Are You Afraid to Plan for Your Own Death?

When Beth Knox lost her 7-year-old daughter in a car accident, she was told the hospital could only release her body to a funeral home. At the time, Knox didn't know she had the legal right to drive her daughter's body from the hospital to her house in the same van in which she took her to school every day. What she knew was that her family needed time.

"I was required by law to care well for her," she writes on her Web site, "but now that her heart had stopped beating, I was being told that her care was no longer my concern." Finding it unacceptable, she found a funeral home that agreed to bring her daughter's body back to her house. "I cared for her at home for three days, bathing her, watching her, taking in slowly the painful reality that she had passed from this life, and sharing my grief with her classmates and brothers and grandparents and our wonderful community of friends, before finally letting go of her body."

For more than a decade, a growing number of Americans have resurrected the ancient practice of "do-it-yourself" funerals. Like Beth Knox, now a funeral rights educator in Maryland, these home funeral guides and educators are spreading the word that after-death care is not the funeral industry's birthright. You have the legal authority, in most states, to care for your loved ones after they die. It will transform your life, with the added bonus of saving you money.

A Sacred Rite of Passage

As a society we have distanced ourselves from the dying process," says Dr. Ronald K. Barrett, professor of psychology at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. "We now have hospices and institutions where people go to die. In former times the dying process was an integral part of the life experience of the community; people were born and died at home. To the extent that we have relocated those experiences to death care professionals, the experience of death itself has become alien, and it has complicated our ability as humans to do what we have so naturally done since time immemorial, and that is to grieve."

Jerrigrace Lyons, director of the non-profit organization Final Passages in Northern California, has made it her life mission to educate her community in the exploration of choices surrounding the death of a loved one and compassionate alternatives to current funeral practices. "When you keep your loved one at home," she says, "the process has a natural beginning, middle and end, and everybody who is around you is benefiting from this rite of passage. There is such a vast difference between a family coming to that place of letting go on their own and the funeral home's transportation service showing up at the door two hours after death to take the body away in a plastic bag."

When Lyons serves as a home funeral guide, one of her first duties is to help friends and family members walk through what she calls "the doorway of fear." "As guides," she says, "we model touching the dead body, rubbing the head, holding the hands, brushing the cheeks. The family's original reluctance melts away as soon as they see that we're normalizing it."

One funeral industry practice that gets the blood of these otherwise gentle educators pumping is the embalming of the body. The Federal Trade Commission's Funeral Rule dictates that funeral directors inform families that embalming is not required by law and doesn't prevent decomposition of the body. In my state of California, the only legal requirement for a body that will not be cremated or buried within 24 hours is that it must be refrigerated. According to Lyons, who has participated in more than 150 home or family-directed funerals, a body can be safely preserved by keeping dry ice under the vital organs right after death and while the body stays at home.