Everyone dies, and nobody has a choice in the matter. After death, on the other hand, there are plenty of choices for those left behind — and most of them cost money.
From playful parlor services to high mountain memorials and backyard burials, Wyomingites are known to personalize their final dispositions. State funeral directors say they are eager to accommodate any and every custom.
“As long as it's not immoral, unethical or illegal, we can probably make that happen,” said Joey Casada, owner of the Casada Funeral Home & Crematory in Rawlins.
The range of options also means a range of price points, which can run from the cost of a shovel up to tens of thousands of dollars. Or it could be nothing if you already have a shovel or borrow one.
While it’s legal to bury a loved one in the backyard in Wyoming, most families don’t go that route.
The average cost in Rawlins for a funeral service bundle–which includes transportation of the body, embalming and cosmetics, casket, headstone and cemetery fees ranges between $7,000 and $12,000.
“People will call, and they'll say, ‘Well, how much is burial?’ That's like calling a car dealership and saying, ‘Hey, my car just died. How much is a new car? I can't answer that over the phone,” said Casada, who is the current chairman of the Wyoming Funeral Directors Association.
The car analogy applies well to coffins, often one of the biggest variables in funeral expenses.
The luxury make is a 32-ounce bronze casket, which will preserve you like King Tut, joked one funeral director.
You’ll also pay King Tut prices, at about $14,000. On the other end of the spectrum is a cloth-covered, single-ply fiberboard box, which funeral directors will as soon give away for free with services.
A Big Menu
Another variable are services themselves.
In Wyoming, they can be creatively fulsome or gracefully nuanced, but they virtually always nod to western life, Casada and other directors tell Cowboy State Daily.
Sometimes it amounts to simple touches, like memorial programs designed as bingo cards in honor of a decedent’s late-life love for games of chance. Other times, families really drive themes home, as when a parlor gets transformed into golf links, with putting greens and golf carts and coolers full of beer.
“Every funeral should reflect that person and not be cookie cutter. The point is to make it meaningful,” Casada said, adding that the details really stand out on Wyoming caskets, from horseshoe and elkhorn handles to branded headplates.
At Ballard Funeral Home in Cody, services can double as tailgate parties. Think outdoor shade tents, the sound of meat sizzling on an open flame, and the smell of brats wafting through the chapel where the decedent’s favorite football team plays on the projector.
“I happen to be a Broncos fan, but I was rooting for the Eagles that day,” said Cody Gortmaker, managing partner at Ballard.
In 1960, the average cost of a funeral in Wyoming was $708, according to the Wyoming Funeral Directors Association. By 2012, that cost had risen to $7,075.
The association stopped providing cost data in 2012, but assuming costs had remained steady, in inflation adjusted terms that would put the average funeral expenditure in Wyoming today at around $9,790, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics Inflation Calculator
Cremation Is King
Cost is among the reasons for the growing trend in cremation, a cheaper alternative to traditional burials. Western states like Wyoming are leading the pack for the highest cremation rates in the U.S., according to the National Funeral Directors Association (NFDA).
Jamey Kirkland, co-owner of Davis Funeral Home in Riverton, said cremations now account for more than half of all the services he conducts. That number is likely to grow, as analysis from NFDA suggests that cremations will top 80% of all U.S. dispositions by 2045.
The baseline cost for cremation at the Davis Funeral Home is $3,000. Add to that a no-frills service and burial and the cost comes to $4,100, a competitive industry price point.
Another factor driving cremation rates are changes in family structure. More and more families have become mixed, blended, and geographically spread apart. In these instances, cremation buys time, says Cody Gortmaker, managing partner of Ballard Funeral Home in Cody.
“Let's say someone passed away in Cody tonight, and the family is spread all over East Coast, West Coast, down south, and they can't get to Cody altogether for another couple three weeks. Cremation takes the pressure off because they don't feel like they have a loved one sitting in limbo waiting for them to get together,” Gortmaker said, adding that often entire seasons pass between the time of a death and memorial service.
“We see that a lot with [deaths] in the winter. Families may want to wait and get together in Cody for a celebration of life in the spring or summer, when they can enjoy it as a vacation destination as well.”
As for the ashes afterward, sky's the literal limit.
Creative options include shooting remains into space or pressing ashes into vinyl records. Although in Wyoming, the preferences are more conventional, like mantle urns, cemetery burials and ash scattering, Gortmaker says.
Legally, scattering is supposed to take place on private property, but that’s not the way it shakes out.
