Some funerals evolving into life celebrations
By Angela Cara Pancrazio, The Arizona Republic
PHOENIX — Craig Hansen once re-created a casino inside his Phoenix funeral home where mourners, in honor of the departed, played slot machines. The idea was to create the noise and activity of gambling, and the money dropped into the slots went to the deceased's favorite charity. At another farewell, the funeral director simulated a campsite because the deceased loved to camp. The director pitched a tent and brought in a faux fire. And recently, when an armored truck wouldn't fit through the door, the truck was parked in the driveway with a banner that read: "You can't take it with you." Hansen, owner of Hansen Desert Hills Mortuary and Memorial Park, and his fellow funeral directors have a unique window into the 21st-century culture of mourning. In this multimedia age, many services are produced and staged; Power Point 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, Hansen said. "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, they are planning "celebrations" and services that memorialize personalities, forgoing Amazing Grace on the organ for the Rolling Stones through a sound system. "Every phase of life they get to, they transform," said Matt Thornhill, president of the Boomer Project, a marketing and research firm based in Richmond, Va. "As they go out on their final hurrah, boomers do it differently." Changing attitudes about death and dying have contributed to how a person is remembered. Shelli Netko was devastated when her husband, Don, 54, suffered a sudden heart attack at a restaurant and died in her arms. But Netko, 45, of Mesa, 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 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, www.netkocelebrationoflife.com. The site featured 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 Rolling Stones' tongue logo was printed up for guests to stick on clothing. Don Netko's favorite music by the Stones, Bob Dylan and Bob Seger vibrated through the sound system. Outside the ballroom, Netko filled tables with the things that helped describe her husband. After his death, she sifted through his belongings. She discovered the cake-topper from his first communion. His draft card. His college hockey stick. A Bob Dylan scrapbook. A book of quotes that he depended on to enrich his life. 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 Netko eulogized her husband, three Ferraris, symbols of his passion for the engineering under the hood, were parked in front of the stage. Two movie screens flanked the stage. Hours of home videos and dozens of photographs were edited to memorialize Don Netko's life in 3½ minutes. "It's for Don, but it's not really for Don," said Gene Michael Best of the production crew. "It's for the people that are here. You're celebrating but grieving." The rise in personalization is historically significant. Embalming, introduced during the Civil War, was a watershed moment in American funerals, according to the Museum of Funeral Customs website. The undertaker embalmed the body at home. The funeral took place there, too. Then, in the 1920s, the modern funeral home came along. For much of the 20th century, the website says, you picked out a casket, and the funeral director took care of the rest. Cemeteries were filled with people who grew up and died in the same community. "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 of collections at the Museum of Funeral Customs in Springfield, Ill. Sherwin Nuland, author of How We Die and a Yale University professor, put it this way, "Death is the last frontier. Up until the 1960s, sex used to be the last frontier."
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