The Death of (Traditional) Funerals
The day before my father died in 2003, he asked me to take some notes for his funeral. He had some hymns he wanted played, some people he wanted to make sure were invited and… he wanted show tunes. He wanted to open and close the service with a medley of popular music from the early 50’s – the music my mother and he had danced to when they were first courting.
I went to the Presbyterian church my father had been attending for 83 years with the request. The organist flatly refused. So we brought in a piano and looked for someone else who could play. We found a former* Baptist church music director who was willing to play the service. Crisis averted.
The afternoon of the funeral my mother and I snuck in early to listen to the piano music from a side alcove, both of us singing along quietly and tearing up.
The pianist finished playing “I Love Paris in the Springtime” and was just starting “Hernando’s Hideaway,” a tango, when the resident church organist walked by, said “Well, I’m glad SOMEbody is enjoying this travesty,” and stalked off. My mom and I almost giggled.
Even though we know intellectually there’s a 100% chance it will happen, it's almost impossible to wrap our heads around the idea that someone can be here on earth, then not. Once it happens, the people left behind get thrust into a world of confusion. Even if all we want to do is quietly mourn, there are so many things we have to do. There are death certificates to sign, a body to deal with, friends to call, public notices to prepare. People want to visit and bring food and talk about the departed. And the expectation is, while you’re dealing with all that, you’re also going to prepare some sort of thoughtfully- planned public ceremony to officially say goodbye to your loved one.
That last part used to be relatively straightforward up until the 1990’s when 90% of Americans still identified as Christian. Funeral services were basically plug and play:
· Find a date (as soon as possible) for a ceremony.
· Choose coffin.
· Select pallbearers.
· Pick three hymns and some scripture passages from a well-curated list. Your church has the rest of the content covered.
· Get the pastor (who of course knows the deceased) to do the eulogy and reassure the assembled.
· Wheel the casket out and take it to a waiting grave.
That model may have been formulaic, but it had the distinct advantage of providing simplicity, efficiency, familiarity and closure – a clear rite of passage at a time when everything else was up in the air.
Nowadays that kind of service a rarity. In a world where we are more mobile and less religious than ever, only about two-thirds of Americans say they want a “funeral” and just 35% consider religious elements of funerals important (down from 79% in 2012). In the UK the decline is even more pronounced, with just 47% of residents wanting a funeral and about 13% requesting religious services. The ways we say goodbye are changing.
Services are changing: Among those who want to maintain many of the trappings of a traditional religious service, my father isn’t alone in wanting to communicate something fun and personal at his funeral. Anita Watkins of Raleigh told me of her father’s insistence that the NC State Fight Song be played as people were leaving his service. “It was comforting and refreshing to see him so at peace and able to talk openly about how he wanted those who loved him to experience closure…I think he also just wanted for it to feel like a celebration.” I’ve heard of religious services with bagpipes, fireworks, pop, rock, country, and rap.
There are other ways traditional services are evolving.
· Friends and family want to have the opportunity to say things too. They increasingly offer “remembrances” at services.
· Funeral homes offer to produce video montages as an extra services for families.
· COVID kicked off an era of livestreaming funeral services. That continues.
The most important funeral may come before the funeral: For my friend, Rev. Dr. Mac Schafer, a Presbyterian minister in Pennsylvania, the “funeral before the funeral – when I go into the home shortly after the death of a loved one -- is almost more important than the official ceremony.” An informal meeting with a skilled pastor or counselor, he says, gives the family a chance to process “real, raw emotions” in a safe space, asking questions about theology and belief and options. It helps the visitor understand what the family believes is most important about the deceased and may help guide advice on what a service might look like. Much of what happens in a pre-funeral may never be part of a formal funeral, Mac says, but it can be critically important to the family.
Burials are declining: Over the past twenty years, coffin burials have plummeted while cremations have soared. According to the National Funeral Directors Association, or NFDA (yes, there is one of those), about 62% of families are now using cremation (up from 5% in 1970), compared to about 30% burials (a small percentage donate their bodies to science), with projections that by 2045, 82% of bodies will be cremated. And among those being buried, the number using coffins is declining, as water-based solutions and biodegradable pouches increase. There are even companies that can load your remains into a capsule and fire them into space.
The changes in our approach to saying goodbye to loved ones are putting tremendous pressure on the funeral home business, where companies have traditionally sustained their businesses by selling packages that include picking up the body, arranging visitations, renting limos, selling coffins, ushering services, and burying bodies. On average, funeral homes charge families $2750 for a cremation, compared to about $8300 for the more traditional set of services.
So funeral homes are finding other ways to help.
“We’re no longer just a funeral company who does events,” Walker Posey of Posey Funeral Homes in North Augusta, SC told The New York Times. “We’re an event company who does funerals.”
