Just as the home birth movement presents alternatives to conventional hospital births, the home death movement offers a different take on how our society deals with the end of life. Lucinda Herring's book serves as a practical guide for people seeking a more natural, personal, and sustainable way to say goodbye to loved ones and to prepare for their own after-death care.
The environmental impact of conventional burial, and even conventional cremation, is not sustainable, Herring says. She cites research showing that the modern funeral industry is an environmental hazard. Every year in the U.S., the funeral industry buries 827,060 gallons of toxic formaldehyde embalming fluid, enough to fill an Olympic-size swimming pool, as well as 2,700 tons of copper and bronze, materials sufficient to construct another Golden Gate Bridge.
These are "harmful, unsustainable practices," Herring says. "I want people to be aware of all their options, and their rights, so they can make more informed and meaningful choices around the end of life." Most people don't know, for instance, that it is legal to care for a deceased friend or family member at home, "to transport a loved one to a cemetery or crematorium themselves, or to help dig a grave as a shared ritual act of love," Herring says.
Herring makes the case that home funerals support better forms of healing than do services offered by the traditional funeral industry. She provides the example of a young man who dies suddenly in an accident. "When it comes time to take him to the cemetery, the young man's loved ones lift the casket up on their shoulders, feeling the weight and wonder of him," Herring says. "This felt sense of being alive and carrying the dead forever changes them. Death is closer, far less fearful, a woven part of them now."
