The Popularity of Cremations

Cremations are among the cremation services offered in Glendale, AZ, and more Americans are choosing cremation as their final disposition. The dramatic increase in cremations over the last twenty to thirty years is tied to many different factors.

One factor is that many family, church, and community cemeteries are at or near capacity, so full traditional burial in the cemetery can’t be done. But family members often want to be together in death as they were in life, so they will choose cremation and have their cremains buried with other family members who have died and been buried in a cemetery. Spouses especially may want to be cremated and their remains buried with a spouse who had a traditional burial. Most cemeteries allow this to be done, because it lets life partners stay together in death.

Another factor is that cremation offers many more choices for memorials than those associated with traditional burials. Cremains can be stored in columbariums (structures that have niches for urns to be stored in). Many cemeteries are now creating urn gardens (landscaped areas that are specifically design for urn burial). Family members can take the cremains and keep them in an urn in a central location or they scatter them in a place that was significant to the deceased. Another option is to use the cremains to make memorial jewelry, which can be worn to keep a deceased loved one close.

A third factor is that our society is highly mobile. Unlike a century ago, when most American families lived their entire lives together in a single place from birth to death, many people now leave home when they’re young for college or military service and they don’t come back to stay and settle down.

People also have to move to take jobs or to take promotions, so that means people might move as little as every five or ten years or as often as every year or two (or less, especially if they are consultants who do long-term projects in different cities). Technology keeps us to loved ones no matter where in the world we live, so there aren’t too many compelling reasons, unless we just want to, to live in the same city, state, or country as our families.

When people are mobile, cremation makes sense, because cremains can be shipped back to the family in the hometown much more easily than a body, and they can dispose of the cremains either as they see fit or as the deceased requested.

Another factor in the increase in the number of cremations is that is because the religious stigma associated with them no longer exists. Early Christianity shunned cremation as a pagan practice, and when Christianity became the official religion of Rome, cremations stopped almost entirely and were replaced by underground burial.

The earliest American settlers brought this tradition of underground burial with them from England. Underground burial were the traditional and standard means of final disposition after death in the United States until the 1990’s. As religions began to relax their societal and cultural views, they also began to relax their views about cremation, which gave people a wider set of choices for the final disposition of their bodies.

For more information about cremation services provided in Glendale, AZ, our compassionate and experienced team at Simply Cremation & Funeral Arrangements is here to help. You can come to our funeral home at 16952 W. Bell Rd., #303, Surprise, AZ, 85374, or you can contact us today at (623) 975-9393.