Remember Me: A Lively Tour of the New American Way of Death

I loved it. I learned a lot about a subject that you really don't want to sit down and discuss with your family and/or friends. Lisa Takeuchi Cullen wrote in such a way that turned a normally sad experience into an elightening journey. I learned I really didn't know as much as I thought I did about the funeral business in America. It is not a depressing book. I laughed at many stories (and the puns...intended, I'm sure). I enjoyed her sort of "journaling" style. I did not want to read a book filled with statistics and business plans. I could not put this book down because each chapter was so interesting. On a recent trip I even got to see the Reef Balls mentioned in the book. A wonderful read and a book that just may change your final decision.

This fascinating, fun and quirky book takes death out of its usual context of fear and sadness and explores the modern rituals of death in a way that is emotionally easy to read. I felt a little trepidation reading this book, since my best friend's mother just died last month and I wondered if it might hit to close to home, but Cullen found a way of speaking about death and its rituals that is both respectful and irreverent, and it enriched my thoughts about death rather than cheapening them.

+++++ Consider the common funeral (or funeral with cremation): it is a planned event involving some traditional ceremony but it always ends with the deceased's body being placed in a wooden box and the box being put in a hole in the ground (or the body being burned with the resultant ashes being put in a container and later the ashes being buried or scattered). What's wrong with this practice? It's BORING. The cure for this boredom? This book by "Time" magazine writer Lisa Takeuchi Cullen. Cullen takes us on the "dead beat," a "tour [of the new American way of death], one leading toward celebrations and funny trends and sparkly merchandise." Cullen skirts "around the sticky swamp of religion." The people she "encountered along the way...chose to celebrate life even as they mourned a death." She also meets the people involved in the "death business," especially the entrepreneurs whom she calls "end-trepreneurs." This book is also practical since it answers the following question: "What's it like to be a consumer shopping for after-death options today?" The key to understanding the majority of this book is that it mentions an improvement, enhancement, or change in some aspect of the typical funeral (and funeral with cremation) process. To fully understand what I mean, I will state the main idea behind each of the book's chapters (not listed in the same order as in the book): (1) The tour begins with the true story behind each of four real funerals and a real but non-typical wedding. These present five takes on celebrating life. (2) Confessions of a Funeral Planner. Planned funerals don't always go according to plan! (3) "Green" or environmentally friendly burials. An improvement in being buried by not harming the environment. (4) Unconventional containers for a dead body. Enhanced caskets for those who want an "afterlife vehicle" with flair. (5) Diamonds are forever. Turn your deceased loved one's ashes into jewlery to remember him/her forever. "Here's a way to make a lasting impression." (6) Ahoy there! Consider making your loved one's ashes a permanent part of the sea. (7) Don't bury or cremate your body! Consider freezing it instead. In this chapter the author finds "a festival celebrating a frozen corpse." (8) Do you want to preserve your body for science and show? Then don't bury or cremate your body! Consider "infusing it with a mix of plastics" instead. (9) Don't just "Walk like an Egyptian." Be preserved like one too! Consider modern mummification instead of burying or cremating your body. (10) New Americans, old funeral rites. This chapter considers the question: "Which traditions [do new Americans] insist on continuing and which [do] they bend to suit their adopted homeland?" (11) Funeral rites in the old country. A very personal chapter involving the author's Japanese grandfather. (12) Undertaking 101. A visit to a modern mortuary school. This chapter answers the following: "Who would become a funeral

