Rebranding Deathcare for the 21st Century — How Eastern ideas can help us overcome Western prejudices against death

[This presentation was given at Amherst College, in May, 2024.]

Hi, I’m J.G. Sandom, class of ‘79E.

“E” because I took a semester off and worked on a freighter that sailed to Namibia, South Africa and Mozambique, a trip that became the inspiration for my honors thesis here at Amherst, and eventually my debut novel, The Blue Men.

Some of you may know me from my novels; I’ve written a dozen of them so far, with a couple becoming international bestsellers and one optioned by Warner Brothers. Some of you may know me because I started the first digital advertising agency in the business, Einstein and Sandom Interactive, in 1984, creating the first digital ads online ever produced, which in turn helped monetize the Net we see today. (Please don’t blame me for your digital addictions).

But I’m not here to talk about writing or digital advertising, although over the next thirty minutes or so, we will be undergoing a rebranding exercise of sorts, hopefully engendering a new way of looking at something as old as humankind. I’m here to talk about something all of us will have to deal with, one way or the other, eventually. Unless … wait.

How many of you out there are immortal? Anyone? OK. Then this presentation is relevant to everyone in this audience.

The author’s Etruscan vase

Through a dubious provenance, I happened to inherit this 2,500-year-old Etruscan vase. My Dad worked for Amex and I grew up mostly in Europe, including in Italy. The vase was a gift to my father. It’s not particularly valuable from an auction house point of view but its delicate simplicity, its dark unglazed finish and elegant lines, and the fact that it’s still in one piece after all this time makes it precious in my mind.

Who once drank wine from this black clay goblet at some distant dinner party, toasting the ancient gods? And who scraped that one thin line that runs inside the lip and down across the base?

That imperfection has fascinated me since I was a boy, when my father first told me the story: how this dark lump had been unearthed by a wayward oxen hoof at plow in southern Italy; miraculously intact; seeing light for the first time since before the Romans ruled the earth.

My small Etruscan vase came to mind some time ago when I happened upon some photographs of pottery dating back to 16th century Japan from the town of Hagi in Yamaguchi, Japan. Like my vase, ceramics made in the Hagi style have shapes that are not quite symmetrical, and colors and textures that appear to emphasize an unrefined, intentionally simple style.

Wabi Sabi vase

Wabi-Sabi

This style both informed and was influenced by an aesthetic philosophy known as Wabi-Sabi. In traditional Japanese aesthetics, wabi-sabi is a philosophy centered on the acceptance of the transience and imperfection of all things.

Ceramics made in the Hagi styles are not only somewhat asymmetrical and unrefined, like my Etruscan vase, but they are often intentionally chipped or nicked, made “imperfect” as a celebration and expression of the wabi-sabi philosophy.

Actively engaging with something considered to be wabi-sabi achieves three things:

• an awareness of the natural forces involved in the creation of the piece;
• an acceptance of the power of nature;
• and 3, an abandonment of dualism — the belief that we are separate from our surroundings, that we are here and everything else is out there.

Combined, these experiences allow the viewer to see themselves as part of the natural world. Rather than seeing dents or uneven shapes as mistakes, then, they are viewed as creations of nature, much as moss growing on a wall, or a tree bent from years in the wind.

To misquote Heraclitus: Nothing is. All is becoming.

To us, in the West, this aesthetic is anathema. We scorn impermanence, modeling our view on Platonic ideas of the Form, perfect and immutable. Not a table. Tableness. The essence of table. Eternal. To us, if it withers and wrinkles and dies, it’s more than inferior; it’s fatally flawed, for perfection is timeless.

And in today’s popular culture, trying to banish or dissolve the idea of the self at the center of all is akin to fomenting a Copernican revolution, when that Polish (then Prussian) astronomer challenged the Church and dared presume that the sun was the center of the universe, not the earth.

As we desperately try and fabricate a Platonic ideal of our lives, it is the idea of self that sits at the heart of this generation’s Instagram solar system, hyperinflated by the American notion of rugged individualism. But as particle physics has taught us, dualism is a myth. The observer and that which she observes are inexorably connected.

