Caitlin Doughty's Blog, page 3

Weaponizing Fear Against Green Death

This article is an edited version of a video, first appearing on the Ask a Mortician YouTube channel as “Weaponizing Fear Against Green Death.”

In 2015 Representative Dick Hamm and his fellow legislators were debating whether or not to legalize aquamation in the state of Indiana. 

Aquamation, aka alkaline hydrolysis, is often referred to as water cremation. The process dissolves the dead body with a final bath (aqua), as opposed to a final flame (cre, or fire). The body is placed in a mix of high heat water and potassium hydroxide, pressure is applied, and the body decomposes down to its chemical components, essentially dissolving into the water. The aquamation process uses just one-quarter of the energy of a flame cremation and has no emissions like carbon dioxide and mercury vapor from dental fillings. 

Whether you choose water cremation or fire cremation, your corpse will end the process as a container of crushed bones, which your family can take home, scatter, or bury. 

Indiana State General Assembly

As Representative Hamm and his colleagues were debating the Indiana aquamation bill, the process itself had already been established and well-tested at medical schools like the Mayo Clinic and UCLA, and was already a legal option for final disposition in ten other states. The bill had already passed through the House’s Public Health Committee and was heading toward legalization.

That is, until Dick Hamm took the floor.

“A country is… great…. when it takes care of its dead” Hamm began his testimony. “We keep going backwards and backwards and backwards taking care of the people we’re supposed to love. And you can tell I feel pretty passionate about this. I urge you to vote no on this bill.”

What would cause Representative Hamm to come out so strongly against this deathcare bill? Perhaps you’re thinking, “it’s those partisan American politics!” But both Hamm and the lawmaker who introduced the aquamation bill were Republicans. Before Hamm’s impassioned speech, that Republican sponsor of the bill believed it would have no trouble getting the votes to pass the full House.

Hamm’s testimony continued, “We’re going to put [the bodies] in acid, and just let them dissolve away and then we’re going to let them run down the drain out into the sewers and whatever.”

There is a lot to unpack in that statement. As mentioned, aquamation uses high heat water and alkali to rapidly decompose the dead body. Acid would be the wrong pH for this job. Local funeral directors aren’t stuffing people into barrels of acid like mob bosses.

As for Hamm’s “dissolving bodies down the drain” claim, he’s referring to the small amount of neutralized and sterilized amino acids, peptides, and salts that may go down the drain, or be donated to local farms. This is no different than the blood, bile, and intestinal fluid that’s also sent down the drain during an embalming procedure.

Next, Representative Hamm started coming after flame cremation, saying, “when you cremate somebody, 20 percent of that body does not cremate. It has to be crushed, sometimes beat up with a hammer.”

Cremation leaves behind six to eight pounds of inorganic bone fragments. These bone fragments are pulverized by a machine called a cremulator into uniform, scatterable ashes.

Information via Bio Response Solutions

Representative Hamm’s speech took what was an uncontentious, Republican-proposed bill, and ended its progress, resulting in a final vote of 34-59 against legalizing aquamation. Why did this happen?

It may help to know that in addition to being a Representative in the state of Indiana, Dick Hamm also owns two casket companies. And he served as the president of the Casket & Funeral Supply Association of America, which, obviously, represents the interests of casket companies. It’s clear that Dick Hamm stood to lose the most financially from the passage of a bill legalizing aquamation.

If a family chooses aquamation over a more conventional burial, the family would no longer be required to purchase thousands, (often tens of thousands), of dollars of funeral products like caskets, vaults, and headstones.  Given those very same caskets are made by Hamm, perhaps he should have recused himself from voting on the aquamation bill. Hamm not only DIDN’T recuse himself, but instead gave a speech on the House floor that wildly mischaracterized the process.

In 2018, Representative Dick “Never Apologize” Hamm, three-time incumbent, was voted out in his Republican primary. His challenger received more than double his vote total. But the damage was already done, and aquamation remains illegal in the state of Indiana.

When an aquamation bill was brought up in California in 2017, we were well aware of the Hamm-effect. A legalization bill had already failed once, back in 2010.

This new bill was introduced by Assemblyman Todd Gloria who represented San Diego, the location of a new water cremation manufacturer, Qico. Qico was founded by two colleagues of mine, who realized it would have to be all hands on deck to get the bill passed this time around. The bill was voted through various committees without much fanfare, then it stalled in the Appropriations Committee, where bills get funded.

