The Afterlife Is Getting a Makeover

Opinion

In my family, death is never really far away. I don’t mean this in a ma­cabre, Edgar Allan Poe sort of way, or because any of us has been afflicted with some terrible illness. I mean this because my retired parents take a lot of vacations, and before each one, they send an email detailing everything my sister and I need to know should their plane go down or their cruise ship be stormed by pirates. “Hi, girls,” these emails always begin, a benign greeting before the morbidity kicks in. “We leave tomorrow. Nothing is going to happen, but in case it does …”

We’ve gotten dozens of these emails over the years, so my sister and I have always felt more or less prepared if, God forbid, our parents never returned from Greece or Hungary or Italy. We know the codes to the safes, the nooks where Mom has stuffed her jewelry, the person in charge of executing their wills. We even know the funeral playlist. (“On Eagle’s Wings,” obviously; we are Catholic.) Everything, it always seemed to us, has been covered.

So you can imagine our surprise when a few months ago, Mom pointed out a blue and white delft jar on her mantel. “That’s where I want my ashes to go,” she said blithely, as if it were a reminder. But this was breaking news: We’d always assumed Mom and Dad would be buried just like their parents were — and just like their parents’ parents were — tucked into a tasteful casket, solemnly lowered into a family plot somewhere. There would be a priest, of course. Maybe a few bagpipe players. But no, Mom went on to explain: She has seven of these delft jars — blue and white earthenware vessels, each one bearing the name of a place she’s lived or visited often, like Bucks County, Ocean City, New England, Annapolis — so we could choose our favorites and divide her up among them, assembly-line style.

“I’m pretty small, though, so I’m not sure how much you’re going to get,” she said.

My sister and I were speechless. Seven delft jars? Ashes? Since when? Until this point, we had had no idea that our mother had ever considered cremation.

Neither, for that matter, had our father. In spite of all of their logistical emails, our parents hadn’t quite nailed down their postmortem plans when it came to themselves. We pressed Dad on the issue, and he informed us that he, too, wants to be cremated, mostly because he doesn’t want to waste money on a casket. But he thinks he’d like his urn to be buried in a cemetery along the Delaware River, next to a recreational park complex where my son, Quinn, plays soccer and baseball.

“That way I’ll have a nice view of the water, and it’s close to the fields, so I can watch Quinn’s games,” he explained.

Mom, not wanting to be outdone in the afterlife, piped up. “Well, I want to watch his games too! Maybe I do want to be buried.”

Dad floated another idea: “You could also sprinkle some of my ashes at the golf course. Or make me into a golf ball and hit me into the water at the 16th hole so I can hang out with all the balls my friends hit in there.” He chuckled at this. My sister and I did not.

A few days later, while bored one night, I looked up Dad’s golf ball idea, to confirm that it wasn’t a real thing. And guess what? Not only is it possible to turn yourself into a golf ball (though it’s meant to be a keepsake, rather than used on an actual green), but there are other options, too. We can put Dad into a full-size urn that looks like a golf ball, inscribed with “Fairway to Heaven.” (The site I visit, Armored Angel, notes that “color possibilities are endless upon request.” They sell for $189.99 on Amazon.) We can infuse him into a clear, solid glass golf ball, or we can go crazy and put some of his ashes into golf ball markers.

It doesn’t stop there — not with golf, and not with my folks. When I casually poll my friends, I learn that one pal’s dad wants his ashes thrown off the back of a cruise ship in the Caribbean. Another had his mom declare that she wanted to be divided between two empty red wine bottles, one for him and one for his brother. (“Gross,” he says. “We talked her out of it, but it took a while.”) My friend Ashley’s husband, whose death is not remotely imminent, recently announced to his family that he would like to be planted as a tree.

“I’m like, what the hell? You drive a big truck. You don’t have a problem with fracking. But you want to be eco-friendly when you’re dead?” she says.

Then there’s my friend Suzanne, who wants half of her ashes sprinkled along the beach in LBI and half kept in a jar in the kitchen so that she’s always around for dinner. There’s Leah, who wants her ashes to be mixed with those of her Chihuahua and made into a diamond. (Yes, this too is a thing you can do.) And there’s Danielle, who isn’t sure exactly what she wants but knows it’s definitely not a traditional burial. Her reason is simple: “I’m too special to be stuck in one place.”

This is an increasingly common sentiment. Last year, nearly 64 percent of Americans chose burning over burial, which is double the rate it was 20 years ago. (Many local churches have been gearing up for this shift, adding scattering gardens and structures for storing urns, called columbaria. The Archdiocese of Philadelphia opened its first cremation-only building in Delco last year, at Sts. Peter and Paul Cemetery, with more than 1,000 niches for urns.) By 2045, cremations are expected to top 80 percent. That’s a lot of ashes.

