Rethinking Farewells: How Funerals and Final Resting Places are Changing

I attended my first funeral in 1992 when I was 7 years old. My Great-Uncle Al was the guest of honor in our small, northern Michigan funeral home. Everyone was dressed in their Sunday best (I remember women in dresses with more ruffles than the Meijer chip aisle) and the program seemed to be familiar to all the adults around me. 

Amazing Grace? Definitely.

The 23rd Psalm? You betcha.

A reminder that the meal (sliced ham and white bread for sandwiches, mayo-heavy potato salads, several pickle trays, and so many Jell-O-based desserts) would follow in the basement of the Methodist church? Check.

But the traditional funerals of my childhood are rarer these days, with more and more folks deciding to forgo the scripted memorials, the days of visitation and even the casket.

I spoke with Hank Borden, funeral director for Gorsline Runciman Funeral Homes in the Greater Lansing Area. Gorsline Runciman was founded in 1903 with its East Lansing location at 1730 E. Grand River Avenue added in the early 1960s, Borden said. It is the second busiest location of the business’ six locations.

“When I started,” he said, “I was in Jackson at the time, not too far away. We were doing, our cremation rate was probably 20%. Most of our calls were traditional burials and they would have two days of visitation and then the funeral. So it was a three day process all together. And cremations…were almost all what we called a direct cremation. So no type of services, no memorial service, nothing at all.

“Today, it’s so much different. Cremation rate right now is probably, I don’t know state of Michigan [numbers], but here in Lansing, at least where I am, we’re above 75%. The numbers have really flipped. And there’s been a big increase in personalization for services. Even with traditional burials, people will still have visitation, but it’s rare to have two days of visitation. It’s either one day and then the funeral [on the next day] or it’s all in one day, just have visitation an hour prior to the funeral. And we really, really encourage people to really personalize their service.”

According to the National Funeral Directors Association (NFDA), as of October 2023, just over 60% of deaths resulted in cremations and in approximately 32% of those cremations, the remains will likely be “buried or interred in a cemetery.”

Borden believes there are several reasons for the change.

“I think some of it is cost,” he said. “Some of it is that it was always just assumed that there would be a cemetery burial and that was where all the family has been buried and also all the family lives here so we can go visit the cemetery, but people are a lot more spread out now than they used to be. And so, instead of having a cemetery burial here in Lansing, but one of the kids lives in San Francisco and the other is in Boston, and the other one is in Germany. No one is going to go take care of flowers, they’re not going to visit the cemetery. A lot of times, people will get little keepsake urns. They might scatter the ashes. There are little pendant necklaces that hold a little bit of ashes and those have become really popular. And there are people who say, we can’t justify taking up that land space. It’s kind of a combination of those things.”

NFDA pinpointed the 2021 median cost of a funeral with cremation to be $6,971, while a traditional funeral with a viewing cost $7,848.

Borden said he has seen more ceremonies that are personalized around the person being honored. He singled out two two examples that stand out, one was a three-hour Paris themed memorial and the other centered around baseball.

“Mom absolutely loved Paris, that was her thing,” he said. “So the entire room was decorated in that theme. You walk in and it’s like we’re in a restaurant in Paris, that’s the food that the caterer brought, the music that was playing was all themed for that.

“Another time, we had someone who was a huge, huge baseball fan, so instead of memorial folders, we printed baseball cards. It had his picture and instead of stats, it would have his date of birth and where he was born, but it was a baseball card people could take with them. It was held outside, we actually had the service at the family’s house, and so our staff all had on Detroit Tigers gear, and the caterers brought in a whole selection of things you would find in a ballpark.”

With the rise of more personalized ceremonies, Borden has seen the traditional aspects of funerals melt away and give way to new trends.