The Order of the Good Death loves this type of challenge. We researched all the lawmakers involved, how to best reach them, and then, armed with this knowledge we launched a campaign asking you – the green death avengers – to write letters and reach out to assembly members on social media. The head of the committee was Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez, who, in her guide for online advocates and campaigns, requested the use of cute animal photos and .gifs. Yes, really.

So, we decided to shower this powerful woman, keeper of the Royal Californian coin, with all the adorable animal gifs she could handle.

Here’s a tweet from our executive director Sarah Chavez

Hundreds of you went to work, and that very night Assemblywoman Sanchez tweeted #INeedWine. Why? Among other issues, “I HAVE MORTICIANS TWEETING AT ME.” My heart sank. The Assemblywoman had said she wanted all those cat .gifs!  If only there was some way to speak to her directly. Wait, were her direct messages open on Twitter?

I slid into her dm’s, introduced myself, and explained that I owned a small funeral home in Los Angeles and that Californians really deserved this environmentally friendly option. I explained we were passionate–not creepy– folks who were happy to answer any questions to get this bill passed. Not only did the Assemblywoman reply, she replied fast. “I’m sorry if it sounded negative… you all are doing an exceptional job of blowing up my personal Twitter feed.”

Assemblywoman Sanchez admitted the aquamation process was actually “one of the most interesting things I have coming in front of me” and was “impressed by the reach and breadth of folks tweeting me.”  She was extremely professional and thanked us for challenging her view of who works in death and who cares about this legislation.

A few days later the bill passed through the appropriations committee, went to the Governor, and now aquamation is legal in the state of California. I’m not saying it was all your cat .gifs, but they sure didn’t hurt.

Depending how you view this situation, it can either be a dystopian tale of lobbying in the 21st century or a heartwarming tale of access and advocacy. For the last century, lobbying has come from the funeral industry– controlled by money, lobbyists, and men like Representative Dick Hamm. But now, the lobbying can also come, quite forcefully, from normal fans of dissolving their bodies with water just like you and me.

The 1883 Law That Still Decides the Destiny of Pennsylvania’s Unclaimed Dead

It’s December 1882 and Louis N. Megargee of the Philadelphia Press is huddled on the side of Passyunk Avenue in South Philadelphia late into the night. He’d been watching this stretch of road from Center City for several months now, at the edge of the city, behind the gates of Lebanon, one of only two Black cemeteries in the city. What he waited for on that cold winter night was the sound of the methodical clod of horse hooves on the dirt path, and the groan of a wagon wheel on the path of the resurrectionist, the night doctor – the body snatchers were headed his way.

Megargee and his fellow concerned citizens sprung the trap, pulling taught a rope across Passyunk  to trip up  the horses. They quickly placed under arrest Frank McNamee, Levi Chew, Robert Chew, and Henry Pillet, all four of the body snatchers who had been involved in the theft of as many as 60 bodies from the cemetery.

Via British Library

The public response would be bombastic. At the time, few people trusted doctors, finding their fascination with the human body grotesque, and the practice of cutting into human remains macabre. Anatomy riots, public protests in response to the perceived immorality of medical dissection, had already taken place in the fledgling United States and the dark memory of the Burke and Hare murders undertaken to specifically sell cadavers to doctors was still fresh; and Philadelphia wasn’t having it.

Megargee and his small posse delivered the four men to the 15th and Filbert police station, and the following night Black community leaders held meetings about what to do, and how to work through the trauma of potentially never being sure that their loved one was at peace in their grave. At the police station, McNamee was quick to give up his buyer. William Forbes was the man who hired him, paying $8 a body, he said. Yes, the same one who was the Demonstrator of Anatomy at a prestigious college, that’s the guy.

The ultimate results of that night are still felt today.

When he took the stand, Forbes leaned hard on technicalities stating he never personally took possession of the bodies, and that the school had a don’t ask/don’t tell policy when it came to “donated” cadavers. For much of the 18th and 19th centuries, medical schools relied on the gallows to supply their cadavers. But fewer and fewer people were being put to death as punitive practices shifted. In 1867, Philadelphia passed a law allotting each medical school a portion of unclaimed bodies equal to the number of their students, as though they were simply divvying up playthings amongst schoolchildren. However, there weren’t enough cadavers to go around, so medical schools began to greedily eye the fertile plots of potter’s fields, full of the anonymous, and poor dead, as well as Black cemeteries where the white populace was likely to turn a blind eye.

