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.“Have you heard about this cremation jewelry?” Tonightshow host Jay Leno joked.“What do you do, wake up in the morningand ask, ‘Who should I wear today—Aunt Grace or Uncle Joe?’”22In addition to this menu of urns, there were cremation containersand urn vaults to consider.There were also competing columbaria.TheGibraltar Mausoleum Construction Company had a model “built tolast an afterlifetime,” and Oregon Brassworks marketed an “Eco-Niche.” At Robert Schuller’s Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, Cali-fornia, you could have your ashes placed in an outdoor mosaic or astained glass window for $2,400 to $5,000.Warrensburg MemorialGardens in Warrensburg, Missouri, had a bronze columbarium thatdoubled as a sundial—“light, like the sun.”Scattering cremains was also big business, and here too options werethe order of the day.Despite intense opposition from “memorial idea”cremationists since at least the twenties, scattering seems to have beenpracticed in a little over half of cremation cases in the nineties.A surveypublished in Cremationist in 1996, for example, found that over 50 per-cent of cremation customers preferred scattering.Increasingly over thecourse of the 1990s cremated remains were scattered not only on pri-vate estates but also in public venues such as race tracks and nationalparks.In fact, wildcat scattering was so popular that Disney World andWrigley Field (the home of the Chicago Cubs baseball team) found itnecessary to ban it.In 1996 an AIDS activist from the group ACT UPtossed an urn containing ashes over the wrought-iron fence at the WhiteHouse to protest President Clinton’s AIDS policies.But unlike theirpredecessors earlier in the century, crematory operators and suppliersdid not try to browbeat customers out of scattering.Instead they of-fered “scattering urns.” (“Regardless of where they choose to scatter,”read an ad from Wilbert, Inc., “offer them a place to hold the mem-ories.”) And scattering services.Afterlife Adventures, Inc., of Austin,Texas, for example, scattered ashes “by hot air balloon, plane, boat, orby hand” at sites as far-flung as Key West ($395), Niagara Falls ($475),the Grand Canyon ($475), and Kauai, Hawaii ($650).For a modest fee,Contemporary Ways of Cremation199Jay Knudsen of Canuck’s Sportsman’s Memorials, Inc., in Des Moines,Iowa, would load your ashes into a shotgun shell, then pick off a duckor a deer.He also stuffed cremated remains into fishing lures, duck de-coys, and golf clubs.“We can’t get you to heaven,” he said.“But wepromise to land you in the happy hunting ground.” Even Boston’s au-gust Mt.Auburn Cemetery got into the scattering business, opening awoodland garden for scattering cremated remains in the 1990s.23Then there was the memorial (or “cremorial®”) to consider.Whilemany cremation consumers continued to buck the new cremation mar-keting by insisting on remembering their loved ones only in their hearts(or, increasingly, on the Internet), death care merchandisers sold memo-rial benches, bronze plaques, and even tree memorials.Batesvilleplanted a tree for free for every urn it sold through funeral directors inits Options® by Batesville program.In 1990 a Texas entrepreneur got apatent for a “tree forest cemetery” consisting of rows of pines plantedover urn vaults.24From the time of Baron De Palm through the Great Depression cre-mationists had promoted their practice as an inexpensive alternative toburial.They gave up that refrain for a time, only to see it resurrected,thanks to Mitford and the consumer movement, in the 1960s.But ac-cording to CANA’s Jack Springer, cremation in the 1990s had “nothingto do with what you spend.” After all, in Japan, where cremation wasnearly universal, the average funeral bill was over $10,000.The differ-ence between the 1950s and the 1990s, said Springer, was that in the1990s “the money [was] being spent post- rather than pre-.” While theextended wake and the lavish pre-burial funeral were going the way ofthe black crape, post-cremation spending on memorial ceremonies,urns, columbarium niches, and scattering was brisk.The typical crema-tion customer was affluent, not poor, and more than willing to spendmoney to see loved ones go out in style.25Personalization and the Fun FuneralThe target market for all these cremation options was, of course, thebaby boom generation, which by the end of the millennium had el-evated to the status of scripture the mantra of keeping your optionsopen.Americans born during the postwar baby boom of 1946 to 1964were, as a rule, well-educated, individualistic, wary of authority, andworried about the environment.Together they ushered in a new era inAmerican ritual life, an era in which the ritual norms of the Gilded Age200Boom, 1963–Presentwere soundly defeated [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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