Funeral homes like Posey’s have traditionally provided a broad range of services (photo Posey’s Funeral Home).
The events can take some creative forms:
“Date night” funeral planning: The NFDA (there they are again) has done studies showing that 55% of us want to plan our own funerals. But then we don’t. Funeral directors are helping with agendas for couples to do “date nights” focused on making after-death plans (anticipating this will increase the likelihood couples will then use the funeral homes services). “It’s funny, but it’s a way for couples to bond,” Lisa Krcilek, vice president of Mountain View Funeral Home & Cemetery in Mesa, Arizona, told the online publication “Lovin’ Life.”
“They’re selecting their plots, deciding what kind of ceremony they want, and ensuring that when the time comes, their families will be spared the stress of making last-minute decisions. It’s a strange form of intimacy.”
Uh, yeah.
Living Funerals: One of the great scenes in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is the one where he and Joe Harper get to watch their own funeral. But these days it’s not a joke; it’s a thing. Some funeral homes are helping the living plan events that bring together friends and family before they die, for “living funerals.” This gives the dying a chance to speak with and listen to the living, to say now what might otherwise go unsaid.
New venues/theme services: “ I don’t want to say that we’re going to become party planners,” Lanae Strovers, a funeral director at Hamilton’s Funeral Home in Des Moines, Iowa, told The New York Times. “But I think that those two lines are crossing over and we just need to open up our thought process and be there to help the families.” “Opening up” for her has taken a lot of different forms over the past few years:
· For the memorial for a Little League coach, she redecorated the funeral home into a baseball diamond, with bases, hotdogs and a popcorn machine;
· For a deceased fashion model, the service was a cocktail hour where friends could walk a runway and look at dresses the deceased had worn.
· For a teenage hunter who died too young she arranged for an ammunition company to load the boys’ ashes into shotgun shells that his friends took out for one final hunt.
The pivot in Americans’ approach to end of life is clear. As lives end, we still want a chance to recognize the end of a life, but we are trying to build recognition ceremonies that are less likely to have a body present and less likely to be in a church. Services are more individualistic, less ritualistic; more secular, less religious; more about celebration and less about rumination.
I had a chance to be part of a service that captured all that last weekend, one honoring my former guitar teacher, Steve Barbour, in a way that would have made him very happy, I think.
· Attendees were greeted at the door with a bandana and asked to wear it during the service (Steve was seldom without his bandana in life).
· The family arrived at the service in a high school auditorium accompanied by the Enloe High School Marching Eagles drumline (Steve played on that drumline as a high school student).
Drumline gets ready to enter the service (photo Teresa Miska)
· The service told the story of Steve’s life in three “acts” – his life as a son and husband and father; his life as a musician; and his life as a music teacher. Each act was accompanied by a video montage and live performances by amazing musicians.
Former students of Steve (me included) got buttons to identify themselves, stood at the service and called out which of 8 instruments he taught them.
· We adjourned to a reception where we got to greet the family and get Steve’s favorite food, ice cream, from a truck waiting outside.
The funeral home? They were there too. They helped with the logistics of the death early on, then on the day of put up some plants and facilitated a small burial ceremony for the family.
As is happening in more and more services in more and more places, there were no official words of comfort at the event; no religious blessing. I’m still getting used to that. But, if funerals are mostly for the living, this one worked.
The event painted a beautiful portrait of a kind man who lived life well and passionately. There was a chance to dwell together with the music he loved, to remember what he meant to each of us, to be in a setting that was, well, spirit-filled. Amen, I think.
-Leslie
*“The church pianist was “former” because her church had discovered she was moonlighting playing at a gay bar downtown and fired her. The show tunes she played were spectacular.
Notes:
Interest in funerals declines in UK: https://www.theosthinktank.co.uk/in-the-news/2023/11/24/less-than-half-of-us-now-want-a-funeral-says-research
Funeral home numbers decline: https://cooperprofessionals.com/blog/f/the-decline-of-funerals-why-funeral-homes-are-vanishing
The changing world of funerals and remembrances: https://www.phoenix.org/lovin_life/news/a-new-era-of-farewells-funeral-trends-changing-the-way-we-say-goodbye/article_85f28ecc-f946-11ef-983d-dfb01c694c96.html#:~:text=Funerals%20are%20no%20longer%20just,unconventional%20ways%20to%20say%20goodbye.
Creativity in funeral planning: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/15/business/funeral-home-industry-innovations-cremation.html#:~:text=In%20recent%20decades%2C%20the%20national,chemicals%20and%20staffing%20have%20risen.
Cremation rates skyrocket: https://nfda.org/news/media-center/nfda-news-releases/id/8944/us-cremation-rate-is-projected-to-climb-to-619-in-2024