DISRUPTING THE FUNERAL INDUSTRY

As a novelist and poet, and as an entrepreneur, I’ve made a career dreaming up and creating new worlds. Literally — when it comes to the characters and realities of my novels. And, in some fundamental way, as an entrepreneur too. After all, behind every new business venture is an idea that reflects a new way of looking at things, some consumer need or business problem that needs fixing.

Let me ask you all a question again, if I may. How many of you out there have lost a loved one, someone close to you, in the past few years? Please raise your hands, and keep them up for a moment. [SHOW OF HANDS.] Now, if you were happy with the outcome, if everyone was pleased with the event, and if the final price was what you expected, drop your hands. [ONLY A FEW HANDS DROP.]

A few years ago, I found myself in your position. My father passed away and I saw first-hand the horror show that is the traditional funeral industry in this country today. Overpriced. Complicated. Time-consuming. And, ultimately, unsatisfying.

Back in 1984, as I launched what became known as the first interactive ad agency in the business, I recognized that the unique benefits of digital technologies and interactivity would eventually revolutionize the ad world. Today, digital accounts for more ad spend than TV, print, radio, outdoor and every other media channel combined.

In the same way, when my father passed, I realized that the deathcare industry needed to be disrupted, to be dragged from its Dickensian business practices and antediluvian methodologies kicking and screaming into the 21st century. The industry as a whole faced then, and still faces, 3 major challenges:

• The way in which we manage deathcare in the US today
• The way in which we memorialize lost loved ones
• And the way we look at our own mortality and at death itself

FIVE KEY DRIVERS IMPACTING DEATHCARE IN AMERICA

To address these challenges, we spent a lot of time analyzing the traditional model. Here are 5 key drivers impacting the funeral industry today.

The high cost of traditional end-of-life practices

• Today, funerals cost between $7,000 and $10,000, and cremations more than $6,000. Even direct cremations (no embalming, expensive coffin, or traditional memorial service) average $2,000 — $3,000. But between 40% and 50% of all Americans do not have $500 set aside for a rainy day! This has stimulated the adoption of lower-cost cremation over traditional burial. In 2000, 75% of Americans opted for traditional burial. Today, more than 58% prefer to be cremated, and in some states the cremation rate is more than 80%. (Overseas, especially in Asia, it’s often more than 95%.) Americans care less and less about having a traditional funeral anymore, pumping our dead with toxic chemicals, gaping at their painted faces for an hour or so in a house of worship or funeral home, and then burying their polluted corpses in some expensive metal or hardwood casket in the earth, never to be seen again.

The secularization of the American culture

• We may not go to Church like our parents did, but we’re still spiritual and in need of systems to help us while recovering from grief. If we are no longer looking for comfort and closure in our houses of worship, where will we find it? Friends and family? Support groups? Chat bots?

Greater mobility

• We retire far away from where we were born. It’s a lot easier and cheaper to ship ashes than a body in a casket.

Heightened ecological awareness.

• With the planning literally on fire, people are finally beginning to wake up to the challenges of the climate emergency.

And new technologies & buying methodologies.

• Let’s face it: if it can go digital, it will. The Internet has transformed the way Americans look for information and buy. No longer do families have to endure two in-person trips to the funeral home (one to shop and sign, and one to settle up), which is where far too many funeral directors take advantage of grieving families to upsell them unnecessary products and services: “Doesn’t your mom deserve the gold handles on her casket” you cheap bastard, implied?

It was because of the experience I had following my father’s death, as well as these trends, that I eventually launched a deathcare service called Cremstar. After advertising and novel writing, I guess you could call this my third act. My daughter had grown and I was ready to sink my teeth into something new.

By offering our service exclusively online, with text and phone support, we at Cremstar (and companies like ours on the West Coast) are able to price our direct cremation solution starting at just $893 (vs. the national average of $2–3K), and instead of 150 minutes of meetings and travel when you’re least inclined to do it, you can order and arrange a direct cremation completely online in about 15–20 minutes.

