Comments:

Lisele - 2007-09-08 10:16:58
I'm especially interested in both what is legal in Michigan (in terms of taking funerals into one's own hands) and green burial sites. I've been interested in the latter for years. I've always thought that completely encasing the body in coffin and cement liner was ridiculous and seemed so completely antithetical to the idea of returning the body to the earth. I would rather have just a shroud and then be laid in the earth. I'll also be interested to see if she talks about religious customs like Jewish burial rites, which are a lot more natural. In fact, there is no embalming and holes are drilled in the coffin to encourage decomposition.
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Ypsidixit - 2007-09-08 10:45:57
It is a very worthwhile topic for discussion and there's no sense being squeamish, as if by doing so one would somehow avoid the event itself...

To add to what you said, Lisele, I believe that in Islam people are buried in a shroud only, on their sides, turned towards Mecca. More information about Islamic burials.

I recently sent away for and received info about Ann Arbor's Memorial Advance Planning Society, which works to provide info to members about low-cost funeral arrangements. But, like Lisele, just a simple shroud is fine with me--no (shudder) embalming, ugh.
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Ingrid - 2007-09-08 15:33:06
When my late husband died, I chose cremation.Due to a family friend being the undertaker,the whole event cost only $500, and the ashes were scattered in the waters, parks, and other natural sites which he loved. The only downside was that his family's priest refused to attend the service which his mother would have liked.
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Ypsidixit - 2007-09-08 15:49:57
Ingrid, that sounds very beautiful. How short-sighted and, frankly, mean that the priest made an arbitrary principle more important than a person. At such moments I particularly despise organized religion.

Over Labor Day our dad spoke to my sis and I of a body donation program he was thinking of (he is a spry 80) in nearby Toledo. They pay to collect the body and for the cremation, and return the ashes to you. The body is donated to medical science. The whole thing costs $50.

I was so proud of him for considering making his last action on earth a selfless, helping one, so true to his nature. I'm getting teary just thinking about it.

The bodies they collect are not, as Pop said, "put into this big bubbling vat, and stirred with a big wooden paddle, and then when they need one, they just fish one out...hmm, no we don't want that one, try another...no, that one's been in there too long..."

Oh, my goodness, we had to laugh. A mordant streak of humor runs in the family...but laughter sure broke the tension and starkness of the conversation.


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maryd - 2007-09-09 06:01:24
This is such an important topic. I lost my dad at 13 and discovered the morbid tradition of a typical American funeral, the 1st I had attended. At that tender age, I recall being shocked to my core by the costs of everything related to funerals. I remember this room full of coffins and then reading their prices and suffering sticker shock, all at a time when the family had just lost their chief breadwinner. I vowed never to particiapte in such nonsense.
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Ypsidixit - 2007-09-10 09:08:40
Maryd: That sounds so awful--to be confronted with such mendacious greed at such a time.

In the Mitford book, she discusses at length the patterns of coffins funeral directors arrange to "funnel" people to the highest cost one, as well as the guilt-inducing patter that goes with it. It has to be read to be believed. The funeral directors actually have conferences on how to extract maximum profit by such things as the floorplan for the coffin display. It was quite the eye-opener for me.
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Lisele - 2007-09-10 13:00:50
Interestingly, the library has a book called "Caring for Your Own Dead," by Lisa Carlson. I think I will read it as prep for the talk on 9/20. I think I read something on American funeral practices from the Ypsi Library, but I don't think it was Mitford's book -- ahhhh, it was "Grave matters : a journey through the modern funeral industry to a natural way of burial" by Harris, Mark. I never made it to the natural burials part because the opening descriptions were so ...disturbing.
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