Like others in their ancient industry, cemetery owners Brent and Tyler Cassity will bury you or burn you. But unlike your average gravediggers, they believe their most noble offering is to immortalize you. That's why their firm, based in Creve Coeur--it means Heartbreak--Mo., has the ambitious name Forever Enterprises. Besides providing the usual burial plots and cremation urns, Forever helps the living remember the dead by producing biographies of the deceased that can be viewed on touchscreen kiosks at the cemetery. That means the Cassity brothers may have found a way for people not to dodge mortality but to shape it to their liking.
"At traditional cemeteries, all you have is something carved in cold stone. There's nothing alive," says Tyler, 30. "This way, you can hear that person, see them as they were in life," says Brent, 33. The Cassitys have stored about 3,000 of their 10,000 biographies on the Web at forevernetwork.com (the others will be digitized from videotape soon). But theirs isn't primarily a dotcom firm. Instead, it is focused on changing the cemetery by making the biography, rather than the remains, the focus of a visit. Eventually they hope to even insert touchscreens into tombstones.
The Cassitys learned the death business from their father, who ran funeral homes when they were kids. But the biography idea was their own. In 1986, three years after their grandmother died, they found an audiotape of her. The sweet voice made them happy and sad at the same time. "Why don't we have more than this?" they wondered. It's schmaltzy and, as they discovered, good business; Forever is set to earn $11 million in revenues this year, up from just $700,000 in 1998. The three-cemetery firm plans to acquire 10 more by year's end.
Forever is doing well because the Cassitys realized before anyone else in their glacially changing industry that many Americans would love to have their own A&E Biography. And not just "the terminally trendy," as a reporter described Forever's clients. Earl Essman, 72, a retired real estate manager and American Legion member, and his wife Marian, 71, decided in the fall of 1998 that they should make arrangements for their passing. Earl worked with Forever's head biographer, Cindy Stafos, to compile pictures and stories. He recalled going to summer camp and meeting Marian. He notes on their bio that their favorite song even before they met was Where or When, which Dion & the Belmonts made a hit in 1960.
"I'm going to give you a quote," Essman says, explaining why Forever will succeed. "It's from Andy Warhol, and it goes something like this: 'Everybody is entitled to 15 minutes of fame.' That biography is going to be ours." What Warhol actually wrote was, "In the future, everyone will be world famous for 15 minutes." Essman got the quote wrong, but he got the sociology right. Many of us believe we have a right to be famous. None of Forever's clients, folks who were dishwashers or lawyers, actors or plumbers, has ever asked that a biography remain private.