Very nice story, what I might add or at least question is how the current views and or actions affect our outlook on death. More and more I see and hear people who are afraid of death. Now, I do not know if it is a function of our desire to “conceal” death or perhaps our fear or what might happen or not happen after death. I seem to see more people who either doubt or deny God, fearing death. And from what I can discern, when death is the end of everything then they do not want life to end.

I do appreciate that I believe in God and thus a life after death whatever form or shape it might take, that allows me to see death as just another stop along the journey. Like the article says, death needs to be out in the open, not hidden away. To be a pallbearer at your grandfather’s funeral at the age of 14 allows you to understand the cycle of life and death. Too many parents want to shelter their children from death; the claim is that they will not understand. I believe that it is the parents that do not understand and thus fear death.

Tony: I so agree. We seem to fear mourning and grief. We shun it because it is embarrassing, or worse, we don't have "time" for it, it's "unproductive." Chief Seattle, in his famous "oration" expressed shame and bewilderment at how whites treated the dead, their own dead. Funerals offer a chance to connect to each other in the chain of life, of generations. How well I remember being a teenage pallbearer at my grandmother's funeral at Lake View Cemetery as the cold winter winds whipped, as the bag pipes wailed, as we laid her down next to my Norwegian grandfather with her beloved Highlands heather at her head. I knew I was a member of the clan, man enough to carry the coffin with father and cousins, old enough to join the uncles in their drinking, adult enough to see the final part of the cycle. Death and funerals ought to be occasions.

A belief in God or one supreme being, whatever you term that being, does not demand a belief in a life (of any sort) after death. Most Jews do not believe in an afterlife (nor do we believe in an actual hell or heaven), and generally we don't have cremations. We do have memorial services quite soon after death, and a later service when a gravestone is placed, and many families sit shiva after a death, receiving mourners. I don't see any diminution of ceremony among the Christians or other religionists I know, either. The fear, I think, is not of death; it's of what we will have to go through to get to that death. Perhaps we don't want our children to see the grisly and attenuated deaths that are more common now with "modern medicine" than they used to be.

Are those days gone? I was a pallbearer at my (Jewish) aunt's funeral, which was followed by a long cortege to the cemetery. Of course, that was 1) seven years ago, 2) on the East Coast (Philadelphia, to be exact), and 3) she was 90. Perhaps it is different in a place like Seattle, with less tight-knit communities, fewer religious folk, etc.

I must echo Sarah's comments. Neither of my family's religio-philosophical traditions (Judaism and Confucianism) place emphasis on life after death, so the lack of such talk doesn't seem strange to me in the least. I do, of course, understand that it is different in the Christian tradition.

As for memorial services — what can one do but have a memorial service, if the decedent and his family do not practice a faith? I don't know if it's necessarily to do with wanting to avoid facing death head-on. Again, it's a different issue if we're talking about religious folk eschewing a "proper" funeral. But we may just be seeing here the changing place of religion, for better or worse, in Pacific Northwest society.

Cremation — yes, most often the family is not present. I would have been present at my parents' had I had the presence of mind to ask, but I think the kind folks at Washelli would have looked askance at that request. I have heard of it happening occasionally in the U.S., but it's certainly not the norm. I don't see why it shouldn't be.

It's good to be having the conversation, though. Everyone deals with the death of their loved ones in their own way, as best they can. But I think there is a larger detachment when it comes to death than is healthy for our society. From what I understand, people did indeed use to be much closer to it. You'd prepare your kin's body, not leaving that job to an employee of a "funeral director." You might dig the grave yourself, in the field behind your farmhouse, and lower the (simple, pine) coffin into the ground by hand, rather than having a hydraulic lift and backhoe do the job, while the coffin costs more than a year's rent. And this isn't even touching end-of-life medical issues.

Thank you for getting the conversation started.

There is no journey; and in a way, death is when everyone left must reconcile things. Putting your mummified body in the ground in a wooden box of some stature is selfish. We live, and then we die. It is finite, and there is no "final journey". Your journey ends when you start to contribute to the rebirth of life on earth, giving back what you borrowed.

Elaborate ceremonies don't change the facts, and usually prolong the grief. There is no afterlife; it's simply a creation of man to help him deal with death's finality. It's something we need to simply move on with. Like Eddie Vetter said; I'm still alive. The question... do I deserve to be... those are the answers we need to seek as the living. John Lennon, where are you?

