An arch of baby-blue and white balloons, held aloft by three helium-filled Thomas the Tank Engines, lent an incongruously festive air to last month’s funeral for 2-year-old Jo Jo Trujillo, victim of a Commerce City house fire.
On the morning of another January memorial service, Angela Holbrook and her family arrived at the funeral home, bearing bags and boxes crammed with fishing and hunting memorabilia.
“We had Dad’s animal-head trophies – a mountain goat, a bighorn sheep – and antlers, a rattlesnake skin, cowboy boots that the florist put flower arrangements in,” Holbrook said.
“I looked around and said how sad it was that my dad wasn’t there to see it. It was so him.”
This is the way lives end now – not with a whimper, but a bang. Thanks largely to aging baby boomers determined to put their mark on the last party they throw, funerals in Colorado and throughout the U.S. are undergoing a sea change.
They want celebrations of life, not somber funerals. Memorabilia and personal effects often outnumber floral tributes at the altar.
While there were flowers at Jo Jo Trujillo’s memorial service, a perky Elmo toy took center stage because his mother “wanted a happy atmosphere, like (Jo Jo) was there.
“Jo Jo didn’t like people being sad, so we wanted to make it like he was there,” Cynthia Trujillo said.
Jo Jo’s service was relatively subdued compared with memorials that have slide shows on drop-down video screens, digital memorials on LCD monitors and props. The somber, conventional rites that closed lives in older generations are becoming a rarity.
“I hear all the time, ‘We don’t want a cookie-cutter funeral,”‘ said Roger Carlson, a manager at Trevino Mortuary.
What they want ranges from bookmarks featuring a photograph of the deceased to commemorative receptions at nontraditional venues, whether that is a lake or, in one family’s case, the neighborhood McDonald’s favored by their patriarch.
“It’s changing from what I call the Eleventh Commandment – ‘Thy Funeral Shall Look Like This’ – to personalized services that are mainly for the benefit of the living,” said John Horan, owner and president of the Denver-based Horan & McConaty funeral corporation.
At its extreme, a personalized service could include the Cremation Cam, an Arizona crematory’s limited-access Internet broadcast chronicling the moments up to entering the oven, and businesses that turn cremated remains into novelties such as jewelry and pencils.
While those represent only a particle of the $11 billion death-care industry, they are part of a metamorphosis that mirrors the transformation of weddings and other rituals that began in the 1970s and ’80s.
“My wife and I wrote our own vows when we married,” said Horan.
“I was present at all of my children’s births, while my father was in the waiting room. I think this is the boomers’ response to that Burger King ad. They want it their way. It presents a new paradigm for a funeral director.”
At Howe Mortuary’s Longmont facility, Chuck Bowland helped one family arrange a display of the decedent’s Santa Claus outfit, commemorating the role he played annually at parties.
“They brought in the complete costume, and we set it up – the beard, the hat, pants, boots – right next to the casket,” Bowland said. “Nothing was missing but the individual who wore them.”
Carlson, who knows every word of “Tears in Heaven,” “On Eagle’s Wings” and other perennial funeral favorites, said the music also has changed.
Now big band and show tunes, hip-hop, along with the occasional recording that barely qualifies as music, make appearances. Bowland will never forget what he described as “an auctioneer song” incorporated into the memorial service of a man employed as a bid caller at local auctions.
Many families inquire whether facilities are equipped with iPod jacks like the one at Horan & McConaty’s new Centennial branch, where the funeral chapel has a 10-foot square drop-down screen, LCD monitors and “a sound system that rivals any theater’s,” as Horan put it.
“Our facilities and our people are adapting,” he said.
Families sometimes find themselves inadvertently adapting as well. Two years ago, when Judy DeNapoli planned the funeral for her husband, Regis High School teacher Ernie DeNapoli, members of the school jazz band begged to play at the wake.
“They surprised me by playing the whole gig – two hours,” DeNapoli said.
“They’re a jazz band, and their repertoire wasn’t very non-secular. When they went into ‘Black Magic Woman,’ my sister and I looked at each other and started laughing.”
Staff writer Claire Martin can be reached at 303-954-1477 or cmartin@denverpost.com
