When Carolyn Leverett's husband died unexpectedly three years ago, she reluctantly complied with his request to be cremated.
Now the Baptist laywoman is making advance plans for when she dies, and she knows one thing for sure: She wants to be cremated and have her remains co-mingled with those of her late husband.
What's happened over the last three years to sway her opinion so strongly? She became the owner of a funeral home and crematory that performs about 200 cremations a year.
Both her personal attitude and her business stand at the head of a growing trend in American society. Cremation is a red-hot business.
In many regions, cultural and religious concerns about cremation are disintegrating.
More than one-fourth of all Americans who died last year were cremated, according to estimates from the Cremation Association of North America. That's up from less than 10 percent in 1980.
By the Cremation Association's estimates, the trend toward embracing cremation will continue to grow in the years ahead, with one third of all the deceased being cremated by 2010. In some regions, such as the Mountain West and New England, the percentage of bodies being cremated could surpass 65 percent by 2010.
A 1999 study by Wirthlin Worldwide confirmed this trend by polling a random sample of American adults. The Wirthlin poll, conducted for the Funeral and Memorial Information Council, found those reporting they intend to choose cremation for themselves or their loved ones increasing to 46 percent, up from 32 percent in 1990.
Experts in the funeral business sometimes offer this comparison to illustrate the growing acceptance of cremation: When President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, the cremation rate in the United States was about 3 percent. The Roman Catholic Church, of which Kennedy was a member, had only two years earlier dropped its ban on cremation, and Catholic priests in the U.S. generally did not allow cremated remains to be brought into church buildings for a funeral mass.
Fast-forward to 1999, when John F. Kennedy Jr. was killed in a plane crash. He was cremated and had full Catholic services.
Because of differences in church polity, Baptists never had an official ban on cremation, although the practice has been rare. Traditional casket burials remain by far the most common practice among Baptists, but cremation is a growing trend in urban areas of the state, according to a number of pastors who conduct funerals.
Bob Beck is a longtime Texas pastor, now serving as interim pastor of First Baptist Church of Bedford. He has seen the trend toward embracing cremation not only among the churches he has served but among his own family as well.
In addition to those actually choosing cremation, "there has been a very marked increase in the number of people who are considering that as a possibility," he said.
He told the story of a series of tragedies that killed all three members of a family in one church he served -- the mother, father and a son. All three family members were cremated over that period of time. Ultimately, all three urns were placed together in a mausoleum.
Such a story simply could not have been told 10 or 15 years ago, Beck said. It wouldn't have happened.
At Park Cities Baptist Church in Dallas, cremations also are on the rise, said Leroy Summers, minister to older adults. Because he's served the church 18 years and knows many of the older members, he spends a great deal of time helping people make funeral arrangements.
"In those 18 years, I've seen a lot more people opting for cremation," Summers said.
The question often arises when he's working with church members in funeral pre-planning, and it's not because he raises the topic, he said.
"Many people are opting for cremation. It's less expensive, and burial costs have gotten so high. My own counsel with them is it's something they have to feel right about."
Hawaii, Washington, Nevada, Oregon and Montana lead the nation in percentage of cremations, each with more than 55 percent of all deaths handled by cremation last year.
In other parts of the country, including parts of the Bible Belt, the practice remains less common. Cremations account for less than 10 percent of all deaths in Alabama, Mississippi, West Virginia, Tennessee and Kentucky.
Guy Thompson, owner of Thompson's Harveson & Cole Funeral Home in Fort Worth, Texas, has been in the business 63 years. During that time, he's seen cremations grow from less than 1 percent of his business to about 20 percent.
He does not advocate cremation and said he would not choose it for one of his own family members unless the body had been subjected to severe trauma before death or at the time of death.
Traditional burial offers more dignity and respect for the body, Thompson said. "The body to me is very sacred because it was the vessel that housed the soul of a person."
People today choose cremation over burial for a number of reasons, and Thompson doesn't discount or discredit those choices. However, he sees the trend toward cremation fitting in with other societal trends, including lack of interest in family burial plots.
The reasons for embracing cremation are varied, experts report. And there doesn't seem to be a common profile of who favors cremation and who doesn't.
"It isn't just people who cannot afford a regular burial, though that is a part of the picture," Beck said. "It's people who choose not to have a burial plot. For them, it's a matter of taking up space. It's people who don't want to have a grave to remind the family of their loss. It's environmental sometimes. ... There's also some simplicity in it."
"It's just a style," he concluded. "It's a rapidly increasing style of dealing with the body of a deceased person."
All these factors were considerations for Leverett's husband in his request to be cremated.
He liked the simplicity of it, the economy of it, the logic of it, said Leverett, owner of Heritage Funeral Home and Crematory near Baylor Hospital in Dallas.
For his funeral, Leverett used what's known in the trade as a "rental casket," a beautiful hardwood casket that would cost thousands of dollars to purchase outright. Though not obvious to family and friends viewing the casket, the box has something like a tailgate on one end. The body actually rests in a cardboard insert that slides into and out of the wooden casket.
Though not all bodies to be cremated are embalmed, Leverett chose to have her husband embalmed because she wanted a more traditional visitation time and memorial service. After that, the casket liner holding the body was easily removed and taken to the crematorium.
She keeps a portion of his ashes at home. That's the part she wants to have co-mingled with her own ashes after her death.
