Photographs by Adam Scott Williams
“You can’t spell ‘funeral’ without ‘f-u-n.’”
I first heard this aphorism 20 years ago, at a meeting of funeral directors. Followed by an asymmetrical grin, it was offered as evidence that even a guy in a grim vocation has a sense of humor, however gallows it might be. I was called to these meetings because I was working my way through the conservatory of music as an obituary writer for the Kansas City Star and so was made to represent the paper to this eccentric group.
I’m reminded of this as I sit in Brent Cassity’s Clayton office, headquarters of Forever Funeral Homes and Cemeteries. During the course of a 90-minute interview on death, dying, cemeteries and funerals in St. Louis, the word “fun” comes up unusually often, as in, “it’s fun to own a cemetery,” “the fun thing about what we do,” and so on.
“Fun” could be the new mourning, because Brent and his equally movie-starrish, effervescent younger brother, Tyler, are loosening up the stoic business. They have been featured in everything from The New Yorker to Variety.
“Funeral directors didn’t really like us,” Brent says, shrugging off their unusual beginnings. “We weren’t second- or third-generation owners. We like being rebels.” He laughs. “Why be like everyone else?”
I See Dead People
The seed of Forever, which has two properties in St. Louis, one in Kansas City and two in California, was planted in the basement of the Cassitys’ Chesterfield home in 1986. Tyler, then 15 years old, was listening to old cassettes when he suddenly heard the voice of his deceased grandmother.
“We had accidentally recorded Mom and our grandmother talking in the kitchen—just gossiping,” Brent says, “and we started talking about how amazing this was. When a famous person dies, it’s all over TV … but they aren’t more important than your grandma. Could we create more than a picture for everyone?”
Inspired to document the eventual dead, the brothers started filming and editing what they came to call LifeStories. One videotape was of a doctor who would die of a sudden heart attack in 1988. “We asked if we could put a TV in the funeral home and play this tribute, and they were very much against it, because it wasn’t ‘traditional,’” Brent says. The family insisted, and the funeral home relented. He recalls: “It was a wonderful thing. It gave people something to talk about. A lot of people don’t know what to do at funerals. I’m a funeral director, and I still don’t know what to say.”
Now the brothers were convinced that this was a future business. “We thought we were onto something big,” Brent says. They knew something of the death industry; their father had made a success of the insurance side of the funeral business. So they approached funeral homes with their idea.
They were turned down by everybody—for years.
Opportunity knocks, sure, but sometimes it cops a plea. The brothers’ dad, Doug Cassity, was privy to the precarious position of a certain funeral director in southwest Missouri. Basically the director had illegally dipped into the pre-trust insurance fund. Dad paid up the discrepancy, the funeral director sneaked out under cover of darkness and the twentysomething duo found themselves the owners of a rundown funeral home in Springfield. They offered LifeStories as a value-added service, and business increased by 300 percent in two years. “It was unusual,” Brent says. “Funeral homes are like churches—people don’t switch easily.” Over the next seven years, the brothers would own nine funeral homes and three cemeteries. (They’ve since sold some off, including the “starter home” in Springfield.)
“You have to look at it by generations,” Brent says of their approach. “The baby boomers are different than the World War II generation. They’ve done things differently at every step of their lives. Now they are changing the way death is handled.”
Forever offers more services to the family, including hotel arrangements, airfare discounts, even catering. Why go back to your house with all these people? Who really has time to make that tuna casserole? At Forever, there’s a house standing in as your home, so you can have the funeral, bury Aunt Mavis and walk over to the house, all without getting in your car. (The only downside? It denies the deceased something we all look forward to: running those red lights.)
Celebrate Good Times, Come On
Brent meets me at Forever Oak Hill in Kirkwood and proudly shows off the mausoleum, noting that it is more like a hotel lobby than anything else. “Tyler and I always found traditional mausoleums creepy,” he admits.
There’s a computer in the airy, well-lit mausoleum, and he takes me to a LifeStory. Specifically, he takes me to the LifeStory of his grandfather Billy Joe. The charming character, wearing a cowboy hat, is cracking wise, and Brent lingers there a long time, smiling, showing off not the technology but the visit with his grandfather.
