Extreme epitaphs

Stephanie Chakar was on her way to a pizza shop after final exams one day last June when the car she was sitting in was rear-ended by an SUV. The impact hurled the Pelham, N.H., high school freshman into a coma. She died six days later. She was 15.

Last week her gravestone was unveiled. Cut from black African granite, it features a smiling portrait of the teenager etched from a photograph. Engraved behind her are a pair of angel's wings. In the corners beneath her name and the dates of her birth and death are a soccer ball to represent the sport she loved and a fistful of balloons to commemorate the 100 pink balloons her friends released at her funeral.

"In 20 years no one else will remember the balloons, but I will," her mother, Linda Chakar, said last week. "I'll always remember."

Tucked among the grim, gray headstones dating back 350 years in some New England cemeteries, more and more markers like Chakar's are being erected. Some depict a bit of whimsy. Others, a touch of irreverence. All are deeply personal tributes to the deceased. Together they reflect America's changing relationship to death and dying, and in some cases, they are sparking tensions among the living.

"The problem [with these personalized headstones] is that one person's dream is another person's nightmare," said Robert Fells, general counsel for the International Cemetery and Funeral Association in Virginia. "It's hard to draw a line."

Baby boomers, who recast the rules of society in life, are doing the same in death. With the help of computer-aided technology, virtually any clip art from the Internet can be engraved in granite. Gravestone etchings of Budweiser cans, Disney characters, and customized Chevy trucks are changing the landscape of American cemeteries and forcing their guardians to rejigger bylaws -- some of which haven't been altered in 200 years.

Drew Dernavich, the 36-year-old engraver who etched Chakar's portrait earlier this month and draws more than 100 a year, said about half his work incorporates toys and hobbies. It's a trend he calls unsettling even as he works.

"Some of it's kind of sad," Dernavich said last week while taking a break from etching Chakar's portrait with a diamond-tipped drill. "It kind of makes you wonder if the most important thing in this person's life was a truck or a motorcycle. Some of it's not very deep."

In New England, where the rituals surrounding death are deeply rooted and remain more traditional than in the rest of the country, this trend toward personalization and whimsy can be particularly jarring. In most cemeteries, thousands of gravestones spanning hundreds of years bear variations on the theme: "As I am so you shall be." That is, until you run into the wing started in the last five years and you begin seeing portraits of clowns, or Red Sox caps, or as in the Auburn Cemetery west of Interstate 495, "The Happy Tomato."

The Happy Tomato was David "Red" Lemire, who died in 2003 in a motorcycle accident, according to his widow, Robin.

Lemire, a fair-skinned redhead, had traveled to Florida with some friends in 1989 and become badly sunburned, but it didn't keep his spirits down, earning him the nickname "The Happy Tomato." It stuck, and the following year at a motorcycle convocation an artist drew him his own insignia: a cartoonish tomato with the silhouette of a naked woman balancing provocatively atop its wagging tongue. He drew the insignia on his motorcycle helmet. Two days after he was killed in a head-on collision on a two-lane highway in China, Maine, his wife decided to have it engraved on the back of his tombstone.

"It's just who he was," Robin Lemire said last week. "It fit him real well. He was the Happy Tomato."

Two weeks after the stone was erected the calls started coming into the cemetery office, said the Rev. Kenneth Knox, a minister at First Congregational Church and chairman of the Auburn Cemetery Commission.

"Some people thought it was inappropriate and they filed a formal complaint," Knox said. Several months later the commission decided to let the tombstone stand, but now all gravestone designs must be approved by the commission before they are erected.

The retooling of cemetery rules -- to reflect these new attitudes toward death and mourning -- are being grappled with across the country, said Fells. "We are constantly fielding questions along these lines of how to rewrite the rules. . . . It used to be the designs reflected a norm; now the technology has outstripped the rules and regulations."

This is particularly true in New England where early gravestones commonly bear the inscription of a skull and crossbones, reflecting the Puritan expectation of a harsh judgment rendered by an angry God. As the Romantic movement blossomed in the 18th century, crossbones morphed into wings and the stern view of God's judgment softened. Weeping willows and elegies became popularized through the next 100 years, but the sense of godliness and sanctity still pervaded the art, said Ryan Smith, an assistant professor of history at Virginia Commonwealth University who has studied the subject.

By the 20th century, with the mass immigration of Irish and Italian Catholics, crosses, crucifixes, and saints began to appear. It was only after World War II that the secular sense of cemeteries as suburban memorial parks -- with inscriptions limited to name and dates of birth and death -- became popular.

The move toward mass personalization and irreverence began to creep into cemeteries in the 1980s as middle-aged baby boomers began to die. Perhaps the grandmother of this irreverent edge is Sheila Shea.

Shea was just 44 when she died of cancer in 1986. She was buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, around the corner from some of the most famous 19th-century authors in America. Tourists from around the world come to pay their respects to Louisa May Alcott, who is buried in a simple family plot. Thoreau is memorialized as simply "Henry" -- no last name, no date -- on a family marker nearby. Above Ralph Waldo Emerson's gravestone is a bronze plaque affixed to a large marble boulder inscribed with the words: "The passive master lent his hand to the vast soul that o'er him planned."

Not far, on the back of Shea's headstone is the wry -- some might even say profane -- epitaph: "Who the hell is Sheila Shea."

Michael Kearl, a professor at Trinity University in San Antonio who has studied the sociology of death and dying, attributes the rising tide of irreverence to a shift in attitudes toward death. With the advent of penicillin in 1940, many baby boomers may reach middle age before they confront the death of a friend or relative.

Paradoxically, death has become caricatured. Americans watch corpses autopsied on "CSI" -- one of the nation's most popular television shows -- while eating dinner.

On top of this, religion has receded from the center of the public consciousness, spiritual traditions have blurred across boundaries, and the sacred has morphed with the secular. Knox of the Auburn Cemetery said he has seen death rituals change over the past 30 years. Now the ancient Jewish tradition of placing stones atop headstones is practiced across religious boundaries, and balloons are placed as frequently as flowers at gravesites. The rituals of death have been deeply influenced by the televised mourning over icons such as Princess Diana and John F. Kennedy Jr.

Religious communities have struggled to keep up. Just 15 years ago, when Dernavich started engraving headstones, he had to work around rules. The Catholic cemeteries in Connecticut in particular were traditional. In the 1990s they precluded portraits but allowed angels. The result was that the families of the deceased would ask Dernavich to engrave angels on headstones incorporating the faces of the dead.

"You would have these angels with glasses," he laughed. "But no one could say anything because who's to say what an angel looks like."

Today not only are portraits accepted, the likenesses of the living are routinely improved in death. Family members ask Dernavich to etch a person without a double chin. One man asked him to depict him winning a horse race he never won in life. Others will show him a photograph of a deceased person and say "Why don't you just make her 10 pounds lighter."

For Linda Chakar, Stephanie's mother, a portrait just felt right. It was, she said, an almost joyous decision for herself and her surviving daughter.

"I just find it very comforting," she said. "It's very symbolic for me. I feel like I have my own angel up there now."

Douglas Belkin can be reached at dbelkin@globe.com.