But she took part of her husband's remains to Branson, Mo., one of their favorite vacation spots.
"We always hated to see the time coming when we had to go home," she explained. "So I spread his ashes there, and I said, 'Now you can stay here; you don't have to go home.'"
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RELIGIOUS CONCERNS ABOUT CREMATION FADING
As cremation becomes more popular in the United States, fewer people are asking serious theological questions about the practice. But such indifference has not always been the norm.
"I don't think there's any doubt but that Christian tradition started off in favor of burial and against cremation on the grounds that resurrection would be easier for God to pull off," said Steven Davis, professor of philosophy and religious studies at Claremont McKenna College in Southern California.
Davis, a graduate of Princeton University's Divinity School, is one of few American theologians to have addressed this issue. He is author of a book titled "Risen Indeed: Making Sense of the Resurrection."
Although the Greeks and Romans practiced cremation prior to the time of Christ, early Christians generally viewed it as a pagan practice, according to Davis and other historians.
One of the major arguments against cremation by Christians is anticipation of a bodily resurrection at the Second Coming of Jesus. The Apostle Paul, for example, talks about a "resurrection body" in 1 Corinthians 15.
"The body that is sown is perishable, it is raised imperishable," Paul wrote. "It is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body."
Most Baptists and most evangelical scholars agree that the Bible teaches a bodily resurrection from the dead. "If there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised," Paul wrote.
From the first century until now, no one this side of heaven has had knowledge of how that bodily resurrection will take place. But early Christians seemed to think the physical body ought to be preserved as much as possible through burial, Davis noted.
"That argument gets a little dicey when you imagine that some bodies of Christians who are going to be resurrected will have been in the ground 2,000 years or more," he noted. "It doesn't seem like it's any more difficult for God to resurrect someone whose body has been in the ground 2,000 years than someone who was cremated," especially if you believe God is all-powerful.
The old assumption was "that resurrection can only happen if God can look about and find the atoms or molecules of which my body consisted and put them back together," Davis said.
Scripture doesn't necessarily teach that, but the Bible is fairly vague on the details of burial and resurrection, he noted.
Many Christians today have a strong belief in bodily resurrection without believing the physical body must be preserved to make that happen.
"A lot of contemporary people think God can resurrect Steve Davis even if God doesn't find a single atom of what once was me," Davis said. "God can take whatever is available and configure those atoms in a Steve Davis way, and it will be me.
"The bottom line is, I don't think it makes any theological difference at all whether a person is buried or cremated," said Davis, who added that he is not an advocate for cremation.
When his wife of 38 years died last year, he had her buried in a traditional way.
His choice of a traditional burial "had nothing to do with belief in the resurrection," he said, even though he believes in resurrection.
The choice of cremation over burial is simply a personal preference, according to Guy Thompson, president of Thompson's Harveson & Cole Funeral Home in Fort Worth.
Although he's not an advocate of cremation either, about 20 percent of his business is in cremations. A devout Catholic, Thompson has worked closely with Baptist ministers for 63 years.
"Christian people would not participate in cremation for a long time because it was thought to be unkind to the body," he explained. The practice was associated more often worldwide with non-Christian or pagan peoples, he added.
Those concerns are seldom expressed today, said Bob Beck, a longtime Baptist pastor who has worked with Thompson on many funerals.
"I honestly have not run into a rabid opinion about theological concerns on anyone's part in recent years," Beck said. "If there is anything, it's just a quiet question: I don't know whether I would want to do that or not. I haven't heard anybody clearly enunciate a theological objection."
Likewise, Leroy Summers, minister to older adults at Park Cities Baptist Church in Dallas, confirms he hears no theological objections to cremation.
Arguments that cremation might somehow diminish God's ability to resurrect a body are inconsistent, Summers and Beck agreed.
"Most of us cannot really imagine the greatness of God," Summers said. "What about people who have been burned in a plane crash, or during the war or have been sunk in ships? Somehow God's going to care for those. The Scripture says 'ashes to ashes ....'"
"It is utterly inconsistent that people would think that any decayed body -- however that might have decayed, naturally, in the ground or in the ocean or in a fire -- could not be resurrected by our omnipotent God," Beck added.
Carolyn Leverett was apprehensive about having her husband cremated after his death. But the Cedar Hill Baptist laywoman, who owns a funeral home in Dallas, heeded the wishes of her late husband anyway.
"He explained it to me in terms of general science, that matter can be neither made nor destroyed but you can change its form."
A dead body will deteriorate regardless of what is done to it, Leverett continued. To her husband, "dust to dust and ashes to ashes in a short time made more sense."
Cremation may be faster and appear more expedient, but family members should carefully consider their choices, advised Thompson. He believes there's psychological value in knowing exactly where a loved one is buried and being able to visit that place.
In cases where his clients choose cremation, he works to provide the most meaningful memorial service possible. He encourages families choosing cremation to have a traditional memorial service before the cremation if possible.
"I still feel like people are better off if they can say goodbye to the body," he said. "This provides confirmation that they indeed are dead."
If the body has been cremated before the service, he always places an empty chair and a small table in the place where the casket normally would be, symbolizing the person who is no longer present.
Thompson also encourages family members to have something at the service that symbolizes who the deceased was and what they will be remembered for. One family brought a wheelbarrow filled with garden tools. Another brought a bugle. Others bring photographs.
"Symbols can be very meaningful," he said.
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