Current Funeral Trends
Part of the cremation services offered in Camillus, NY incudes being able to personalize your or a loved one’s funeral to be exactly the way you or they want it to be. This follows the general current trend in funerals in the United States.
Almost three-quarters of Americans don’t want to have a traditional funeral. Americans see the traditional funeral rituals as being sad and somber, so they are opting for more happy experiences that include things like celebrations of life, parties, and customized funeral services that reflect the passions of the person who died.
As funerals become more personalized, the things that people want as part of their funeral services have changed. In surveys done recently, people were asked to name the top five things they wanted to have at a funeral. The answers, in top-to-bottom order, were music, family, people, beer, and music. That beer would have made this list shows that Americans are moving more toward a funeral as a good time instead of a funeral as a sad time.
It should come as no surprise, since they upended traditions in their teens and twenties, that Baby Boomers are the driving force (62%) behind the trend of personalizing funeral services. The reason for personalizing funeral services for this generation is that they feel that it’s a meaningful way to begin the grieving process for someone who has died. Since Baby Boomers are the largest population segment in the United States, they are often the driving force behind many of the changes that sweep the nation.
Approximately 3 ½ million Baby Boomers are projected to die in America by the year 2037. That is a significant portion of the population, especially when it is anticipated that by the year 2030, people who are 65 or older will outnumber children in the United States.
Along with more personalized funeral services, another current funeral trend is the move away from religious-based funeral or memorial services. Only about 40% of the American population thinks that it’s important for funeral or memorial services to have some kind of religious component. That means services are become more secular, with a focus on storytelling and sharing memories of people while they were alive.
Another current funeral trend in the United States is opting for cremation instead of burial. In part, this trend is the result of cemeteries being almost full (with either no room for expansion or with expansion being too cost-prohibitive, especially in urban areas) and because families have become more scattered across the nation, making it less likely that cemetery graves will be visited very often, if at all. If the current trend toward cremation continues, it’s expected that cremations will account for 75% of funerals by the year 2030.
Funeral services are becoming less common in America, while memorial services or celebrations of life are becoming more common. This change parallels, to some extent, the increase in the rate of cremations in the nation.
Some people have come to the conclusion that traditional burials have a negative impact on the environment. This has led to a trend known as green burials, where the body and the container in which it is buried naturally decompose to release nutrients that will enrich the earth.
If you’d like to know more about cremation services in Camillus, NY, our compassionate and experienced team at Bagozzi Twins Funeral Home, Inc. is here to help. You can visit us at our funeral home at 2601 Milton Ave., Solvay, NY 13209, or you can call us today at (315) 468-2431.
