Category Archives: Aging Boomers
The last boomer competition is not just about how long you live. It is also about how you die. This one is a “Mine is shorter than yours”: you want a death that is painless and quick. Even here there are choices. What is “quick”? You might prefer something instantaneous, like walking down Fifth Avenue [...]
A bachelor, Hryhoriy Nestor who attributed his long life to the fact that he never married, died at 116 in the Ukraine. In accordance with his wish that there should be no crying, a hearty meal was served of his favourite dishes: warm potato and herring, and cabbage with home-made sausage. — “He didn’t find [...]
Following up on a mini-boom in newspaper obits — both the New York Sun and the Wall Street Journal have added them — a husband-and-wife team from Princeton, N.J., plans to start publishing a glossy magazine, Obit…. On its website, Obit calls itself “the hottest thing in periodicals since the golden years of Esquire and Playboy, that will leave an indelible mark on American society.”
From the Newsweek cover story on Billy Graham To everything there is a season, says the author of Ecclesiastes, and for Billy Graham this is the season of coping with the toll of time…. Yet rather than simply withdrawing into the shadows to enjoy a few richly deserved quiet years with his wife and family, Graham believes he may have been called to a last mission: to soldier on by faith, praying and pondering and sharing what he has come to see and feel and think in the twilight of his life.
Ken Dyctwald, wrote in Age Power that Boomers didn’t just eat food — they transformed the snack, restaurant and supermarket industries…. Boomers didn’t just date –they transformed sex roles and practices Boomers didn’t just go to work — they transformed the workplace It’s My Funeral and I’ll Serve Ice Cream if I Want to As members of the baby boom generation plan final services for their parents or themselves, they bring new consumer expectations and fewer attachments to churches, traditions or organ music — forcing funeral directors to be more like party planners, and inviting some party planners to test the farewell waters.
I’m one voice in a group of talented people each with a distinctive voice, experience and expertise: Connie Goldman, Jacqueline Marcell, Jed Diamond, Lisa Haneberg, Rinatte Paries, Ronni Bennett, Sharon Whiteley, Susan Anderson, Susan Mitchell, Tom Blake and Yvonne Divita…. Until I can get me on of those doohickies that signifies a new post on another blog, I’m just going to periodically round-up a group of posts and link them here in reverse chronological order.
And I have become less the funeral director and more the memorial caddy of sorts, getting the dead out of the way and the living assembled for a memorial “event” that is neither sacred nor secular but increasingly absurd – a triumph of accessories over essentials, stuff over substance, theme over theology. The genuine dead are downsized or disappeared or turned into knickknacks in a kind of funereal karaoke – bodiless obsequies where the finger food is good, the music transcendent, the talk determinedly “life affirming,” the accouterments all purposefully cheering and inclusive and where someone can be counted on to declare “closure” just before the merlot runs out.
I hope that this Congress seriously debates and considers how to provide the incapacitated with rights that insure the same due process if they have left no written directives that we accord convicted criminals…. The costs of end of life care can be extraordinary, a fact which prompted former Colorado Governor Richard Lamm to say in 1984 that “we have a duty to die” and get out of the way of younger generations.
She not only addresses what it’s really like to get older, she does so with passion and humor and sometimes with an insouciance that makes aging seem just another of life’s adventures and mysteries and not something to be feared. I love her small photo essays and I think her rule of telling a story in several sentences to illustrate photos is a wonderful way to tackle the overwhelming amount of photos we all have, choosing the best to create a personal legacy archives to leave behind as evidence of the lives we lived.
I’ve already written about creative cremains, fantasy coffins, rocket rides for remains to rest in space, green burials, dust to mulch, and in boomer remains how diamonds are forever, silk urns get through airport security, and the promessa process to turn your body into compost But I never knew about harleycaskets where you can choose the custom casket built for bikers with a velvet interior and custom “highway to heaven panel and decals” Or the DNA Genome Vault to preserve your genetic strands inside a miniature pyramid with a 3-D memorial bust on the top. Golfers – and some golf widows – should know that cremated remains can be poured down one of two putting-green holes that lead into two large ossuraries or containers, underneath the putting green for eternity on the greens at Catawba Memorial Park in North Carolina You can become one with nature again, buried in Mother Earth, naked and in the fetal position, all tight and cozy in a biodegradable pod from capsulamundi with a tree planted as your marker.
