Reefs provide a memorial underwater

In life, Lou Tafuri loved to fish in the waters off the New Jersey coast. In death, he sleeps with the fishes. His family couldn't be happier.

Tafuri, who died in 2005, was cremated after donating his body to science. Shortly before the ashes were returned to his daughter Susan, she learned of a program that could provide her father with an eternal resting place better-suited to him than an urn.

Today his remains are part of a concrete ball that makes up an artificial reef seven miles southeast of Great Egg Inlet, where fish roam, plants grow and anglers fish.

Soon his daughter will be able to visit him: She plans to take scuba-diving lessons.

"You're in the ocean, you're back to nature, you're not clogging up land," said Susan Tafuri, whose father, a Navy veteran, had full military honors at the viewing of the reef ball the day before it was deployed. "The majority of people I know never go to the cemetery."

Memorial reefs are part of the emerging movement in the U.S. toward simpler, less costly, more environmentally friendly burials.

Eventually, Susan Tafuri's father will have company in his underwater setting.

"I'm going to have one," she said, "and I'm going to put them all in with me, my three dogs and the ashes of another."