
From the start, the Baby Boomer generation (born between 1946 and 1964) embraced an anti-establishment, do-it-myself attitude.
With such common characteristics as being experimental, individualists, free spirited, and social cause oriented, this generation has trail blazed its way through life changing the world along the way and they’ll leave, without a doubt, with the same vigor.
If they’re known for one thing, it’s doing it their way. This even extends to death, which has aging boomers designing their own departures reflective of the way the lived their lives, out loud and with lots of friends.
Burying Their Parents
They’re getting first hand experience of what it’s like to organize a funeral as they say goodbye to their parents. Living through the experience of arranging traditional funerals, they’re realizing that they not only need to get their things in order through better organization prior to death but they’re also discussing death more openly.
The Need for Pre-Need
Organizing your affairs is the last thing any of us want to think about, let alone do but bad experiences with parent’s passing away with debt, bank accounts being frozen, documents being hidden or not found and no one really knowing what their parent’s wished for because no one ever talked about it is leaving a sour taste in the mouths of Baby Boomers.
Death’s a Party
To the boomer, the urge to live and die as they want is reshaping the very nature of funeral services which are changing, thanks to boomers’ distaste for the sombre doom and gloom ceremonies. More boomers are opting for fun, party-like funerals and elaborate services. Driven, no doubt by the decline of traditional ceremony and the growth of spiritualism.
As more and more Boomers choose on location Living Funerals and Memorial Celebrations as joyous celebrations of life, more services both online and off are offering unique ways to help celebrate the end.
Online Cremation
From online cremation arrangements and interactive memorial tributes to end-of-life event celebrations held anywhere meaningful to family and friends, Boomers are asking for and getting the funeral industry to reinvent itself.
End-of-Life Is a Celebration
Today it may still be unusual to hear rock music at a Living Funeral for someone terminally ill or find a Memorial Celebration taking place in remote and beautiful country setting with the deceased buried in an environmentally-friendly cardboard urn that turns them into a tree, but soon these progressive ideas will be as mainstay.