DIY funeral

Here’s an extract from an account of the funeral of Ken Kesey:

It was the least maudlin memorial service and funeral I’ve ever been to—his family and community loved him and shared his disinterest in sentimentality. At the burial at his farm his corpse was right there in front of us. People filed by and studied it, and put things in the coffin with him, slipped joints into his pockets.

The grave was next to his son Jed’s. It was not six feet deep. They’d been working on it for three days. It was like looking into a mine shaft. Well, his friends nailed the coffin lid shut, and then they lowered it down. The youngest kids were asked to shovel in the first of the dirt. I happened to be close by, so my turn to help came pretty quickly. I got a shovel full of that good central Oregon agricultural soil and heaved it way down there onto the coffin. It made the deepest boom! I thought about what it must have sounded like from inside.

And here are extracts of an account by Ken Kesey of the funeral of his son Jed, killed in a road accident:

I sincerely hope that I do not—as Richard II worries—`play the wanton with my woes,’ by this display of my family’s private grief and publication of my personal correspondence. I mean only to suggest a path for others wandering in similar pain. We’ve all got a lot of dying ahead of us. We might as well learn how to go about it.

It was the toughest thing any of us has ever had to go through, harder than jail, or my dad’s death, or an OD on STP, yet it also had and always will have a decided glory. Partly, I think, because Jed was such a good kid, very loving and very loved, and the power of his being carried us through a lot of the ache. But there was also the support we got, from friends and family, from teachers and coaches and schoolmates. Without this support I don’t think we would have attempted the kind of funeral we had, or plunged into the activism prompted by the circumstances of the accident.

It’s the funeral that I mainly want to share, because I think you guys and your constituency of readers should know that this homemade ceremony is legally possible. All you need is the land, the determination, and the family.

We built the box ourselves … and Zane and Jed’s friends and frat brothers dug the hole in a nice spot between the chicken house and the pond …You would have been proud, Wendell, especially of the box—clear pine pegged together and trimmed with redwood. The handles of thick hemp rope. And you, Ed, would have appreciated the lining. It was a piece of Tibetan brocade given Mountain Gift by Owsley fifteen years ago, gilt and silver and russet phoenixbird patterns, unfurling in flames. And last month, Bob, Zane was goose hunting in the field across the road and killed a snow goose. I told him be sure to save the down. Susan Butkovitch covered this in white silk for the pillow while Faye and MG and Gretch and Candace stitched and stapled the brocade into the box.

It was a double-pretty day, like winter holding its breath, giving us a break. About 300 people stood around and sung from the little hymnbooks that Diane Kesey had Xeroxed–“Everlasting Arms,” “Sweet Hour of Prayer,” “In the Garden” and so forth. With all my cousins leading the singing and Dale on his fiddle. While we were singing “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain,” Zane and Kit and the neighbor boys that have grown up with all of us carried the box to the hole.

People filed by and dropped stuff in on Jed. I put in that silver whistle I used to wear with the Hopi cross soldered on it. One of our frat brothers put in a quartz watch guaranteed to keep beeping every fifteen minutes for five years. Faye put in a snapshot of her and I standing with a pitchfork all Grantwoodesque in front of the old bus.

Paul Sawyer read from Leaves of Grass while the boys each hammered in the one nail they had remembered to put in their pockets. The Betas formed a circle and passed the loving cup around (a ritual our fraternity generally uses when a member is leaving the circle to become engaged). (Jed and Zane and I are all members, y’unnerstand, not to mention Hagen) and the boys lowered the box with these ropes George had cut and braided. Zane and I tossed in the first shovelfuls. It sounded like the first thunderclaps of Revelations …

Read a fuller account here.

Interesting piece from Canada on home funerals in which a ‘death midwife’ (gotta find a better term than that!) acknowledges that funeral directors can, in the right circumstances, do the job as well as her. She’s right, of course. Good funeral directors are not the enemy. Read it

From Pam Vetter’s newsletter, this tragic account of a car crash which killed three generations of a Mennonite family. They were musicians. Hear them sing here.

And now I’m off to spend the day with my friend Teresa Evans.

Pip-pip!

Another home funeral story today. It’s beautiful. And the account was written by a man. So much of what read about home funerals is by women, so it’s good to have this balance.

It’s called No Grey Suits. Grey Suits = funeral home staff. You can download it as a pdf (all 52 pages of it). Very well written and illustrated. Very empowering. Here’s how its author, Jack Manning, begins:

This book is a love story, or more correctly, a story of love. And how a bunch of friends and family came together to celebrate the end of life and help each other get through the loss of their friend, mother, wife, daughter, sister and colleague.

Download the book here.

Very nice story of the heartwarmingest sort here.

The natural death movement in the UK was pioneered by the good old Natural Death Centre. Its philosophy grew out of the natural childbirth movement and its principles are broadly the same. It believes that by taking control and keeping interventions by strangers to a minimum, we improve the quality of dying for the dying person and its impact on his or her carers. In the matter of caring for the dead, it believes that taking control is therapeutic.

It all makes perfectly good sense. And there’s the nice symmetry of birth and death.

There’s also some symmetry in the vocabulary used. We have home births and we have home funerals, both unobjectionable terms. We have midwives and we have death midwives – or midwives to the dying. And that’s where I falter. A death midwife? There’s a contradiction there, isn’t there? Birth and death are only analogous up to a point, surely? And there’s an uncomfortable resonance with Sam Beckett’s words in Waiting for Godot: “They give birth astride a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more … down in the grave, lingeringly, the gravedigger puts on the forceps.”