“It doesn’t have to be the same cookie-cutter funeral that you grew up with,” he said. “[I] show them the chapel, [say] ‘this is where the service is going to be, and this is your space. Make it your space.’ We have people bringing in a lot more personal items, memorabilia, mementoes, things that really tell more of a story of who the person was. Even the eulogies are more personal now. A lot of times people won’t have a minister. They might have a celebrant, someone who’s not religious necessarily, but more of a secular celebrant to do the service. Or they may just have family members and friends get up and talk. That’s a big change. The other thing is, with all the cremations we’re doing now [compared to] where it used to be, everybody’s mindset was cremation is an alternative to a funeral. Well really, cremation is an alternative to burial. And that has become a lot more widely recognized now. I can still have a visitation, I can have a viewing, I can have an open casket viewing, a funeral service, I can have all these things the same, but instead of going to the cemetery after the funeral, we go to the crematory. We don’t usually go in procession and go like we normally would to a cemetery, the service would end there and then probably the next day, we would go to the crematory. We’re seeing a lot more people choosing cremation, but still wanting to have some type of gathering, some type of celebration of life.

“Visitation times are not as formal or stuffy or uncomfortable as they used to be. You would go to a visitation, sign the guestbook, pass by the casket awkwardly, greet the family, and be on your way. A lot of families now will have catering at the visitation. In a side room, there will be an area that the caterer has set up, and there are round tables and chairs. Anytime people get together, anytime they gather, it’s usually around a table. People sit around a table, they’ll talk to each other, they’ll share memories. If you have just some rows of chairs set up, it’s not real conducive to conversation. We’ll sit up a visitation room with maybe a couple rows of chairs, but then have several round tables with chairs, so people can actually sit and have a conversation. They’ll stay longer and talk to the family and share their memories.”

I spoke with East Lansing residents who recently chose a route other than a traditional funeral when  planning services for departed loved ones.

“She really didn’t [leave any instructions],” Julie Seraphinoff Price said of her mother who died in April 2023. “She wasn’t religious, she was spiritual but she didn’t attend a church. She didn’t give any specific instructions and she was so sick at the end, too. She was not into pomp and circumstance. She wouldn’t have wanted a traditional funeral and we just wanted to stay true to her. Nature was really important to her, her friends were really important, family, being true to herself. So that was kind of how we approached it. We wanted it to be a celebration of her. And music was really important to her. We had all these recordings of her playing her guitar and singing so we played that during it.”

Price, a retired high school journalism teacher and former ELi Managing Editor, and her siblings chose to hold the memorial at their mother’s favorite park in Rochester, where she frequently sat by the river. Each of the siblings spoke about their unique experiences with their mother.

“[Besides family] my mom had a really good friend that she knew for 50 years, we had [her] speak,” she said. “My mom was also very active in [Alcoholics Anonymous] and she sponsored a number of people, including a woman who credits my mom with saving her life, and she spoke in that aspect. So we tried to bring out all the parts of her.”

The memorial was held two months after her mother’s death.

“My siblings just weren’t ready to organize anything,” Seraphinoff Price said. “The people who were important to her were there and it was just a real casual day. We had her artifacts everywhere that she had collected, her guitar.”

Seraphinoff Price said she has noticed a change in how the lives of the dead are commemorated.

“I’m a religious reader of obituaries,” she said. “I read every one; I don’t distinguish…when I sit down on Sunday morning, I read every obituary in the Lansing State Journal because they all deserve time. What I’m noticing is, there aren’t a lot of funerals now. I’ve noticed that people will be holding a celebration later. I find that interesting.”

Leo Sell, an IT support professional and union leader from Michigan State University, attended several funerals growing up.

“I was attending funerals from the time I was about 8 years old,” he said. “They were very common occurrences in my family. I was raised with funerals and remembrance type things, going up and visiting the coffin and all that.”

When time came to memorialize his parents and later his son, the nontraditional route won out each time and Sell has no regrets today.

“No, for me,” he said, “I rejected that years and years and years ago and have no interest in accommodating any of it.”

When his mother died in 2021, her family scheduled a brief internment of her and her late husband’s ashes at Fort Custer National Cemetery near Kalamazoo. 

