The Quiet Erosion of Our Collective Relationship with Ceremony

My earliest memories of funeral service are rooted firmly in burial. Growing up in Michigan in the 1970s, in a Midwestern, conservative Protestant family, every funeral I attended followed a familiar and unquestioned pattern of visitation, service, procession, and burial. Cremation was not part of my childhood vocabulary around death, nor was it part of the religious or cultural framework that shaped how my family understood loss.

Even when I entered mortuary school in 1990, cremation remained largely peripheral in my education. It was discussed, certainly, but it was not central to how funeral service was framed or practiced. That changed almost immediately after graduation.

Shifting Expectations

My first position out of mortuary school brought me to Boulder, Colorado, a community that, in the early 1990s, was already well ahead of the rest of the country in its embrace of cremation, with rates exceeding 60 percent. I was making cremation arrangements almost daily, a stark contrast to the burial-centric model that had shaped both my upbringing and much of my formal training. While I had been prepared for the traditions of funeral service—formality, continuity, and established ritual—it was immediately clear that I was practicing in a place where expectations around death, ceremony, and professional identity were already shifting.

What is important to note, however, is that cremation at that time did not yet mean the absence of ceremony. Families choosing cremation in the early 1990s in Boulder often still opted for embalming, a visitation, and a service with the body present. Cremation typically occurred after the service, with the urn either returned to the family or interred in a local cemetery. In many ways, cremation functioned less as a replacement for traditional funeral service and more as an adaptation within it.

“Am I allowed to teach cremation?”

It was not until several years later, during my early career as an educator and Department Chair of the Mortuary Science Program at Arapahoe Community College, that I fully grasped just how progressive that initial professional environment had been. In the mid-1990s, while hiring a part-time instructor, I encountered a question that stopped me short. I was asked, “Am I allowed to teach cremation?”

That question revealed how differently cremation was still viewed across the country, where it remained optional, controversial, or secondary in funeral education. In that moment, it became clear to me that teaching about cremation wasn’t simply permitted, it was expected.

I had entered the profession at the leading edge of a shift that funeral service as a whole was only beginning to confront.

Grief does not respond to efficiency

Today, as cremation has become widely accepted, often expected, I find myself holding a different concern. Alongside its normalization, I have noticed the quiet erosion of our collective relationship with ceremony.  As a society, we have stepped away from ritual across nearly every stage of life. Many people no longer participate in graduation ceremonies. Weddings are delayed, minimized, or bypassed altogether. Baptisms and other rites of passage that once marked transition and belonging are increasingly absent. Funeral service has not been singled out for abandonment; rather, it reflects a broader cultural retreat from ceremony in general. When these rituals disappear, we lose more than tradition, we lose shared moments of acknowledgment and meaning. And that makes me deeply sad.

Ceremony matters because ritual gives shape to transition. It creates space for acknowledgment, for witness, and for meaning. It allows us to pause long enough to recognize that something irreversible has occurred. When we lose these markers, we do not eliminate grief; we simply make it harder to carry.

During the COVID pandemic, I shared these concerns in an interview with a national publication, specifically around the growing number of families selecting immediate, non-ceremonial cremation. My worry, then as now, is rooted in a misunderstanding I encounter far too often: the belief that if there is no viewing, no service, no formal acknowledgment, no ceremony, the process of grief will be easier, or at least over more quickly. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Burying someone does not make grief last longer, and cremating someone does not help a person reach “the other side” of grief faster. Grief does not respond to efficiency. What ceremony and ritual offer are not delay, but depth—an opportunity to feel the weight of loss in a supported, intentional way. Ceremony does not prolong grief, it helps contain it. When families are implicitly or explicitly encouraged to bypass that process, they may later discover that what was deferred has not disappeared.

Adaptation Not Rejection

At the same time, cremation has continued to cross generational and cultural lines, even within my own family. In the early 1990s, when a more progressive family member first expressed a desire to be cremated, the choice felt notable and unconventional. Today, however, an increasing number of family members, many shaped by more traditional expectations, have expressed their preference for cremation, often with their urns buried in a cemetery rather than choosing a full casketed burial. What once felt unconventional has become a thoughtful adaptation of tradition rather than a rejection of it.

This evolution points to what I believe is one of the profession’s greatest challenges moving forward. Funeral directors must consistently communicate the value of ceremony, of ritual, and of what I often describe as presenting the gift of a final goodbye, while honoring family choice and autonomy. The challenge lies in offering options without coercion and guidance without pressure. Respecting choice does not mean withholding information. It means engaging more deeply, asking better questions, presenting meaningful options, and clearly communicating the value of ceremony without insisting upon it.

In many cultures where cremation is the norm, ritual remains inseparable from the process. The American tendency to remove ceremony entirely from cremation raises important questions about what we may be losing in the name of perceived simplicity and what future generations may inherit if the value of ceremony continues to diminish.

As cremation marks its 150-year history in the United States, the path forward is not about choosing between tradition and change. It is about remembering why funeral service exists in the first place: to help families acknowledge loss, honor life, and find footing in the aftermath of death. Cremation, when thoughtfully integrated with ceremony and ritual, has the capacity to do exactly that. The responsibility now rests with the profession to ensure that this understanding is not lost.

---

This post oritinally appeared in The Cremationist, Vol. 62, Issue 1. Members can read this article and get more inspiration in The Cremationist archive. Not a member? Consider joining your business today!

Want more from Martha? This August, she'll take the CANA Convention stage to discuss AI in Funeral Service: Ethics, Compassion, and Professional Judgment so you can see how to approach AI as a support tool without compromising compassion, trust, or professional judgment. See what else we have planned and register for CANA's 108th Annual Cremation Innovation Convention today!

Martha Thayer is a presenter, trainer, and online curriculum designer whose work is grounded in longstanding professional practice. She is the founder of Mortuary Training, where she and her team develop modern, practice-focused learning programs for funeral service professionals and organizations nationwide. 

---

Martha received Emeritus status from Arapahoe Community College in Littleton, Colorado, after teaching and serving as Chair of the Mortuary Science Department for over 25 years. In 1999, she pioneered the first fully accredited online mortuary science curriculum in the United States, establishing her as an early leader in distance education for funeral service professionals.