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More and More Choose Cremation

By Sonia Scherr
Valley News Staff Writer

June 25, 2005—Newport, N.H.—Nearly 40 years ago, John “Chick” and Minnie “Toby” Call moved from Stony Point, N.Y., to Newport, where they would spend the rest of their lives.

They took over ownership of the Hilltop Motel in Newport, joined Episcopal Church of the Epiphany, and bought a plot for two at a cemetery in town, intending one day to be buried there.

But before John Call died in 1994 at age 77, they changed their minds about using the burial plots. Instead, they became the first on both sides of the family to be cremated.

“It's something that they both wanted,” said their daughter, Jan McMahon of Newport.

The Calls are part of a growing number of people -- especially in New Hampshire and Vermont -- choosing cremation over burial in a casket. In New Hampshire, 48 percent of people who died were cremated -- the 10th-highest percentage among all states in 2002, the last year for which confirmed statistics were available, according to the Cremation Association of North America. In Vermont, 46 percent of people who died were cremated in 2002, well above the national average of 28 percent. At some Upper Valley funeral homes, including Cabot in Woodstock, more than 50 percent of death arrangements involve cremations.

The cremation rate has increased steadily nationwide over the past several decades, more than quadrupling from 6 percent in 1975, according to CANA. It's expected to reach 35 percent in 2010, with rates in New Hampshire and Vermont increasing to 55 percent and 61 percent, respectively.

“It's slowly gaining acceptance,” said Lisa Carlson of Hinesburg, Vt., author of Caring for the Dead: Your Final Act of Love. “The more people do it, the more people do it.”

The upsurge in cremations has also affected cemetery planning in Upper Valley communities and the way funeral homes do business. It has contributed to a move toward more personalized remembrances of loved ones, even for families who do not choose cremation.

A multitude of factors are driving the increase in cremation nationwide and in the Twin States, including a move toward simpler, lower-cost death arrangements, a desire to conserve cemetery space, fewer religious prohibitions, scattered families and weaker ties to tradition, funeral experts say.

“A lot of it is Yankee frugality,” said Buddy Phaneuf, president of the Cremation Society of New Hampshire in Manchester. “They just don't see the value of spending money on traditional funerals anymore.”

The Calls chose to have their ashes scattered together in the flower garden that Minnie Call tended behind her daughter's Newport home. Minnie Call talked openly about her plans if people asked. “When I go, our ashes will be mixed, and we'll be spread at Janice’s,” McMahon recalled her mother saying. “And she’d kind of chuckle.”

Minnie Call had a fear of being buried underground, her daughter said. Neither of McMahon's parents wanted a viewing, partly because they wished to be remembered as they were in life, not lying in a casket. They also wanted to spare their relatives the inconvenience of traveling long distances for several days of emotionally difficult funeral events.

Minnie Call died on Christmas Day last year at age 88. Her ashes now sit on McMahon's dining room table in a blue container; her husband's are in the garage. At a memorial service this summer, the family plans to spread their ashes among yellow lilacs, milkweed and Johnny-jump-ups.

For the Calls' granddaughter, Mandy McMahon of Newport, “Scattering and burying (the ashes) is just that release where you can be everywhere at the same time. You're no longer confined. It's the ultimate freedom.”

For other families, cost is the main reason they choose cremation. Americans spend an average of $6,500 on a funeral, excluding cemetery expenses, according to the National Funeral Directors Association. The average cost for all types of cremations is about $1,800, said Jack Springer, executive director of CANA. Direct cremation typically costs about $1,000 -- that consists only of picking up the body, cremating it and returning it to the family.

“(Traditional funerals) have become an issue of keeping up with the Joneses, because you're made to feel guilty if you don't spend enough money,” said Tom Robinson, owner of the Brattleboro, Vt.-based Eternal Flame Crematorium, which does direct cremations. Since starting Eternal Flame in 1997, he's seen the number of cremations he handles annually increase from 63 to more than 300.

