Undertaken With Love
A Home Funeral Guide for Congregations and Communities
Chapter 1: At Life's End
Additional Resources
An ally to the home funeral movement is the hospice movement in the United States, which delivers palliative care to those at the end of life. HospiceDirectory.org is one Internet resource for locating a local hospice organization in your area, which will have many additional resources related to the care and comfort of the dying and the support of their caregivers. These organizations vary in their familiarity with the home funeral movement, but we hope that as more home funeral committees form, local hospices will play a crucial role in reaching families who want to care for their own dead.
We also recommend the following books and additional resources:
Living Consciously, Dying Graciously: A Journey With Cancer and Beyond, a book by Nancy Manahan, Ph.D. and Becky Bohan, M.A.
The End-of-Life Handbook: A Compassionate Guide to Connecting with and Caring for a Dying Loved One, a book by David B. Feldman, Stephen Andrew Lasher Jr., and Ira Byock
The Four Things That Matter Most: A Book About Living, a book by Ira Byock
Final Gifts: Understandng the Special Awareness, Needs, and Communications of the Dying, a book by Maggie Callanan and Patricia Kelley.
Witnessing Death: A Grandson's Reflections, a DVD by David Rosenthal.
Family Caregiver Alliance has four listserv groups for family caregivers at the end of life: a general listserv plus more specific ones for families who have a loved one with Huntington's disease, for gay and lesbian caregivers and for Californian caregivers.
Prepare for Chapter 2
The assignment for the next chapter is to interview older men and women who have memories of home funerals. If you are unable to identify individuals in your area who remember home funerals from their childhood, you might assign one of these accounts to each member of your home funeral committee:
Here is the story about Nellie Hickerson's funeral, mentioned in our introduction, and also featured on our video page.
In the moving essay "Dying With Dignity," religious educator and storyteller Klara Tammany revisits the deaths and funerals of her father and mother, comparing the painful "uninformed consent" at play in the conventional arrangements provided her father and the healing "compassion choice" evident in the home funeral the family provided her mother.
Alison's Gift by Beth Knox is the heartfelt story of 7-year-old Alison Knox's sudden passing and the founding of Crossings, Caring for Our Own at Death. It answers why home funeral care is important and shows how families can find a measure of healing and comfort through greater involvement in caring for their own dead.
Here is a Chrone Chronicles interview of Jerrigrace Lyons, founder of Final Passages, another home funeral training organization. The interview tells about death of Lyons' friend Carolyn Whiting, who left detailed instructions for her home funeral, and whose example prompted Lyons to become involved in other home funerals.
Isabel Berney of Funeral Consumers Alliance of the Virginia Blue Ridge sent a link to an article about one of her members who did a home funeral and burial in 2008 for his mother. Thanks, Isabel! I hope other readers will send us their stories of home funerals also!
The Smithsonian Magazine online recently published an article by Max Alexander about the back-to-back funerals of his father and father-in-law, one involving embalming and the assistance of a funeral home, the other a home funeral. He reflects on how very different the two experiences were for his family.
Please send us links to other home funeral stories!