Undersea Afterlife

When Edie Hink was near the end of her life, family members visited her with a proposition. Rather than a traditional funeral, how about preserving her ashes in the deep, as part of an artificial reef?

“She hated the idea of being put in the ground,” says her son, Ron Hink, 55, a south Florida executive with a large food company. He showed her a video of the reef during her last days in a Naples hospice. “She got to swim through it. She loved the idea and told all the nurses how she had a fine waterfront property,” he adds.

What may seem like a strange idea to many is catching on in South Florida as a relatively inexpensive option compared to the underground casket burial.

“It’s the way to go,” says Julie LaMontaigne, a sales rep with the Neptune Society, the nation’s largest cremation firm, which inaugurated its reef memorial site three miles off Key Biscayne in 2007.

Sitting on the seabed at a depth of 40 feet, the reef features a sunken cityscape of sculptured arches, columns and lions. Future plans include the addition of sculptures of dolphins, chariots and Neptune himself.

“Think outside the wooden box,” the company proposed in a recent ad campaign. And many people are doing just that. Cremations accounted for 28.7 percent of all deceased in the U.S. in 2003, compared to only 16.4 per cent in 1989, according to the Cremation Association of North America (CANA). Based upon increases in acceptance over the past five-year average, the association has forecast a national cremation rate of 43 percent by 2025.

As cremation catches on, the Neptune Society is hoping to break into the Hispanic market, which until recently shunned incinerating loved ones, due mostly to traditional religious and cultural beliefs.
Careful to keep the ecosystem in mind, the company markets the reef using the slogan, “Leave the world a better place.” The company’s last survey in 2009 showed there were 5,000 fish already living on the reef, including eels, two stingrays, and a turtle.

“We were asked to design the whole ecosystem from the smallest to the largest habitat,” says Jim Hutslar, Neptune’s reef operations director, explaining how each feature of the reef has different shapes and surface textures, designed with a different organism in mind.

The original idea for the reef began several years ago to create an Atlantis-type tourist attraction. But as the project evolved the idea of incorporating cremated remains was added. When the original investors ran out of money, they approached the Neptune Society, which was looking to expand its business in South Florida.

It took several years to get all the permits and install the five-ton columns on 50-ton bases, with 20-feet tall arches. A few hundred memorials already cover a small portion of the 16-acre undersea cemetery. When complete it could hold the remains of more than 100,000 people, the company says.

Every few days Hutslar takes the short boat ride out to sea to “deploy” a new memorial of cremated remains mixed in cement and moulded into different shapes—starfish, shells or coral. Family members are free to observe the mixing process at the company’s Deerfield Beach crematorium. Small mementos from the deceased can also be added. Hutslar says families have requested varied items from a $100 casino chip to a favorite fishing lure, even a mermaid-shaped bottle opener. Some add a personal paper note.

On a calm, sunny day, a turtle floated nearby and schools of small silvery fish darted below the surface, dodging larger predators. The quiet was disturbed only by the creaking of the boat and the lapping of waves against the side. After mixing a special undersea glue, Hutslar studies a map of the reef aboard the company’s dive boat.

“Okay, let’s see where Marjorie goes,” he said. “Everyone has a reef address.”

Moments later he back-saulted over the side in dive gear holding a starfish shaped memorial weighing about 10 pounds and bearing a shiny golden plaque for a 68-year-old woman who died last year. The sculptures are affixed along pathways or set inside columns. “They become part of the reef,” Hutslar explains.

He likes to say a few words as the glue sets. “I read the name of each person and say something like, ‘See you later,’ or ‘Hope you like it down here,’” he says.

A burial at sea couldn’t have been more appropriate in the case of the Bert Kilbride, who died aged 93 shortly after being named the world’s oldest active diver by the Guinness Book of World Records. Married five times, Kilbride was a famous dive resort owner in the Caribbean who learned to dive in the 1940s off Key Biscayne. “He’s in a very nice spot, at the head of a column,” says his son, Gary Kilbride, 72.

The reef option costs about $4,000, far less than the $8,000 to $12,000 for your average casket burial. The company offers a regular cremation, with ashes spread at sea, for $1,699. (For a $2,148 pre-paid membership, it will guarantee worldwide collection and repatriation and cremation of the deceased.)

Cremation is growing in popularity for financial reasons as well as practicality and flexibility, Neptune adds. The company has averaged double-digit growth in cremations over the past six years, says Jim Ford, the company’s chief operating officer. “It’s on the rise because of economics and because we are a transient society,” he says. That’s certainly true of Hispanics who have large, often widely dispersed families, and lower average incomes than most Americans.

In a traditional funeral it’s extremely expensive to keep a loved one preserved for several days while relatives gather, says Juan Gonzalez, sales manager of the Neptune Society in Miami. With a cremation the ashes can be looked after until a “celebration of life” can be arranged.

“There are so many options. The practicality of it is enormous,” says Gonzalez, who is from Cali, Colombia. Hispanics prefer their ashes to go back to their families and often will hold onto the ashes for a year or so until there is closure. Some families like to pass around the urn among each other for a few months, before choosing a place—or several places—to scatter the ashes. “I know one family that took the urn to Disney World, spread some ashes there, and then did the same at Hilton Head. Then they brought the rest to us,” says Gonzalez.

Ron Hink believes his mother is far better off being part of the reef than buried next to her husband back in Michigan. He has dived “to say hello” half a dozen times in the two years since his mother joined the fishes. Hink says he especially likes the idea of “giving life to new life,” on the reef. “To me it’s just a more sustainable idea. I’m amazed how rapid and abundant the growth on the reef is.”

His relatives liked the idea so much, “we bought a family column,” he adds. “My wife and I are already committed. Now my mother and father-in-law are thinking about it.”

HISPANICS AND FUNERALS

For many years Latinos considered cremation taboo, in large part because it was not accepted by the Roman Catholic church. Some believed that if the body were burned to ashes, it would be impossible to be resurrected. The Vatican lifted its ban on cremation in 1963, but it wasn’t until 1997 that cremated remains were allowed to be brought into church for funeral Masses. The church still prefers remains be buried in graves or entombed in mausoleums. But old beliefs die hard. “It just seems ugly to me to burn up a loved one,” says Enilda Arriaza, 51, a Miami house-cleaner who emigrated from El Salvador a decade ago. Misperceptions about cremation persist. Some Hispanics mistakenly believe that cremation precludes a funeral and burial. Also, visiting the gravesite has long been an important ritual in Catholic societies, to reconnect with loved ones on birthdays and special holidays, such as the Day of the Dead.