While cost is a major factor in the transition from traditional burial to cremation, increasingly, so too is the environment. Studies have shown that traditional burial has a significantly higher ecological cost than cremation.

ECOLOGICAL IMPACT AND CONCERNS

This chart details the environmental impact of cremation versus traditional burial as measured by a composite measure called the ‘shadow price’; the higher the shadow price, the higher the cost to the environment and the less eco-friendly it is. Using these ecological metrics, burial has a 23% higher environmental cost than cremation.

One exciting technological development is the greater adoption of aquamation. Aqua cremation (or aquamation) is a water-based process also known as alkaline hydrolysis, which uses a combination of water flow, temperature, and alkalinity to accelerate the natural breakdown of the human body. Many highly regarded institutions — the Mayo Clinic, UCLA Medical School, and UTSW Medical School — have utilized aquamation for over twenty years.

Unlike flame cremation, which is already ecologically superior to traditional burial, aquamation adds no direct emissions of harmful greenhouse gases or mercury into the atmosphere. The process is very energy-efficient, offering over 90% energy savings compared to flame cremation, with only 1/10th of the carbon footprint. Furthermore, this smaller footprint can be mitigated via carbon offset programs. All that’s left over is water, which can be used for commercial irrigation. Already, one of our investors, who happens to be class of ’78, has shown an interest in using it to irrigate some of his tree farms in Florida.

And what is the ecological cost of deathcare the old-fashioned way?

• More than 800,000 gallons of formaldehyde are dumped into the earth as a result of burials every year in the US. That’s enough to fill a couple of Olympic-sized swimming pools. Every year.
• Conventional burials use 30 million board feet of hardwoods, 2,700 tons of copper and bronze, 104,272 tons of steel, and 1,636,000 tons of reinforced concrete every year in the US. 104,272 tons of steel is enough to build a 400-story skyscraper, 2 ½ times as tall as the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, the skyscraper Tom Cruise ran down in Mission Impossible — Ghost Protocol. Again, that’s every year!
• The amount of casket wood alone is equivalent to about 4 million acres of forest and could build around 4.5 million new homes every year in the US. To put that in perspective, that’s roughly an area the size of Texas. And 4.5 million homes: That’s about 1 for every person in Philadelphia, where I currently live. But instead of building new homes, we’re burying them in the ground, never to be seen again.

Today, folks are still choosing to be buried …

but more and more folks are opting not to be embalmed, but to be buried naturally …

perhaps in a mushroom shroud …

or under a living tree.

Where available, instead of traditional flame-based cremation (top), they’re opting for aquamation (bottom) …

and even human composting, where the decedent is placed in a sealed chamber in a special solution, resulting in mulch that you can use to fertilize your garden. Though I will add that human compositing is rather expensive and not as green as it first appears.

While scattering remains the most common choice (and here is the complementary Cremstar scattering tube we provide), more and more families are choosing from the many unique and highly personal options available when it comes to the disposition of their loved one’s cremains.

• Putting the Cremains in a potted planter (clockwise from bottom left)
• Hand-crafted glass jewelry
• Transforming them into a diamond
• Embedding them in fireworks
• Shooting them up into space in an Elon Musk rocket to create a shooting star
• Scatterings on land and at sea, including by drone
• Green burial of cremains in forests or mangrove swamps
• And Integrating cremains into a live coral reef

Even urns have had a facelift. Another Spring company called Final Spring uses 3D printing technologies to create personalized high-quality funeral products — from urns to new products like biodegradable scattering stones and personalized night lights and mobiles.

Our bespoke Scattering Stones are made of biodegradable polymers and seaweed extracts, within which we embed the cremains. I’m sure you all remember that scene in The Big Lebowski, when John Goodman spills Donny’s ashes all over The Dude, Jeff Bridges.

