Outside the box - Sydney Morning Herald - Sydney Morning Herald

"A topic of conversation not dissimilar to buying a pair of Jimmy Choos" … the "death cafe" in Nimbin, northern NSW.

For today's baby boomers, funeral services are just as much about celebrating the individual as mourning their passing. By Lisa Pryor.

A couple of years ago, Nimbin funeral director Lisa Liversage delivered a plain cardboard coffin to a house in the Brisbane suburb of Inala. Within the home was a family mourning the death of a son who'd died in a workplace accident. While the young man's body lay in the mortuary, his relatives got to work. All over the coffin, members of this Aboriginal family painted the life story of this son, the story of his spirit. "You can really reflect the personality of the person who's passed on in this way," says Liversage, a blonde, 40-something mother of five.

Just as baby boomers have reshaped every rite of passage they've ever reached, they are now remodelling funeral culture in their own image. Religious convention is swept aside, family participation is welcomed and funeral services are as much about celebrating the individual as they are about mourning his or her loss.

Illustration by Ben Sanders/The Jacky Winter Group.

For families unsure of how to make the big day unique, funeral parlours offer their own tips. At Olsens Funerals in Sydney's Sutherland, suggestions include a live jazz band during the ceremony, a motorcade of "interesting vehicles" or a trip on a steam train.

Of course, not everyone is looking for new ideas. Increasingly, families know exactly how to farewell their loved one because he or she has left behind a funeral plan. Before Betsy Graham died from cancer in February, the retired Sydney nurse wrote down strict instructions for her funeral. "She said she wasn't going to give it to me because I'd just change it," says her husband Peter. In the days after her death, there was a brief panic as her family tried to locate her plan. Eventually, they found a file on her desktop computer called, simply, "Betsy's Funeral".

In it was a list of the music she wanted and one simple entreaty to her guests. "She caused consternation in the family when she wrote 'Don't wear black', " says Graham. "It was Betsy's wish that people did not mourn, but give thanks."

"We can choose how we can die" … Nimbin funeral director Lisa Liversage. Photo: Jacky Ghossein

While Betsy's service of thanksgiving took place in a Presbyterian church in Sydney's Eastwood, the range of venues where funerals take place is widening. Funeral director Chris Timmins, expanding his business to cater to the celebratory funeral trend, launched Life Celebration Funerals in Parramatta three years ago and has organised funerals in homes, parks, even a town hall.

"There's a common misconception that the health department is concerned with where you hold funerals," he says. "The regulation is that the body may be unrefrigerated for eight hours, so during that period you can take the coffin to whatever location you want" - as long as you don't breach other rules, such as council regulations.

The soundtrack to final farewells has changed, too. A survey published in Britain's Guardian newspaper in October found that for the seventh year running, the most popular funeral song in the UK is Frank Sinatra's My Way - with its secular sentiments about facing the "final curtain", having "travelled each and every highway" and saying "the things he truly feels and not the words of one who kneels". Meanwhile, the proportion of funerals requesting hymns fell during the same period, down from 41 per cent to 30 per cent.

At one with nature … a headstone at Lismore's bushland cemetery. Photo: Jacky Ghossein

Back in Australia, Timmins says pop music from an era significant to the deceased is popular. He says he regularly receives requests for Elvis songs and The Long and Winding Road by the Beatles. Recently, he organised a funeral for an elderly lady that featured Vera Lynn songs from the World War II era.

Some of the readings that have become popular at modern funerals are about the importance of not mourning. On the web page of Sydney funeral celebrant Elaine Searle, nearly every suggested reading is about not crying or being sad, including Mary Elizabeth Frye's poem Do Not Stand at My Grave and Weep and Christina Rossetti's Song with its request, "When I am dead, my dearest, Sing no sad songs for me." Has the cult of positive thinking been taken to such an extreme that it is no longer permissible to be sad even at a funeral?

Ever since the publication of Evelyn Waugh's satirical novel The Loved One in 1948, and Jessica Mitford's humorous investigation of the American funeral industry in her 1963 book The American Way of Death, the euphemisms, sales tactics and underhand practices of funeral homes have been a cause for both laughter and concern. And yet, even as families try to escape their clutches and make death rites their own, funerals have become even bigger business.