“Everyone has their favorite hunting spots where they shot their first big bull elk, or the place where grandpa always took them fishing. There are countless places all over Cody, Clark and Yellowstone that people have those special connections to,” Gortmaker said.
“We don’t condone spreading on public property. But I couldn't even tell you how many hundreds or thousands of people have been scattered all around the hills of Wyoming.
Cremations may also be driven by the popular assumption that they are more climate friendly. Although David Harness of Harness Funeral Home Services in Buffalo says that’s not necessarily true.
“Cremation has a significant environmental cost. It uses about 3,000 cubic feet of gas per body, that's 1.3 million BTUs of non-renewable resources,” he said.
Do It Yourself Burial
The most affordable option, though, is to cut funeral homes out of the equation entirely. Wyoming law allows families to perform direct burials on private property.
Fremont County Coroner Erin Ivie says direct burial makes sense for some families because of religious, moral or financial reasons.
“From a coroner’s perspective, all of the deaths that this office investigates are unanticipated, unexpected, and usually involve some type of trauma. Nobody was saving up for this burial and there is likely no life insurance policy. The family may not have the monetary resources to bury their loved one next week,” she said.
“People want to care for their loved ones in their own way, at their own pace, and without having to take out a second mortgage to do it,” she said.
Though cost effective, DIY burial requires jumping through hoops, and most people don’t know how to go about it until it’s too late, she said.
First, a burial area must be assessed by a registered surveyor to confirm sufficient distance from waterways and fence lines. Then the property must be registered as a cemetery parcel with the county recorder.
Additionally, family members are required to obtain body-transit and burial permits. These are issued by Wyoming Registrars, typically a funeral home or coroner’s office.
Besides the bureaucracy, there’s the handling of the body itself, including the fluids and odor.
One Wyomingite laid her loved one on a blanketed bed of cat litter to absorb fluids and odor during an extended home viewing, Ivie said. Yet each body is case-by-case, according to Joshua Slocum, executive director of Funeral Consumers Alliance.
If a person has not consumed anything in the days preceding death, for instance, noxious odors are minimal for a number of days after passing. Yet, “the robust body of someone who finished a meal of corned beef and cabbage just prior to death…might produce telltale odors,” Slocum explains in his book “Final Rights.”
Municipal cemeteries also permit direct burials, but different standards and pricings apply.
The municipal cemetery in Riverton, for instance, requires only that decedents are enclosed in a disaster pouch, or body bag. The Lander cemetery requires the body bag as well as a burial vault, a type of protective structure that maintains the landscape against ground collapse. Whereas the cemetery in Dubois requires a casket as well as a vault.
The costs for a plot and burial fees in Wyoming can range from $150 on the low end to $700 at the high end, depending on factors like the amount of remaining cemetery real estate.
Sometimes descendants will go unclaimed, usually because they have no next of kin or family is estranged. In such cases the county arranges a burial. But sometimes they go unclaimed because families cannot afford to administer their remains.
For Ivie, this is untenable.
“It hurts my heart to know that families may not claim their loved one simply because they cannot afford to do anything else,” Ivie said.
Funerals Are For The Living
David Harness lost his brother in the Vietnam conflict. The grief from that loss led him on a spiritual journey and ultimately to a career in the funeral industry. Through that process he’d come to see that memorial services are not for the deceased.
“I take care of the deceased like they're my own brother, sister, mother or father. But that's not who we're really taking care of. We're taking care of the people who survive because that's where grief lies,” he said.
He detailed an experience involving the unexpected death of a 6-year-old boy living on a ranch in Sheridan County. The boy helped with cattle in the afternoon, came down with a flu in the evening, and was found dead the following morning.
Harness was at the time a child of about the same age and described feeling overwhelmed with sadness as he carried the deceased 6-year-old to his casket. He says that bearing sadness alongside families is a part of his calling.
“I will say this without reservation — the day that I sit down with a family that just lost a 16-year-old in a car wreck and I don't cry, I'll quit, because it means that I've become hardened, and that's not who I want to be and that’s not who those families need.”
Shortly before Harness spoke with Cowboy State Daily, he’d been discussing funeral arrangements for a man who’d been his daughters’ soccer coach. He knew the man for decades, and he teared up as he explained how such moments feel.
“The longer I'm here in this small community, the harder it is on me because I know everybody. But the longer I'm here in this community, the better I am at what I do because I know everybody,” he said.
“I’m a grief counselor. That’s how I see myself. I never want to be called a businessman.”
Zakary Sonntag can be reached at zakary@cowboystatedaily.com.