For some reason, when it comes to scattering ashes on a beach, people seem to forget the properties of physics: the wind generally blows off the sea and onto the land. That’s just the way it works. With our customized Scattering Stones, instead of spilling out ashes into a sea breeze at the beach during a scattering, families can skip stones of their lost loved one out into the ocean, knowing they’ll dissolve and disperse their embedded ashes into the water over time … and not blow back all over those attending the ceremony.

RFID TRACKING OF LOVED ONES

I have a confession to make. I’m rather lazy. I have no interest in chasing animals across the African plain when I’m hungry. I’d rather hang out at the waterhole, at the spring, and wait for the animals to come to me. That was my approach when staking out our claim in the nascent realm of digital advertising back in the ’80s. And that’s our approach at Cremstar today. Indeed, that’s the reason we call our parent company the Spring Holding Group. Our guiding principle is, if I or my funeral directors can’t do their job from anywhere they happen to be, we have failed. Everything has to be mobile-first.

This rather daunting picture (above) displays the Cremstar process. We are the only company in the US currently using RFID technology to place a chip on the decedent when we perform removals, and then tracking that individual using the driver’s GPS-enabled phone from initial removal all the way to the final cremation. Our funeral directors dispatch drivers using the Cremstar Funeral Director App, drivers accept and track removals using their own Driver App, and our crematories intake and record cremations using the Cremstar Crematory App.

This is tech at its best and it represents where the industry is going.

Finally, while Americans may be less religious today, we are still spiritual and, increasingly, we’re holding our own life celebrations at alternate venues — from natural settings to private homes, museums, halls and restaurants. Rather than funeral plots and stone mausoleums, folks are turning to digital remembrances at online media repositories such as MemoryBox.com, another Spring business.

Here, for example, is a MemoryBox in the Metaverse that we’ve created to memorialize those of us from the Class of ’79 who are no longer with us. Why spend a fortune on a physical venue, caterers, decorations, and printed materials to honor the passing of your loved one, especially in these pandemic times? For families that are distributed far and wide, for those who find traveling difficult, for folks who are sick and tired of videoconferencing, there is an alternative. Hold your Celebration of Life event … in the metaverse, an online location to memorialize lost loved ones and host virtual Life Celebrations in real-time, with live eulogies, and guests from anywhere in the world.

Take a look around this MemoryBox in the Metaverse after the presentation, and leave a Note by the portrait of friends you’ve lost. And if you have a photo of someone who’s missing a picture, please let me know. We’d be happy to add it.

These types of technologies are very exciting, especially as families become more far-flung. Another one of our investors from the Class of ’78, used the same tech to showcase artwork she’d created to promote animal preservation. I urge you to check it out the EyeAm.Art Show in the Metaverse for another example of what can be done.

With an entire generation of Baby Boomers beginning to transition, with the climate emergency, with animal life disappearing from the planet at an unprecedented rate, with war enflaming the Middle East and Eastern Europe, famine in the Sudan and Gaza, and with the world suffering from lethal pandemics, it’s no wonder we’re more focused on mortality today than we have been in years.

Unfortunately, we are woefully ill-prepared for what’s coming. Here are some sobering facts:

• 90% of people want to be kept at home if they become terminally ill. In reality, only 20% of Americans die at home; the figure is the same in Australia, slightly higher in New Zealand (30%), and lower in South Korea and Japan (15%).
• 40% of Americans ages 65 and older don’t have an Advance Directive and fewer than 50% have a Will. It’s important to note that the authority granted by a “Power of Attorney” loses validity once a person passes.
• Fewer than 30% of Americans pre-pay for their funeral or cremation. The rest leave this burden to their surviving loved ones to pay for and manage.
• Of the 76.4 million Baby Boomers living in the United States, 20% do not have children to act as caregivers. In fact, nearly 50% of U.S. adults are single today. In 2034, adults aged 65 and over will outnumber children aged 18 and younger for the first time in U.S. history.
• And finally, the number of people aged 65 and over is projected to increase from 52 million in 2018 to 98 million by 2060. And yet, as the number of elderly people is increasing, the number of medical professionals is decreasing. The U.S. could see a shortage of 120,000 physicians and will need 12 million new nurses by 2030!

