It's Not a Funeral Home, It's an "Events Center"

Woody Allen once said, "marriage is the death of hope." (He also said, "I am not afraid of death, I just don't want to be there when it happens," which applies equally well to the act of tying the noose ... I mean knot.) So it strikes the Captain as perfectly appropriate for couples to take their giant leap where the bones of the departed eternally sleep.

INDIANAPOLIS — Paulita and Tony Flores took their wedding vows in December in an elegant rotunda with marble floors amid glimmering chandeliers and a bubbling fountain.

It didn't bother them that a room down the hall showcased caskets and urns. Or that the building was surrounded by a large cemetery with 100,000 gravestones on 60 acres. Or that on other days, the facility hosts something a lot more somber — funerals.

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Across the USA, funeral homes are building and marketing such centers as not just a place to mourn the dead but as sites for events celebrating the living, including weddings, birthdays, anniversaries, holiday parties and proms.

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"The place wasn't being utilized because people had tunnel vision," says [events coordinator Carla] Fletcher, who also often plays the part of wedding planner for the couples. "They thought since it was a funeral home, they (couldn't) sell it. But I don't see a funeral home; I see an events center."

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Although people may think it morbid to start a marriage in a place surrounded by sadness, it would be no different than doing it at a church — where both caskets and newlyweds occupy the aisles throughout the year, says Sue Totterdale, national chairwoman of the National Association of Wedding Professionals. "A banquet hall is a banquet hall, and a chapel is a chapel," she says. "If you can get past the driveway and the cemetery, it's going to be beautiful."

[USA Today]