Comments:

Continued - 2007-09-21 00:09:09

The documentary profiled about 5 families throughout the U.S. who'd chosen home burials. In each case, they'd bought a cardboard coffin ($50) and decorated it in idiosyncratic ways. One family had everyone put an inked handprint on the coffin...even the dog, with a pawprint. One decorated the outside with beautiful photographs of nature. One wrote tender letters and notes and taped them to the inside of the lid. One painted the coffin with flowers and wrote loving farewells all over it.

One Montana cattle ranching family had its 90-year-old patriarch, in a wheelchair, brand his own home-made wooden coffin with a branding iron, after all the family members had branded the coffin with the brands from their own family ranches. This family so loved this man. For his 90th birthday, they lined up 90 cupcakes, each with one birthday candle, on a 30-foot-long table. They slowly wheeled him past the cupcakes, as he wielded a hair dryer to blow them all out one by one. He died soon after, and was buried in the branded coffin carried by his family to its gravesite on an antique Model T Ford truck, the vehicle of his youth.

What struck Y. was the rhetoric of the funeral directors promoting a standard clinical funeral-home funeral as "respectful." The documentary showed a typical funeral-home embalming: the violence, impersonality, and invasiveness of which--Y. had to look away a couple times and squeeze my leg in revulsion--was the total opposite of the tender respect, loving care, and gentle reverence showed the dead who were laid out in their homes.

After the documentary, Wendy took questions. She explained that Michigan has a strong funeral industry that has succeeded in passing legislation that requires a death certificate to be signed by a funeral director before anything else, even a home funeral, can be done. She also said that you can find funeral directors--she's found 1 so far--who will comply with a family's wish to lay out their dead at home. One audience member said that the Michigan Cremation Society is good about honoring families' wishes to lay out their dead at home, before cremation.

A film about death turned out to be one of the most uplifting, moving, tender, and life-affirming films I've ever seen. Y. was in tears for much of this exquisite documentary. Kind readers who wish to know more may contact the Funeral Consumers Information Society, where you can read the blistering response, from funeral director Kevin McCabe, to the speak-truth-to-power FCIS presenter Wendy Lyons. You can also find helpful links, and if you email them, they can tell you whom to contact in state legislature, and points to bring up to them, to protect the custom of home burials.

Ypsidixit found this evening extraordinarily moving, and felt privileged to see the beautiful, tender ceremonies each family created, all on their own, for their passed member.
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Ypsidixit - 2007-09-21 00:24:55
That's odd. The McCabe Funeral Home does not provide an email address. Only a phone number.

Ypsilanti's Stark Funeral Home can sell you a coffin for $1,000-$8,000.

Ann Arbor's Muehlig Funeral Home doesn't even appear to have a website.

Ypsilanti's Janowiak Funeral Home's "Affordable" page is remarkably short on info on why they are affordable.


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Lisele - 2007-09-21 08:09:57

It was a very emotional night -- imagining oneself in place of those who had lost someone, faced with making those choices. I especially identified with the young mother of three whose seven year old daughter was killed by an airbag in a low-speed crash. But really, every story felt personal, because we all have parents, partners, children, loved ones.

I had the opportunity to sit with a close friend who had died and to participate in many aspects of her care before and after death. I found it very reassuring that there was nothing to fear -- my friend was clearly gone from the body left behind. Yet, honoring that body has a place. After her cremation, her partner generously offered me some of the ashes. I had them in a tin box for a long time (years) before I was ready to scatter them. At that time, I finally opened the tin to look at them. It was quite amazing -- they didn't seem to be ashes at all. Instead, they seemed to be very fine fragments of bone. I felt like I was looking right into the center of what remained of my friend -- that I was staring at what remained of the bones which made up her frame and animated her spirit for all the years I knew her. It didn't feel morbid at all. I lovingly put them into my garden. Now I think of my cold frames (later placed in that spot) as the perfect place for her essense to reside -- the most intensively cultivated spot in my garden. Even when everything else is swimming in weeds, the cold frames are well cultivated, and I think of her as I care for them.

Requiring a funeral director's signature on a death certificate seems like such a slap in the face to me. Why should we be required to get the OK of a business merchant -- frankly -- before we can complete the final transition of a loved one?! Wendy Lyons provided letters to protest this invasion of families' rights. They can be found at the FCIS website. And I think everyone should check out the POV documentary, A Family Undertaking. Although our library doesn't currently have a copy, I think I will request that they buy it.
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Sandy D. - 2007-09-22 16:33:08
You're back! I've missed reading your blog. I assumed it was because real life was taking up your time, but I'm still glad you're blogging again.
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Ypsidixit - 2007-09-24 00:38:31
Lisele: Your thought about your cold frame is quite beautiful. how fitting.

It was a very emotional night. That is a great idea, to request the video. The concept of DIY Death might sound a bit unfamiliar to anyone who's never thought of it. But this video provides an eloquent argument in terms anyone can identify with.

Yes, that Michigan law requires a funeral director's signature on something so intimately part of one's family as a death certificate is abhorrent to me. If I remember correctly from Jessica Mitford's "The American Way of Death," one can get a funeral director license in 18 months. Not what I regard as a "profession."

The only reason, to my view, that the powerful Michigan funeral industry got this law passed is to force more people into the funeral home, where they'll be more prone to go along with a standard American funeral, instead of summoning the grit, in the most difficult of times, to make an independent choice. All hte more reason to pre-plan.
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Ypsidixit - 2007-09-24 00:39:21
Sandy D.! how nice to hear from you again! Your reasoning was correct, but I'm back, and glad to see you visiting.
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