It is the inevitable intertwining of mortality and nature that is key to understanding wabi-sabi. As author Andrew Juniper notes in his book Wabi Sabi: The Japanese Art of Impermanence, “(Wabi-Sabi) uses the uncompromising touch of mortality to focus the mind on the exquisite transient beauty to be found in all things impermanent.”

Like the falling of cherry blossoms.

Alone, natural patterns are merely pretty, sometimes mesmerizing, baubles for the eyes. But in understanding their context as transient items that highlight our own awareness of impermanence and death, they become truly profound.

Despite the promise of “Barbie”, the movie, the Barbie doll influencers we see on Instagram today are not real…and never will be. They are unrealizable, Tantalus crack, and doomed to make miserable all who reach for such sticky fruit, like monkeys in the upadana forest.

This is largely why we face a crisis of depression amongst our young — mostly young girls. This is why we’re now making the purchase of high-strength skin products to teens and tweens illegal. You’ve got 15-year-old skin; why do you need a skin cream, for crying out loud?

Rather than have us grasp for the unreachable, the cold and timeless Platonic stars, wabi-sabi lets us recognize the value and beauty in all that passes and fades.

Indeed, it is because of its individual stretch marks and wrinkles and scars, as well as its mandala transience, that life has beauty at all instead of a Groundhog Day banality. How monotonous would eternal perfection become!

It is our “flaws” that make us unique and special, not cookie-cutter impeccability.

Kintsugi

So enamored of these individual imperfections are the Japanese followers of wabi-sabi that some have gone so far as to actually highlight the cracks in their crockery. Kintsugi is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with lacquer dusted or mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum.

Here there is no attempt to hide the damage; the repair is literally illuminated.

Look, see, I’ve lived, the golden cracks proclaim. I’m not out there, like some Platonic ideal, nauseatingly perfect, forever young. I am right here, in this moment, not timeless but timeful, not uniform but unique, with the eternal river literally written upon me.

Given our growing acceptance of multiculturalism and our evolving sense of what and who is beautiful, I’m hopeful that the wabi-sabi aesthetic will encourage a new appreciation for the cracks in all of us, diminish our fear of aging and death, and ultimately foster a heightened sense of tolerance and equanimity.

I started this talk by saying that the funeral industry faces three major challenges today:

• the way in which we manage deathcare;
• the way in which we memorialize lost loved ones;
• and the way we look at our own mortality and death itself.

By adapting to new market trends, by leveraging the latest digital technologies, Cremstar and companies like ours operating on the West Coast are well on our way to meeting the first two of these challenges. But the rebranding of death in our hearts and in our minds is an ongoing, almost Sisyphean exercise, and one which I hope you will help us in meeting.

As I stand here and gaze at my 2,500-year-old Etruscan vase, as I ponder each nick and scratch, and think about my own wrinkles and stretch marks and brown spots and scars, I have to smile a little. Once, someone toasted the ancient eternal gods and took a sip of wine from this small, simple cup. But where are the ancient deities today? Trapped in eternal youth, that nectar of Western dreams, do they sit idle and all-powerful, waiting for something — anything — new to happen?

In truth, I pity them. No matter how colorful, think how dull and flavorless their feast! For they will never taste the sweet fruit of mortality.

CONCLUSION

I’d like to leave you with some practical things you can do:

• Talk with your family about your end-of-life desires. PLAN, PLAN, PLAN.
• Get the legal stuff out of the way; i.e. define an AA or Designated Agent as POA goes away
• Set up a Living Will so your family and friends know what to do in case you become incapacitated
• Prepay for your funeral or cremation so your family doesn’t have this worry
• Begin to create your MemoryBox now so that you’re remembered the way you want to be remembered
• Plan your Ultimate Party (the one you’re guaranteed not to attend)
• Become a Wabi Sabi Brand Ambassador

The only way that we will rebrand death in this country is with your help.

Thank You.

For more information, visit https://SpringHoldingGroup.com, or email us at info@SpringHoldingGroup.com.