The Final Hurrah

JoEda Gregory is so happy with her job, she has to pinch herself every day to make sure it’s not a dream. She has been in the events industry for over a decade, and in 2005 was recognized as a finalist for the Event Solutions Spotlight Award for Creative Director of the Year. Despite her success, she felt like she wanted something…more.

Early this year, an opportunity presented itself. Gregory’s new position has her working on eight to 10 events a week in a fast-paced environment that draws on her creativity, people skills and time management, and earns her the profound gratitude of her clients.

But her dream job is one that many event professionals might not even recognize as part of the events industry. The seasoned planner is director of community care for Oklahoma, Arkansas and North Texas for Dignity Memorial. She plans funerals.

Gregory, however, is part of a growing trend in which funerals are being preplanned with the type of detail and personalization that was previously reserved for special events — and it didn’t just spring up yesterday. In fact, the development is something that celebrities have done for years.

For example, at the funeral of Estée Lauder, gourmet chocolate-covered marshmallows were served to mourners on silver platters, and the funeral of New York City socialite and fashion maven Nan Kempner was held at the legendary Christie’s auction house, The New York Times reported. Gregory says colleagues in her company’s Florida office regularly contract tents, bands and bartenders.

What or who is behind this surge in funerals that seem downright…eventy? The current school of thought is that the “I want it and I want it my way” baby boomers are the culprits.

Gregory doesn’t dispute that boomers are behind it, but points to a different motive. “It’s not so much that we’re self-centered or control freaks as that we’re educated and we don’t want our kids to be left with all those weird questions that we all were left with,” she explains.

According to the National Funeral Directors Association (NFDA), in addition to boomers’ influence, funeral service consumers today are starting to understand the benefits of preplanning their own funerals.

Bob Biggins, a certified funeral service practitioner and certified preplanning consultant, is president of the NFDA and owner of Magoun-Biggins Funeral Home on the South Shore of Massachusetts.

“I’ve been doing this for 30 years, and we’ve been planning things that commemorate life all of that time,” he says.

Although funerals today do offer more and different ways to honor the deceased, he adds, “we need to be careful. If you really come right down to it, a funeral never has been and never really will be, in our organization’s opinion, an event. What the event is, in our circumstance, is the death of a loved one. That’s the event. [The funeral] is how we respond [to it],” he says.

But the link between event planners and those planning funerals isn’t so tenuous, according to Gregory. “We’re all caretakers. Event professionals are all people who on some level want your event, your life, to be all it can be,” she says. “Every one of us is someone who’s challenged with meeting your dreams — if we weren’t caregivers of some sort, we wouldn’t be able to handle that.”

Some consider the trend toward “putting the ‘fun’ back in funeral” to be, at best, black humor of the “Six Feet Under” variety, and at worst, an irreverent, disrespectful attitude toward what is traditionally a solemn, mournful process.
However, what funeral-planning companies really offer are unique options at the request of the deceased himself, during the preplanning of the imminent event. Such tributes might also be planned by the deceased’s family, or suggested by the funeral director himself. The funeral reflects how that person wants to be remembered, often including a video montage of the person’s life, or a final video or audio message by the deceased himself to his loved ones. Overall, the specialized funeral service is a tribute to the person who has died, say people who plan them.

Biggins notes that such personalizations are not for everyone, and should be considered simply another option.

For example, he says, when he planned the funeral of Sonny Ewell, a beloved neighborhood ice-cream truck driver for more than 20 years, it seemed appropriate and fitting to lead the funeral processional with Ewell’s truck, lights flashing and music playing.

“That truck was an icon in our community,” Biggins says. “We took what he did for a living and what he was recognized as, and we just highlighted it as his funeral. [That’s] no different than we have for generations, because we’ve been doing that with firefighters, with fire trucks involved in funerals. … I think what is new, and I think what our focus is, is that our consumer is the changing consumer that every business and every profession is dealing with today. They want things their way. And what could be better, when it comes to commemorating a life, than to do things that may be a little bit creative?”

Should we expect to see event professionals move en masse into this sector?

Caterers and equipment providers have seen positive results, says Gregory, as they are able to supplement large, long-term projects with everyday business.

The progress of the trend could vary by region, as well. Due to cultural differences, “the Florida market has taken off far more than mid-America,” she says.

Kelsey Bray is the owner of event planning firm Little Divas Event Productions in Los Angeles. She says that while her company has not yet planned a funeral, if someone showed up at her door and asked her to plan his or her funeral, she’d do it.

In general, though, Bray says that in the L.A. area, there are very large funeral homes that handle the entire funeral planning process at their own facilities.

“I think they do these entire packages where everything’s on-site with them and I think it’d be tricky for an external event planner to sort of break into that market,” she says.

Biggins doesn’t expect to see an influx from the event side.

“I think for event planners to do it, it becomes redundant. I think [funeral directors] need to continue to be on the cutting edge, and continue to be tuned in to our customers, and to continue to be proactive. The thing that funeral directors do, that an event planner never will do, is that we serve the living while caring for the dead. Our single [area] of expertise is in our ability to care for the dead, and that’s an important sociological task that we fulfill,” he says.

But this added element is precisely why Gregory finds her new position so rewarding.

Previously, her career had seemed to be a series of anticlimaxes. “It would be like your world just fell apart — four months of your life are over in two hours,” she says. “It’s rewarding, but not as rewarding as seeing a family say, ‘You captured the essence of my dad perfectly. You helped us so much.’ You can’t duplicate that, no matter how many firecrackers there are.”