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Sociocultural Aspects

Learning Activities

Activity 10: Read “Boomers’ search for comfort gives the death industry new life.”

Dec. 12, 1996

Boomers' search for comfort gives the death industry new life

By Carol M. Ostrom, Seattle Times staff reporter

The baby boomers have discovered death.

And, as with every other natural and unnatural act they've "discovered" - eating, sex, having children - they are demanding attention be paid.

Where the boomers go, of course, so do their dollars. Their interest in eating was satisfied by a proliferation of restaurants and gourmet cookbooks; their problems with sex by legions of therapists and self-help books; their concern for their children by private schools and tutors.

Now, publishers, counselors, funeral homes and others with a product or service to offer have begun to notice that something new is going on with that old standby, death. As their parents begin to die, boomers are devouring books on death, dying, grief and bereavement. They are turning to support groups, counseling and rituals, and buying memorial scrapbooks, affirmations and even packets of "healing stones" to help "ground" them in their grief. At their computers, they're visiting a newly hatched crop of Internet news groups and Web sites.

Where other generations quietly accepted their burdens, suffering in silence or perhaps turning to their faith for answers, boomers are getting in touch with their feelings, seeking answers and amassing a pile of information, say those who are riding the wave of interest.

"There certainly is a market out there," says Sandra Burrowes of Augsburg Fortress Publishers, a Lutheran-based publisher. "It is extraordinary."

In the past few years, books on death, dying, grief and bereavement have flooded into the market.

"I think it's a demographic phenomenon," says Lynn Garrett, religion editor for Publishers Weekly. "Boomers are beginning to get to the age where they're losing parents, losing a partner, and some, losing a child."

Books published this year cover the spectrum of death, dying and grieving. There are how-to-die books, such as Patricia Weenolsen's The Art of Dying. There are memoirs: Christopher Noel's In the Unlikely Event of a Water Landing: A Geography of Grief. There are how-to-grieve books: Dorothy Bullitt's Filling the Void: Six Steps from Loss to Fulfillment. And there are how-to-talk-about-it books, such as Ganga Stone's Start the Conversation: The Book About Death You Were Hoping to Find.

Relatively affluent and well-educated, boomers are used to turning to books to answer their questions, Burrowes says.

"We have such a demand from retail bookstores, churches and individuals, we actually have a page in our catalog devoted to back-listed grief titles," she says.

When Sherwin Nuland, a Yale University professor of surgery, wrote How We Die a few years ago, he was surprised to find that many of the buyers who pushed it to the bestseller list were boomers.

In retrospect, Nuland muses, perhaps he shouldn't have been. After all, the book began after a call from a boomer friend, urging Nuland to demystify death for his generation, whose parents were now dying. That well-educated and "most self-absorbed generation," Nuland realized, was a perfect target for information about death and dying.

"We raised a generation that has permission to feel, but no skills with which to feel," says Darcie Sims, a nationally recognized speaker and trainer in grief management. Sims says she makes an excellent income helping to train funeral homes to do grief "aftercare," a trend that "suddenly exploded" in the past two or three years. "Yes, it is big business," she says. "The funeral industry is recognizing it as something they want to provide to increase their market share."

Cherry Spielman, who runs the Grieving Well Center in Orlando, Fla., noticed a few years ago that her outpatient therapy business was filled with boomers who didn't have the foggiest idea how to deal with any loss.

"Sometimes it wasn't even death - it was other losses," says Spielman. Often, it was the loss of a job, an unfulfilled dream, empty-nest syndrome, or the loss of their independence as they cared for an older parent.

"Generations before, they coped with it; they didn't talk a lot about it. Because this generation is so therapy oriented, they said, `This is a real problem. I want some help with it.' "

Need to control

More than any other generation, boomers believe they should be able to control their destiny, says Nuland, who is 65. But, indulged and protected by his generation, who saw world war and economic depression firsthand, boomers have had little practice coping with things they can't control. "They just don't know about trouble," he says.

