Better off dead: the cheap, exciting afterlife of modern mortal remains.

• Author: Beato, Greg
• Position: Columns - Column

A STAINLESS STEEL casket with cherry veneer inserts can set you back more than a foreclosed townhouse in the exurbs of Las Vegas. Then there's the embalming, the funeral service, the cemetery plot, the headstone, the charge for digging a grave, the charge for filling that grave back up, the eternal lawn-mowing and weeding fees. These days, millions of us can't afford to die, much less spend our afterlives slumbering in a suitable memorial property of our own. Instead, in this age of widening income disparity, all that most of us can hope for is two and a half hours in an 1,800 degree oven, then a timeshared hereafter on the living-room mantels of our surviving relatives, homeless for eternity in a discount keepsake urn.

This, at least, was the spin The New York Times gave to the rising popularity of cremation in a December 2011 article tided "In Tough Times, a Boom in Cremations as a Way to Save Money. "According to the Cremation Association of North America, an industry trade group, 41 percent of the approximately 2.4 million people who die each year in the U.S. choose cremation over a traditional burial. The Times suggested the poor economy was partly responsible for this trend. To support this conclusion, the article quoted a handful of funeral directors and cited a "national telephone survey of 858 adults" that the Funeral and Memorial Information Council, an industry group, commissioned in 2010, finding that "one-third of those who chose cremation in 2010 said cost was a primary factor, up from 19 percent in 1990."

It was a rather funereal way of interpreting what is in fact great news. As the Times itself noted, the turn toward cremation is a long-term trend. According to Boston University religion professor Stephen Prothero, author of the 2002 book Purified by Fire: A History of Cremation in America, the national cremation rate stalled at around 3.7 percent from 1945 to 1962. Then, in 1963, Jessica Mitford published The American Way of Death and Ruth Mulvey Harmer published The High Cost of Dying. Thanks in part to these exposes, changing standards of taste, and growing environmental concerns, the U.S. cremation rate began an upswing that has persisted, through economic booms and busts, for the last 50 years. In 1985, it hit 15 percent. In 2000, it was 25.5 percent. By 2025, the Cremation Association predicts, it will be 56 percent. And what all this steady, uninterrupted growth ultimately suggests is not that we have fewer and fewer...