Rodney Frazier went out with a bang.
His cremated ashes exploded into the Missouri sky, showering down as part of a fireworks display. It was the sort of quirky send-off that the State College, Pa., real estate investor would have loved.
Frazier — who died from a pulmonary embolism last year at 54 — had told his widow, DrueAnne Schreyer, that he wanted his ashes scattered over the Current River in Missouri. “Then we found that it’s a protected waterway,” says Schreyer. “So this would not be legal.”
Instead, Schreyer stumbled across Greenlawn Funeral Home in Springfield, Mo., which offers the fireworks funeral. At a cost of $4,000, Frazier’s remains were stuffed into explosives. Schreyer made a weekend of it, including a picnic — former teammates from Frazier’s high school football team handled the grilling — and tubing on the Current River.
Traditional funerals are a dying trend. Cremation has risen in popularity in New York state from 20 percent of deaths in 1999 to 39 percent in 2012; nationwide, 43.5 percent of Americans chose cremation in 2013. Plus, it allows families to be more creative when memorializing a loved one.
According to Amy Cunningham, funeral director at Fitting Tribute Funeral Services in Brooklyn, “People are doing funerals that actually have to do with the deceased.”
The wife of Richard “Space” Duane, a former NASA engineer, gave him in death what he dreamed about in life. Jeannine Duane, 84, based in Long Valley, NJ, says he always wanted to go up in the rockets that he programmed. In 2007, 11 years after Richard died at age 68, Jeannine discovered a company called Celestis that takes cremated remains into space. “I knew it was the right thing to do,” she says.
Jeannine had Richard’s body — which was previously embalmed — cremated and prepared for blastoff. “Just looking up in the sky, sometimes, has a real resonance for me,” Jeannine says of the experience, which cost $1,295. Five years later, she sent up more of Richard’s remains in a Celestis rocket that, for $4,995, orbited Earth before burning up upon re-entering the atmosphere.
If space is the place for a NASA man, then it made sense for George Grauvogel to sleep with the fishes. Before dying from sepsis in 2015 at age 70, the avid angler told his wife, Margaret, 75, that he wanted a Viking funeral. But putting a body on a boat, setting it aflame and pushing it out to sea is impractical — and illegal.
So Margaret found the next best thing: using his cremated remains to create an oceanic reef. Working with a company called Eternal Reefs, she and her family brought a bag of George’s ashes to Ocean City, NJ, where they were mixed with a concrete reef for $4,000. The family went out on a boat, dropped the reef into the ocean and watched it sink. “We talked, we laughed, it was the best three days of my life — and not at all gloomy like I feared it might be,” says Margaret.
For these families, finding unique ways to dispose of a loved one’s remains helps them heal, too.
“There is something appealing about putting your loved ones in places where they want to be,” says M. Katherine Shear, MD, director of the Center for Complicated Grief at the Columbia University School of Social Work. “It reflects a specific value, and that usually makes us feel good.”
Lily Maslanka, 21 and living in Brooklyn, opted for a final destination close to her heart. Before her mother, Halina, passed away from cancer at age 59, she cut off a lock of her hair (Halina was later cremated). Working with Greenpoint-based jeweler Maggie Cross, Maslanka had the hair placed into a pendant at a cost of “around $400.”
“I wear it over my heart every day,” says Maslanka. “The only time I didn’t have it on was when I attended a Black Sabbath concert. I didn’t want it to get messed up — plus she was more of a David Bowie person.”
Those who want a permanent reminder can opt to memorialize loved ones with ash-filled tattoos.
After Russell Zellner died at age 67 from Parkinson’s disease, his wife, Denise, 66, and Russell’s two daughters all got ash/ink tributes, at a cost of $100 to $280 each, at Daredevil Tattoo in Chinatown.
“This was a way of keeping him with me,” says Long Island-based Denise.
The process, she adds, “settled something in me. I catch the tattoo every now and then in the mirror, and it just makes me feel better.”
