Are funeral homes a dying business?

 

There was a time when the majority of the population chose a traditional funeral for their loved ones – but that has changed dramatically in recent years.

 In his half-century in the death business, Richard Moylan has never experienced years like these.

 As president of Brooklyn’s Green-Wood cemetery, he spends his days managing the historic site where families have spent the past couple years tending to loved ones lost to the pandemic. But the bigger change had been building before then: the choice to routinely cremate over traditional casket burial of years past.

 

At the height of the pandemic, Green-Wood’s crematory burned constantly, 16 to 18 hours daily. A wall recently collapsed. Maintenance costs spiked. Last year, 4,500 bodies entered the five chambers, a 35 percent increase over 2019.

So many ashes to ashes, so much dust to dust. Cremation is now America’s leading form of final “disposition,” as the funeral industry calls it — a preference that shows no sign of abating.

 

In 2020, 56 percent of Americans who died were cremated, more than double the figure of 27 percent two decades earlier, according to the Cremation Association of North America (CANA). By 2040, 4 out of 5 Americans are projected to choose cremation over casket burial, according to both CANA and the National Funeral Directors Association (NFDA).

 

This seismic shift represents potentially severe revenue losses for the funeral industry. It’s leading innovators to create a growing number of green alternatives and other choices that depart from traditional casket funerals. And rapidly shifting views about disposing with bodies have also led to changes in how we memorialize loved ones — and reflect an increasingly secular, transient and, some argue, death-phobic nation.

 

Other countries have been quicker to embrace the practice, like Japan, with a rate of almost 100 percent, in part because of its high density and paucity of burial grounds. Cremation is central to Hindu and Buddhist funeral practices, releasing the soul from the body. But Judaism, Catholicism and Islam resisted it, because of views about the sanctity of body and spirit in death.

 

Though the United States’ first crematory opened in 1876 in Washington, Pa., Americans were slow to acceptance. They were just queasy about the practice. It took a century or more to evolve.

 Cremation finally skyrocketed as America became increasingly secular. Last year, the number of people belonging to a house of worship dropped below 50 percent for the first time since Gallup launched the poll in 1937.

 

Americans also started to recognize the convenience of cremation and its lower cost. Comparisons are challenging because of the many options, but the median price of a funeral with burial and viewing is $7,848, according to the NFDA, while the median cost of direct cremation is a third of the price at $2,550. Cremation with viewing and funeral is comparable to traditional burial, with a median cost of $6,970.

 

For families scattered across multiple states, there often seems little point in investing the effort and expense to bury a loved one in a cemetery no one will visit. Like pet food and leisure footwear, cremation is now available through direct-to-consumer websites such as Solace and Tulip.

 

Cremation is more popular in states that vote Democratic, include large transient populations or endure brutal winters that make the earth frozen solid. (Canada’s rates are notably higher than those of the United States.) Cremation rates already hover near or over 80 percent in Nevada, Washington, Oregon and Maine. They remain half that in Utah and many Southern states with large religiously observant populations.

 

“If there’s anything that is going to slow down or reverse the cremation rate in the United States, it is green burials,” says Kemmis, the CANA executive director. “People are looking to the greenest final disposition so that our deaths will reflect our lives.”

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/04/18/cremation-death-funeral/

 

 Founded in spring 2019, Recompose in Seattle is the nation’s first company to offer natural organic reduction. The body is laid in a vessel on a bed of wood chips, alfalfa and straw and transformed into soil over 30 days, enough to fill a pickup truck, for a flat fee of $7,000. Some families take some soil for personal use; about half donate it to a forest or farm. Subscribers to Recompose’s newsletter about “the death care journey” have swelled to 25,000. “People are looking for different options,” says Recompose outreach manager Anna Swenson. “Cost is a factor. Cultural beliefs are a factor. Guilt is a factor. The environment is a factor.” Recompose plans to expand to 10 facilities during the next decade.

 

Other options include being buried in a coral reef off the coast of Florida, or being turned into mulch. I also know at least one person who had sprinkled his mate’s ashes into Lake Superior.

 

The funeral home business is still a big business, with estimated revenues of $17 billion a year. That’s still a lot of money, but growth rates are down a lot from what they use to be.

 

https://bizfluent.com/12081976/are-funeral-homes-profitable

  Both of my parents are buried at Ft. Snelling cemetery in St. Paul, Minnesota, and we visited there a few times when we lived in states that were close to Minnesota. The reality, though, is that we now live 1500 miles away, and will likely never visit the cemetery again in our lifetimes.

Although my demise is likely at least a decade in the future, my final remains (after the hospital obtains the parts it needs from my carcass), will likely be an urn of some type.

For now, here is one of my favorites:

 https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/81QNfSnLfHL._AC_SX679_.jpg