What Cremation's Surge In Popularity Says About Our Evolving Views On Death
1A
NPR
4.3 • 4.5K Ratings
🗓️ 12 May 2022
⏱️ 34 minutes
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Summary
What's behind this surge? And what does it suggest about the way our cultural values have shifted?
For families scattered across multiple states, there often seems little point in investing the effort and expense to bury a loved one in a cemetery no one will visit. Like pet food and leisure footwear, cremation is now available through direct-to-consumer websites such as Solace and Tulip.
We talk with deathcare experts about the rise of cremation.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is fresh to me, my husband died suddenly on March the 7th of this year. |
| 0:12.0 | We chose cremation because he didn't like the idea of being laid out and he didn't like |
| 0:17.2 | the spectacle of that. |
| 0:18.6 | Her children are spread across many different states and one particular burial spot is |
| 0:24.1 | hard for people to come and remember her. |
| 0:27.4 | We chose cremation because it just fit with her no nonsense personality and her practical |
| 0:34.9 | choice of organ donation. |
| 0:36.8 | We held the ashes of my father who passed away first until my mother died. |
| 0:41.6 | Then we combined their ashes and distributed them to the wind together. |
| 0:45.9 | Over the last eight years, friends, family members and fellow writers have taken little |
| 0:51.3 | bits of my mother's ashes and taken her all over the world. |
| 0:55.6 | After having them cremated, I had them placed in biodegradable urns and interred right |
| 1:01.8 | next to each other with the thought that eventually the urns would break down and they both |
| 1:06.7 | would absorb into the earth and comingle their ashes in that way. |
| 1:11.4 | Grateful for those messages. |
| 1:13.0 | As the COVID-19 pandemic continues, many of us are reflecting on the experience of being |
| 1:17.1 | surrounded by death for the last two years. |
| 1:19.9 | It's brought up questions about how and when we die and also what happens to our bodies |
| 1:24.2 | after we do. |
| 1:25.9 | 56% of Americans who died in 2020 were cremated, according to the cremation association |
| 1:30.6 | of North America. |
| 1:31.6 | That's more than twice the rate from two decades ago. |
... |
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