Andy Tullis / The BulletinMike McNeill, funeral director at Niswonger-Reynolds, stands in a display room filled with items to help people personalize their funeral service.

Funeral director Mike McNeill walks into a room at downtown Bend’s Niswonger-Reynolds funeral home and pulls from a shelf a dark green urn engraved with a yellow University of Oregon logo.

It’s one of several items — others include a tombstone featuring a picture of someone with a motorcycle standing before an open stretch of highway, a gray tombstone that has a full-color picture of a red rose and an elaborate photo display that can be stashed inside a coffin lid — that he said can be personalized to reflect some aspect of a deceased person’s life.

“We just throw different things out there and let the family come up with what they want,” said McNeill, who’s been working in the funeral planning business for 32 years. “It’s not for everybody, but at least it’s available.”

McNeill said these items play a critical role when someone wants to have a celebration of life — a newer type of funeral service that focuses on remembering the happy experiences shared with the deceased instead of mourning — because they spark memories, give people something to talk about and lighten the mood.

According to a recent survey, this type of service has taken hold across the country over the past few years and an increasing number of Americans would rather be remembered with a celebration of life or no funeral at all than a traditional memorial service that features a formal presentation of the body in a casket, a church service and a burial.

But while they may be outnumbered — particularly in states such as Oregon and Washington, where almost three-fourths of the dead are cremated — proponents of the more traditional burial services say there is still a place for their way of saying goodbye and that it may, in fact, be healthier for everyone who is involved.

“People who hold a public grieving do much better in terms of healing,” said Brad Baird, the owner of Baird Funeral Home in Bend. “There’s just something about a casketed burial service that gives people a sense of completeness.”

The remembrance

During the fall of 2010, the funeral planning website FuneralWise.com asked 1,643 of its users questions about the type of funeral they wanted for themselves.

It found 48 percent of respondents said they would like to have a celebration of life, while 31 percent — a number that jumped to 37 percent if the pool was limited to people 75 or older — said they did not want to have a funeral at all. Eleven percent said they wanted a traditional memorial service.

An informal review of obituaries and death notices published in The Bulletin between Sept. 9 and Sept. 16 suggests that Central Oregon may be a little bit more balanced when it comes to these types of remembrance ceremonies, with 10 of 28 services mentioning a celebration of life or private service and 12 including details about services planned for a church or other venue. Eight of the 28 announcements said the family was respecting the loved one’s choice not to have a funeral service.

One of these obituaries was written by a family that said anyone wanting to remember their patriarch, an 87-year-old World War II veteran, should make a donation to Partners in Care hospice or “just have a beer to salute him.”

Another obituary told the story of a 75-year-old cross-country skier whose family planned to remember her by “(spreading) her ashes on the mountains she loved so much during the first snowfall.”

McNeill, with Niswonger-Reynolds, said he’s been seeing more and more people choose nontraditional locations — a covered shelter at Shevlin Park, a beach or their personal homes — for the site of their celebration of life or memorial service.

“With cremation, you have so many options,” said Creed Lute, a funeral director for Autumn Funerals who has seen people hold their services at local grange halls, the Bend Senior Center and just about every other venue imaginable.

Lute said his father-in-law’s family chose to remember his loss by holding a celebration of life during the Fourth of July barbecue they hosted at their house.

The timing

But what made this ceremony stand out even more, he said, was the fact the father-in-law’s family didn’t hold their remembrance ceremony until several months after he died, because members were scattered across the country and it took that long to get everyone together in the same place.

“People don’t grieve like they used to,” Lute said, explaining he has a special storage locker at his facility where he can keep a person’s ashes until the family is ready to say goodbye.

But Baird stresses that the trend toward having a celebration of life — particularly one that can be delayed until a family is able to come together on their own time — isn’t necessarily a good thing.

“There’s nothing like a traditional casketed burial service to bring a family together,” he said, explaining that while it may force a family to drop what they are doing and gather in the same place, it also forces them to deal with their grief.

Baird and other funeral directors said that one of the advantages of a traditional service is that they force people to face their loss, while a ceremony that is focused on remembering the happier times from a person’s life may only delay this process until later, when his or her loved ones are alone and unable to get the support they may have when they come together.

He also stressed that the more formal memorial services can be done regardless of whether a person’s body is placed in a casket and buried or cremated, a process that can help people cut their funeral costs in half (see “Cost of a funeral”).

“(The traditional service) has such a good feeling,” he said, adding that families who are forced to mourn their loss immediately after it happens have an easier time dealing it with it than those who don’t. “Then when it’s all over everyone can go back to their lives.”

— Reporter: 541-617-7816, mmclean@bendbulletin.com