There’s a fence surrounding the property with large rocks flown in from the Mediterranean Sea propped deliberately outside the entrance. The sun reflects in perfect mirror off marble columns supporting a massive triangular roof; you have to squint to see the top as the sun sets. An elegant steel door with circular rivets sports four images of animals: a lion, a snake, a bull and a ram, harking back to a time when animals were used in art for their symbolism, not just their beauty. The building is a miniature imitation of the Parthenon, though still the largest single-family residence on the block and costing $4 million to construct, not including the cost of the land it was built on. It’s not a house. It’s a mausoleum.

The brand new mini-Parthenon monument sits next door to a public mausoleum offering some of the cheapest burial plots in the Olivet Memorial Park in Colma. It’s almost laughable the way it dwarfs the family mausoleum 15 feet away and tries to look majestic to the cars zipping by on the road right in front of it. It’s a stark reminder of the value some people place on image, in death as much as in life.

Our big date with death calls for one final shopping spree. Whether you are the type to splurge on a hot new car to impress the neighbors or invest in some no-nonsense wheels to get you from here to there, the amenities available for that final road trip into the sky are endless. But like that hot new car, who's all the fuss really for?

Cost is always a factor, as much as we’d like to pretend it isn’t. And funeral costs add up quickly. According to the National Funeral Directors Association, the average cost of a funeral, as of July 2004, is $6,500. This price includes an outer burial container, but does not include cemetery costs. Cemetery costs for casketed burials average $7,000 in Colma, where most San Francisco residents are laid to rest.

When shopping for a funeral there are two different prices to factor: the service and the grave. The service is usually taken care of by a funeral home that provides caskets, urns, cremation services, embalming and the actual service itself as well as body transportation. For the grave, families go straight to the cemetery.

“There’s a lot more detail,” says Jay Avis, funeral director and embalmer at Evergreen Mortuary-McAvoy O'Hara, which advertises itself as California’s oldest family owned funeral service. “There used to be a service price and a casket price and now everything has to be itemized, so now it’s a lot more expensive than it used to be.”

Avis says their cheapest funerals start around $2,200. This price includes embalming, mourning service and hearse, but doesn’t include a casket and he says prices can soar from there. The most extravagant funeral he helped orchestrate involved a $40,000 casket and airplanes scattering rose petals on mourners.

The priciest part of funeral shopping is the casket, which runs anywhere from $695 to $40,000 and sometimes more. If you think your funeral home is marking up too much, bring your own casket. Costco sells caskets online ranging from $925 to $2,700.

The big difference to consumers now than in years past is the options available. There used to be only one way to do a funeral – formal and stuffy, often unlike the person being buried. A woman who got married in a $50 number she found in a Mexican dress warehouse probably won’t be too concerned with all the funeral accoutrements. She could, however, want an intimate service where her passing could be publicly mourned and shared. And funeral homes today are customizing their services to meet your needs.

“You used to have a funeral mass with the body present and then have the burial,” says Carol Giovannini, a funeral director at Halstead N.Gray-Carew & English. “Well now, instead of the burial, we’re going to go ahead and have a cremation and we’ll still have the service.”

Giovannini says their home now offers urns and cremation options whereas it used to leave those choices up to the cemeteries.

Both Giovannini and Avis notice an overall downward trend in funeral service. “We’ve gotten away from the real extravagant type service,” says Giovannini.

“Kids just don’t have the ties to communities like they used to, there’s not the same need to put on a big show,” says Avis.

Whether you see yourself in a simple pine box, at the bottom of the sea or enshrined in a miniature wonder of the Western world, it might already be time to start saving your pennies for that fateful rainy day.