Nonetheless, people with higher income and more education -- precisely those who could afford an expensive funeral -- are more likely to choose cremation, according to statistics. That may help explain why New Hampshire, among the most affluent states, has a high cremation rate, said Phaneuf of the Cremation Society of New Hampshire.

The society, which Phaneuf says is the biggest cremation provider in New England, performed 100 cremations when it opened in 1994. This year it expects to handle nearly 900. The increase also reflects societal changes.

“Cremation fits very well with our tremendous mobility, particularly among the middle class and upper class,” said Sergei Kan, chairman of the anthropology department at Dartmouth College.

States with lots of retirees, including Arizona, Florida and New Hampshire, have high cremation rates, Springer said. People like the ease of being able to have an urn shipped back to the deceased person's home state, however, funeral directors say shipping a casket isn't a problem. And relatives who live far from each other can postpone a memorial service until a convenient time for the family to gather. Cremation allows families to separate the disposition of a body from the commemoration of the deceased person's life, giving them more leisure and flexibility to plan meaningful remembrances.

The rise in cremation signals a shift away from death rituals centered on the body, which predominated in the United States until recently, Kan said.

“We are less religious in a more conventional, traditional sense, but remain spiritual. And this spirituality focuses more on the spirit, the soul and the memory (of the deceased person) -- and those are not tied to the body.”

When Eleanor Paine of Woodstock -- a longtime owner of the 3 Church Street Bed and Breakfast and a prominent community volunteer -- died last April at age 78, she was cremated and her ashes scattered in a special place according to her wishes, said her son, August “Gus” Meyer of Randolph.

“She wanted it simple, and I think in our case the spirituality of it all was within the family. I guess there were a variety of ways that we chose to memorialize her, and the funeral and the casket and stuff wasn't part of it, wasn't part of how she wanted to be remembered. She wasn’t big on ceremony. She was much more concerned about things straight from the heart as they occurred to people.”

The family had an informal memorial service at the Universalist Church in Woodstock, where family and friends shared reflections on her life.

Cremation also appeals to some people's concern for the earth. Even when cremated remains are buried, they use up less land than a casket.

“It just seems to fit better with where we are now in the 21st century,” said Laura Waterman of East Corinth, calling cremation “the ultimate in recycling. It's sort of a heightened environmental awareness.”

Laura Waterman's parents were cremated and interred in a cemetery, she said. Her husband, Guy Waterman, was cremated after he took his life in February 2000, dying of exposure near the summit of Mount Lafayette in the White Mountains. Guy Waterman, 67, was a well-known writer, wilderness advocate and mountain climber.

Several months after a memorial service for Guy Waterman at East Corinth Congregational Church, the family chose to scatter his ashes in a private ceremony at Barra, the small, rustic homestead that he'd built with his wife when they moved to East Corinth. A plaque -- affixed to a boulder on the property that was special to the couple -- gives Waterman's name and the dates of his life, Laura Waterman said.

“That was somehow just a healing time for the whole family,” she said. “It seemed more personal to me to have the ceremony that we had be on the land.”

Fewer religious restrictions against cremation also have helped the practice gain ground.

For years, Catholicism prohibited cremation because it had been used to refute the notion of eternal life, said the Rev. Wendell Searles, vicar general of the Diocese of Burlington. In 1963, however, the Vatican lifted the ban as part of its Vatican II reforms aimed at modernizing the church.

“As time went on, it became much more acceptable to people,” Searles said. “It was not seen as a denial of any of the truths of Christianity.”

The Church continued to require the presence of the body during the funeral Mass until the 1990s, when the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops decided that cremated remains could be brought to the church if cremation took place before the funeral, Searles said.

The Catholic Church still requires that cremated remains be enshrined; scattering or keeping ashes is not permitted out of respect for the person's earthly remains.

About 30 percent of Catholics now choose cremation, slightly more than the national average, Springer said.

Most Protestant denominations have a longer tradition of accepting cremation.

“Typically, the mainline Protestant position has been that it's a matter of personal choice and convenience,” said David Wolfe, pastor of The Tunbridge Church.

