A Business to Die For
The “death care” business is booming, and Boomers haven’t even begun to die in large numbers yet. We continue to be amazed at the attention now being given to the death business, from stories in local newspapers about funeral “celebrations” with live music and ice cream, to a new Web site and soon to be launched magazine called Obit (with the tagline “Revealing lives.”
We’re not drawn into the excitement about a well-written obituary (we skipped this past weekend’s 9th Great Obituary Writers' International Conference in Alfred, N
Y); and we find something a little creepy about a section of the Obit-mag.com site called “Mourning Roundup,” which links to obituary pages on newspaper sites across the country (we’re not making this up, ask Dave Barry).There are even books for Boomers to bone up on getting to the boneyard: Michelle Cromer’s Exit Strategy: Thinking Outside the Box and Lisa Cullen’s Remember Me, A Lively Tour of the New American Way of Death. We guess if Boomers bought books on how to have a baby, then it makes sense we’re going to be buying books about dying.
And of course, we’re going to go green when we go. Learn how to do so yourself at greenburialcouncil.org. Or just buy the book (agh!): Grave Matters: A Journey Through the Modern Funeral Industry to a Natural Way of Burial.
