Residents of Nantucket, the wind- swept Massachusetts island where billionaires Eric Schmidt and Abigail Johnson own vacation homes, can get just about anything -- except a proper death.
The sole funeral home shut down last month after 137 years, meaning corpses now must take a round-trip ferry ride to a Cape Cod embalmer before they can rest in peace in one of the island’s cemeteries.
“A lot of things 30 miles out to sea are a little different, and now that includes dying,” said Pat Newton, 76, one of Nantucket’s 10,000 year-round residents.
The Lewis Funeral Home, in the same family for five generations, fell victim to two forces affecting the industry: The children weren’t interested in taking over the business and revenue declined as residents increasingly chose lower-cost cremations, said Sylvia Lewis, the last owner’s wife.
“It wasn’t the business that we had before,” Lewis in a phone interview. Instead, the family took advantage of a different trend -- rising real estate prices -- and sold its gray-shingled building in Nantucket’s main village to a developer for $1.25 million, according to state land records.
The number of funeral homes in the Bay State and the rest of the U.S. have declined in the past decade. In Massachusetts, almost one in five has closed since 2003, according to the National Directory of Morticians Red Book. Nationally, about 10 percent shut in the same period.
No Coffin
Cremations, which typically don’t require a coffin or a public viewing, accounted for 42 percent of Massachusetts burials in 2012, up from 34 percent in 2008, according to the Cremation Association of North America. The median cost is $2,245, the group says. By contrast, a full-service funeral runs about $7,000, according to the National Funeral Directors Association in Brookfield, Wisconsin.
The Massachusetts figures track national trends. Forty-four percent of Americans who died in 2012 were cremated, according to the Wheeling, Illinois-based cremation association. In Nevada, Washington and Oregon, more than 70 percent picked cremation.
Anecdotally, wealthy families -- like those who move to Nantucket, where the median home price is almost $1 million -- spend less money on funeral services and are more likely to chose cremation, said Josh Slocum, executive director of the Funeral Consumers Alliance, a nonprofit in South Burlington, Vermont.