Accounting for the Afterlife's New Appeal

ByABC News
October 27, 2003, 6:19 PM

Nov. 11 -- Steve Moeller spends all day with dead people and that's been making him popular with the living, he says.

Moeller, the director of Floral Haven Funeral Home in Broken Arrow, Okla., has had a quarter-century career working near death, but lately, he says he's seen a change in public attitudes toward the great unknown.

"It used to be when I was going to a party and I told people I was a funeral director, they cleared the room. Now they flock around and ask questions," he told ABCNEWS.

Death and the afterlife are apparently putting the pop in pop culture nowadays. The HBO series Six Feet Under, about a Los Angeles family's funeral home business, kicked off the phenomenon a couple of seasons ago. But now there's a whole slew of entertainment that's transformed death from an unmentionable into a curiosity.

Change the channel from HBO, and you might find Dead Like Me, Showtime's dark comedy about a young woman's afterlife experience as a grim reaper. Fox has Tru Calling, a drama about a college grad who has a gift for communicating with dead people.

If you'd rather read, it would be hard to avoid Alice Seybold's The Lovely Bones, a story told from the perspective of a young murder victim in heaven, which has been on the New York Times best-seller list since it was published in June 2002.

And this season, another book has appeared at the top of that list also about the afterlife.The Five People You Meet in Heaven is about the lessons a maintenance man learns upon his arrival in heaven, from the figures at pivotal points in his life. Author Mitch Albom's previous book was Tuesdays With Morrie, a 1997 best seller recording conversations he had with his college professor as the older man lay dying from a terminal disease.