Cemeteries and funerals are beautiful, because they tell a story of the past that we care about. They’re also somewhat expensive: families routinely spend on the order of $10k on funeral and burial rites for their families. There are people whose entire jobs are the preparation of bodies for funeral rites. Can we tell the story of the past better, but for the same cost?
I believe we can. If your loved one is close to death or has recently died, instead of planning for an expensive burial funeral, you might consider instead planning for the cheapest possible disposal of their earthly remains, and use the excess money to hire a biographer. The biographer can talk to your loved one’s family, and even your loved one directly if they haven’t yet passed, and write down people’s most treasured or meaningful memories about them. Your children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren could have much more than a tombstone to remember them by.
If more people adopted this tradition, cemeteries could become libraries where we keep tomes of stories about our lost loved ones, both bitter and sweet. When we bring flowers to the cemetery, we could leave them next to a book containing their life story. We could re-read their memories, and perhaps even take some time to read through the memories of other people we don’t know, and develop a feeling of what it was like to be them. Probably some people would take an interest in reading the stories even of strangers. Perhaps these “cemetery historians” would even bond when they meet at the cemetery, and recommend their favorite stories to each other. Together, we’d have a culture more capable of preserving and cherishing the memories of the people we’ve lost.
Sure, the biographies wouldn’t always be perfectly accurate, and perhaps far from it. Some biographers might offer to exaggerate in order to create more favorable stories. But we’d all know that to be the case, and we might even become more aware of the inconsistencies between our stories of the past if we could read many different accounts of what happened. And I know I’d spend more time enjoying the beautiful landscape of cemeteries if there were also books there to read about the people who were buried there.
How could we transition to such a culture?
- Writers: advertise yourselves as end-of-life biographers. If you’re a writer willing to write stories about people around the ends of their lives, tell people you’re willing to do it, and name your price. Start a website. Pioneer a culture. Try partnering with a local funeral home to make it easier for grieving families to find you and get your help.
- Funeral homes: partner with biographers. Offer to connect biographers with grieving families in exchange for percentage of the fee paid for their service.
- Families with dying loved ones: make a social media post seeking a biographer. Let your desire to preserve the memories of your loved one clear and visible to people you know. Decide an amount you’re willing to pay—or range of amounts, say “Between \$1000 and \$3000″—and let people know that you’re interested in their help writing up a biography for your loved one. Let them know it doesn’t have to be perfect, and that something is better than nothing (if that’s how you feel).
I realize there would be lots of challenging questions and priorities for the biographers and families to sort out. But that’s why it’s a job. Funeral directors get used to dealing with grieving families, and learn to accommodate their preferences as best they can. I believe end-of-life biographers could learn to do the same. And I wager that, in 50 years time, if we’re all still around to read the stories they right, we’ll be glad of their work.