Rembrandt van Rijn, The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp, 1632

Forbes passionately defended the right of doctors to practice medicine. The strict laws around human bodies made it incredibly difficult to study them upon death and few of the Victorian denizens, focused on “peace” and “rest”, were willing to offer themselves up to science upon death. Rather than face charges and sentencing for his role in stealing bodies from their resting place, he was instead held up as the “Father of the Pennsylvania Anatomical Act” which outlined that no bodies could be obtained illegally, that a board of scholars would be responsible for delivering legally obtained bodies to medical institutions, that the bodies would be allotted to each institution based on need and class size, that any body crossing the state line would be considered trafficked and illegally obtained, and that any unclaimed body in the state of Pennsylvania could be claimed by hospitals and medical schools for research and training.

The act was extensive and rather influential at the time with several other states creating laws emulating it. Today the American Association for the Advancement of Science considers it the best created of the many “anatomy acts” of the time period, and it’s still in place today. While our world and understanding of death has changed, our death practices have evolved, and the socio-economic and societal reasons a body may be found anonymous have shifted dramatically, it remains in the state of Pennsylvania the only law governing the fate of the unclaimed deceased persons.

We’re a far cry from the days when doctors performing autopsies and studying cadavers was considered an insidious act. Today, folks regularly donate their bodies to science, at an estimated rate of about 20,000 a year. On top of that, over 160 million people in the United States have volunteered their organs upon death. And the need for medical cadavers is not what it was in 1883 when the law was created, thanks to technology. That’s part of why the City of Philadelphia has at least two mass graves in Laurel Hill Cemetery for the cremated remains of a combined 2,015 anonymous people and untold others in storage in the coroner’s office.

Emma Lee

As per the 1883 law, if no one comes forward in 36 hours the body is declared unclaimed and stored for three months before the city pays the $500 fee for a contracted funeral home to cremate the remains and either store them, if there is space (for up to 10 years), or send them to contracted burial sites. An average of 250 bodies are cremated every year this way in the city of Philadelphia.

The causes behind why someone may die without family or friends to identify them are varied and intersect constantly with various other racial and socioeconomic issues. Over the past two years, the city has seen over 200 gun-related deaths a year, with many of them disproportionately located in the poorest sections of the city. Many unclaimed bodies are the result of families unable to pay the several thousand dollars it would take to offer their relative a proper burial with the city only offering a $1,500 stipend. Not to mention even qualifying for financial assistance for burials and cremations means needing to meet certain requirements with the state, and only working with approved funeral homes. It’s cheaper and easier to let the city cremate the remains, whether the deceased would have wanted it or not, and then pick them up later. Another common source of the unclaimed dead is nursing homes, where mandates around creating end-of-life plans are a facility-by-facility decision and record-keeping can be antiquated.

With no changes to the law on the horizon, concerned volunteers have taken matters into their own hands. Unclaimed Persons, a volunteer organization of genealogists and historians founded by Janis Martin, attempts to identify next of kin and get the information over to county coroners. Every life is worth remembering, as their motto goes. As of 2017, they’ve tackled well over 400 cases since their founding 10 years earlier and boast a 70% success rate across 55 counties. The larger NameUs organization is part of legislation in at least 5 states (Pennsylvania is not one of them) and has resolved over 700 cases of unidentified persons (6 of which were in Pennsylvania) with well over 13,000 still open. Philly Death Doula Collective, in addition to their wide variety of services during the final stages of life, assist family and friends in dealing with funeral homes and the associated necessities which can help prevent the financial burden that necessitates allowing the city to cremate the remains.

Photo courtesy of Salt Trails.

But for those who could not be identified and for whom hopes for a personalized burial are too late, Laurel Hill superintendent Bill Doran tends to their resting place and watches mourners, with no apparent connection to the thousands of deceased, he places flowers at the site of one anonymous headstone: “1,500 citizens consigned to the earth.” Salt Trails, a Philly collective focused on exploring grief through art and gatherings, offers a community-based approach to grieving, which can help give dignity and remembrance to those who died and were buried anonymously.

