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And they will pay a tidy sum for the broadcast. A bare-bones Forever package, including 10 photos and as much as 20 minutes of audio recordings to explain the pictures, with no music or video, costs $600. Those who buy a Platinum Biography can include 115 photos, three songs of their choice, an in-home interview with the subject of the bio (if he isn't dead) and those close to him, and a videotaped reminiscing party with family and friends. A Forever editor then puts it all together into a movie--for $4,195.
But the Cassitys say their product means more than traditional funeral fare--the coffins and flowers and sermons--that will be lost to history. The typical funeral costs something like $7,000. The Cassitys don't want you to spend less overall, but they would rather you devote less to a coffin, say, and more to your life story. That approach has made them outcasts in their own business. Many traditional cemetery owners think the brothers have found a new way to perpetuate a hoary tradition of mortuary science: gouging customers by pushing them to purchase needless fluffery when they are low. The Forever biography "sounds to me like an effort to turn an existential event into a retail one," says Thomas Lynch, a noted poet and essayist who runs the Milford, Mich., funeral company that his father started. (He knows something about turning memory into a retail event: his memoir, The Undertaking, was published in 1997 and is in paperback, available at amazon.com for $10.36.)
Lynch fears that the cemetery trend toward providing bio-kiosks, celebrity tours or even bird-watching sessions will turn these sacred places into amusement parks. "Once you say a cemetery has to be a place other than the place we put our dead, you open it up to the ridiculous," he says. When told that the Cassitys' Creve Coeur cemetery has a fitness walk, Lynch goes even further: "If we have a fitness walk, why not a concert, and if you have a concert, why not a rap concert? Why not have a chicken barbecue for the Rotary Club?"
Well, as it turns out, "we do have rap concerts," says Tyler Cassity defiantly. Or at least one, at the service of DJ Rob One (a.k.a. Robert Cory), a prominent fixture in the Los Angeles hip-hop world who died in March. "The people who come to us define who we are," says Tyler. "For us to define for them how they can remember someone, well, we're just not going to do that." The debate comes down to a central question: What is a cemetery for? Traditionalists think it is a place for rituals of closure, a place we go to for a funeral and return to only on birthdays. The Cassitys allow us to keep our dead loved ones--or ourselves--open to new interpretations and new (if virtual) relationships with great-grandkids they (or we) will never meet. Instead of finality, the Cassitys' cemeteries offer a kind of manufactured immortality, a heavily edited performance of someone's life that shunts aside what was a cemetery's focus: the end.
And is there anything wrong with turning a cemetery into a theme park for memories? Not in the abstract, though the reality can be a little...unreal. Few people tell the whole truth in their biographies. The Essmans, for instance, don't mention their previous marriages. Another client forced Forever's editors to remove all references to a deceased mother's mental illness.