Doug Moore, senior pastor of Norwich Congregational Church, said he feels that “God can certainly deal with ashes as well as a body. I don't see that there's any theological reason to (believe) the end may change depending on whether you’re cremated.”

The Orthodox and Conservative branches of Judaism don't permit cremation, however. “It is forbidden by Jewish law,” said Neil Gillman, a Conservative rabbi and a professor of Jewish philosophy at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York City. “It is part of a whole series of ordinances that respect the integrity of the body.”

Reform Judaism, the religion's most liberal branch, does allow cremation, although it's not widespread, said Alan D. Fuchs, a retired Reform rabbi who lives in Hanover. Although Jews have traditionally believed that destroying the body would destroy its afterlife, Reform Judaism maintains that cremation is acceptable partly because the body disintegrates even when it's buried.

Nonetheless, the notion of cremation is extremely unpleasant for many Jews after the Holocaust, said Susannah Heschel, a professor of religion at Dartmouth. Nazis incinerated the bodies of millions of Jews who died in the gas chambers at death camps such as Auschwitz.

For Howard Erdman of West Lebanon, who's Jewish, the Holocaust plays a greater part than Jewish law in his desire to be buried when he dies. Although he's not a Holocaust survivor and has no close relatives who died in the Nazi-led genocide, his feelings about the Holocaust prevent him from considering cremation. He recalled a local Holocaust survivor telling him, “I will not do voluntarily what Hitler hoped to do to me involuntarily.”

But his daughter made a different choice. When Karen Erdman -- a 39-year-old teacher who lived in Hanover as a young child -- died in a car accident last October, she was cremated in accordance with her wishes, her father said. Although family members initially thought they'd bring her ashes back to Hanover, they decided to leave them in Wilmington, N.C., where she taught, after seeing the deep respect she had from her school community. Her ashes were immersed in the ocean at a favorite spot on the Atlantic Coast.

As cremations increase, some Upper Valley communities are taking the trend into account in their cemetery planning. Their goals include offering people smaller, less expensive plots for cremated remains and saving land.

In Lyme, where at least half of all death arrangements involve cremation, town officials are planning a cremation garden in a new section of Highland Cemetery, said Jean Smith, a cemetery commissioner.

The area will be for people who wish to scatter ashes or who scattered them elsewhere and want a commemorative stone in the garden. The commissioners, who anticipate that the garden will open in late 2006, also are planning some plots for cremated remains that are smaller than regular burial plots.

“I think one has to always look toward the future, and of course Lyme is growing and the area is growing,” Smith said. “I don't think it will always be the case that there's plenty of space available and plenty of land” for cemeteries at a price taxpayers can afford.

Hanover has a new wildflower area for scattering cremated remains, said William E. Desch, an urban forester with the town of Hanover. “I've had quite a few people asking about it,” he said.

The wildflowers were planted this spring in a semi-wooded section at the rear of Pine Knolls Cemetery. Desch also plans to have a natural monument, probably a stone set in the ground, on which families could list the name of a deceased relative. He plans to charge the same $100 fee that families pay for burying cremated remains at the cemetery.

The area used to be mowed each week, but planting wildflowers is more environmentally friendly and less expensive, Desch said.

Norwich is planning “quite a few” cremation plots, which it lacks now, as part of an expansion of Hillside Cemetery, said Fred Smith Jr., a cemetery commissioner in Norwich. The commissioners hope to finish the project this year.

Lebanon changed its cemetery ordinance in 2000 to allow cremation plots.

The adjacent Valley and Sacred Heart cemeteries offer cremation plots that are one-sixth the size of regular plots, said Chris Ferguson, an administrative assistant with the city's public works department. The plots cost $150 rather than $500 for traditional graves, including perpetual care.

Most area cemeteries allow multiple cremated remains to be buried in a regular plot, often on top of an existing burial. But that can have financial implications, said Charles Marchant, secretary of the Vermont Old Cemeteries Association.

