Saturday, October 18, 2003  
WXPort
Feedback
 Clubs TonightHot TixBand GuideMP3sBest Music PollFall Arts GuideThe Best 
Music
Movies
Theater
Food & Drink
Books
Dance
Art
Comedy
Events
Home
Listings
Editors' Picks
New This Week
News and Features

Art
Astrology
Books
Dance
Food & Drink
Movies
Music
Television
Theater

Archives
Letters

Classifieds
Personals
Adult
Stuff at Night
The Providence Phoenix
The Portland Phoenix
FNX Radio Network

   
  E-Mail This Article to a Friend

The young and the restful
Dennis Keohane is part of a new generation of funeral directors who stress life over death. But is it okay to celebrate when someone is going to the grave?
BY CHRIS WRIGHT


The building that houses Keohane Funeral Service is not what you’d expect of a place devoted to the business of death. A single-story, white stucco structure on a busy, shop-lined street in the Wollaston area of Quincy, it all seems a little too cheery, a little too mod, lacking in the funereal trappings one usually associates with the so-called dismal trade. Inside, with its sunny foyer and tasteful, understated décor, the place has the feel of a mid-priced hotel. This effect is heightened by the home’s staff members, who bustle about in a remarkably upbeat fashion. It’s not until you wander off into one of the side rooms and encounter a corpse that you get a real sense of what this family does for a living.

In some ways, Keohane is about as traditional as funeral homes get. The business, founded in 1932 by Cornelius V. Keohane, is currently on its third generation of funeral directors. Edward J. Keohane, age 60, the founder’s son, is widely regarded as one of the most prominent funeral directors in the US. "I’ve known Ed for 25 years, and he is as consummate a professional as I’ve ever run into," says Todd Van Beck, president of the Commonwealth Institute of Funeral Services. "He’s a very ethical and upstanding funeral director."

Now, though, Ed Keohane’s own sons, Dennis and John, are in charge, and while there seems little doubt that they are every bit as ethical and upstanding as their father, they are also in the process of changing the way the business is run. Dennis, a 32-year-old father of three, seems particularly determined to knock the stuffing out of the industry. Indeed, since long before anyone heard of the show Six Feet Under, Dennis Keohane has been not-so-quietly going about the business of ridding the funeral profession of its starched-collar, bats-in-the-belfry image.

"If you ever feel like you’re doing something a funeral director would do, then you’d better do it another way," Keohane says, sitting at a small conference table in the home’s basement, his brother John tapping away at a computer nearby. "When people come here, they’re never getting what they expect from a funeral home, and they’re never getting what they expect a funeral director to be."

With his sandy hair, a handsome, boyish face, and a dress sense that tends toward earth tones rather than traditional black, Dennis Keohane certainly succeeds in defeating expectations. His manner — open and friendly, even a little boisterous — makes a mockery of the dour, sallow stereotype generally attached to people in his field. And his approach to the business of burying the dead is equally unconventional. For one thing, he doesn’t like to use the term "the dead" — he prefers "people who lived." He is also given to saying things like, "I want to create funerals that wow people."

Keohane is not alone in this desire. These days, you will often see balloons at funerals as well as flowers; you will hear poetry as well as liturgies; you may even be treated to a little rock music. "I think the impact you’re seeing from young funeral directors is that things are becoming much more dramatic, and much less based on tradition," says David Walkinshaw of the National Funeral Directors Association. "New people are coming in with new ideas, and they are changing our business."

The drama inherent in this transformation has not been lost on the press, which for the past few years has been filled with pun-filled stories about the penchant among Baby Boomers to opt for funerals that sometimes verge on the ridiculous: ashes shot into space aboard rockets, mid-ceremony firework displays, and themed, theatrical services, such as those provided at Big Momma’s Kitchen in St. Louis, where mourners can enjoy plates of fried chicken and corn bread as they remember the deceased.

Though not quite as outré as some of his peers, Keohane — partly because of the nationwide reputation of his family’s funeral home, and partly because he doesn’t mistake bad taste for innovation — plays an important role in the move toward personalized, celebratory funeral services. Last year, he was featured heavily in a Boston Globe Magazine story — "Taking the Grim Out of Reaper" — that explored the move toward more spirited ceremonies. In the piece, Keohane appears in a photograph holding a balloon.

Not everyone, though, is happy with this turn of events. "Just as they think they invented sex, Baby Boomers think they invented death," grumbles one funeral-home owner. "Young funeral directors have to distinguish between what is fashionable and what is fundamental."

There is, however, a fundamental principal underpinning Keohane’s approach to his job: that a funeral service should stress a person’s life rather than his or her death. "People come here knowing they’ll be able to celebrate a person," he says. "I always recommend clients bring this person’s favorite music, so we can play a selection of it. Sometimes it’s crazy stuff, but I don’t care." Keohane is aware that mourners may be a little surprised to walk into a funeral home and hear Sammy Hagar or Cher blaring from the speakers, but, he says, "if it’s done in the right spirit, people almost always react well."

As part of the drive toward personalization, the Keohanes are also not averse to incorporating certain belongings that some might consider unorthodox. "We had a guy who loved to be home, loved his living room, loved Sunday football," Dennis says of a recent service he conducted. "So we went over to his house, took his La-Z-Boy and put it in the van and drove it here. We had his newspaper and his TV clicker and his favorite chair, this whole display set up at the wake. Some people thought it was crazy, but the people who knew him certainly understood."

While Dennis Keohane’s drive to revamp the funeral profession is part of a widespread movement in the industry, it can also be traced to his own sensibilities. A former film student at Boston’s Museum School, he once had dreams of entering the film industry, perhaps as a director. "I am a director," he says. "I’m a funeral director." Even though he means this as a joke, the impulses that led Keohane to pursue a career in the arts are still very much with him. "The creative side allows me to put something together out of nothing, to be completely unique," he says. "If I’m setting up flowers, for instance, I’m always thinking of scale and color, the way various things relate to each other. Those are the types of things that appeal to me in an artistic sense."

Yet while Keohane is determined to breathe new life into funerals, he is also aware that he works in a profession that is notoriously conservative. "The funeral industry is very slow to change," he says. "You have a lot of mom-and-pop funeral homes that haven’t changed since the ’50s. Then you have a smaller number of funeral homes like ours, more forward-thinking, open to people’s needs, willing to break the rules and go against tradition at times. I think it just comes down to people waking up. What you did 50 years ago just isn’t going to cut it anymore."

But it’s not as easy as all that. For one thing, the Keohane funeral home for the most part serves the blue-collar communities of the South Shore, where tradition and religious observance remain strong. For this reason, there is a certain amount of compromise, or at least an amalgam of the old and the new, involved in the services the Keohanes provide. "You try to build things around the tradition," Dennis says. "So you may have a traditional funeral and at the end have a balloon release. Even the funerals that seem most over-the-top are still strongly rooted in some kind of religious tradition."

page 1  page 2 

Issue Date: October 10 - 16, 2003
Back to the News & Features table of contents
  E-Mail This Article to a Friend







about the phoenix |  find the phoenix |  advertising info |  privacy policy |  the masthead |  feedback |  work for us

 © 2000 - 2003 Phoenix Media Communications Group