The Good Funeral Guide

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.

Great excitement here at GFG HQ. The latest edition of the Resource Guide – a Manual for Home Funeral Care has just arrived from Beth Knox at Crossings: Caring For Our Own at Death. Is it the very first copy to set foot on UK soil? I rather fancy it is.

In the UK, as in other ‘advanced’ countries, it has become our custom to permit our dead to be whisked away from us by undertakers, strangers who take them we know not where and do to them we know not what. Most people suppose that this is what the law requires; most suppose that the care of the dead is the preserve of specialists. They are, of course, wrong on both counts.

Having said which, it is undeniable that this is what most people want. They want their dead out of the house at no matter what hour of night; they won’t even sit with them till morning. They are puzzlingly incurious about what happens to them next.

How do we explain this behaviour? Does it stem from a horror of dead bodies? Or is it that our instincts are so insulated by sophistication that we have become divorced from our deepest needs and wishes?

Whatever the answers to those questions, there is a sizeable number of people who are not content to acquiesce in this whisking away of their dead. They will not settle for being helpless bystanders. They are the sort of people who know exactly how Beth Knox felt when her 7 year-old daughter Alison died.

“I would not let her out of my sight; I would not surrender the last vestige I had of her vibrant and loving self to the care of strangers. What sense would that make when I had so recently brought her into the world, nursed her at my breast and given her my full attention as she went through the steps of infancy? … Society expected me to surrender her to a hospital morgue … No, absolutely not. Not if I could help it. I would continue to care for her myself as I had always done. That was our agreement when she came into the world, and I was keeping my end of the bargain … We brought her home and kept her in her room for three days surrounded by her beloved toys and pictures and stuffed animals. Her friends came to be with her one last time, and took as much time as they needed to say goodbye … This small and mighty child had led us all through the valley of death … It was terrible and beautiful.”

It was this event that led Beth Knox to create Crossings “to help make it possible for families to fashion their own funerals.” She defines her rationale with characteristic clarity and cogency: “It is our desire to take the fear and uncertainty out of dealing with physical death and help put the value of being close to your deceased within your reach.”

The Resource Guide is, indeed, empowering, not just because it puts into words what you feel, but also because it tells you everything you need to do. It rolls up its sleeves. It lists the jobs to be done and suggests how they might be divvied up. It tells you how many people you’ll need to move an adult male (4-5). It is graphic. It warns you “Always keep the head higher than the rest of the body to prevent discharge of fluids”. It tells you about rigor mortis. It tells you how to shut the eyes and close the mouth and empty the bladder. It tells you how to dress a dead body, how difficult that is, and how tricky it is to carry a dead body down stairs and round sharp bends.

Most important of all, in my opinion, the Guide tells you the very worst that could happen, for it is only in the evaluation of this that people who are inclined to care for their dead can decide whether this is what they really want to do. The Guide unflinchingly tells you about problems caused by oedema, obesity, bed sores, clostridium perfringens and other infections – “special situations that Crossings has not encountered in ten years of home death care work (other than a bedsore or two).”

The Guide examines approvingly the option of working with a funeral director, especially if there has been a post mortem.

Beth Knox, together with her three other writers, have, I believe, created a wonderful piece of work. It is written with great clarity and skill. It is also very inclusive, wholly succeeding in its aim to be “useful to people of all spiritual and cultural traditions.”

Above all, the message of this Guide is not confined to those brave and eccentric folk who want to do everything themselves. You don’t have to do everything yourself. The important thing is, first, to take control and, then, to do what you feel you can.

There are two reasons for this. First, “By participating in the end of life of a loved one, by helping with the arrangements and bringing sanctity to the days after death, there is an almost universal experience that life and death are embraced without fear.”

Second, “By the end of several days, you will see the changes [to the body] that indicate finality.” To come to terms with finality is to accept the death. “Staying connected to the care of our departed loved ones brings greater closure and healing than is otherwise possible. It allows us to move ahead more gracefully in our lives without leaving our departed loved ones behind.”

We’ve needed something like this Guide here in the UK ever since the Natural Death Centre first evoked the spirit of the natural childbirth movement. While there are sections in the Guide which deal with aspects of US law, all the rest of it is applicable in this country. I commend it to you without reservation and I hope my lonely copy will soon be joined by countless others.

Download a PDF copy here. If you do, you may feel inclined to make a donation to Crossings (details on the home page). 

There’s a tragic story doing the rounds of the papers concerning a lad in Scotland whose father buried him in the garden of his ex-council semi.