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However, talking to study participants revealed things weren’t so black and white. It wasn’t that those opting out of traditional funeral ceremonies were doing nothing to honor the dead. Instead, they were holding their own deeply personalized rituals, decoupled from the disposal of the body: celebrating the deceased’s life at the beach or at a social club, for instance. People said those activities helped with their grieving processes.
“They felt that they weren’t being cajoled into doing things that were conventional because that’s just the way it’s done,” Woodthorpe explained. “Personally, I thought what they were doing was wonderful, because it was actually really meaningful to them and to the person who died.”
Woodthorpe tells me she sees a baby boomer–led shift in which the funeral industry is increasingly led by consumers and less dictated by customs, like how weddings in the 1970s and 1980s started to break with tradition. Other scholars, such as Wake Forest University’s Tanya Marsh, who teaches the only course at a US law school on funeral and cemetery law, make similar arguments.
“Baby boomers are insisting upon more control over their funeral and disposition so that their choices after death match their values in life,” Marsh wrote in a 2017 article for the Conversation. “And businesses are following suit, offering new ways to memorialize and dispose of the dead.”
This isn’t the first time funerary practices have shifted in recent history. It wasn’t long ago that cremation was rare in the United States, with rates rising from 5% in 1975 to 57.5% in 2021.
One Aura Flights reviewer admitted that making this unconventional decision about a loved one’s remains earned them a few confused responses at first. But to them, “It was the solution to a problem we just couldn’t solve.”
As someone who thinks about death for a living, Woodthorpe doesn’t see any singular “right” way to dispose of human remains, though she does think environmental considerations will become more important. And she says new trends in handling remains, from space burial to having ashes made into diamonds or vinyl records, have another benefit: They get people talking about death.
“It’s actually become rather unhealthy that people don’t engage with their mortality,” she said. “Getting people to actually think in advance is helpful. It alleviates some of the pressure on bereaved families to have to make those decisions on people’s behalf, which can be really difficult.”
After Delma Carman lost her husband of nearly 40 years to COVID-19 in 2021, learning about Aura Flights did offer her a small sort of solace. For her, it wasn’t the poetic idea of looking up at the sky and thinking of Ian — it’s rare she’s not thinking of him. But she thought her husband, who loved Apollo 13, tracking the International Space Station, and anything to do with the cosmos, would like the idea.
“It’s just for him,” she said. “It was his thing. If he was here, he would be beside himself to know.”