In the funeral rooms, my eye is drawn to the sizable TVs. Brent tells of one man who was crazy about football: His wake was held on a Sunday, with the game on TV; afterward, friends and family walked up the hill and held a barbecue at the house on the property. “It was fun,” says Brent.
OK. But where could this be leading us? Will we see green turf brought in? Goalposts set up, with the deceased laid out in the end zone? Funeral personnel dressed in referee outfits?
That’s exactly what Debora Kellom did for a man “who loved the Rams more than the Rams.” Wade Funeral Home, now in North St. Louis, was founded in 1915. In 1998, funeral-home conglomerate Perpetua bought it, and Kellom was hired to direct operations. Gracious, funny, articulate—she, too, brings a “why not?” attitude to the business.
Wade, like the Cassitys, has been testing the outer limits of the final farewell for years, garnering national media attention for its efforts. Wade creates sets. There’s “Big Mama’s Kitchen,” where the deceased is laid out in a retro kitchen; the sportsman’s room, with a basketball hoop over the casket; the large room dressed up as a typical living room, complete with piano; and, finally, the simple traditional viewing room that … well, seems kind of barren and cold once you’ve seen the others. (Kellom purposely gives a guest the tour in this order—she’s not pushy, but she wants to make her point.)
She, too, speaks of boomers: “It’s now about the experience. If you can experience that person’s life, that person’s passion, then people have something to talk about.” Is her approach more acceptable in the African-American community than in white suburbs? Absolutely not, she insists.
“The focus groups that pointed to new directions had a small percentage of African Americans,” she says. “This was risk-taking. I could lose business. And when we first started working on ideas like Mama’s Kitchen, people thought we had lost our minds—but I was so excited to provide an opportunity to celebrate the life of the loved one. I knew my competitors wouldn’t do it.”
The approach worked. So why hasn’t it been copied?
“I thought by now it would be,” Kellom admits. “There are small things that are increasingly common, like video tributes. Please! We’ve been doing that forever.
“I think we’re still afraid of it,” she sighs. “The funeral industry is extremely touchy. A lot of directors are afraid to venture out, and older funeral directors will not change.”
They see the modern attitude as disrespectful—is it? “This has nothing to do with minimizing someone’s death,” Kellom insists. “When we say ‘celebrate,’ some people think it’s demeaning, but what we found is that when you bring that fishing pole, that favorite hat, have their favorite sport on TV, it actually starts the healing process.”
Standing in Big Mama’s Kitchen, Kellom recalls a woman who swore that no one would get her pound-cake recipe until she died. She was laid out with her much-admired secret on the chalkboard above the faux sink. “There were all these women scribbling it down,” Kellom says, pantomiming animatedly. “They went away from the memorial with something tangible.”
When will we see themed rooms of funeral homes in, say, South County? Kellom thinks for a moment. Ten years? No, 15. Then she’s got it: “When the Generation X-ers are making arrangements for the baby boomers.”
Some Things Never Change
The great old St. Louis names—Ziegenhein, Baue, Lupton, Bopp, Kriegshauser, Hoffmeister—continue mostly as they always have. Few have even bothered to launch websites. Among the respected names is Kutis—and when you call and ask for Tom Kutis, you have to specify “III” or “IV.” All of Kutis III’s children—three daughters and Tom IV—work with him.
“Funerals aren’t really changing,” says Kutis III, reflecting on his 50-plus years in the business. “It’s still pretty much the same as it has always been.” Asked whether he gets any unusual requests, he says yes: “Sometimes people want a bagpipe. Every time I think we’ve seen everything, we haven’t.”
Schrader is the oldest family-owned funeral home in St. Louis, dating back to 1868. Funeral director Dan Heaman says that he sees a move toward personalization of services. “People today feel less bound by constraints about what the family has done and are more about the here and now. As long as it’s legal, moral and ethical, we’ll try to make it happen for the family. We did get a request once where the deceased was a nudist and wanted to be laid out in the nude. We weren’t willing to do that.”
Grief counselor Patti Bitter sees “a cultural shift to positivity and celebration, focusing on the life rather than the death. We’re seeing more people who want to celebrate the person’s life as part of saying goodbye.”
Not everyone is up for the good time, though. Bitter says that people who didn’t have a positive relationship with the deceased are less likely to want to “celebrate.” Others simply need the traditional somber event.