Some of that isn't their fault, say Nuland and others.

"Besotted with the promise of medical science," as Nuland puts it, our society swept death from the home and from the continuum of life. It became a medical problem to be fought at all costs in the hospital, where families visited nervously, feeling like aliens in rooms filled with stainless steel and an eerie green glow from a frightening array of strange machines.

"People under 50 have lived their entire life in a society where death is totally invisible," says Patricia Anderson, author of All of Us: Americans Talk about the Meaning of Death.

Growing up in a secular culture, often disconnected from spiritual traditions, "they have no way of incorporating it into their lives, learning how to accept it, how to deal with it," she says.

Not surprisingly, our material culture has responded with material answers - goods, services, products. And boomers, who are used to solving problems by "consuming answers and products," says Anderson, buy. She once wrote a piece projecting the trend into the future, where, she facetiously predicted, the market would offer the services of a "personal death trainer."

Because we have so little experience with death, "it becomes this thing around which we're very naive," says Anderson. "We're suckers about death."

Because that naiveté is so prevalent, "you'll see more promises made: If you eat this, you'll live forever. If you do these things, it'll be all right."

Answering a need

But stuff doesn't answer the deep need that people have, she says. "A longing for an answer, a longing for some sense of comfort around death, and also, as is described in the book a lot, a need for ritual."

So, many imitate Native-American rituals, read books on Buddhist attitudes and buy "healing stones" - available for $9.95 from the Grieving Well Center in Orlando.

Spielman, who began the center about a year ago and the Web site a few months ago, makes no apologies. "People who are grieving want concrete answers, and there are not concrete answers. Anything you can give them that's concrete makes them feel better."

She got the idea for the stones when she was running bereavement groups on grief and loss. "The first stones I used I picked up in my driveway," says Spielman. "They were just rocks." Now they're polished, and come with a card explaining that the rose quartz represents the inner quest for peace, the clear quartz, the quest for physical well-being and balance, and the unpolished stone, the daily struggles that lie ahead.

Part of healing

In the funeral industry, too, trends are forcing changes.

Cathy Brannan, owner of the Green Lake Funeral Home and Green Lake Bereavement Center, notes that a trend toward burial or cremation without a ceremony leads many mourners to become involved later in some kind of bereavement program.

"Some people criticize funeral services as using (ceremony and viewing) as a way to make money, and yet it's crucial to some people's healing process to view and ritualize."

Some who observe these trends shake their heads at the wealth of products and services suddenly available for the grieving.

"There's a lot of schlock out there," says Andrea Gambill, editor of Bereavement magazine, published in Colorado Springs. "There's a lot of schlock coming from the professional community, too. There are a lot of people who have jumped on this grief-support bandwagon and noticed there's a market there."

But even those who are critical of particular offerings applaud the general trend.

"In a consumer society," says Anderson, "the seed of spiritual connection hides inside a test-marketed, consumer-approved saleable item. It's like you have to find the real thing in the middle of that false thing."

Buried in the flood of information are real stories and real help for the dying and the grieving, she and others believe. Even the knowledge that they are not alone, says Darcie Sims, can help.

The products and services are society's way of noting a change of attitude, other observers say.

"The commercialization of death by the publishing industry, the new-agers wanting to sell you a rock to mourn with - these are part and parcel of a more optimistic trend, for the most part," says Nuland.

Like childbirth, death became "medicalized," as Nuland says. Now, as with the birth process, that view is shifting. "It's a movement back to reality, away from the thought that death is some looming, strange enemy and not part of life," he says. "We are at the beginning of a public discussion about the other end of life, a de-medicalizing of death. . . We are at the beginning of turning our thoughts to the naturalness of death."

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TNEEL-NE ã2001 D.J. Wilkie & TNEEL Investigators Grief: Sociocultural Aspects