When Mary Van De Berg, the “meat lady” of Sioux Center, Iowa, died at age 72 a week before Memorial Day, 250 people in the city of 7,400 came to her funeral. Among the crowd sat about 35 of her co-workers from the closed-for-the-day Fareway supermarket, where for 26 years she had a reputation for knowing everything there is to know about meat.
Van De Berg’s kind of funeral—a church service, a viewing attended by more than 300 neighbors, burial in a local cemetery—is becoming unusual in American life. Funeral homes are consolidating under financial pressure due partly to changing attitudes about cremation: In 2016 U.S. cremations outnumbered burials for the first time. Meanwhile, families are scattering, religious affiliations are fraying, and attitudes toward death are changing. Some laud such changes, but has something been lost in our drive toward independence and economic efficiency?...