In 2003, author Lisa Cullens was given an assignment by her editors at Time Magazine to look into new trends in funeral services among Baby Boomers in America. This seemed fertile ground for inquiry- after all, around 2.3 million Americans will die in the coming year, and as the population ages, this number will double, if population trends continue, by 2040. Cullens' editor was particularly curious in seeing her write about "wacky" new trends in funerals- NASCAR coffins, artificial diamonds made from the cremated remains ("cremains", in the language of the industry) of loved ones, and that sort of thing. But what she discovered on her journey went well beyond the curious and the strange, although that aspect is represented in this book. She discovered how, as the ethnic and cultural profile of this country continues to change, funeral customs have changed, too, among both the immigrant communities and the native born. Cullens' journey takes her from the mundane- traditional funeral homes in New York- to the exotic- a Hmong funeral in St. Paul. Minnisota- and the truly bizarre, a pyramid in Salt Lake City where a fellow by the name of Corky Ra prepares bodies in something approximating ancient Egyptian mummification. Along the way she visits schools of Mortuary Science, casket discounters, mourning families, and Dr. Gunther von Hagens, the German scientist/showman, with his traveling exhibit of "plastinated" cadavers. Interwoven with Cullens narration are the stories of a number of recently deceased people, and how they, or their families, chose the celebration that followed their departure. One chapter, on the emerging tradition of "green" burials, in which bodies are buried in such as way so as to quickly decompose and feed the ecosystem impressed me enough that I made a decision to research this for my own (hopefully distant) eventual disposal. The idea of becoming part of a nature preserve sounds much better- and more ecologically sound- than either quasi-permanent internment in a large, and ridiculously costly casket, or being turned into a lot of ash and gas. "Remember Me" will no doubt be compared to Mary Roach's "Stiff", which is unfortunate, as this is a much better, and much more respectful book; Cullens doesn't treat her subject as something that must be viewed with the postmodern sense of ironic detachment that spoiled "Stiff" for me; rather, she treats all her subjects with deference and with respect, even the fellow making mummies in Salt Lake City. Cullens herself worries that some will also compare it to Jessica Mitford's "The American Way of Death", and makes a point of stressing that her aim is not a debunking of the funeral industry. I don't think to many people will make that comparison- although I suspect a lot of reviewers looking for a point of reference will. The rest of us will simply enjoy a well-written book that manages to be interesting, entertaining, and thought provoking.

James Joyce knew that there was "fun" in any "funeral". Actually, he called it (in _Finnegans Wake_) a "funferal" or fun-for-all. The pun is an old one, but according to Lisa Takeuchi Cullen, plenty of people nowadays are more interested in fun farewell parties and creative novelties than in the standard weepy postmortem sendoff. In _Remember Me: A Lively Tour of the New American Way of Death_ (Collins), Cullen has reported back on a tour of unusual obsequies and memorials. She does give a nod to the traditional funeral (called by one marketer the "greet 'n weep") by dropping in on a class for morticians-to-be, but most of her chapters have to do with less ordinary ways of dealing with the inevitable end. She is not, she informs us upfront, updating the classic 1963 exposé _The American Way of Death_. The funeral industry, perhaps reluctantly, has had at least limited reform since that shocker. The variations on commemorations and dispositions she describes here are not a response to reform, but to demographics and the market. The time has simply come for baby-boomers, having "bulldozed most cultural norms from sex to music to hairstyles" to take on their reforms for the big sleep. Many of the new ways of dealing with the departed are funny, some are very strange indeed, and many are deeply moving, not only for the participants, but also on the pages as Cullen describes them. One big change in disposition of loved ones is that cremation is much more accepted than it used to be. 56% of those getting a cremation will wind up in an urn. There are traditional marble urns, the sort that would have looked good on a mantel a couple of centuries ago. There are wooden boxes like shoeboxes, but with intricate lid carvings. But then there is the urn in the shape of a giant seashell. It is made to be thrown to the waves, where it floats for a little and then dissolves. A paper urn is embedded with wildflower seeds; after being buried, it blooms, fed by all that calcium within. There are urns made of motorcycle cylinders. There is a line of urns whose selling point is that they go through airport detectors without setting off alarms. If sitting as ash in a container is not to your taste, who says ashes have to go to ashes? LifeGem converts the carbon dust into diamonds. If you would like something a little cheaper, your remains can be mixed into big concrete honeycomb blocks that are to be dropped into the ocean to be the seeds for future reefs. Eternal Reefs offers such a service. If you are one of the traditionalists that refuse to be turned into ash, there are still lots of options. The very simplest is just to get buried in the natural state: "no embalming, no upright tombstones, no fancy caskets." "The point is to nourish the earth, and you don't want to sequester the nutrients," explains the proprietor of a "green" cemetery which doubles as a nature preserve. Cullen says he speaks "as if a human body were only so much Miracle-G