Minnesota Leads Midwest in a Hot Trend: Cremation

Just as there are blue states and red states, there are burn states and bury states.

Minnesota is feeling the burn. About 45 percent of the people who died here last year were cremated, according to state health department figures. That’s not as high as some Western states and New England states where half to two-thirds of the dead are cremated.

But it’s the highest cremation rate in the Midwest and well above the national average of about 35 percent. In Wisconsin, for example, only 32 percent of the state’s dead were cremated last year.

Cremations here and nationwide are expected to continue to grow, especially as baby boomers cash in their chips. In five years, most of those who die in Minnesota will be cremated, according to projections.

But cremation rates within the state vary widely.

In the farmland of the northwestern and southwestern corners of Minnesota, it’s still plant you now, dig you later, with cremation rates as low as 12 percent.

But on the North Shore, it’s burn, baby, burn. More than half the people in the state’s Arrowhead and Iron Range region are cremated. The state’s cremation hot spot is Cook County, where nearly three out of four who died last year were cremated. In neighboring Lake County, nearly two out of three people who died last year were cremated.

Cremation is also hot in the Twin Cities. Anoka, Washington, Hennepin and Dakota counties are among the 14 counties in the state where at least half of those who died last year were cremated. Ramsey County was an exception, with a 48 percent cremation rate.

CHANGING VIEWS

It took about two generations for cremation to change from being seen as almost taboo to the being on the verge of becoming the preferred method for Minnesotans to dispose of their dead.

Fifty years ago, less than 2 percent of the dead in Minnesota were cremated. But cremation has experienced steady growth since then.

Five years from now, close to 60 percent of those who die in Minnesota will be cremated, according to projections from the Cremation Association of North America.

“It’s kind of becoming the new tradition,” said Kevin Waterston, co-owner of the Cremation Society of Minnesota, the largest cremation business in the state.

The same thing is happening nationwide, where cremation rates were in the single digits for most of the 20th century. Now, one out of three people who die in the U.S. are cremated.

In states like Nevada, Oregon, Washington and Hawaii, that figure climbs to two out of three, and more than half of those who die in New England states like Maine, Vermont and New Hampshire are cremated.

Cremation is least likely to happen in the Bible Belt states like Mississippi, Alabama, Kentucky, Tennessee and Louisiana, where rates go down to 11 percent.

Utah is an exception to the high cremation rates among Western states, possibly a result of the practice being discouraged in the past by leaders of the Mormon church. Florida is a Southern exception. More than half of those who die there are cremated. Funeral experts think that’s because so many people in Florida are retirees from other places.

By 2025, the number of people cremated in the United States will double compared with today, according to the Cremation Association of North America. The national cremation rate is projected to hit 56 percent.

WHY CREMATE

Higher cremation rates are associated with higher income and education levels, according to a survey done for the Funeral and Memorial Information Council. The survey also found that blacks are less likely to choose cremation than whites and Catholics are less likely to choose cremation than Protestants, except for Baptists, who are less likely to choose cremation than Catholics.

The reasons people choose cremation include lower cost, and people think it is simpler, less emotional and more convenient, and that it saves land, according to the survey.

David Harrington, an economist at Kenyon College in Ohio, has found that more restrictive funeral regulations in some states lower cremation rates. But he said the biggest factor that determines whether someone chooses cremation is if they die in the same place they were born.

“People who were born in the area they die, often they have family burial plots,” Harrington said. He said the nationwide rise of cremation rates in the second half of the 20th century has been driven by the increased mobility of the U.S. population.

People in the funeral industry in Minnesota can’t point to any one explanation for why cremation rates are so high in the north woods while burial is preferred in farm country.

“We’ve been trying to figure that one out, too,” said Ken Spangler, owner and operator of a crematorium and funeral home in Grand Rapids.

“It might have a tie to the whole perspective to how one uses the land or sees the land availability,” said Cory Michaelson, president of the Minnesota Funeral Directors Association.

Spangler said among the national and state forests on the Iron Range, people who get cremated are likely to scatter their ashes in places where they’ve hiked, hunted or paddled, like a favorite lake or a deer hunting camp.

Peter Monkres, pastor of the United Church of Christ in Grand Marais, said he’s seen North Shore residents opt to have their ashes scattered at the family cabin, underneath old-growth pines, on Lake Superior, on the Gunflint Trail and at the Boundary Waters.

Monkres said many people in Grand Marais, including transplants from the Twin Cities, feel their spirituality is grounded with the earth, and that connection is more directly fulfilled by cremation than burial.

“I think a lot of it has to do with people’s love of the spirituality of the created order up here,” said Monkres. He said that when he dies, he would like to be cremated and have his ashes spread in his favorite backpacking destinations like the Sierra Nevada and the Colorado Rockies. “Whatever happens after I die, I’m becoming more of a part of everything that is.”

HERE TO STAY

In the farmland of the Red River Valley, however, becoming part of the earth means being buried under it, according to George Korsmo, a funeral director in Moorhead.

“In a sense, up there you don’t possess the forest,” Korsmo said of the Iron Range and Arrowhead. But “farm people have real strong ties to the land itself.”

He said cremation is a rarity in rural communities where generations of families have been farming the same piece of land and are buried in the same cemetery.

“There’s something about the ties to the land that farmers have that are handed down to even nonfarm relatives,” Korsmo said.

He said he hopes to be buried in his version of an ancestral home, Northwood, N.D., where Korsmos have been farming since the 1880s. “That land is almost holy ground.”

Spangler said traditional rural people have the reputation of being a funeral director’s best customers.

“If you want to sell expensive caskets, go to the farming communities, not Edina,” Spangler said.

But observers say the funeral industry will have to adjust as cremations ? which can cost thousands of dollars less than a traditional funeral ? continue to rise.

Cemeteries are rushing to add options like cremation gardens and cremation niches in mausoleums.

“The days of the 200-acre cemetery are gone,” said Bill McQueen, president of the Cremation Association of North America.

Waterston said casket sales are starting to stagnate.

“We don’t use the funeral coach as often as we did,” Spangler said. “We still have to have the dang thing, but it sits in the garage more often.”

Source: TwinCities.com

MaryJo Webster contributed to this report.

Richard Chin can be reached at 651-228-5560.