Marty Barrett: The Flight of the Mavervorl: Thoughtful perspectives on selecting your upscale grave

Large, freestanding, and often rectangular outside advertisements are known as billboards. Here in Los Angeles there are a number of them, alerting potential consumers to available goods and services.

The Forest Lawn Memorial Parks, a franchise of high-quality, well-maintained, tourist-friendly ossuaries and crematoria, advertise their trendy boneyards via billboard campaigns that speak to our gentle acceptance of the mortality of our loved ones and ourselves.

Below are several of my own attempts to hit the right note with Forest Lawn's target audience, but I didn't get the gig.