Not everything about the issue of the unclaimed dead can be solved with policy. Sometimes families drift apart or even become estranged. Anonymity in death can be part of a larger systemic problem of poverty and violence that requires far more solutions than an update to Pennsylvania’s Victorian-era unclaimed body laws. But a price ceiling on many funeral costs would put the ideal funerals within reach of many who simply cannot afford their or their family’s own last rites. The lack of end-of-life plans or diligent recordkeeping in place for the elderly in nursing homes creates undue burdens which could be resolved with state-wide mandates requiring such conversations to take place as part of onboarding. There’s no single fix, but exploring these alternatives could do more than simply lower the statistic of unclaimed dead, it could work to provide families,  friends, and communities the closure they deserve, and the deceased the respect and care they are due.

The Forgotten Disaster of the SS Eastland

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Defending Your Right to a Good Death

Akhila Murphy is an end-of-life doula and the founding director of  Full Circle of Living and Dying; she does the critical work of providing non-medical support to people through their end-of-life and dying experiences and education about these all too often fraught and complicated subjects. Murphy’s work is as holistic as it is skilled; she is part of a community of death doulas across the country and the world that practice this centuries old tradition. But she, and her organization are also at the center of a lawsuit where funeral home directors in her home state of California are doing everything in their power to stop her, and others like her, from providing important information and support regarding end-of-life care and choices. 

Image via the Institute for Justice. 

Donna Peizer and Akhila Murphy of Full Circle.

In 2019, the California Cemetery and Funeral Bureau issued an order to Full Circle instructing them to stop “advertising” as a funeral agency, until they were fully licensed. The problem with this order? Full Circle is not a funeral agency, and even contains a disclaimer on their website that clearly states that they are not a funeral home and do not offer funeral services. 

In June of 2020, Full Circle filed suit against the Bureau claiming that their order violated their First Amendment Rights; doula work largely involves educating people on their options and resources – by restricting this action the lawsuit alleges they are infringing on their rights to free speech. 

Becoming a licensed funeral agency in the state of California would mean that Full Circle would have to abide by certain procedures and requirements like having a space to store and embalm bodies; they would also have to pass a number of exams on information specific to funerary practices and embalming that may be irrelevant to the care work doulas do. But the implications of this case extend beyond logistical formalities. 

“If subjected to the same regulations as conventional funeral directors, many death doulas will be priced out of business and forced to stop offering these invaluable services altogether.” 

“Ultimately, this case is about whether or not death doulas will be able to continue to offer their services in California,” says Jess Pezley, a staff attorney with Compassion and Choices which filed an amicus brief in support of Full Circle in the case. “If subjected to the same regulations as conventional funeral directors, many death doulas will be priced out of business and forced to stop offering these invaluable services altogether.” 

Image via the Institute for Justice.

Doula work is a centuries old practice; you might be familiar with birth or abortion doulas who provide support in a similar dynamic to pregnant patients around the world. Like reproductive health doulas, end-of-life guides and death doulas ensure that the support people receive at these critical moments in their lives is culturally competent – appreciative of the many spiritual and cultural beliefs and experiences that shape our relationships with death. This doula work also involves bridging the gap between modern funerary care and the more ancient practices surrounding death care; a connection that is especially pertinent for marginalized communities, who, like in birth, pregnancy, and abortion care, are often given the least access to autonomy. In fact, end-of-life doulas often do the radical work of ensuring that cultural death practices live on – which makes the attacks on this work even more troubling; without end-of-life guides and death doulas, many marginalized communities may experience yet another barrier to accessing what they consider a “good death.” 

The distinctions between the services provided by funeral homes and the services provided by end-of-life doulas like Murphy are vast; while funeral homes need to be licensed and abide by certain regulations to protect consumer health and safety, there is no such need for the work doulas do. Unlike funeral homes, end-of-life doulas are not necessarily in possession of a body; many death doulas are, but others are not. Commonly, they share information with a dying individual and their loved ones about their options and help to best facilitate their wishes. “It is critical for people to know their options in order to make informed choices that feel proper for their individual dying person,” says Murphy. “End-of-life doulas often act as a liaison between mortuary care and cemetery districts. We inform clients that embalming is not required by law in any state with the exception of special cases.”

