We like Chuck Lakin at the GFG. We’ve blogged about him here and here. Here’s his reply to the question ‘When did you begin learning about death?’
The precipitating incident was the death of my own father. This was in 1979 and he was home for the last six week of his life, and I’m glad to say I was there for the last month of that. And he was in his own bed with his wife and four kids touching him. It has been a very personal experience up until that point. And I didn’t know it before that, but I knew I wanted to be a part of whatever happened next. But I didn’t know what I could do. So, we called a funeral director. And he did what I’m sure he thought we wanted him to do, which was arrive promptly and zip dad in a body bag and take him away and mail us a box of ashes four days later. And that disconnect was very important to me. And it was almost 20 years later that I found the information that I needed that told me what I could have done at the point. I started giving people the information that they needed to have if they wanted the experience that I wanted to have when my father died. It has evolved past that. I started out just talking about home funerals. Now, I’m big on planning and making choices. It’s about thinking about it and making sure it is written down and you’ve had a conversation with the family. If you haven’t transmitted the information about what you’d like to have happen to your body to anybody, those people are going to have to make a lot of potentially expensive or contentious decisions. It’s a tragedy and it’s very stressful for everybody. If you’ve made the plans ahead of time, it can be a spiritual time. It can give them a chance to grieve.
Full interview here.
