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'Tis sadly said we are more afraid to live than we are to die.
—Pandora
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Final Passages is a company dedicated to the new home funeral trend — this dignified and compassionate alternative to current funeral practices.
As a whole, American culture reveres youth and conceals illness, aging, and death. Creatures of comfort and convenience, many believe death to be an intruder, or the enemy. Death in the media is portrayed as violent, painful, unlawful, tragic, imposed, unnecessary, distant, unwanted, and a failure. Death is seldom seen as peaceful or as a natural part of our life cycle.
A Buddhist commentary on our culture states, ''Americans are the only culture who consider death as optional.'' We tend to cope with loss by withdrawing, avoiding, tranquilizing, and denying death's reality while giving a loved one's body away to a passive onlooker or grief choreographer.
Old ways of thinking about after-death care are beginning to be challenged. We have become a generation of people who are seeking personal, relevant, and meaningful conditions in our lives — yet we have no experience with death.
Although individuals may express apprehension about taking charge of a home or family-directed funeral — which includes personal involvement with a deceased person — unsettled feelings seem to dissolve when we confront the unknown and are given the opportunity to conquer our fears and misconceptions. Caring for your own dead is completely legal in most states.
Diane: I read that the death of your friend, Carolyn Whiting, was the motivation behind the startup of Final Passages. Will you tell us what happened?
Jerri: At the time, I held my first- and second-degree Reiki certificates, and I heard about a Reiki share group that a woman in Santa Rosa was having at her house. I called and she invited me over.
I had an instant warm feeling about her. I really liked her. By day she was a registered nurse, doing in-home care for an older woman. At other times, she was a Reiki Master doing alternative health care, sharing and teaching Reiki.
One day, about a year after I met her, she had difficulty breathing at work and went to sit on the porch while someone called 911.
When the paramedics arrived, they couldn't resuscitate her. She was pronounced dead on the way to the hospital.
Carolyn had a card in her wallet that said, in the event of her death, to call her friend in San Francisco.
It turns out that she had written instructions about her last wishes and made her friend Norma the executrix of her will.
Carolyn had helped Norma's family when Norma's husband, Joe, died of cancer. And they realized that they didn't know all the things Joe might have wanted for his funeral — what kind of ceremony he would have liked, and various other things.
After that, Carolyn had suggested to a group of friends that they get together and write down their funeral requests. Then at some future point, after a conversation with Karen Leonard, director of the Redwood Funeral Society[1] here in town, Carolyn discovered it was legal to have your friends take care of your body after you died, and she amended her own paperwork accordingly.
Her instructions were something like, I don't want my body turned over to a mortuary. I don't want to be embalmed and I don't want an autopsy. I want my friends to bring my body home if I'm at a hospital, to bathe and dress me and do ceremony in my own home. These are the songs I like, the music I'd like you to play, these are the flowers I love, and these are the things I want on my altar for my memorial service — she provided lots of detail. I want my friends to drive me to the crematorium. . . and so forth.
So Norma met with all of us the night after we found out Carolyn had died.
Apparently Norma couldn't get Carolyn's body home from the hospital because they had never heard of a request like this before. The hospital needed to make sure it was legal, and they needed certain paperwork. So they told Norma to come back in the morning.
A local mortuary helped with the necessary documents, and the next day we brought Carolyn's body home, and we did all that she had requested. We touched her body and found it wasn't frightening — it was very natural. We bathed and dressed her, and then sang, chanted, and told stories.
For the next three days, her friends gathered, met each other, and bonded. There was a perceptive sense of her presence in the room at different times, as if she were orchestrating the whole thing.
I was totally inspired by the sense of grace, dignity, and honoring that went on around her. We couldn't have planned it ourselves any more perfectly. It was so magical.
We drove her body to the crematorium and then that afternoon we brought her remains home, where we did more circles and ceremonies with her ashes. We had a memorial a month later, on her birthday.
Diane: And this is what inspired you to start the movement?
Jerri: The Book by Lisa Carlson Caring for the Dead; Your Final Act of Love[2] was what started the movement. Lisa had a powerful experience caring for her husband at home, and decided to write a book about people's right to do so.
At the time that I had my experience around Carolyn, I didn't know about Lisa or her book. All I knew was that I wanted to share it with as many people as I knew.
It was as if I had been reawakened to something that everyone used to do around the turn of the century. When someone died, you prepared the body at home, and it was ''laid out'' in the parlor. People would have a celebration of the dead person's life, and then bury the body out on the back-forty.
Diane: So Carolyn's death was the ''marker'' that woke you to your life purpose?
Jerri: It was, precisely. It completely took me in a new direction. It didn't happen overnight, though. At first I spoke to groups who wanted to hear the story — at a hospice, at a metaphysical store in town — that's how it started.
I wanted to learn everything I could about death. I had a friend die when I was in my 30s and my father died when I was young, but I had always felt uncomfortable around death and dying because it made me feel helpless.
I knew that much of the fear around death had diminished from my life when, one month later, my aunt was dying in the hospital and I was able to walk into the hospital room, sit beside my aunt, and put my hands on her. I did Reiki, I sang and talked to her. Before that, I would have been totally frightened. The ''mystery'' around death had dissolved.