Murphy’s work can involve everything from supporting people through the process of arranging a funeral with a modern funeral home, to educating them on the best practices for a home funeral – something many folks might not even realize is an option available to them. “Different people have different preferences and wishes for when they pass away,” she says. “And for hundreds of years some people have preferred in–home funerals. In order to perform those in-home funerals, doulas are essential. People welcome doulas into their inner circle and we provide much-needed support during these times.” 

In the simplest terms, Murphy’s work is mostly “pure speech,” says attorney Ben Field at the Institute for Justice, the organization representing Full Circle of Living and Dying. 

With the distinctions so obvious, it might be hard to imagine why the Bureau might be motivated to try and stop folks like Murphy from doing their work. 

Lee Webster is a funeral reform advocate, and the Executive Director for Funeral Resources, Education & Advocacy in New Hampshire; she paints a somewhat David and Goliath-like picture of the dynamic between doulas and modern death practitioners like the Bureau. “The current movement to take back the practice of caring for our own dead is significant not just because it necessitates going up against a $22B monolithic industry,” she says, “but because it necessitates fighting hard to keep those rights that are threatened by an industry that appears to want to limit our personal freedoms. 

This is not about wanting to bring back the old days; it’s about preserving our rights in the future to choose how to care for our own dead.”

“This is not about wanting to bring back the old days; it’s about preserving our rights in the future to choose how to care for our own dead.” – Lee Webster

Webster sees the matter at hand as a straightforward one about privacy and autonomy; seeking the services of an end-of-life doula is no different than choosing to see a homeopathic doctor, or obtaining culturally significant treatments such as traditional Chinese medicine. 

 “The State does not have the right to tell us what to do in the privacy of our own homes and lives,” she says. “It can not tell us who to marry, what schools to send our kids to, or whether to bury or cremate.”

Field says that if the Bureau is allowed to prevail here, it will have devastating impacts on the autonomy of people in their ability to control their end-of-life plans. 

“If the California Cemetery and Funeral Bureau is allowed to require a license to offer end-of-life advice, it will dramatically narrow the information available to individuals and families making some of the most intimate and important choices they will ever face,” he says. ”Rather than serving California consumers and families, it would entrench the conventional funeral industry against alternative choices that people want to explore for themselves and their loved ones.”

End of life doulas essentially are in the business of sharing information and that scares funeral home directors who rely on the myth that families need their services – their pricey services – to care for their loved ones. They worry that if people are fully apprised of all the different ways someone can die, that it will render their services at least partially obsolete. But if funeral home directors are threatened by the mere availability of information, doulas like Murphy are not to blame – their own reticence to meet the needs of the people they serve, is. 

Death, like life, should be an autonomous experience, left untarnished by our inability to meet financial constraints or other onerous and frivolous impositions. End-of-life doulas can help bring us one step closer to that reality. 

“Traditional funeral homes may feel threatened by this competition,” says Murphy. “But at the end of the day, we’re simply providing families with a service they want.”

Meet the Morticians

One of the most frequently asked questions we get here at The Order is, “What is it like to be a funeral director or mortician?”

In the aftermath of an ongoing pandemic, the introduction of new methods of disposition, like aquamation and human composting, and an increasing number of people seeking more meaningful and sustainable options, funerals and the role of the funeral director is changing.

We talked to a variety of licensed funeral directors about their work, the future of death care, and what they wish more people understood about their job. These death care professionals demonstrate there’s no one way to be a funeral director.

Morgan Yarborough
Recompose
Washington

Morgan is making history as one of the first directors to create meaningful funerals for people choosing Natural Organic Reduction aka human composting. 

What motivated you to become a funeral director? How and why did you want to work at the funeral home you are currently with? 

I’ve been drawn to funeral service seemingly from the time I was able to understand that things die. When I was a child, I would hold funerals for my dearly departed goldfish, tenderly wrapping them in tissue paper and securing them in jewelry boxes, (much to my mother’s dismay), prior to burial. My family has a longstanding tradition of not talking about death, and I swam against that stream almost immediately.

While I went down an initial path of studying physics and tech, I ultimately ended up dissatisfied and switched to funeral service. Once I became aware of Recompose, Urban Death Project at the time, I knew that I had to be a part of it someday. I wanted to help build innovative and restorative deathcare practices. After several years in the field learning conventional funeral service practices, I saw an opening for Recompose Services Manager and knew it was a great fit.

Tell us about the community and people you serve.

