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    		•

    Getting creative after cremation

    		    
    By John Wilkens    Monday, March 24 2008, 05:42 AM EDT    Views: 193
    AFTER CREMATION
    The way Becki Clark sees it, she was turning a "horrendous tragedy" into something beautiful.

    Two years ago, the Vista, Calif., woman's 17-year-old son, Zak, died. He was cremated. Clark took a small portion of the ashes and sent them to a company based in Chicago, which used them to make a diamond ring.

    "Now he's with me every single day," Clark said.

    Cremation is gradually becoming the farewell of choice in America - up from about 12 percent nationwide 25 years ago to about 34 percent now, with projections for it to cross 50 percent by 2018.

    In about a dozen states, most in the West, cremation is already the majority option.

    The boom in cremations is merging with another trend - consumer empowerment. People want more say-so in almost every aspect of life, including death. That's causing some people to spurn the urn.

    "People love the idea that they can choose what they want to do and celebrate the life of a loved one how they see fit," Clark said. "They want the freedom to do something instead of just leaving Grandma on the mantel."

    Some, like Clark, are having ashes turned into jewelry. She chose a yellow LifeGem diamond for Zak, a splash of sunshine that she said reminds her of his sunny personality.

    Others are spending hundreds or thousands of dollars to have ashes shot into space in rockets, spun into glass balls or ceramic pots, floated away in helium balloons, mixed into paint for artwork.

    "We're seeing these cottage industries popping up all over the place," said Nick Drobnis, whose Angels Flight company in Castaic, Calif., disperses remains in fireworks shot over the ocean. "It's become really personal for people. They want more options than burial or dumping the ashes off the end of a boat."

    One of the newest ventures, The Great Burial Reef, is planning its first funeral service this month off the coast of Sarasota, Fla.

    Founder Jason Rew said a 2,500-pound concrete artificial reef, designed with biologists, will be lowered by barge to the ocean floor, where it will become home to marine life - and cremated remains.

    "This is something for people who love the water and who love the environment - people who like the idea of conserving land and creating life in the ocean," Rew said.

    Each 5-foot wide, 3 1/2-foot tall circular reef will have room for one or two urns, he said. A bronze plaque affixed to the reef will carry the name of the departed.

    Rew and his father, who shared a love of sailing, first talked about memorial reefs 10 years ago. (His dad, an incurable punster, came with up with the name, a play on Australia's Great Barrier Reef.)

    When his dad died in 2006, Rew found himself "reflecting on my life and what I wanted to do." He quit his job with Goldman Sachs and dived into subsurface send-offs.

    Any day now, weather permitting, Rew is scheduled to don scuba gear, go down to the inaugural Great Burial Reef and deposit the very first urn - his father's.

    If all goes well, the company plans to expand to other areas of Florida and maybe eventually to California, Rew said.

    California, with its reputation as a trend-setter, is fertile ground for this kind of thing. Creative Cremains, a San Francisco firm, incorporates ashes into fishing rods, musical instruments, picture frames - even replicas of the Stanley Cup and the ruby red shoes from "The Wizard of Oz."

    Memory Glass, based in Santa Barbara, Calif., spins a half-teaspoon of ashes into round balls. The remains show up as swirls of white in the finished piece. Like many of the companies, the service is available for the remains of both humans and pets.

    But Angels Flight's Drobnis said it would be a mistake to assume that all the customers come from the Golden State, too.

    "We thought when we started that this would be a very California kind of thing," he said. "But there hasn't been any part of the country we haven't heard from."

    His company has done hundreds of fireworks farewells in the past decade, he said.

    Most of the services are done off the beach in Marina del Rey, Calif., accompanied by music. Each pyrotechnic display lasts about the length of one song and involves dozens of small shells.

    "We've had everything from classical music to hard rock to rap," Drobnis said. "It's really amazing what people will choose for the final song."

    Often, he said, it's the person being remembered who did the choosing. They line up the service ahead of time, picking the song and the color of the fireworks. (The Irish like green.)

    "It's partly a baby boomer thing, but it's really more of a cultural trend," Drobnis said. "People have decided they plan everything else about their life, except when they leave. And they want their loved ones to celebrate their life, not mourn it. They want marching bands, fireworks, whatever."

    He said he enjoys watching the reaction of people at the services. "There is sadness in the beginning, but then there are smiles," he said. "I think they walk away with a feeling of closure."

    In Clark's case, what she wanted was connection - a daily reminder of her son. She was well aware of the options out there for cremains - she's a director at California Funeral Alternatives in Escondido, Calif., - and she thought a diamond ring would be best.

    "I wear it every day," she said. "There's nowhere that kid is going without his mom. He has no choice."

    She didn't want to discuss the circumstances surrounding her son's death. He was in New Mexico when it happened, two days before his 18th birthday. "He is an eternal teenager now, and the ring is kind of like me being able to keep tabs on him," she said. She also bought one for Zak's sister.

    LifeGem, the company that made them, was founded seven years ago by brothers Dean and Rusty VandenBiesen. They way Dean tells it, Rusty realized early on, at age 4, that he would someday die, and it bothered him that he might also be forgotten.

    "He had issues throughout his life with this, a fear of being out of sight, out of mind," Dean said.

    The more they talked, the more they were convinced that Rusty wasn't the only one to feel that way. That led them to figure out a way to extract carbon from cremains and turn it into diamonds.

    A MOBILE SOCIETY

    Dean said traditional burials are still dominant on the East Coast and in the Midwest, but cremation is gradually growing in popularity everywhere. (Hawaii has the highest percentage of cremations, 66 percent; Alabama has the lowest, 9 percent.)

    "We're a much more mobile society now, so burial presents problems for people," Dean said. "It's difficult for them to visit grave sites if they live out of state."

    What that means, in all likelihood, is more and more options for the creative use of ashes, he said.

    "It used to be that funeral directors said, 'This is how the service is done,'" Dean said. "But the consumer has stood up and said, 'No, this is what I want.' There are new ideas every year." 
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