hope for humanity in death

[chelidon]

A Movement to Bring Grief Back Home: Many Bereaved Opting to Bypass Funeral Industry

I am so glad to see this kind of thing taking hold. Death, like birth, is one of those fundamentally primal, human transitions which should be allowed to happen at home, with your family, friends, and tribe around you, if that's what you want. And after death, there's no reason to pay the obscene funeral industry many, many thousands of dollars to do what you can better do your own self, in your own way, by the hands of your own people. No hermetically sealed box, body pumped full of toxic chemical preservatives, stuck in a industrial park full of dead preserved corpses for me, no thanks. That's just wasteful, and hugely unnecessary.

For me, when it's my time, I want a proper wake. Prop my corpse up in the corner and throw one hell of a 3-day bash, let everyone sing, tell stories, laugh, cry, fight, drink, dance, carouse, love, and whatever else they need to do, then dig a hole in the woods out back, drop me in it, no box, no chemicals, and plant an oak or an ash or a hazel tree over my head. Someday maybe my great grandkids can build a swing in my tree.

And the beauty of it is that as far as I can tell, there's nothing right now preventing exactly that from happening.

We all deserve a birth, a life, and death with dignity. This is definitely one area where a step back is a step forward.

Comments

[christeos-pir.livejournal.com]

Just don't pull a Tim Finnegan!

[chelidon.livejournal.com]

Oh, I dunno, I that would be a total hoot, and a pretty good excuse for a party ;>

For those who don't know the song we're talking about, lyrics are here (http://www.vincentpeters.nl/triskelle/lyrics/finneganswake.php?index=080.010.080.010).

[kitten-goddess.livejournal.com]

Sounds like a good idea. I hate the idea of having to go broke to pay for a funeral.

Not to mention the sterility of your standard funeral. As I am not a Christian, I don't want the funeral home giving a generic Christian ritual. I assume they would do that, because most white Americans are Chrisitans.

[chelidon.livejournal.com]

Most Americans have a total avoidance response to anything having to do with death, which is ironic, since it's the one thing we all have to deal with, and the one thing that is guaranteed to happen to each of us, sooner or later. We're going to be young forever, and we're never going to die. Yeah. right.

Much of the funeral industry shannigans are designed to play right into that complex of fears and denial, along with the natural grief people feel after having lost a loved one -- thus memorial parks with perpetual maintenance contracts, "living flames," $15,000 metal-cased hermetically-sealed caskets, $50,000 vaults, preservative-pumped, makeup-covered corpses, elaborate viewings, and so on. Bleah.

[kitten-goddess.livejournal.com]

How can you pre-pay for a funeral if you're probably going to be here at least another forty years? I want to do that, but I don't want the home funeral people to go out of business before I die.

[chelidon.livejournal.com]

Gosh. no clue. I'd think a safer route might be to set aside a certain amount of cash with someone who has your medical directives, power of attorney, etc, who would be empowered to make the arrangements at the time, and check in with the home funeral folks every so often to make sure they're still around and that you've set aside enough $$.