisherman, we have a fishing motif,” said Chester Perry, funeral director at Clausen. In addition to urns, he said, “we have a birdbath, a water fountain with an urn beneath, a sundial and a rock.”

Teri Craig, whose family has run the Charles Carroll Funeral Home in Ventura for 49 years, offers “cremation jewelry”: lockets and pendants that can hold small amounts of ashes. “It’s part of hanging on to someone special,” she said.

The jewelry got started in 1992 when Lisa Saxer-Buros of Wisconsin wanted a special way to remember her mother, Madelyn. She designed hollow pendants, each holding a half-teaspoon of her mother’s ashes, and distributed them to her siblings for Christmas.

Now her Madelyn Co., based in Janesville, Wis., sells 30 styles of cremation jewelry, from hearts and crosses to butterflies.

“I wear my pendant all the time,” Saxer-Buros said. “It’s comforting to touch and wear, especially in situations where I need my mother close.”

LifeGem, a Chicago company, can convert the carbon in human ashes into diamonds that can be mounted and worn. During cremation, a filter collects carbon from the remains. The material is taken to a laboratory, where it’s superheated and pressed to create diamonds. Each comes with a certificate of authenticity from a gemologist.

A hundred diamonds ranging from .25 to 1.3 carats can be created from a single person’s remains. Prices range from $3,950 to $27,950.

“To be buried in a cemetery these days is to be easily forgotten,” said Dean vanBieson, vice president of operations at LifeGem, which made its first diamond this year. “Diamonds are perfect; you can take them with you. We crystallize your memory.”

Lynn Gage, a 35-year-old salon owner in Rockford, Ill., figures she’s already a diamond in the rough; why not become the real thing when she dies?

“My husband will do the same thing,” she said of their joint plans for gem-hood. “We could become true family heirlooms.”

But gems, necklaces and designer urns fill some with horror.

“We would 100% discourage it. The body is not born to be burned,” said Rabbi Chaim Kolodny, a Los Angeles cleric who volunteers with Chevra Kadisha, a group providing traditional burials for Orthodox Jews.

Jewish tradition, along with those of Islam and Christianity, long held cremation to be at odds with divine commands that the dead go back into the earth.

Martha White, sales and marketing director at Mount Sinai Memorial Parks and Mortuaries in Los Angeles and Simi Valley, said: “If some new style of urn helps people connect to someone, I can understand, but it has no connection for me. Family stories should be carried forward, not the physical things.”

Old-fashioned burial remains the norm in most parts of the country. It’s preferred in the Bible Belt, where people move around less and religious traditions proscribing cremation remain strong. Alabama has the lowest cremation rate in America, at 5%, while Mississippi and Tennessee are about 6%.

Cremation is most popular in the West.

Hawaii has the highest cremation rate at 60%, followed by Nevada, at 58%, and Washington state, at 57%. California is at 47% and is expected to reach 65% by 2010.

“Cremation was seen as a very radical ... idea in the 19th century,” said David Sloan, a USC professor who is an expert on cemeteries and urban history. “It was seen as scientific, rational and a rejection of religious ritual. But it lost its stigma, and has very recently become part of the accepted ritual of death.”

In a 1999 study by the cremation association, 24% of respondents said they had chosen cremation because it was less expensive than burial; 17% cited environmental concerns; and 13% said it was a simpler way to dispose of a body.

Cremation of the average adult requires 1,800 degrees of heat for about 90 minutes, said Miguel Andrade, a crematory operator at Ivy Lawn Memorial Park in Ventura. A body in a coffin is rolled into a brick chamber, a heavy blue door shuts and gas flames are turned on.

When the cremation is done, Andrade puts on a heat-proof suit, stands in front of the oven and sweeps the ashes into a metal tray. He uses a magnet to pick up any pins or screws that may have been left from medical treatments.

The ashes are then pulverized into a fine powder. The remains, which weigh 7 to 8 pounds, are put in a plastic urn and given to the family.

The cremation association says a no-frills cremation costs about $1,000; a basic burial costs about $1,250. But burial prices are easily pushed up by such expenses as caskets, embalming fees, cemetery plots and clergy costs.

Though urns can cost more than $3,000, they also can be bought for as little as $80. Most specialty urns run between $200 and $800, industry officials say.

Some people skip the urn entirely, taking the ashes and scattering them at home, at sea or somewhere else special to the living or the dead.

Ashes can also be molded into customized shapes. Eternal Reefs of Decatur, Ga., mixes them with concrete, forms them into balls and uses them to make artificial reefs along the East Coast and the Gulf of Mexico.

“It’s a final resting place that gives back to the environment as a final gesture,” said the company’s owner, Don Brawley. “I got the idea when my father-in-law said he’d rather spend eternity with the snappers and groupers than with a bunch of dead people in a field.”

It was burial prices that persuaded Connie Owens, 47, of Laguna Niguel to buy a boulder urn from Rock & Water for her father’s ashes.

“It’s perfect,” she said. “He’s always there in the backyard, and my mother can go talk to him. You don’t have to drive to the cemetery, and when you move, you can take him with you.”

Others remain squeamish.

Ron White, director of White’s Funeral Home in Azusa, has helped arrange hundreds of cremations. He even had his cat cremated. But he won’t be joining his pet in the end.

“I figure I’ve taken too good care of my body to burn it up when I’m dead,” he said.

That goes double for Chester Perry of the Clausen Funeral Home.

“There is something about being consumed by fire that bothers me,” he said, wincing slightly. “I’ve arranged to be buried in a T-shirt and shorts.”