All in all, Eaton’s commercial companies seem to come off astonishingly well in their dealings with the friendly Memorial-Park company. In a stupendous display of Christ-in-businessmanship, his land company in 1959 sold the Wee Kirk o’ the Heather and two other churches to the nonprofit company for eighteen times their depreciated cost, thereby realizing a bonnie profit of over $1 million. To ease the pain of the capital gains tax on this transaction, the Memorial-Park is paying the purchase price, plus 4 percent interest, in installments of $100,000 per year.

As Mrs. St. Johns says of Dr. Hubert Eaton, “He was a businessman-idealist with an inspiration, whose plan’s greatness lay in its simplicity.”

The Dreamer is not through yet. In 1954 he announced his discovery of the Memorial Impulse. He says he might have called this force of nature the Memorial Instinct, but preferred to defer to “psychologists and scientists” who feel the term “instinct” is imprecise. The Memorial Impulse is a primary urge founded in man’s biological nature, and it gives rise to the desire to build (as one might have already guessed) memorials. It is also an indispensable factor in the growth of any civilization.

There are a number of ways to turn the Memorial Impulse, “as old as love and just as deathless,” to cash account. “Let every salesman’s motto be: Accent the spiritual!” says the Dreamer, and, “It is the salesman’s duty to measure the force of the Memorial Impulse in his client and to persuade him to live up to that noble urge in accordance with his means…. Most important of all, every salesman should understand that if properly inspired the Memorial Impulse will do more for him than he ever did for himself, but let your financial desire be tempered with the morality of the Memorial Impulse.”

The Memorial Impulse can also be channeled to remedy what was perhaps a tactical error in the early days of the Dream: insistence upon the use of small, uniform bronze grave markers.

Eaton mused that while there was universal agreement that the elimination of tombstones was a good thing, nevertheless the tombstones did serve a purpose: they were a “great assist” to the Memorial Impulse. The “great assist” that was unwittingly discarded, we learn, is the good old epitaph. There just isn’t room for it on the 12-by-24-inch bronze tablets currently in fashion. True, the little markers permit of vast, almost unbroken areas of grass—the “sweeping lawns” of the original Builder’s Creed—but since bronze markers are priced by the square inch, more or less, their size also limits the amount that can be charged for them. Now that the Impulse has been discovered, this can be corrected, and the epitaph was slated for a comeback that may radically alter the appearance of the memorial park, transforming its sweeping green lawns into seas of bronze. Eaton suggests that cemetery owners should be thinking in terms of “ever-larger” bronze tablets, big enough, in fact, to contain complete epitaphs and historical data—big enough to cover the entire grave! This, he says, would be a most “convenient outlet” for the client’s Memorial Impulse.

Nationwide, there has been a phenomenal growth in cremation since The American Way of Deathwas first published. In 1961, 3.75 percent of the American dead were cremated; by 1995, 21 percent and rising.

Preference for cremation varies greatly from region to region. In 1993 (the last date for which a state-by-state breakdown is available) Mississippi had the lowest cremation rate, 2.6 percent; and Nevada the highest, with 58 percent. In general, all the Southern states with the exception of Florida (40 percent) have very low cremation figures. Midwest are medium low; New England, fairly high, West Coast, high.

While national and state statistics show that cremation is gaining ground, a further breakdown by counties is revealing as to who chooses cremation. For example, while 41 percent of Californians are cremated, in the San Francisco Bay Area the figure is 60 percent, and in affluent, trendsetting Marin County, 70 percent. In Sarasota, Florida, an upscale retirement area, the cremation rate is over 70 percent, while for the state as a whole it’s 40 percent.

In the 1960s, the Catholic Church lifted its ban against cremation, thus making it permissible for members of most major religious faiths to use this method of disposition.

How to explain this extraordinary increase in the resort to the retort?

A common reaction of people who learn for the first time some of the facts and figures connected with the American way of death is to say, “None of that for me! I’m going to beat this racket. I just want to be cremated, and avoid all the fuss and expense.” Cremation is no doubt a simple, tidy solution to the disposal of the dead. It appeals to the nature lover and the poet, who visualize their mortal remains scattered over sunny hillside or remote strand. It is commended by environmentalists and by those who would like to see an end to all the malarkey that surrounds the usual kind of funeral. It has appeal for the economy-minded; logically one would expect the expense to be but a fraction of that incurred for earth burial. And, to continue along that seditious line of thought, why not bypass the undertaker altogether, by taking the corpse directly to a crematory, there to be consigned to the flames—the only expense incurred: a modest crematory charge?

It is true that in most countries where cremation is on the increase, the objectives of economy and simplicity are well served. In England, for example—where there were three cremations in 1885—it is today the mode of disposal for 72 percent of the dead. The average crematory charge of $280 includes amenities such as use of a chapel, not usually available in North American crematories. Specifications for the coffin to be used are the simplest, “easily combustible wood, not painted or varnished”; to facilitate the scattering of the ashes, they are “removed from the cremator, and after cooling, pulverized to a fine texture.” The ultimate disposition of 90 percent of cremated remains in England is scattering, or “strewing,” as the clergy like to call it. Sometimes the ashes are scattered over the sea or over the countryside; more often, by a crematory attendant in a Garden of Remembrance, consecrated ground specially set aside for the purpose. Most crematoria and cemeteries maintain such a garden; in some there is a nominal charge for the service.

The vogue for cremation is a very recent development in England. The cremation “movement” was initiated there in the nineteenth century. Its adherents included many distinguished physicians, scientists, intellectuals, radicals, and reformers; a few members of the aristocracy. Among the organizers of the first Cremation Society in 1874 were Sir Henry Thompson, Bart., Surgeon to the Queen; Anthony Trollope; Spencer Wells; Millais; and the Dukes of Bedford and Westminister. Naturally, that thorny old critic of the status quo George Bernard Shaw was strongly in favor of cremation, and he sums up the argument for it with his usual pithiness: “Dead bodies can be cremated. All of them ought to be, for earth burial, a horrible practice, will some day be prohibited by law, not only because it is hideously unaesthetic, but because the dead would crowd the living off the earth if it could be carried out to its end of preserving our bodies for their resurrection on an imaginary day of judgment (in sober fact, every day is a day of judgment).”

There were at first strong objections to cremation from some of the clergy, who thought that it would interfere with the resurrection of the body; this point was neatly disposed of by Lord Shaftesbury when he asked, “What would become in such a case of the Blessed Martyrs?” In the 1870s and 1880s, cremation advocates campaigned on a number of fronts for legality and public acceptance of the practice. They published expository material urging support for their cause; they experimented with various types of furnaces; they went so far as to cremate one another in defiance of the authorities, thus subjecting themselves to public censure and even to criminal prosecution. It was not until 1884 that they won a court decision declaring cremation to be a legal procedure, but there was still much opposition from church and public; police protection was sometimes necessary when a cremation was to take place. In short, acceptance of cremation as a sensible and also respectable disposition of the human dead was only won as the result of a hard-fought, uphill struggle.