Accordingly, because this is America, an entire industry has risen, ­phoenix-like, to deal with them all. And so the world of death is now our oyster. (Literally: A company called Cremation Creations can seal a tiny bit of your ashes into a hollowed-out freshwater pearl.) We can also be made into a paperweight, or a marble, or a suncatcher. We can be shot into space or planted as a tree. (“I do not want to be a tree,” Mom says. “Way too liberal.”) We can be blended into a tattoo or printed onto a vinyl record or turned into pencils! In short: We’re not only living in a world that can be tailored to our exact preferences, customized for our comfort.

We’re dying in it too.

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So, yes, that you can be a pearl after you shuffle off this mortal coil might feel like humanity has jumped the shark — but if you think about it, it’s really just the latest chapter in man’s eternal quest for some sort of immortality. Ancient Egyptians mummified bodies and built monumental, elaborate tombs. The Vikings ferried their VIPs into the afterlife in treasure-laden ships that were either buried or sent out to sea. Mourners in the Victorian era braided locks of the deceased’s hair into intricate pieces of jewelry. And in 1998, two guys from Sarasota, Florida, founded Eternal Reefs — a concept wherein cremains (cremated remains) are incorporated into artificial “reef balls.” These hollow domed structures, made out of special marine-grade concrete, mimic real reefs and create new habitats for sea life. (Yes, this is legal; I checked.)

“Now doesn’t that seem like a fun place to be?” says a woman I’ll call Judy. (She prefers to remain anonymous so as not to publicly proclaim her unconventional burial plans.) Judy is 74 and lives in Bucks County. She also has a home in Ocean City, and this is where she first heard of the whole death-reef thing. Eternal Reefs offers locations in a handful of spots off the East Coast, including one near her place at the Shore. (What luck!) Judy loves swimming, snorkeling, and the sea, and thus was delighted at the notion that her remains could be surrounded by swirling fish and other funky deep-sea organisms.

“The idea of being buried in the ground with bugs is creepy,” she says. Besides, there’s nowhere else she ­really needs to be, no one she needs to keep company. Her husband, who died in 2024, is buried in Haym Salomon Memorial Park in Malvern, next to his brother. (For the record, his brother is only buried there because there wasn’t any more room in the family plot in West Philly.) Judy’s parents are buried separately too — her mom died at 48 and was laid to rest in her hometown in Michigan, close to her parents; Judy’s dad was buried in the graveyard of his family’s farm in Illinois, four generations tucked beside one another in the earth. Judy feels no particular pull toward any of them when it comes to her forever resting place, though she would like a few of her ashes sprinkled over her husband’s grave before she’s shuttled down to the Sunshine State to be turned into a reef.

Folks are thinking about death differently now. The act of dying seems less shrouded in mystery and reflexive doom and gloom.”

As it happens, these types of generational plots are dwindling: We all simply move around too much for them to make sense anymore. (As my colleague Sandy Hingston once wrote in a story about the changing burial industry: “Eternity in the same place is becoming a tough sell.”) Plus, traditional burials are expensive — the average cost hovers somewhere between $8,000 and $9,000, not including the cost of the plot and headstone — and also bad for the environment. (Toxic chemicals used for embalming can seep into the soil, metal caskets and their encasing concrete vaults never break down, and wood coffins contribute mightily to deforestation.)

But migration, money, and eco-mindfulness aren’t the only factors driving the shift from graveyards to golf balls. I think it’s also that folks are thinking about death differently now. The act of dying seems less shrouded in mystery and reflexive doom and gloom. To wit: We have DeathTok, a corner of TikTok where morticians, hospice workers, and funeral directors post (mostly funny) videos about their jobs. We have WeCroak, an app designed to help users live in the moment by reminding them five times a day that they’re eventually going to die. We have end-of-life doulas, who aim to holistically and spiritually guide us more comfortably into the great beyond. (Membership in the National End-of-Life Doula Alliance grew from 250 in 2019 to more than 1,500 in 2024.)

Lansdale’s Kathryn Rivard and Elizabeth Conarroe, who in 2022 co-founded Tempus Metals, which makes custom memorial and cremation jewelry, have their own theory about this shift: COVID forced us, en masse, to confront our mortality, they say. We couldn’t look away.

“So many deaths happened at once. People were all experiencing loss and grief and mourning at the same time, and it became something we talked about more openly,” Conarroe says. “Death comes for all of us,” she adds, sagely. “And it’s nice that the younger generations are saying, let’s figure out a way to make this positive and not necessarily this horrible, sad thing that we don’t talk about.”

Patricia Quigley, the director of Laurel Hill Funeral Home in Bala Cynwyd, has a name for this: death positivity. Her funeral home sits on Philly’s most famous resting ground, Laurel Hill, a 190-year-old historic property that spans two cemeteries, a sculpture garden, and an arboretum. She does a lot of death-positive programming here, including “death cafes,” in which a group of people come together to informally discuss dying and mortality. (They had a comedian at the last one who — pardon the pun — killed it.) This month, you can visit the cemeteries for a yoga class or a concert (the Divine Hands); next month, there’s a virtual meeting of Laurel Hill’s book club, the Boneyard Bookworms, and in August they’re hosting their 18th annual classic hearse show.

