So there's been a recent surge of interest in home births and I think it's fantastic. I can talk all I want about how I don't want no evil doctor man shoving a needle in my spine and ripping my stomach open to seize my baby, but until I'm in that position, I don't really have any room to talk. Lots of women have done home births and I admire them for it. I want to do it or at least have as few drugs as possible involved, but who knows what I'll be asking for when the draws near.
While home birth might be grabbing all the headlines, there's another DIY area that is quietly gaining popularity- home funerals. No embalming, no expensive casket, no funeral home. The wake takes place at the family's home and the casket is very simple- sometimes cardboard. The person is transported by family vehicle to whatever religious ceremony is chosen and then the family buries their loved ones themselves either on their property or in a cemetery. This might sound crazy at first, but I think the home funeral idea has some merit. Just think about it.
I watched a PBS POV documentary on netflix instant play called "A Family Undertaking" about home funerals. The "death midwife" or "home funeral guide" ,as she prefers, interviewed by PBS made a really good point: "We've institutionalized the most important rites of passage in our culture- birth and death." Before the 20th century, people had their children at home and laid their loved ones to rest at home. Now we just hand them over to strangers in hospitals and let these people deal with our relatives at the very beginning and very end of life. Our emotions about these events become monitored on someone else's time. The joy of birth is dampened by doctors taking the babies too soon or the nurses ready to whisk the newborns off to the the nursery. The grief of losing a relative is hidden away because a show of that kind of intense emotion around strangers (funeral directors and so on) is disturbing and too intimate. We are prevented from experiencing these events and emotions as fully as we could or should.
Just like home births, home funerals are more natural because there are no chemicals involved. Anyone who says a dead person at a the funeral home is "so natural looking" is either weird, lying, or both. It's not natural. There is nothing natural about what undertakers do. Jabbing holes in a person's body to suck out all the fluids, propping up the eyeballs, clamping the mouth shut, filling the body with formaldehyde- if anyone but a funeral director we're doing this stuff it would be considered desecration of a corpse. It's not pleasant to think about, but it's true. And all so we can get our relatives to look like they did in old age, right before they died. That's not the way I want to remember any of my grandparents.
Finally, it's no secret that funeral directors take advantage of the grief stricken and bereaved. This is yet another similarity to families in the delivery room. We'll do what they say because they are the experts. Never mind that they don't have our best interests at heart, they don't have our emotional well being at heart, and they certainly don't have our financial well being at heart. So we end up paying thousands of dollars for something we don't want and something our relatives didn't want because we are not in the right state to deal with it.
The topic is macabre, I know, but it is important to think about culturally. Would I want a funeral with no chemicals, no expensive casket, and no funeral home for myself? My gut reaction is to say that as long as I have a funeral mass said for me, I'm buried in a Catholic cemetery, and I'm right with God before I go, I don't need anything else. Would I have the strength to be in charge of a home funeral for someone I know and love? Like home birth, I can only really answer these questions when the time draws near. What do you guys think?
