No second time

The American funeral, often satirized as ostentatious and decried as needlessly expensive, is poised to reinvent itself as the baby boom generation grows older and begins to confront its final passage. "Our business is show business and hospitality. Every funeral service we provide is like opening night, except that we don't get to do it a second time, so we have to get it right," said Ernie Heffner, who owns and runs 17 funeral homes in Pennsylvania and New York: "When my father started in the business, the only difference in funerals was, which casket did you want. Today we have no idea what a family would like to do until we sit down and start talking to them. People may not be sure exactly what they want, but they are very clear what they don't want: cookie-cutter, impersonal funerals, all alike: Everybody who attends a service is waiting to feel the experience. We have to choreograph that experience."

Heffner's catalog now offers a choice of more than 60 coffins. When it comes to crematory urns, the choice is virtually endless. There are urns that double as clocks or sundials, urns that look like golf bags or empty boots, pheasants in flight or leaping dolphins. Then there is the King Tut replica, cast in bronze and gold-plated, which costs $ 2,895 and serves as a living room adornment. And there are "sounds of peace" wind chimes - soprano, alto or tenor - with "water-resistant pewter compartments" for the ashes of the deceased. A big seller is "keepsake" jewelry containing a lock of hair or ashes from the deceased: $ 79 for a pewter teddy bear, $ 695 for a set of four pendants in gold or sterling silver.

The funeral industry is big business. Each year, American consumers purchase 2 million funerals costing billions of dollars, according to a 1999 General Accounting Office report. That number is expected to grow at a rate of 1 million additional deaths each year once the baby boom generation starts to reach its peak mortality period. U.S. rituals and customs surrounding death have long been a rich source of satire.

The classic of the genre is Evelyn Waugh's ghoulish 1948 novel, "The Loved One," a black comedy that skewers the world of a California "memorial park." In 1963, Jessica Mitford published "The American Way of Death," which savagely attacked the financial excesses and what she saw as the horribly bad taste of U.S. funerals, especially the quintessentially American practice of embalming and publicly viewing the body of the deceased.

That book helped pave the way for tight industry regulation by the Federal Trade Commission, which now requires funeral providers to give consumers accurate, itemized, up-front information about their services. And in fact there are relatively few complaints filed to the various watchdog organizations about the funeral industry, although this may be partly due to the reluctance of some consumers to dwell on an unpleasant experience. An industry-

commissioned public opinion poll last year found the "ritualization and memorialization" industry enjoyed a five-to-one favorability rating. Mitford updated her book shortly before her own death in 1996, while still attacking financial gouging in the industry. She would probably be even more appalled by some of today's innovations as, inevitably, baby boomers who reshaped so much of American life come to grips with death American-style. "If my father sold caskets on protection and permanence, I offer choices, options, New Age alternatives," wrote Thomas Lynch, a prize-winning essayist and poet who runs his family's funeral business in Michigan: "We do combustibles, ecofriendly, video, virtual, cyber obsequies. . . . He sold velvet and satin and crepe interiors. We sell denim and linen and warm fuzzies," Lynch said.

Despite the fact that everybody at some time will require some type of disposition of their earthly remains, selling funerals remains a cut-throat industry. Pennsylvania has 1,800 funeral homes chasing 110,000 annual deaths. That works out to only 61 deaths per funeral home. While some Americans look for the cheapest solution - so-called "direct disposition" straight from the hospital to the crematory with no rituals in-between - a big majority of U.S. mourners still prefer the time-honored tradition of an open casket and public viewing to bid farewell to their loved ones.

That in turn requires a range of services, notably cosmetic treatment by the funeral home to ensure that the deceased is looking his or her best.

"We try to bring them back to a more natural look. Often the last view people have of their loved one is in a hospital and they often look terrible, with tubes sticking out of them. That's not a memory they want to continue on with," said funeral director John Katora at Heffners: "You get people coming up after the viewing and joking, 'I wish you could make me look that good'". Heffner says the industry's biggest challenge is figuring out what consumers will be ready to spend on five or 10 years from now. He sees the funeral industry branching out into catering and even house cleaning. "You're going to see a range of casual-to-formal options. Food will be incorporated into services. It's already becoming more informal. We see pallbearers showing up wearing jeans and guests arriving in cutoffs and sandals," he said: "We may be privately outraged but we dare not stand at the door and cringe. The rule is: Anything goes."