Nevada doesn’t do lists half-assed. We either kick the pants off them (our stellar growth, our billions invested in new hotels), or we trail so far behind (highest foreclosures, shoddy education) that we are like a beer-addled showgirl competing in a three-legged race.
Here’s a ranking we’re definitely not taking lying down: Nevada ranks No. 2 in cremations per capita, according to the Cremation Association of North America (yes, there is such an organization). While the raw number of cremations in 2005, the most recent year for which data is available, was only 12,815 (far behind California’s 120,883), the percentage of deaths that resulted in cremation was 65 percent, just below 66 percent in Hawaii, and well above the U.S. average of 33.3 percent.
Nine of the 10 states with the highest percentage of cremations are in the West (Maine is the exception). So what gives, other than, perhaps, the hard desert, which makes digging difficult? Mike Nicodemis, a CANA board member, suspects that the many migrants to Nevada result in a population in which people don’t have the strongest ties to community. As a more modern and efficient method of “disposition,” cremation makes sense. Here, he says, there’s “no need for burial, no one here, who’s going to visit the graves?”
Palm Mortuary handles the most cremations in the state—about 3,000 to 3,500 a year. The entrance to the mortuary’s Downtown complex resembles nothing so much as an immaculate Vegas hotel lobby from, say, the 1970s—a wide and long concourse, a handsome reception desk, a “flower shop” and a belt of comfortable sofas. Ned Phillips, the mortuary’s spokesperson, leads me on a tour of the cremation caskets (the minimum casket required for the service is a $25 cardboard box) and the urns.
As we talk, the four steel smokestacks of Palm’s Downtown crematorium are at work at the other end of Palm’s parking lot. Phillips thinks the high rate of cremations has much to do with the cosmopolitan population of the city that doesn’t see it as a big deal. Still, he won’t be choosing cremation himself. When asked why, he smiles and declines to comment. “It’s a strictly personal preference.”