Death Care Industry Reacts As Popularity Of Cremation Grows

    DALLAS, TX, September 05, 2009 /24-7PressRelease/ -- Responding to predictions like those from the Cremation Association of North America, a Chicago-based industry group that has projected that 38 percent of all deaths this year will be finalized by cremation (a rise of 12% just since the year 2000) and that cremation rates will rise to 50% over the next fifteen years, John P. Brooks, a licensed funeral director with more than 35 years of experience, is expanding and improving the cremation-related services he offers through his family-owned businesses, including North Dallas Funeral Home.

A convergence of widely varied interests is stimulating this dramatic shift, including people who are interested in returning to a simpler death-care process, those seeking one that is less expensive, and even those whose main concern is environmental impact. As these diversified groups have helped push the death care industry strongly toward cremation, people like Brooks have worked both to satisfy demand and also to ensure the development of high-quality cremation services that maintain the level of integrity that people expect from the funeral home industry.

Brooks continues to revamp his funeral homes to keep up with the changing face of the industry, helping to provide greater access to cremation services for those who seek a more simplified, natural passing for themselves or their loved ones. Brooks' efforts have placed his businesses at the forefront of the movement to make cremation a simpler matter to arrange, aided by the advent of internet access as a household service now as common as the telephone was thirty years ago.

North Dallas Funeral Home maintains its own website, and Brooks recently launched Cremation-Online.com, a website that allows cremation arrangements to be made nationwide, from the comfort and privacy of home. Thanks to these innovations, a cremation can now be arranged simply by calling a toll-free number, downloading necessary forms, and returning them by fax. Cremation-related services and products, like memorial services and videos, along with ceremonial urns, keepsake jewelry, garden statuary, and a variety of other items designed to hold ashes of the departed, can be purchased online, as well.

Aside from simplicity, people are also expressing cost considerations, with the cost of a traditional funeral with burial skyrocketing over the past decade to an average of $8,000 or more, and with the additional financial difficulties caused by the current economic recession. Funeral home clients are definitely looking for an alternative that is easier on the pocket, while maintaining an appropriate level of dignity, and many are finding that in cremation.

Cremation at North Dallas Funeral Home can reduce the cost of a traditional funeral with burial by more than half, while still allowing people to arrange for many of the traditional funeral trappings, like visitations, funeral services, memorial ceremonies, and permanent memorialization with stones or interment in niches at churches and cemeteries. Online clients have access to many services and products at greatly reduced prices, or even those that are not often available at traditional funeral homes. Private memorials, like quiet scattering ceremonies, can be even less expensive.

Dallas Funeral Home can ship ashes discreetly and securely to any desired location.
Another unexpected group now expressing widespread interest in cremation is comprised of people concerned with "green dying," or environmentally-friendly options for death care. Cremation saves space normally used for cemeteries; it saves resources, some of them quite rare, like the mahogany wood often used to make caskets; it saves the resources expended and the environmental hazards involved in manufacturing products like caskets; and the newer crematories, including the ones operated by North Dallas Funeral Home, produce nearly zero emissions, avoiding air pollution.

In addition, newer services like Brooks' Cremation-Online.com contribute even more environmental friendliness to the cremation process. While other "green" death care options may be available to people in major cities, Cremation-Online.com brings access to cremation to people in even the most rural areas. Clients can arrange every aspect of the cremation process through a secure and almost paper-free, environmentally conservative online process. Other services offered, such as live streaming video of memorial services, can save enormous resources normally expended by family and others in traveling to be present for memorial events.

For additional information on the many benefits of choosing cremation, contact John Brooks at 1-800-300-1655, visit http://www.cremation-online.com. The Brooks family and its group of funeral homes continue to work on developing simpler, less expensive, and more environmentally sound cremation options.

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