A little more ease and humor around death might account for some of the cremains-related creativity we’re seeing, but this isn’t a story about death. Not really. It’s a story about living on, about immortality and how we’re seeing, shaping, and securing it today. In an era when individualism is so often prized above shared experiences — when everything from your playlists to your shopping experiences to your media feed is crafted especially for you — a basic urn or box buried beneath a sea of similar marble slabs just doesn’t cut it. Why confine yourself to a coffin when you can live on as the singularly unique, special human you are? As a golf ball, or a necklace, or a home for fish off the coast of Ocean City, so a daughter can stand on the sand of the beach her mother loved, the beach they went to together, and take comfort in the fact that her mother is out there, close to her.

Or maybe not.

“They’re starting to do reefs off of Key West,” Judy says. “And I’m a huge Jimmy Buffett fan.”

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As I write this, it occurs to me that I haven’t given any thought to what I want to leave behind of myself. I like my friend Leah’s idea of being made into a loose diamond (everyone who knows me will tell you I’m a passionate accessorizer), but my nine-year-old son loses track of his Pokémon water bottle daily, so I fear I’d be left languishing for eternity in the dark recesses of a couch or closet. I’m scared of the deep ocean, so a reef is off the table too.

There is a towpath, though, that unspools itself like a ribbon along the Delaware Canal. It’s a historic crushed-stone trail that dips under old wooden bridges and winds through shady wreaths of trees. I’ve been running a stretch of this path for more than 20 years; it gives me peace. I think I might like some of my ashes sprinkled there, maybe with my own bench so people could sit and find peace too.

Of course, I know, intellectually, that I won’t be able to find or feel anything, peace or otherwise, when I’m dead. What happens to my ashes is really no business of mine. I understand this; I think we all do. Our need to make something of each other, something that lasts and lives on — on a mantel or around your neck or in the sea — is a part of how we cope with loss. It’s how we make sense of it, how we find solace in it.

It is impossible to encapsulate someone’s soul in a material way. A body is the closest thing we have. And so we’re making it into something beautiful, or at least into something meaningful, because now, in this age, we can.”

I’ve only seen one person die, my mother-in-law, and the hardest part wasn’t watching the cragged peaks of her heartbeat smooth to flat land on the machine to which she was tethered. It was watching her essence, the most important part of her, slip away. The shift was nearly imperceptible, but it was there: One second my mother-in-law was a person; the very next, she was a body.

But it is impossible to encapsulate someone’s soul in a material way. A body is the closest thing we have. And so we’re making it into something beautiful, or at least into something meaningful, because now, in this age, we can.

My mother-in-law, Christine Patricia Goulet — beloved wife and mother, March 17th, 1952, to October 26, 2015 — is buried in a cemetery in Washington Crossing. She was embalmed, and dressed in a beautiful outfit and pearls. We made sure her lipstick looked good and held her hands and kissed her cheek before closing the lid of the casket. My father-in-law visits her often; he has already bought the plot beside her. But my husband and I never go. It’s too sad, too hard, too overwhelming. I’ve thought more than once that it would be nice to have some of her ashes so I could keep her close. She, too, was a passionate accessorizer; there’s a beautiful gold ring on the Tempus Metals website, emerald-shaped, with a raised star that’s dotted with a diamond and set against a backdrop of enamel mixed with a tiny bit of ashes. Rivard and ­Conarroe have made hundreds of pieces like this since they opened in 2022, for people all over the world. They cry every time.

The company makes other things, too, like pendants and monogrammed memorial rings, to honor both people and pets. They also have a collection of gold bands inscribed with “memento mori,” a Latin phrase that loosely translates to “remember that you must die.” This sort of memento mori jewelry dates all the way back to the 16th century — proof that humans have always needed to be reminded of dying so that we would remember to live.

“You can see the ashes in the enamel, all the flecks and specks,” says Rivard of the particular ring I like; this is one of the reasons she and Conarroe cry when they make their jewelry pieces. “We like this process better than a vessel where it’s all hidden.” I do too. I wonder if Mom or Dad would mind my spooning a teaspoon out of their delft jars and golf balls so I can get a ring made. You know, when the time comes. For all of Mom’s opinions — on reefs (“Sharks!”), wind chimes (“Random”), and glass art (“Tacky”) — I don’t think she’d really care. All my parents really want, all any of us wants in the end, is simply to be remembered well and fondly and often. For our personalities. For our passions. And sure, Dad, for our golf swings.

Published as “You Want to Spend Eternity Where?” in the June 2026 issue of Philadelphia magazine.