Bush burial … John Gough beside the Lismore bushland grave of his mother-in-law, Evelyn Greene. Photo: Jacky Ghossein

If you have attended a funeral recently, chances are some of the profits went towards a company called InvoCare. The Coca-Cola of the funeral industry, this conglomerate owns a big stake of what it calls the "funeral, cemetery and memorialisation" industries, is listed on the Australian Stock Exchange, and turns over $250 million annually. Its big brands are White Lady Funerals and Simplicity Funerals, which operate nationwide; there are many more. Some sound like family businesses: Turnbull Family Funerals, Tobin Brothers Funerals, Ann Wilson Funerals, William Riley & Sons Funerals. InvoCare also has a Multicultural Unit that caters to the needs of various ethnic groups - ensuring, for example, that resting places for Asian families comply with feng shui principles and offering crypts and vaults to Italian and Greek families.

InvoCare's personable 42-year-old CEO, Sydney-based Andrew Smith, once worked for tobacco company Rothmans - "I was uncomfortable, hence I was only there 18 months" - and has a background in accounting. He says that White Lady Funerals, its attendants distinctive in their white suits and burgundy hats, is the fastest-growing brand in the Australian industry. According to Smith, those planning funerals are saying, "I don't want a funeral director dressed in black; I don't want a black hearse." Where once a family would seek guidance from the funeral director about what to do, now the family is telling him or her what it wants. "We're becoming event organisers," says Smith.

He relates an example of a thoroughly modern funeral. Nicole Fitzsimons from Sydney was a 24-year-old personal assistant working on The Footy Show in Sydney when she died in October this year following a motorbike crash in Koh Samui, Thailand. InvoCare brought her body back to Kogarah (with so many more Australians travelling further afield, for business and pleasure, repatriation is a growing arm of the business) while White Lady organised the funeral. "We ended up webcasting that through the internet," Smith says. "A unique page was set up on Heaven Address [heavenaddress.com] where mourners were invited to post photographs and messages, light virtual candles, send virtual flowers and donate money to charities nominated by the family." InvoCare has a 27 per cent stake in the website.

The changing nature of funerals is also reflected in the refreshments offered. "In the past, we would do the typical 45 minutes, then mourners would move back to the house, where one of the family would have made sandwiches," Smith says. Now, professional catering is the order of the day. At Sydney's Northern Suburbs Memorial Gardens and Crematorium, $7 million has been spent on new facilities that include function space for mingling and drinking. InvoCare owns these facilities.

As time goes on, more people are paying their hefty funeral expenses before they die, a fact that was noted by an Australian Securities and Investments Commission report back in July: "A fundamental motivation is emotional: to avoid feeling guilty about leaving family and friends with the bill for their own funeral (and in some cases its organisation). They call this 'not being a burden'. A secondary motivation is control; some people worry a lot about whether their family will observe their wishes for the funeral."

Smith finds that the latter tends to take precedence over the former; baby boomers are increasingly more concerned with arranging a funeral that they feel is representative of them as an individual than saving money. "If I go back 10 to 20 years, a lot of people chose to pre-pay their funerals because of the fact they didn't want to be a financial burden on their kids," he says. "They were trying to be responsible in ensuring they were providing for a pretty simple send-off."

These days, every detail can be tailored to reflect the personality of the deceased. Chris Timmins recalls a two-hour service held earlier this year for one half of a same-sex couple. As each guest arrived, they were handed a frond from a tree fern that was significant to the pair. The event included speeches, the screening of a DVD about the life of the deceased woman, even a breathing and meditation session. As the service concluded, guests were asked to bring the fronds forward to be placed on the distinctive coffin, which was covered in a tree pattern reflecting the couple's connection to the bush.

Not everyone is pleased with the loss of something sombre in the choreography of funerals. Addressing the Anglican Synod in Sydney in October, Archbishop Peter Jensen turned to the topic of funerals. He lamented the "deadly individualism", the "moral ineptitude", the "sort of vulgar egotism" that led to so many people choosing My Way as a send-off. Funeral services, according to Jensen, were once "opportunities to hear God and to pray to God, to be forced to think about [and] to hear about sin, judgment, redemption and resurrection and to reverently dispose of the body".

