Lowering quilt-covered coffin

Family members help lower Pansy Anna Palmer's coffin, covered by a quilt, into her grave in a "green" cemetery in South Carolina. After a Baptist service, she was buried in a wooded grove in a biodegradable casket.

Ashes blasted out of cannons. Gemstones, paintings, and eternal reefs of cast concrete that are made in part of cremated remains. Mummification. Custom caskets. Personalized services designed and run by friends and family.

Members of the Baby Boom generation want their deaths to be as individual as their lives.

"The people who have done home birthing or home schooling seem to be attracted to this. It's definitely a boomer thing," says Jerrigrace Lyons, the founder and director of Final Passages, a non-profit educational website on home funerals. "People are looking for things that are more relevant to their lifestyle, and to celebrate that person's life through creating a death that makes sense for who they were."

For Susan Weiss of New Hampshire, that meant creating a Viking service. When her husband, Eric, died unexpectedly last August at age 54, she gave him a send-off that honored his Swedish heritage, his Wiccan beliefs and his own wishes.

At the service - which included traditional Lutheran rites as well - specially prepared CDs played music that was important to Eric. A Wiccan high priest and priestess conducted a ritual created especially "to honor his spiritual path," Weiss says.

The guests stood in a circle, then passed around the cord to Eric's religious robes, telling a story or a memory of him as each took their turn. Signs of runes were made on his forehead, to signify his journey, the gateway to Valhalla, and radical transformation. Finally, the cord was passed to his mother, who tied its ends together to signify that his life had completed its circle.

"She was there at the beginning, and she was there at the end," says Weiss.

After Eric's body was cremated, the ashes were loaded onto a longboat loaded with his favorite foods, clothes, tools, and poems, books, letters - "gifts that people wanted to send with him" - and the whole was set afire.

"Everyone who left there came up to me and said it was one of the most moving ceremonies they ever attended. Yes, there were tears, there were a lot of tears, but they felt good when they left, and that's important," Weiss says.

Home services

Weiss did consult a funeral home to carry out Eric's wishes, and Jessica Nagle, an attorney in Texas, says arrangements for final dispositions can be made with either funeral planners or funeral homes. Any prepaid arrangement constitutes a contract that makes the wishes binding, she says.

Funerary laws are governed by the states, and vary (check www.funerals.org for a list). Kimberly Campbell, vice president of Memorial Ecosystems in South Carolina, says none require embalming - and many permit home services.

That was important to Judith Fenley, 63, of California, when her mother died five years ago. She and her siblings kept the body at home for five days, in a flower-filled room they decorated, "so she could lay in grace in our home," Fenley says.

They prepped their mother's body themselves, washing and dressing her, talking to her body as they worked. Fenley says that afterward her brother, who had initially been hesitant about the idea, told her, "Judith, that wasn't for anybody to do but us." Her brother built their mother's casket himself, using redwood his uncle gave him.

"The bottom piece was shaped like a heart, then the top was shaped like a butterfly, and in the spine of the butterfly he carved an iris from a drawing my mother had done, because her name was Iris," Fenley says.

Fenley says doing the work themselves made the death more deeply felt and more natural. For Baby Boomers who followed the back-to-the-land movement in the 1970s, that sense of returning to nature is important, and more are following it to its natural conclusion: green burials.

Campbell is part of that movement. "Our distance from death is really quite unhealthy. Death is so much a part of life, and you see that in a garden," she says. "That sense of giving back to the earth is something that really does appeal to a broad spectrum of people. There are a lot of wasted resources that go into present funeral practice."

At Memorial Ecosystems' Ramsey Creek Preserve, cremated ashes and unembalmed bodies in shrouds or biodegradable caskets are buried on land conserved for that purpose, in graves that are dug by hand. The preserve also allows scattering of ashes.

Campbell explains the motivation behind it by quoting the book of Genesis: "'From dust thou art, to dust thou shalt return.' People do want this sense of simplicity. That's why cremation rates have gone up so much." According to the Cremation Association of North America, nearly one-third of people who died in 2005 were cremated, up from 17 percent in 1990.

Campbell says cremation, green burials, and home services are also significantly lower in cost than the $10,000 to $15,000 required for most traditional funerals. Yet she emphasizes that the most important aspect of alternative burials is the relief they give those left behind.

"It's very sobering when you're out there. The sound of that first shovelful of earth hitting the box, that dull thud ... After, as we're closing the grave, a lot of stories will come out about that person."

"I hear over and over again that ministers just say the same words, and what they say doesn't sound like the person at all," agrees Lyons. "I think people are looking to be filled up with celebrating the person's life and who they were. It's a sense of passion and compassion that makes hearing the about their life unique."

To plan your own funeral:

Your body: Do you want to be embalmed? Open-casket or closed? Do you want to be buried in any special clothes or jewelry?

Ceremony: Is there special music you would like played? A meaningful poem, psalm or prose passage you would like read? Who should conduct the service? How do you want people to remember you?

Your remains: Cemeteries, spread ashes, stored ashes, even burial on your own property can be an option in some states.

Write down your wishes. Discuss them with your loved ones, your executor, or a funeral planner, with whom arrangements are legally binding.

Think most of all about what you want the people at your funeral to remember. As Susan Weiss says, "Funerals are for the living. Dying is the easy part, it's living the day after that's hard."

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