“It was a veteran’s service which is amazingly quick and efficient,” he said. “They have a very precise way they’re going to do it and a very precise time window. We had my niece, my brother’s daughter, sing one song in memorial particularly oriented towards my mom. Dad was getting his veteran’s funeral and we had a song, “I am a poor wayfaring stranger” [for mom]. And then I had reserved a pavilion in a park just a few miles away, a lovely, lovely place. It was family only. Me, my sister and two brothers, two nieces and a nephew, my son and granddaughter and my wife. And that was the gathering. We just had some catered food and some memories that we shared. A couple hours of that, that was sufficient.”

Sell added that his mother had pre-planned her cremation, easing the burden on her family.

“When dad passed,” he said, “all she had to do was call a 1-800 number and later, when I got the call about her, I called the 1-800 number. I didn’t have to worry about any of that, it was already taken care of.”

When Sell’s son died in 2023 after a lengthy illness but only in his 40s, the family was left with little instruction on how to proceed.

“There was no pre-arrangement made,” he said. “So the family, which was primarily my son’s daughter and his ex-wife, had to make the decision on how to proceed. They knew that Sean would not have wanted a tremendous amount of money spent on a traditional funeral and the services. And then, again, really not a religious family. We talked it over and they identified a park down there in the Raleigh, North Carolina area that had a very nice wooded area he used to walk his dogs there. It had a nice banquet hall. We all agreed that that seemed like a really appropriate place to have, again, just a simple remembrance, except in this case, he’d been in that area a long time, he had numerous friends, and he’d been a business partner in a remodeling company for years and years and years, so this room was packed out with people. About a dozen of us spoke to the assembled people. We had a nice lunch, again, a catered event. His best friend and business partner acted as emcee. “

Borden said there has been an increase in individuals seeking out “green burial” options. NFDA reports that in 2023, 60% of clients were interested in exploring green funeral options, a number that has been steadily rising.

Summit Cemetery on Beeman Road in nearby Williamstown Township was the first location to offer green burial services in the greater Lansing area. Mac Donnelly, the cemetery sexton of 16 years, said Summit began offering a green option in February. He explained what the eco-friendly services entail.

“First and foremost, there’s no embalming,” Donnelly said. “The whole reason in having sealed caskets and concrete vaults is to keep the nasty embalming fluids out of the water table. But without that, they’re mostly going to be just burial shrouds. If it is some kind of actual casket or pine box or cardboard box or wicker casket, we’ve got it specified in the ordinance that it’s got to be as close to the size of the body as possible for settling. We’ll mound it up a little bit when we’re done with the burial, but we want to minimize the amount of settling and not have depressions all over the place.

“[The deceased] have to be dressed in all biodegradable, organic materials; no polyester. It’s got to be all cotton, hemp fibers, silk, something that’s going to break down.”

Donnelly said that the greenness of the burial is also carried into the actual mode of burying a body.

“We try to minimize the use of machinery,” he said, ‘but we still dig with a backhoe. We don’t have any kind of a lowering device like they do for traditional burial. That’s completely up to the family and the funeral home, as well as sufficient pallbearers to carry them from the last driveway into this next expansion area.” 

In the first four months, the cemetery has already sold 13 spots in the green section.

“That’s a pretty substantial number for that short of a timespan,” Donnelly said.

860 full spaces for body burials and 160 half spaces for cremation burials are available in the new green section at Summit.

As the way we mourn our loved ones evolves, options have only grown, Borden said.

“Think about what really suits your personality or the personality of the person you’re making arrangements for,” he said. “Don’t think, ‘no, we have to do this; it’s expected that we’re going to have this traditional funeral and people are going to be sad and they’re going to cry at the service.’ There is certainly a place for that and there are still people who prefer something very traditional and very formal. But anything you can think of, we can probably make happen. Brainstorm with family members and think, what were some things that dad really really liked? What were his passions and his interests? And then ask the funeral director how we can incorporate some of those things. We want to help you create the appropriate experience.”