Particular criticism fell on excessive eulogising of the dead when funerals are left "in the hands of unbelief". Too often the aims of friends and family speaking at the service seemed to be building up the reputation of the dead person, Jensen complained: "All seems designed to avoid the truth that the person is gone, that death is horrible, that bodies turn to dust, that the person has not one chance in hell of avoiding hell based on the quality of their lives."

The Catholic Church has already cracked down on loved ones speaking at funerals. In 2007, Cardinal George Pell issued new guidelines amid similar concerns that Catholic funerals were becoming a setting for a series of eulogies instead of worship. Guidelines from the Liturgy Office of the Catholic Archdiocese of Sydney counsel that "words of remembrance" can only be delivered by one person, should last no more than three to five minutes and should be prepared in advance so the priest can review it before the service.

The edict went into further detail about the behaviour which led to its issue: "On not a few occasions, inappropriate remarks glossing over the deceased's proclivities (drinking prowess, romantic conquests, etc) or about the Church (attacking its moral teachings) have been made at funeral Masses, embarrassing the priest, the family and the congregation and becoming the focus of the service."

For Peter Graham, though, it is religious faith and not the dearth of it that made him comfortable with the idea of a funeral as a celebration when his wife Betsy died. "We weren't frightened of death," he says. "I wasn't and she wasn't, that's just our make-up." The thanksgiving continued in October when Betsy, a great cook who loved parties, would have turned 65. She had been looking forward to this landmark and had been planning the party for some time. The family decided to hold it anyway. There was plenty of food, wine and soft drinks, but the family drew the line at a birthday cake.

Richard Stanton, a University of Sydney academic and Anglican who is currently writing a book titled The Commodification of Death, is not convinced the focus on celebrating life in death is always a good thing. Some mourners, he believes, lacking the ritual that religion provides, appreciate that they can turn to funeral businesses for guidance. He cites White Lady Funerals. "They will stand out the front and they will make a speech, so it's all choreographed, they will make an action with their hands to make you stand at the right time and sit at the right time, because we don't know what to do."

He speaks of modern funerals celebrating life because death is too difficult. "I'm saying that death's [become] a topic of conversation in the post-modern world not dissimilar to buying a Coach handbag or a pair of Jimmy Choos." In other words, it's treated like any other product purchase.

And then, once the party is over, mourners are left with their grief. Stanton relates the story of a woman he knows whose husband died. She was surprised that one of her best friends failed to turn up to the funeral. The friend, a widow herself, knocked on her door six weeks later and said, "Come on, I'm taking you to lunch." Having been through the process herself, the friend knew that it was at this stage, long after the brouhaha of the funeral had died down, when the woman was wandering through her empty house in pyjamas, that she'd really need the support of her friends.

"There's not a lot of research around about how we will go through that grieving process now we are commodifying death and treating it as a party," says Stanton. He adds that the "corporate entities that control funerals" have no interest in the ongoing process of grief: "They're interested in getting you in, getting you under."

Certainly, the funeral industry is the subject of numerous consumer complaints, especially about overcharging. The consumer group Choice examined the industry last year and found wild fluctuation in the "professional service fees" charged by funeral directors, ranging from $450 to $2750. The cost of transporting the body ranged from $129 to $1995.

In one case, a Western Australian family was charged $9200 for a small, simple funeral with 15 mourners - even though they had arranged their own transport and paid for their own refreshments after the service. In another case, a family complained that the funeral company had placed their newspaper death notice in full colour advertising the name of the funeral company, which they didn't remember agreeing to.

Then there are the smaller, daily insults, such as bodies being embalmed without the family ever being consulted to prevent a post-mortem escape of gas and fluid. "A lot of corpses are 'prepped' without asking permission of the family," confirms Liversage, "because it stops these purges." And then there are the special requests that just go ignored, such as when a family member requests that their loved one be dressed in a special outfit. "Often the funeral home will just throw the clothes on top of the body bag, close the coffin and the family never finds out."