Over in the US (where the home funeral movement is just that, a movement, unlike over here, where it’s more or less dead stopped), that wise old bird Lisa Carlson has just spoken about this. Lisa is the grand pioneer of home funerals over there; it was her book Caring for the Dead: Your Final Act of Love, currently being re-written, that broke the ground.

Here’s what she says:

The term “death midwife” has been a struggle for me. At one point, it seemed like an ideal term for conveying quickly what most of you do or want to do. I’ve come to feel that “home funeral guide,” however, is a far more prudent choice, as it preserves the “education” image when compared to the hands-on “midwife” image … So many of us in the helping careers want to *do* things for people, to feel needed, including funeral directors, too. But I can assure you from personal experience that empowering others is a much headier “high” than being thanked for something fairly temporary that I did to or for them. (Teach a man to fish . . .)

Home funeral guide. Yup. Like it. Let’s have more of you!

Some good and inspiring home funeral stories here.

There’s an excellent series of photos on the Undertaken With Love Flickr site telling the story of a home funeral. 

It’s thought provoking in any number of ways. See how engaged the children are. And you can see from everyone’s faces how emotionally healthy the whole business is.

Now, I know I bang on a lot about home funerals. But I do recognise that, though this is how people cared for their dead in centuries past, the (real) traditional funeral is unlikely to make a comeback, not in any widespread way.

At the same time, I wonder about the emotional impact of outsourcing the care of our dead and the creation of their farewell ceremonies to various un-joined-up specialists—undertakers, celebrants, etc.

Put it another way. What would be the impact on the bereavement counselling industry if people were to participate more than they do now in caring for their dead, going the distance with them? Would counsellors find their caseloads slashed?

I rang Cruse to ask them. Had they ever thought about it? Had they ever considered campaigning for more participative funerals in order to enable people to grieve better at the best time for grieving? No, they hadn’t.

I think there’s something in it.

It was the Natural Death Centre (NDC) which first advocated a return to the ancient, not long lost practice of caring for our own dead, and it was John Bradfield who did the bulk of the research into what you can legally do and what you can’t*. This re-birth of ancient practice was branded the do-it-yourself or DIY funeral.

Many people found the term repugnant, with its associations of botch, bungle and smashed thumbs. In truth, installing a new kitchen and caring for one’s dead share little common ground. Over in the US they coined the term home funeral. Much, much better.

Did home funerals take off here? No. And yet, while this is acknowledged, I am amazed how many funeral directors tell me that they have worked with families who have cared for their dead at home. It may be unusual, but it’s happening all the time.

Why would anyone do it?

Because if you have cared for someone in life, and through their dying, why would you not want to keep them with you and see it through? Why hive it off to strangers? As Lisa Carlson has it, this is a “final act of love”.

Before we can muster the courage to undertake any task in which we are unversed, we need the reassurance of three things. Here are my Three Things:
• a workshop manual
• an understanding of the worst that can go wrong
• the phone number of an expert who can help—or rescue us in case of calamity

People patiently tell me that home funerals will never catch on. After all, even communities which remember the old days prefer undertakers. I accept this, but I still feel that more people would care for their dead if they were empowered by the Three Things.

The home funeral movement is thriving in the US, where there’s a growing number of support networks to empower those who would care for their own dead. I very much hope that the revived Natural Death Centre will revive the movement in the UK and produce its own workshop manual.

In the meantime, home funeralists in the UK should know that the Three Things are in place for them now.

There are two very good US workshop manuals out there, and they are free. Download the Crossings Resource Guide. Download the Undertaken With Love guide. Be sure to make a donation if you can well afford to. The Crossings guide will tell you the worst that can happen.

Phone your local funeral directors and tell them what you’d like them to do. You’d be amazed how helpful most of them will be.

And now there’s a brand new resource out there. It comes from Undertaken with Love and it’s a flickr site from which the photo at the head of this post is taken.

*John Bradfield’s book, Green Burial, the d-i-y guide to law and practice, is out of print and sadly almost unobtainable. Check out Abe and Amazon.

For all that the funeral industry is aware of pressure to change, and has readied itself for that, and for all that newspapers like to run features about nice, funny coffins, nothing has essentially changed.

Death occurs. A stranger – a funeral director – accompanied by another stranger, his or her assistant, come to take away the body. You don’t know where they keep the body, nor who sees it, nor what they do to it. You shut your mind to all that, and undertakers are very much of the mind that there are things it is best for you not to know about. Instead, you get busy sifting paperwork, ordering flowers, ringing people up and telling them what’s happened. That, you reckon, gives you more than enough to do.

In doing so, you may be missing the point.

If you have cared for someone in life, and as they lay dying, why would you want to stop when they are dead? Why wouldn’t you want to complete the journey with them?

What’s really important here?

Is it really such a kindness of the funeral director that he or she relieves you of so much to do, freeing you up to do lesser things, many of which could, frankly, wait?

Does all this make the death easier to bear?

I doubt it. I suspect that the grief counselling industry has got so big because people pass up the opportunity to, in Tom Lynch’s words, deal with death by dealing with their dead.

And that’s the point of a home funeral. That’s the point of working with a funeral director to wash and dress your dead person, and sit with them, and observe the changes, and become aware, after a few days, that it’s time to go.

It’s not all about cost and simplicity and fusslessness, it’s about joining up dying to farewelling. Nothing makes better sense of death than the present absence of the one who has died.

Read this.

Then listen to Lisa Carlson and others here.