Although the cemetery saves space by allowing people to bury cremated remains on top of a casket in their plot, it also loses the revenue it would have received if the family had bought a new plot, he said.

“You still have to deal with how to pay for the operation of the cemetery,” he said.

As its popularity grew, cremation met resistance from some funeral home operators. When Robinson opened his crematory a decade ago, some Vermont funeral businesses complained to the state. Robinson said funeral home operators worried about competition because he was able to offer lower prices. Industry representatives said they were concerned Robinson might lack health and safety training. The Vermont Attorney General's Office sided with Robinson in 1998, saying his crematory was legal.

Robinson's experience isn't unique. Some funeral homes have responded to the cremation trend by keeping their prices reasonable to attract business, said Joshua Slocum, executive director of the Funeral Consumers Alliance, a nonprofit group based in South Burlington.

Others have aggressively marketed the value of a traditional funeral and denigrated cremation, he said. “They don't like it because it doesn't pay as much.”

But that's no longer true, said a spokesman for the National Funeral Directors Association. “I have not heard for years of any funeral director discouraging a family from cremation,” said spokesman David Walkinshaw. “The acceptance of cremation is pretty much universal at this point, and I think most funeral directors are trying to meet (families') needs, whether that be cremation or burial.

Jeff Knight is director of Knight Funeral Home in Windsor and White River Junction, which has operated its own crematory for about 20 years. At Knight, a cremation costs about $1,500 less than the equivalent burial.

“Our philosophy here is that we want people to be happy when they leave,” he said. “We'd rather have them come back and use our services again than try to get a few extra dollars out of them.”

Although changes in funeral trends, including cremation, have lowered the profit margin for funeral homes, the business has adapted, Walkinshaw said.

The funeral homes that have responded most successfully provide “one-stop shopping” -- a spectrum of services that go beyond death arrangements, said Bob Covey, president of the Vermont Funeral Directors Association. They range from self-help support groups to death anniversary remembrances.

“You have to try to change with the times each year as much as possible,” said Charles Hafner, who directs Chadwick Funeral Home in New London with his wife, Marion Hafner.

The increase in cremations has prompted Chadwick and other funeral homes statewide to change their pricing structures, said Hafner, who also serves on the executive board of the New Hampshire Funeral Directors Association. Although profit used to be tied primarily to the sale of a casket, it's now largely dependent on a “service fee,” a flat rate that covers overhead expenses, Hafner said. At Chadwick, a basic cremation costs $1,190, of which $1,125 is the service fee.

While the growth of cremation affects funeral home profits, said Greg Camp of Cabot Funeral Home in Woodstock, “As long as they're charging what they should for their services, the impact may not be as big as the public would perceive.”

Those services include transporting the body to the crematory, helping with paperwork and arranging funeral services, said Camp, who owns Cabot Funeral Home with his wife, Karoline Camp.

Sixty-five percent of the families he worked with chose cremation last year, up from 15 percent when he started in the business 16 years ago. Cabot uses Knight Funeral Home for its cremations.

But even as more Upper Valley families choose cremation, they generally aren't forgoing other aspects of traditional funerals, such as a service and a final resting place, funeral directors say.

“In this area, people still hold pretty true to having services and having a public goodbye, and I'm still very involved in that,” Camp said.

At Cabot, the least expensive cremation option -- with no memorial service or burial of ashes -- costs $1,350, Camp said. But families typically spend about twice as much, or roughly $2,800, on a cremation that includes a memorial service, urn and burial. The average cost of a funeral involving body burial is roughly $6,000 at Cabot, while the least costly option is about $4,200.

Funeral home directors say that cremation can cost as much, or more, than a standard funeral. People may still opt for embalming, lengthy visiting hours prior to cremation, a casket (ranging from mahogany to cardboard) that may be rented temporarily or burned with the body, a funeral service and a cemetery burial for the deceased person's ashes.

And even when there's no gravestone, many families still try to create a tangible memorial for their loved one, such as planting a tree or installing a bench, said Kan, the Dartmouth professor.

“I think most of us are not ready to cremate, forget and move on.”

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