Lisa Liversage began her long journey with death early. She spent her childhood living above an ambulance station in Sydney's Rockdale, where her father worked as an ambulance officer. As a young woman working as a palliative care nurse, she cared for the dying. Then she crossed over to the other side and joined the funeral industry. Now she is trying to do funerals in a different way and has just started a monthly "death cafe" in her northern NSW town of Nimbin, where people can meet to talk about and plan for death. She believes that if people are more open to discussing and understanding death, it will be harder for them to be misled or ripped off by the funeral industry.

As cemetery space fills up, cheaper and greener alternatives are being sought. On the western plains of Victoria, about 120 kilometres west of Geelong, Kurweeton Road Cemetery offers "upright burials" that take up less space and do away with the need for a coffin. Each body is placed in a biodegradable body bag before being lowered feet first into a hole three metres deep.

Wilder innovations are still to be embraced in Australia, such as promession - where bodies are freeze-dried then shattered with vibration - and aquamation, which uses a chemical process called alkaline hydrolysis to dissolve the body, a method that has typically only been used to dispose of animal carcasses.

Andrew Smith says politely that Australian trials of aquamation have yielded "mixed results". Lisa Liversage is less circumspect: "Your loved one basically goes into a big steel vat and they throw in alkalines and acids to dissolve the body, which takes two or three hours," she says. "Then [the body] turns into a brown sludge, you turn on the tap and pour Mum into a bucket and then throw it on the tomatoes." She would like, one day, to import an embalming product that does not contain the formaldehyde found in traditional embalming fluids, which can leech into the soil. Called Enigma, and with a seaweed and salt recipe, it sounds more like a day-spa treatment than a chemical for preserving corpses.

A more popular option, which is both affordable and green, is the bush burial; indeed, bushland cemeteries are opening across the country, including in Tasmania, Western Australia, South Australia and NSW.

With the metal tip of his umbrella, John Gough, a carpenter and former master builder, marks out shapes in the red dirt on the edge of Lismore Lawn Cemetery and Memorial Gardens, in northern NSW. First he draws the tapered shape of a casket, then a rectangle. He demonstrates how he built a coffin for his mother-in-law, Evelyn Greene, using Tasmanian oak when she died four years ago. She was then buried beside a stand of grey-green eucalypts in a bushland burial site adjoining a conventional cemetery, the same place Gough and his wife plan to be buried. "We put Dad's ashes in her arms like this," he says, making a cradle in the crook of his arm.

Lismore's bushland burial site, its trees populated by koalas, can be found by following the hill down from a line of children's graves, bright with painted butterflies and silk flowers, towards a bushy gully that doesn't look like a cemetery at all. Evelyn Green was the first to be buried here. Now stones jut from the long yellow grass, marking the resting place of Evelyn and the dozens who have come after. For those graves without any markers at all, relatives are given GPS co-ordinates to track down their loved ones.

Why did the family choose this option? "Can I tell you how much coffins are worth?"

John Gough asks. He doesn't have to. I know funeral businesses tend to offer mourners coffins costing between $4000 and $9000, according to research undertaken by Choice. Metal caskets can cost as much as $28,000. "Now you know why." And, he adds, they liked the idea of returning Evelyn's body to nature. Gough says he was never told of this option by a funeral parlour; he learnt about bushland burial sites only through a chance conversation.

As he speaks, there is the sound of the breeze moving through leaves and warbling birds and, further up the hill in the memorial gardens, the ominous "beep, beep, beep" of a bulldozer reversing, getting ready to dig.

As a direct result of consumers becoming concerned about the possibility of being ripped off by the funeral industry, cardboard coffins are becoming increasingly popular. In the US, Amazon and Walmart sell discount coffins online. Caskets Direct offers a similar service in Australia.

The ones offered by Lisa Liversage that can be personalised by family members are produced by a company called LifeArt, which was established in 2004 and is based in Sydney's Wetherill Park.

"They're a lot cheaper," says Liversage. The cardboard coffin costs about $800. "A good funeral to me shouldn't be about how much money is being spent, it should be more about family and friends [participating]. We can choose our lifestyle; we can choose how we die."

In 2010 LifeArt was sold - to InvoCare. It is well known that the only certainties in life are death and taxes. What is less well known is that in death there is a growing certainty, and its name is InvoCare.