“I’ve heard of people feeling guilty for laughing and having a good time at a wake,” she adds, “but that’s part of the tapestry of family life.”
Their Final Close-Up
It’s a beautiful Los Angeles day, and I’m getting a tour from Samantha Tibbs of Hollywood Forever Cemetery. Clues to the future are buried here, in the domain of Tyler Cassity. And Tibbs—spunky, slightly self-conscious—is Tyler’s right hand.
She tells the story of how a St. Louis company came to own one of the most famous cemeteries in the world, where such notables as Rudolph Valentino, Bugsy Siegel, Cecil B. DeMille and John Huston are pushing up the proverbial daisies. The brothers were in L.A. in 1998, working on licensing their memorial software to 200 cemeteries in the area. It was another deal that didn’t pan out, but on the way to the airport, they decided to drop by this cemetery. The place was falling apart, its streets dotted with potholes. “People were digging up family members to bury them elsewhere,” Tibbs says.
Tyler told Brent to catch the plane back to St. Louis; he’d follow later. “But he never came back,” says Brent with a laugh. In what had to seem like an odd business decision, they bought the cemetery for $375,000.
“It was horribly neglected, but it was beautiful,” Tyler tells me later. “The founders of Hollywood were being treated horribly.” A lot of time, heart and money (more than $7 million, as reported in Variety) turned the place around, and it blossomed into a tourist attraction. It’s also a viable cemetery again—and, as at any trendy L.A. spot, people are dying to get in.
Tyler wasn’t able to give the tour himself because he was in Northern California, working on his latest passion: the “green” cemetery. The Cassitys have also bought Fernwood, another formerly rundown cemetery, in Marin County. In what will shake the financial foundation of the $15 billion-a-year funeral business, the Cassitys envision a time when there is no embalmer, no metal casket and no concrete burial vault. The idea is so old, it’s new: Wrap that body in a shroud or a natural wood coffin and plant it. No tombstone is needed, just a rock or a tree.
An environmentalist, Tyler sees a time when it’s that simple, when those visiting the grave could whip out a BlackBerry and download LifeStories, virtual memories and all of the deceased’s data. But he doesn’t see it happening in St. Louis anytime soon.
“St. Louis has a lot of traditions,” he says. “In California, we’re dealing with a different attitude; people don’t want to waste space.” He quotes an AARP poll conducted a year ago: Sixty percent of respondents said that they would prefer a natural burial—no chemicals, just a return to the land. “I think we’re on the right path,” he says softly.
Irony to Die For
It’s two weeks after my L.A. visit, and I’m back in St. Louis. It’s a cold, rainy day, and death is with me again. I’m in a chapel. It’s a funeral. And, yes, that’s me playing jazz piano.
Former St. Louis congressman Jack Buechner has lost his wife, Nancy, to cancer. A memorial service is being held here after her cremation and interment in Washington, D.C. “They want it to be upbeat, so I suggested you,” Sally, sister of the lead singer in my jazz quartet, tells me. “They want it to be a celebration of her life. They want people to wear bright colors. They want Frank Sinatra music.”
I’m told to play swing music before the ceremony, then doodle bits of music while people share memories of the deceased, then end big with “Fly Me to the Moon.” I’m uncomfortable with this, but I ease into a simple, slower version of “Autumn Leaves,” followed by “How High the Moon.” (I’ve ruled out “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore.”)
People go to the podium and tell warm stories. I become increasingly upbeat in my music selection, and the songs’ tempos quicken. The widower rises to speak. Now, at this point I know Nancy Buechner as well as I can know someone I never got to meet. I get that she would dig this. This guy? He’s a man’s man, and he cracks a few times, and you get that “I promised myself I wouldn’t do it” vibe. I tear up. I laugh. I’m ready to launch into “Fly Me to the Moon” right now—but the priest enters. We do prayers. Foiled! People stand. Even I stand. Tradition versus wishes, the respect for the dead versus the swingin’ needs of the grieving. I lose my nerve, but just a little. I take the “Fly Me” chord progression and give it a classical treatment … and once people are milling, 16 bars later, I swing it.
Sally grabs Jack Buechner and dances a bit to the music. I end on a big fat chord. He comes up to thank me. Maybe it’s from habit, maybe it’s the truth, but I hear myself say: “It was fun.”
