Not necessarily six feet un- der. There are something like 100,000 cemeteries in the United States, but space, at least in some of the urban ones, is at a premium. ““There are not a lot of new cemeteries being built,’’ says Stephen Morgan, executive vice president of the International Cemetery and Funeral Association, a trade group. ““I don’t mean this in a pejorative way, but it’s not necessarily the highest and best use of a scarce resource.’’ One Japanese company wants to use lunar land for burial plots, but–let’s face it–flowers don’t do too well up there. Traditional cemeteries will likely continue to cope by adding wings to mausoleums or columbaria (a wall of niches for cremated remains), or by what’s known as ““stacking,’’ a practice in which people rest for all eternity beneath other people.
There will, of course, be alternatives. Cremation has been on an upswing for the past 10 years and may account for as much as 40 percent of all postmortem arrangements by 2010. Jack Springer, executive director of the Cremation Association of North America, predicts an eventual rate as high as 60 percent. Driving the trend, he says, is the increased mobility of the population. Retirees don’t necessarily feel a strong attachment to Florida or Arizona, and would just as soon reside in an easy-to-ship, easy-to-store urn back in Ohio. Or perhaps they’d like to be in both places at once. ““You can really spread yourself around–literally,’’ says Springer. ““You can take your cremated remains and scatter some at Wrigley Field and some at your golf course, and also have some at a permanent memorial place.''
Your options go far beyond that–and are multiplying almost daily. Adventurous decedents can opt to have bits of their ““cremains’’ encased in molten-glass objets d’art or placed in flat glass ““skipping stones,’’ for tidy and fun dispersal. Designer jewelry with special compartments can keep you close to friends and relatives. In the future you’ll be able to join ““Star Trek’’ creator Gene Roddenberry and acid guru Timothy Leary and have a ““symbolic portion’’ (about seven grams) of your ashes shot into space. They, along with 22 others, are slated to lift off later this month, in the first of what Houston-based Celestis Inc. hopes will be many flights into the hereafter. ““Will it become more common?’’ asks company VP Charles Chafer. ““I think so. I mean, eventually people will move off the planet, and at that point you take everything with you.''
A spaceflight may offer a leg up on the journey to heaven, but many of us will always want at least some memorial to ourselves here on earth. Eleanor Weinel, as- sociate professor of architecture at the University of Oklahoma in Norman, has studied cemeteries extensively and believes they’ll endure in some form. ““What’s important is a place for the memory,’’ she says. ““So maybe we’ll find new ways of creating that without the idea of physical burial.’’ Cyberspace is one candidate. The Internet is already rife with memorial Web pages, offering pictures, stories, poems–even music–in tribute to the departed. Perhaps, though, we’ll still insist on something more tangible–yet still high tech. One company has just introduced funerary urns and headstones containing chips programmed with biographical information about the deceased that can be viewed on an attached liquid-crystal display. Weinel envisions a return to the landscaped, parklike settings that marked 19th-century cemetery design. What would the monuments look like? ““Well, when I break down and get futuristic, I’d say they’re in whatever medium we’re using: maybe it’s holograms, maybe it’s light shows,’’ says Weinel. ““I don’t think it has to be the traditional form of funerary art.’’ It sounds spectacular. Too bad we won’t be here to see it.