There was certainly a heartening display of social ritual at the service for James Sanders on Saturday. A parade of a hundred construction vehicles, led by his excavator, traveled in a procession to the church where the service was held. It was inspiring and moving. Maybe not as impressive as the displays of official vehicles which accompany the last rites for fallen police officers and fire fighters, but entirely genuine, sincere and appropriate.

There's a marvelous book on this subject by the late Greg Palmer, essayist, playwright and television commentator (at KING-TV in a different world). “Death, the Trip of a Lifetime," published by Harper-Collins, examines how cultures all around the planet deal with death and why. It's the companion book for Greg's PBS documentary of the same name. He confronts the subject with great frankness, humor and respect, and I’ll bet you view your own death (we each get one) differently after you read it. The great electric book-store-in-the-sky lists it. So, God bless’em, do your local public libraries.

I see that mythologizing around death is alive and well. First, long automobile death parades were clearly a transitional 20th century phenomena. Before 1900, horse-drawn hearses followed by mourners on foot prevailed for hundreds of years. Now, traffic congestion becomes a prohibitive factor for urban automotive events except when a famous figure is involved. Second, cremations in India are seldom "fiery public events"; the cost of a wood funeral pyre cremation is beyond the budget of the majority of Indian families. Most Indian cremations in fact occur in big, ugly electric furnaces with tall smokestacks. And even at the famous Manikarnika Ghat on the Varanasi waterfront the important religious rituals have been performed before the body is delivered. At any point in time you may see there dozens of smoldering fires tended around the clock by the untouchables who do the cremation work. Family members are usually present when the fire is lit but depart long before it has finished burning.

Death rituals in this country are in a state of transition with lots of experimentation happening, some of it successful and some less so. I am personally a great supporter of cremations but agree that we are still in the early stages of improvising appropriate rituals. Cremation is quick, cheap, utterly final, requires no land and offers to the family greater control over the process. By this last point I mean that you can minimize the role of the unctuous parasites who run the funeral industry. In our queasy and antiseptic commercial society funeral directors have managed to obtain a legal monopoly on handling dead bodies. The best way to work around this is to go the hospice route and let the patient die at home, leave the body in place for a couple of days while family and friends stop in to grieve and say good-bye, and only then call in the boys in the cheap black suits to cart off the corpse for cremation after the family's internal dynamic has mostly run its course.

Figuring out the best way to handle the actual burning of the body remains a work in progress. In our clan one thing we have done that people seem to like is to have a small farewell gathering with the now made-up corpse just before it goes to the furnace. In the manner of the ancient Egyptians, everyone puts into the casket (a heavy cardboard box, actually) farewell messages, flowers and mementos of things identified with the deceased. We also arrange beforehand for those who wish to accompany the body to the crematorium and participate in its final disposition. This is of course something best negotiated with the funeral parlor before you hand over the body and the money.

When my father died in 1995 in San Diego, the desire for an end-of-the-game ritual arose at the last minute and the most that we could do at that point was to arrange to visit the body at a cold storage shed, put some things in the box and read a few parting scriptural passages. But when my father-in-law died in 2006 my wife was able to orchestrate a more elaborate process in advance with the people at Evergreen-Washelli, including accompanying the body to the oven and pressing the button to start the furnace. And last year when my mother died, we not only accompanied the body but got to push it into the oven, press the starter button and then adjust the heat controls through the various stages of bringing the unit up to its optimal temperature -- all the while getting a detailed explanation of the machinery and the procedure from the chatty and friendly crematory operator, who told us all about his family and life, including his real job as a bartender. Obviously, this kind of experience will not appeal to everyone. Crematoriums typically are industrial sites in industrial neighborhoods, utterly devoid of the trappings of sentiment. But for those who can handle it, this manner of following the string of earthly existence out to its prosaic end is a good way to reach finality.

Good to hear that about Washelli. They're moving in the right direction. There is also, of course, the People's Memorial Funeral Cooperative (founded 2007), an offshoot of Seattle's pioneering People's Memorial Association (founded 1939), for those who prefer the nonprofit route.

To hold to the certainty that what we currently understand as life is all there is, is as fundamentalist in nature as the certainty of Pearly Gates and Streets of Gold vs. a Lake of Fire

There is a lack of processions, and there also is a lack of tears.