Eternal Image Inc (fka ETNLQ)

[al44]

from Long Island:

http://libn.com/blog/2008/11/13/fans-of-pop-culture-can-take-their-obsessions-to-the-grave/


Fans of pop culture can take their obsessions to the grave

by Ambrose Clancy
Published: November 13, 2008
Tags: funeral homes, sports

Vigliante is the only funeral director on Long Island offering the baseball send-off

John Vigliante is an advocate of people expressing themselves. Even when they’re dead.

If your passion is to live and uh, die with the Mets or Yankees, Vigliante will put you in a custom-made casket authorized by Major League Baseball, bearing the colors – and in the case of the Bombers, the pinstripes – of your beloved team, complete with a pillow bearing the team logo. The logos also appear on the inside lid of the casket and along the handles. Two long, wide panels of ash, the wood most often used to make major league bats, run the length of your uniformed on-deck resting place.

An owner of Branch Funeral Home of Smithtown, Vigliante is the only funeral director on Long Island offering the baseball send-off. In the past 10 years or so he has buried people with baseball bats and hockey sticks and about five people a year are interred in Mets or Yankees jerseys. (More Yankees than Mets, he said, which hurts because he roots for the Amazins, but business is business.)

But now you can go six feet under totally encapsulated in and
embraced by your team.

Vigliante spotted the hardball coffins at a convention in Florida last month and jumped at the chance to offer the $6,000 steel caskets.

“We celebrate people’s passions in life, and baseball is a passion,” Vigliante said. “It makes funerals more meaningful.”

Baseball caskets are just the latest innovation in the “personalization” movement for funerals, Vigliante said, which has picked up significantly over the past decade.

The traditional funeral – a gathering of friends and families for a wake and then a memorial service followed by a trip to the cemetery – is still the way most families see off their loved ones.

But more and more people want the funeral to be a celebration of the deceased’s life and not just a somber gathering. There are companies that market “coffin” cakes and urns, which when opened play “How Dry I Am.” Many people want a funeral to be, as strange as it might seem, fun.

Jeff Davis, owner of Rocky Point Funeral Home and in the business 40 years, said personalizing services is nothing new, although the trend has accelerated of late.

“I don’t know if people want personalization or the media is telling them they want it,” Davis said. “Years ago, we had light-colored coffins and gave everyone permanent markers to write their names or messages on the caskets. That was the beginning of personalization. Before that, it was picking out a prayer card.”

The outdoor national pastime doesn’t toll for thee? You’re a die-hard Trekkie facing the final frontier and want to boldly go where all men have gone before? You’re in luck.

Michigan-based Eternal Image has secured the rights to launch the Star Trek casket, a sleek-looking aerodynamic number with the Enterprise’s logo.

If cremation is your vehicle to go gently, or not, into that good night, you can be more than just a mound of ashes in a nondescript urn on the mantel. Eternal Image will place your ashes in a Star Trek Urn which, company literature says, is a “three-column base of both chrome and brushed metal. … The design is reminiscent of the 24th century styling of the United Federation of Planets and Star Fleet.”

Vigliante pointed to literature from a company that takes cremated remains, mixes them with colors and places them in blown glass for pendants. A Memory Glass Touchstones brochure says this will “allow you to keep your loved one in your pocket, in a purse or in any creative place, allowing you to keep your loved one with you at all times.”

Or you can have a company take your ashes, mix them with
cement and dump the whole thing off the New Jersey coast, creating a reef your family and friends can visit while scuba diving.

“Personalization is really big today,” Vigliante said.