NEW YORK — Sometimes the best business ideas come from a joke.

Joanie West had a conversation about what to do with her husband Clyde’s remains after he died. His reply: “I don’t care. Just put my butt in a balloon and send me up.” West, who already owned a gift and balloon shop, thought putting cremated ashes in a balloon might be a good idea. She consulted with her son, several lawyers and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which said it would not be a health hazard to do so. And soon the Eternal Ascent Society was born.

“The idea evolved from there, and as crazy as it sounds, what we do is cheaper than the average funeral and a little more creative,” West said.

Businesses like West’s are springing up across the country, offering alternatives to traditional burials. The grieving, driven by a desire to be creative and the record cost of funerals, can have ashes used in portraits, jewelry and sculptures to honor their loved ones, or even less-formal burials.

When Debra Watson was looking for a way to memorialize her father-in-law, Richard, she felt that the usual funeral services with caskets and a cemetery would not do him justice.

She called Eternal Ascent Society and found it was the perfect fit. “You have to be special to deal with people who just lost someone they love,” she said.

Eternal Ascent Society, with locations in Crystal River, Fla., Los Angeles, Cleveland and Browns Mills, N.J., will put a pet’s or human’s ashes in a 5-foot-diameter, helium-filled, biodegradable yellow, green, red or blue balloon and release the ashes to the sky at a location chosen by the family. After traveling 30,000 feet in the air, the balloon will explode and scatter the ashes. The living can see the balloon only for about two miles, or 13,000 feet.

Services range from $595 for pets to $995 for humans. The ashes, West says, scatter through the atmosphere and don’t return to Earth.

“People love their pets, but we actually get more human ashes,” West said. “I would say we send about 20 to 25 balloons in the air a year.” That included Richard Watson, whose ashes were sent up in a yellow balloon with family and friends standing nearby.

Robert Biggins, former president of the National Funeral Directors Association and the owner of Magoun-Biggins Funeral Home in Rockland, Mass., said factors such as the economy, personal preference and regional residence make a difference in deciding between burial and cremation.

“Unfortunately, death is a business and it’s a very sensitive subject for people to talk about,” said Biggins, who has been a funeral director for 35 years. “People want their ceremonies to be personal, no matter what they choose to do.”

Biggins said he recently had a client who had a Red Sox-themed funeral ceremony. “It’s not unusual at all. At the end of the day, it’s a celebration of a person’s life and how they wish to be remembered,” he said.

Victoria Bradley of Raleigh, N.C., started making cremation art several years ago. Bradley, who has been sculpting for eight years, doesn’t actually put the ashes into the sculpture but places the ashes underneath, usually in a granite veneer base. “It’s just another way to commemorate a person’s life. It’s unique and tasteful,” she says. Most sculptures start at $450 for a head; Bradley, 65, said she donates a percentage of a sculpture’s sale to a charity of the loved one’s choice.

The Cremation Society of Arizona in El Mirage, Ariz., outside of Phoenix, offers keepsakes such as necklaces in which ashes can be stored; prices are in the $150 range. Arizona is an example of how death traditions vary regionally; six of every 10 deaths result in cremation. Eight of the top 10 highest states for cremation are in the Western United States, according to the Cremation Association of North America.

Biggins says attitudes about funerals and cremation also have changed because of economics.

The cost of a funeral in North America averages between $7,000 and $10,000, whereas a cremation costs between $1,000 and $6,000, according to the NFDA. The prices fluctuate depending on the services rendered, with most of the cost for funeral going into the casket and headstone. Inflation, along with rising costs for upkeep of a funeral home business, has led to an almost 20 percent increase in cost from just five years ago.

Whether it’s a person in love with Fenway Park’s Green Monster, planning to live the afterlife at the bottom of a coral reef, or sending a balloon to the heavens, West says that the many different consumer options could make the process of choosing the right services easier.

“All we are doing is giving people a different option to help them grieve,” she says. “I am proud of that, no matter how unusual it may seem to the rest of the world.”