Cremation’s rise in popularity is changing mourning rituals

KANSAS CITY - The nation is fast approaching a cultural milestone that says as much about life as death.

Within a year or two, more than half of Americans departing this world will be cremated.

You might imagine past generations spinning in their graves.

No viewing the body? No family burial plot? In many cases no funeral, even?

At funeral homes everywhere, 'people are coming in and saying, ‘I don't want the service. Just cremate my loved one, and I'll take the ashes and go,' ” said Jimmy Radovich, general manager of Kansas City-based Charter Funerals.

The reasons are well known. They range from the high costs of what morticians call a traditional 'full body” funeral, to the blurring of religious convictions, to the geographic fanning out of U.S. families.

'We're a scattered nation,” said Julie Walter Davis of the Kansas City office of the Neptune Society, a cremation provider.

Our great-grandparents would be mortified that the final resting places of most people cremated aren't scribbled in a cemetery ledger or published in the local newspaper.

In fact, in the hubbub of modern life, ashes of the dead can be forgotten, lost or given out for others to handle.

Countless quantities of cremated remains - call them 'cremains” if you wish - sit for years in urns on the garage shelves of relatives of the deceased, say area funeral directors and cemetery superintendents.

Cremains are tossed illegally from thrill rides at Disneyland, dropped legally (with a permit) from planes over the Grand Canyon and packed into fireworks to be exploded in a brilliant spectacle, as the late gonzo journalist Hunter Thompson chose.

A smidgen will be worn as jewelry or even embedded in paintings.

Only about 40 percent of the nation's cremains wind up buried at gravesites or placed into formal columbaria at churches and cemeteries, said Barbara Kemmis, executive director of the Cremation Association of North America.

So what happens to the remaining 60 percent, the remnants of perhaps 700,000 Americans each year? Kemmis said there is no way of accounting for it.

'People take them home, and that's perfectly legal,” Kemmis said. 'But there's a lot of urns in closets and on mantels, with no plan for them.

'I think most people intend to scatter the ashes at some point. But do they do it? We don't know.”

Preliminary figures for 2014 show that 46.7 percent of all U.S. deaths led to cremation, up from about 31 percent a decade earlier, according to the Cremation Association of North America.