Diane: Well, that's certainly true. Death is a mystery because our society seems to protect us from it all our lives.
I remember my grandmother dieing when I was about five. I think I understood what was going on, but it did not have much of an emotional impact on me. I remember being curious about it though.
Later in my life I can remember going to a funeral and feeling an energetic force around the body and trying to figure out what it was. Was it the attention of the mourners, or was it the energy of the body leaving?
Jerri: There is still activity in the body going on for several days.
Diane: I imagine that each situation is unique and different.
Jerri: Yes. Every family is unique. I feel so much passion for what I do because each family has such a different story and individual dynamics and needs.
As an example, this week I had the very incredible experience of helping a well known woman who died from cancer. The family received a pine box from a local friend who makes them. They decorated it with roses, and lined it with beautiful material. A Native American friend gave a wolf skin for her body to lie on.
Each family does it differently, producing this wonderful piece of artwork — this beautiful cradle to take their loved one off to the Sacred Fire. It is so graceful and loving.
I help about three or four families a month. I love watching them transform before my eyes — from tremendous emotional upheaval about the coming death to walking through the doorway of fear. The family is comforted when they see their loved one looking so peaceful. All the wrinkles of pain are gone.
They the family have the creative process to help with their grief. They are empowered because they are being allowed to spontaneously create a ceremonial rite of passage.
Diane: How do you approach a loved one to talk about these issues?
Jerri: We get asked that a lot. One of the ways you can enter the conversation is through a video we have which shows people doing their own ceremonies.
We always say to our students, ''Get our video and say to Mom and Dad, 'Hey I heard about this organization and I got their video and it's so unusual, I thought you might be interested in seeing it. It made me start thinking about the end of life and my own death. I hadn't really thought about this before. I realize I could die at any point in my life — I know I'm young but it made me start thinking and wanting to plan how I would like my last wishes carried out.' ''
Enter the conversation from your own personal place. Not about them or their death, but about your own.
Diane: Well, I have to say that talking about my own death gives me the goosies.
Jerri: It brings it home, doesn't it?
Diane: Yes. I think of my parents, and project myself into my father's place, thinking he might only have ten years to live, or maybe even only one or two. It also makes you look at your own issues of aging and what that means. Wow. As if we need something else to think about.
Jerri: It helps to look at what spiritual teachers such as Ram Dass, Stephen Levine, and Elizabeth Kubler-Ross have to say about death.
From the Buddhist perspective, Sogyal Rinpoche, in his Tibetan Book of Living and Dying,[3] says that you should contemplate your death. Not when you're depressed or suicidal, but at times when you're feeling good about life.
This is important because contemplating our own death is really the passageway to living life more fully.
One of the reasons I love the work I do is because I'm face to face with death all the time. Sure, I still think our psyche holds out and says, no way — I'm never dying. Maybe we have to get to a place where we are really ill and really feel the life force going out of us, then maybe we can surrender to the idea that we are not going to be here forever. If we could go to that place more frequently, we would have less judgment about ourselves and how other people live their lives — we'd have a lot more tolerance.
Diane: If someone is feeling fearful of death, would you say it would be appropriate for them to go work in hospice?
Jerri: Absolutely, go through hospice training, or visit people at convalescent homes. I'd definitely recommend that.
Diane: I see how completing a process this can be with a loved one.
Jerri: Yes. It helps a lot to have closure. It is definitely empowering for people to have a sense that they have done everything they could possibly do in the way the loved one would have like it.
Whether they choose to paint the casket, carry it to burial themselves, or whatever. It becomes about the person who died, their family, and the relationship they have — not someone else's contrived celebration.
Diane: It reminds me of creating your own wedding vows, and birthing at home. It's so much more personal.
Jerri: It gives everyone a chance to get beyond their fears. And they do.
Diane: Your company is called Final Passages?
Jerri: Yes. Part of what I do is to educate peoples about their rights to take care of their loved one when they die at home.
I have another organization called Home and Family Funerals, in which I act as a home-funeral guide. That's where I help the family plan what they want to do, and walk beside them through their own family-directed funeral.
I help with their paperwork and with preparation of the body, if they want, bringing ice and so forth if they are going to do a two- or three-day ceremony. I help get the body transported, and supply cardboard cremation caskets if that is what they want, along with a resource list of other things they might need. Basically, I'm there to support the family on every level.
Families need someone around who is grounded, balanced, peaceful, so they can get on with what they need to do: to find a way of embracing death as a natural and loving transition in life.
Diane: Wow — what amazing work you do!
Jerri: I'm grateful for someone who wants to hear about this work. I'm working on a book with a friend who co-teaches classes with me. As well as providing our handbook on how to create a home funeral, we'd like to tell the stories of some of the amazing families we've met.
Footnotes:
- Redwood Funeral Society, funeral.org/index1.html.
- Caring for the Dead: Your Final Act of Love, by Lisa Carlson, paperback, 640 pages (November 1998) ISBN: 0942679210.
- The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, by Sogyal Rinpoche, paperback, 425 pages, reprint edition (May 1994) Harper San Francisco; ISBN: 0062508342.
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