From the time he was diagnosed with cancer in July, Ronald Paulls and his wife, Jane, maintained their positive attitudes. But that didn’t stop them from making plans.
“My husband was always optimistic, but he knew he had an uphill battle,” Jane Paulls said recently. “We sort of wanted to get something set up so we could have something in place when we needed it.”
And that something for the Paullses and others throughout the Chicago area involved becoming members in the Cremation Society of Illinois, the state’s only exclusive cremation society. It’s based in Mt. Prospect, with offices in Oakbrook Terrace, Park Forest, Romeoville and Chicago.
The Paullses’ one-time memberships of $30 each assured the arrangements, including a small memorial gathering, would cost $595, a fraction of the cost of a traditional funeral (which averages $4,500). So, when Ronald died on Nov. 6 at the age of 60, everything was ready.
“We don’t have a large family in the area,” Jane Paulls said, “and we wanted things simple, but we didn’t want to put each other through the ordeal of a wake and funeral.”
Residents of Naperville, the Paullses used the society’s office in Romeoville, which includes, as do all the offices, a small chapel. “There were no hidden expenses, and there was no sales pressure,” Jane Paulls said. “The morning my husband died, it was just a phone call to the society and they came out right away. We had a memorial gathering, and they were very helpful with suggestions of how to have something that wasn’t a service and wasn’t exactly a party.”
The Paullses’ desires–for simplicity, low cost and a non-traditional memorial–are common among the society’s 12,000 members, according to Gerald Sullivan, president and founder of the society. “More and more people are living all over the country away from their families,” he said. “For most people, the `family plot’ doesn’t exist anymore, and if you have a full-service, two-night wake, the question becomes, `Who’s going to attend?’ “
Sullivan, 48, of Olympia Fields describes himself as a “typical second-generation funeral director” but adds that he has always been interested in cremation, even when the option was ignored by others in the funeral industry.
Sullivan founded the Cremation Society of Illinois in 1983 and patterned it on cremation societies in California, which had been one of the leaders nationally in the trend toward cremation. “We started out exclusively with cremation because it was a growing trend that the traditional (funeral home) people weren’t handling very well,” Sullivan said. He noted that funeral homes do handle cremations, but the cost may be higher because of higher overhead.
Since the society was founded, Sullivan said, other funeral directors have become more sensitive to the need to provide cremation, responding to the demand for smaller, simpler funerals and also to environmental concerns as existing cemeteries fill up.
“If you look at the area,” Sullivan said, “the land in the farther suburbs is so valuable that it is not being used for cemeteries.”
The Mt. Prospect office takes up half of a small brick-fronted building and includes small offices. There’s also a reception room and chapel, which will accommodate up to 30 people.
In addition to handling arrangements for members, the society will also handle funerals for non-members at a higher price, Sullivan said. And whenever he or any of his 20 staff members talk to prospective members, they discuss how to talk about arrangements with families.
“We stress to people that they talk to their family and to their attorney and to their neighbors so that people are clear about what they want,” he said. “We provide members with a card with a phone number and they fill out all the authorizations.”
An open discussion of funeral plans was important to Karen Brown-Nelson of Grayslake and was a great relief to her son, Frank Marks, and his wife, Melody, of Grayslake when Brown-Nelson died on Nov. 2. “She had been ill on and off for 10 years with diabetes,” Melody Marks said, “and she was a member of the Cremation Society. She told us about that a long time ago and talked about her dying quite a bit. I don’t know what got her interested, but I’m glad she did it. When I called the society, they walked me through everything.”
Brown-Nelson had a memorial service in a funeral home in Mundelein near where she worked, Melody Marks said. The Cremation Society staff helped the family arrange the service even though it was not in one of their chapels. “We went to their Mt. Prospect office to pick out an urn,” Marks said, “but it was so much easier than having to pick out a casket and the clothes she would wear. I really don’t think she liked the idea of everyone staring at her after she was gone.”
Memorials are usually held with the urn containing the ashes present, Sullivan said, but some families choose to have a viewing of the body for family and close friends. “It’s not an either/or thing,” Sullivan said. “People can blend the traditions.”
That, however, would increase the cost substantially, because embalming of the body would be required, and there is a $595 charge for rental of an oak casket.
The actual cremation itself occurs at one of the society’s two crematoria in Romeoville and Park Forest. Because of the society’s modern facilities, embalming is not required in Illinois prior to cremation unless the body will be viewed.
“Our crematorium in Romeoville is 2 years old and is the newest and best equipped in the state,” Sullivan said. “If people want to watch the cremation, we have facilities at the crematorium where they can be present. Usually as soon as we tell people they can come to the cremation, they don’t need to, but it’s a reassurance for families.”
Many religions have encouraged cremation traditionally, including Hinduism and Buddhism. Among Christians, Sullivan said, mainline Protestants, particularly Episcopalians, have fairly high rates of cremation, while African-American Southern Baptists have very low rates. “For years, cremation was discouraged among Roman Catholics,” Sullivan said, “but that has changed. The rate of cremation is about 7 or 8 percent among Catholics.”
What to do with the ashes is a question that has a wide variety of answers, Sullivan said. Approximately one-third of the families will choose to inter the urn in a cemetery, and one-third will scatter the remains according to directions from the deceased. The final third “are returned to the families, and we’re not sure what happens to them,” he said.
The number of people using the Cremation Society’s services has increased 10 to 18 percent per year in recent years, according to Sullivan. In response to the growing number of cremations, some churches are installing columbarium, columns that provide a place for urns, he said, and some have set up scattering gardens for parishioners. Sullivan said he has been considering building a scattering garden near one of the society’s crematoria.
“A lot of veterans who served in the South Pacific have their remains scattered there,” Sullivan said. “Veterans can be buried in a national cemetery, but the only way an ordinary veteran can be buried at Arlington National Cemetery (in Washington D.C.) is to be cremated. A lot of people don’t know that.”
For the Paullses and for Karen Brown-Nelson’s family, the disposition of the remains is one of the things their loved one discussed, along with membership in the Cremation Society of Illinois.
“We had the ashes at the memorial gathering,” Paulls said, “and it is my daughter’s and my plan to scatter them in Lake Michigan, but we’ll do that sometime in the spring.”
Melody Marks said her mother-in-law was very specific. “She told us she wants us to sprinkle her ashes in the ocean,” she said. “She went on a cruise in July, and she loved it so much she asked us to go on a cruise and sprinkle them there. Next summer we’ll go to the ocean for her. She had so much fun there.”
