Alternative Funeral Practices
Home funerals and green burials are replacing traditional funerals
Jun 4, 2007
It's still small, but growing - the trend toward funeral and burial practices that were abandoned at the beginning of the last century. Home funerals, green burial practices, and personalized funeral ceremonies are replacing the traditional funeral practices that dominated the twentieth century.
Understanding the reason for bereaved families and friends abandoning the practice of washing, dressing, and "laying-out" the body at home is like understanding the riddle of the chicken and the egg - did families begin looking for someone else to handle those chores, or did the funeral industry create its own market? Given the predominant national inclination to avoid the subject of death and to view a funeral as something to be gotten through as quickly and painlessly as possible, either explanation is possible.
Whatever the reason, "undertakers" became recognized as the official handlers of the corpse, responsible for transporting, preparing, maintaining and disposing of what became known as "the final remains." Every euphemism coined by the funeral industry distanced the bereaved a little farther from the awful truth. The corpse, so recently a viable human being worthy of love and care, became a stranger. The funeral parlor became a funeral home, although neither resembled its namesake, the front room of the house where a person had so recently lived.The undertaker became a mortician who was transformed into a funeral director. Even the gravesite, once a raw, gaping wound in the earth, became a staged scene, draped with fabric and surrounded by chairs. No one ever saw the casket being lowered into the ground.
Now, however, a small but growing number of people have realized that there are options to the traditional funeral practices once accepted as the norm. Increasingly, bereaved family members and friends opt to wash, dress and prepare the body for viewing. Often, they hold vigils at home, with the corpse lying in state in his or her own bed They create personalized funeral ceremonies, or let the conversations and memories flow naturally.
Sometimes, they arrange for a green burial, eschewing toxic embalming fluids, heavy wooden caskets and metal liners in favor of dry ice for the viewing and a simple wooden box or even a cardboard casket for burial. A funeral director might still transport the body and handle the actual burial, depending on the legalities of the state involved and the resources (physical and emotional, as well as financial) of the family and/or friends. But the nature of the final farewell is in the hands of those most intimately involved.
The funeral has come home again.
