It’s not that fewer people are dying — it’s that the way we care for our dead is changing.
Close to half of all U.S. deaths are now cremated, up from 3.5 percent in 1960.
Fifty years later, 40.6 percent of deaths were cremated, and that number will climb to 46.5 percent within the next three years.
That’s causing cemetery superintendents like Spitler to act now so they don’t find themselves scrambling later on.
“Ferncliff has been here for many years,” he said, “but times are changing, and the cemetery needs to change with the times.”
In March, the 240-acre cemetery opened a crematory to accompany recent landscaping that better accommodates cremains.
Fewer traditional burials can result in a tighter operating budget, Spitler said.
“I wanted to set this cemetery up for the next century,” said Spitler, who’s served as superintendent for nine years.
For at least 20 years, the Littleton & Rue Funeral Home could boast that it had the only crematory in Clark County.
Even as demand spiked, rival funeral homes still opted to use crematories as far away as Piqua, in part thanks to “generations of competition,” said owner Rob Rue.
At his funeral home, Rue said, the cremation rate mirrors the national figures.
After two years of studying whether to install the $90,000 crematory that can incinerate a human body weighing as much as 800 pounds in about two hours at 1,600 degrees, Spitler hopes Ferncliff can serve those local funeral homes without a crematory.
Fewer people every year are opting for a traditional, casketed burial.
“It’s just the way people look at death today,” said Jack Conroy, funeral director at Conroy Funeral Home in Springfield. “The simplest, they feel, is sometimes the easiest. That’s the way society is today.”
Conroy uses the crematory at the Eberle-Fisher Funeral Home in nearby London, and likely will continue, he said.
Of the 109,898 deaths in Ohio in 2009, the most recent numbers available, 36,809 were cremated — or 33.4 percent — according to the Cremation Association of North America.
Ohio’s cremation rate will jump to 42 percent by 2015, CANA predicts.
Elsewhere nationally, Nevada had a 2009 cremation rate of 73 percent, the highest in the country, while Mississippi had the lowest rate at 12.5 percent.
“It’s not always due to cost,” Spitler said. “It’s due to preference.”
As Rue put it, “Some people just don’t want to be buried.”
The savings, however, are significant.
The average funeral cost $6,560 in 2009, according to the National Funeral Directors Association, but that figure includes neither a headstone nor a burial vault costing an additional $1,195.
By comparison, the average price of cremation, with a limited memorial service, is $1,650, according to CANA.
“What’s changed is that people are more accepting of cremation,” Rue said. “You have a lot more choices with cremation on how to memorialize someone.”
Nowhere is that more evident than at Ferncliff.
In the past three years, the cemetery has installed two scattering gardens for ashes and — for those who still want to return to nature yet maintain an eternal presence — has created a section where cremains can be sealed inside granite boulders that line a babbling creek.
Elsewhere, ashes can be sealed inside jewelry.
As late as 1985, when Littleton & Rue opened its onsite crematory, people were wary of the process, Rue said.
“Burning a body? Are you serious?” he said. “That in itself was taboo.”
In 1985, the cremation rate was only 13.8 percent.
Funeral directors themselves were just as cautious.
“Funeral directors were fearful of it and were afraid they might not be able to maintain their business,” Rue said.
The Catholic Church, for one, has softened its stance on cremation.
While cremation is permitted, U.S. bishops were only given permission in 1997 to allow cremated remains to be present at the funeral mass.
The church, however, remains dead set against anything other than burying or entombing ashes, calling the scattering of ashes “bizarre.”
But will people be ready for aquamation?
Last year, a Columbus funeral home temporarily became the first in the U.S. to dispose of 19 bodies by way of alkaline hydrolysis — a process using water and lye to liquefy a body.
Touted as being even more “green” than cremation, the liquefied remains supposedly can be poured on flowers to help them grow or even just dumped down the drain.
A Columbus judge in February ruled against the process, in part because only burial and cremation are the accepted ways to currently dispose of a human body in Ohio.
According to the Ohio Funeral Directors Association, however, it’s working with the state legislature to approve alkaline hydrolysis.
“It’s going to take on the same taboos,” Rue said. “Someone who installs one will have to educate the community at the same time.”
Contact this reporter at amcginn@coxohio.com.
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