When Jack Faria died in April after a long bout with lung disease, his wife threw him a party. To honor her late husband--a passionate Miami sports fan--Carole Faria asked the funeral home to re-create a stadium setting with Marlins, Heat and Dolphins paraphernalia. Jack's favorite putter, pool cue and family photos surrounded his coffin. The song As Time Goes By, from his favorite movie, Casablanca, played in the background. "I wanted a huge celebration," says Faria. "After two and a half years of difficulty, I saw the good times. It made me feel like he really did have a great life. I wanted everyone to see that."
The funeral is getting a makeover as a growing number of Americans have begun thinking outside the box, so to speak, about how they want to say goodbye to their loved ones. Not for them the weepy, organ-heavy ceremonies of their parents and grandparents. Funerals today are less about mourning a death than about celebrating a life. Custom-made coffins reflect the departed's devotion to NASCAR or deep-sea fishing. Harleys or Corvettes lead processions in place of hearses. Wakes are staged as garden parties and feature professionally made biopics of the deceased. Cremated remains are fashioned into jewelry, fused into artwork, and stuffed into fireworks for those who want an exit with a real bang. "There's not a cookie-cutter funeral anymore," says Michael Gill, funeral director at the Brady-Gill funeral home in Tinley Park, Ill. "People want to do their own thing."
The popularity of Six Feet Under, the HBO series about a family of undertakers, and the success of novels like The Lovely Bones, about a dead girl who watches her family from heaven, and this summer's The Dogs of Babel, in which an artist makes fanciful death masks, have helped give people new ways to look at death. Recent waves of immigrants have also made people more comfortable with diverse funeral customs. But it's the demographic might of the baby boomers, finally coming to terms with their mortality, that has sent the $17 billion funeral and cemetery industry scrambling. "Boomers have changed every market they've come across," says Bill Burns, a funeral-services analyst with the New Orleans brokerage firm Johnson Rice & Co. "Why not death?"
In response, funeral directors act more like event planners, keeping prop rooms, offering video services and dropping words like "choreography" and "production quality" into their spiels. The Panciera Memorial Home in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., held about 100 nontraditional services last year, compared with just a handful five years ago. Valerie Panciera-Rief, the home's director of aftercare, has imported butterflies to be released at the end of a service, staged a beach party--complete with seashells and margaritas--for a late Jimmy Buffett fan, and regularly covers chapel walls with sheets of white paper on which attendees can record their memories of the dead. Jason Bradshaw, the second-generation proprietor of a funeral home in Minneapolis, Minn., has attended customer-service seminars at Disney World in Orlando, Fla., to pick up tips. "We look at ourselves as being in the hospitality industry," says Bradshaw, 28.