Story and Photos by Cody Newton
As the clean white Chevy Express cargo van pulls up to the back of Riverbend hospital in Springfield, Oregon, there is already a security guard waiting with the morgue doors open. The driver of the van—Bill Evans, a mid-70s man with tan skin, kind eyes and a warm, capacious sense of humor—gets out and unloads a gurney from the back. Evans works for Musgroves Family Mortuary in Eugene, Oregon. Wearing black slacks, a slick purple button-up shirt, and a matching tie, Evans wheels the gurney into the morgue.
“Who are you here to pick up?” asks the security guard.
Evans reads the name of the deceased man.
The morgue is cool and clean, with solid white floors, stainless steel counters, sinks, and cupboards. Tools and bottles of chemicals are scattered on the counters. White florescent light fills the room. The security guard opens the large stainless steal door to a walk-in freezer, while Evans looks over the “release of patient” sheet for body. The sheet has “EXPIRED” written across the top in blue ballpoint pen.
Evens and the security guard wheel the body out of the cooler and unzip the white body bag, exposing dead, pale, rubbery skin. They double-check the name on the body’s wristband for accuracy, then, with a heave, plop the corpse onto the gurney. They zip it into a red velvet body bag and roll the gurney into the back of Evans’ van.
Although there is no slack in the number of people dying every year, the funeral industry is in the middle of a massive change as more people opt for cremation over traditional burials.
“In Oregon now, more people choose cremation than they choose burial,” said Mark Musgrove, “and it’s spreading across the country.”
Mark Musgrove, the co-owner of Musgroves Family Mortuary and former president of the National Funeral Directors Association, said a funeral home’s main source of income used to be merchandise such as caskets, headstones, and burial sites, which isn’t a part of cremations. For this reason, funeral homes have had to seek out other sources of income.
Todd Major, owner of Major Family Funeral Home in Springfield, Oregon, said one reason cremations are requested more often is the recession. A traditional funeral at Major’s goes for about $8,000. “Some people just can’t afford that right now, so we offer them alternatives such as cremation,” Major says. A cremation at Major’s costs $1,000 to $3,000 depending on whether or not a service is included.
Another reason Major said cremations are on the rise are the differences in today’s typical family structure, with children often living far away from their parents. This makes it difficult for families to get back in time for a traditional funeral. “It used to be that everybody lived in the same community, so everybody was there,” says Major. “Now that’s not always an option.”
In addition, some people simply don’t want their children to have to deal with the hassle of planning their funeral. “Grandpa will say, ‘Oh, just bury me in the backyard,’” Major said, “which obviously you can’t do.” So they choose cremation.
Musgrove believes a lot of the shift towards cremation has to do with America becoming more secular. “When you don’t have religious traditions that dictate what you do, you can do whatever you want,” Musgrove says. This leaves room for cremations and more personalized funerals.
Wally Ordeman, co-owner of Fisher Funeral Home in Albany, Oregon, has seen a dramatic increase in cremations in the twenty-seven years he’s been in the business. When Ordeman started about fourteen percent of their business was cremations, he says. Today the number is around sixty-two percent. “So the business my son is coming into is drastically different than the one I came into with my dad,” Ordeman says.
At first, Musgrove says, many funeral homes resisted making changes. Those that wanted to survive in this new world of cremations had to be willing to adapt. “The people that embrace change, and listen to the families, are the ones that are going to be successful,” he says.
Just because somebody chooses cremation doesn’t mean the funeral home needs to be left out, Ordeman adds. In this new era, services, particularly those that incorporate a video tribute to the deceased are quickly becoming the funeral home’s bread and butter. And this is where the technology comes in. “It would be hard to find a successful funeral home that doesn’t have a flat screen in it,” Ordeman says. “Video tributes are a big part of services now.”
Funeral homes are now filming and selling their own video tributes that they have been able to sell as services to help off set the loss of income from low casket sales. “Funeral homes have had to get very creative in those kinds of things to make themselves relevant in a cremation world,” Ordeman says.
Major says there are a lot of funeral homes that are simply burnt out. There are some that don’t even have a Visa machine. “There’s no, ‘Hey we have new ideas, like video tributes, and wireless microphones,’” Major says. “They’re not young guns that are running any more.”
Musgroves has adapted to personalizing their ceremonies to accommodate almost anything a family asks for, from releasing doves, to arranging for bag pipes to play at the service. Musgrove even mentioned new technology where microchips can be planted in memorial sites that will play video tributes on a smart phone. There would be an app for smart phones that a person would download, and as they go past memorial sites with the implanted chips the phone could play the persons video tribute. “Because of technology, things are really happening fast,” he says.
Music is another prominent change. According to Musgrove it used to be easy to predict what songs would be played at a funeral, because there was basically only four: “How Great Thou Art,” “In the Garden,” “Old Rugged Cross,” and “Amazing Grace.” Musgrove says nowadays they play all kinds of music, from rock and roll to country. Major’s has even replaced their old organ with a keyboard.
According to these funeral home directors, the industry doesn’t even look similar to what it did twenty years ago. When asked about the future of the funeral home industry, Ordeman says funeral homes will always be caring for the deceased and caring for their families, but that the services will become more about celebrating life than morning death. “How we help families now is much more dependent on the families wishes, and much less on tradition,” he says.
Despite all the changes in the industry, Evans says his job is safe. People will always be needed to taxi the dead, and to clean and prepare the bodies. “It doesn’t matter who you are, we treat everybody with the same respect.”