Recompose primarily serves Seattle, WA and surrounding areas. However, because we offer a wholly unique and new service (Natural Organic Reduction, turning the body into soil after death), we receive clients from all over the United States. Our community is diverse, attracting groups such as ranchers, lawyers, off-the-grid homesteaders, activists, master gardeners, lifelong city-dwellers, organic farmers, scientists, and artists.

A common thread among all our clients is the desire to give themselves back to the earth as soil, be it through donation to a forest conservation or placement in their own gardens. Many are looking for a non-traditional funeral service that walks the balance between science and spirituality. As such, Recompose specializes in ceremonies that connect us to the natural cycles of the planet, our place in them, and how they allow us to continue on in new ways after death.

Via Recompose

A dummy covered in plant material rests on a cradle in front of an open vessel.

Give us a “day in the life” overview of what a typical workday is like for you. 

Since opening our new location in downtown Seattle, the Recompose team can come together under one roof. While I work remotely 1-2 days a week, days spent on-site are collaborative, busy, and never dull.

Mornings are spent checking in with my team to see what the day’s needs are and how we can support each other. After checking in and handling basic managerial duties, you can often find me in our preparation room, where we ready the decedents whose ceremonies are scheduled that day. Preparation of the deceased includes cleaning, placement into our cradle (the vehicle that allows them to be placed into a composting vessel), applying essential oils and herbs, shrouding, and then bringing them to our Gathering Space.

From there, if I’m the ceremony guide, I wait for the family to arrive and then lead them through our laying-in ceremony. In addition to celebrant work, being a ceremony guide involves assisting friends and family in laying down plant materials over their person’s body and helping place their person into our threshold vessel. If I’m not the guide that day, I often run tech for the ceremony in the background, making sure music plays at the right time, video tributes play, and that the Zoom streaming is as seamless as can be expected.

Other activities in my day-to-day include working with our conservation forest partners to build a tour program, providing trainings for those new to death care, coordinating soil shipping with families, and working to improve our client spaces for the best Recompose experience possible. In general, there are a lot of Zoom meetings. I also take night shifts monitoring phones and responding to death calls.

What I have always loved about working in death care (beyond the profound human connection) is that the work is never boring, learning never stops, and everything that you do is part of a bigger picture.

Overall, what task do you spend the majority of your time on? 

Most of my time is spent talking to people, albeit over the phone or computer. Funeral directing is so much more than working with the dead. Primarily, it’s a unique service job that involves constant human interaction and care of the living.

What do you wish more people understood about your work? 

This work requires devotion. While I’m now fortunate to work for a company that encourages time off and work-life balance, it’s difficult to act on those ideals. Death doesn’t stick to a 9-5 schedule, and this is reflected in the life of a funeral director.

At my first employing funeral home I was expected to meet with families, answer phones, file their paperwork, perform cremations and burials, embalm, conduct funerals, and retrieve folks from their places of death day and night. This is common, but it leads to a 60+ hour workweek plus nights on call.

Funeral directing is structured differently at Recompose, so we don’t perform cremations or go out in the night to retrieve the dead ourselves. However, the tradeoff is building a new kind of funeral home while still providing funeral services. You can expect to work more than 8 hours a day and still answer phones at night.

What changes do you think we will see in funeral service over the next 5 years, both within the funeral industry, and among consumers? 

I believe (and hope) that we will begin to see an increasing number of funeral workers demand better from their employers. Unfortunately, compensation for this important work is often low, especially if you’re an apprentice or newly licensed. Those starting out typically do not make a living wage and struggle to take time off, as it is also common for funeral homes to be understaffed. I hope to see more workers ask for their worth and take care of their mental/physical needs. This is a tough (and beautiful) job.

I also believe that we will continue to see diverse and creative kinds of funeral homes open as new generations of death care workers expand the market to meet the needs of their peers.

Consumer profiles are changing as Generation X steps up to plan funerals for Baby Boomers, and in turn, Millennials for Generation X. These generations may be keener to choose disposition options that are better for the environment, feel forthright, and align with their individuality versus choosing services informed by religious backgrounds or family tradition.

Finally, I believe the trend of direct cremation (or aquamation, terramation, etc.) will continue as communities opt to take planning celebrations or memorials into their own hands, without the use of a funeral home.

Tamara Bullock
Bullock Funeral Services, LLC.
New York

As a funeral director Tamara wanted to create a unique funeral service model that works like a concierge service, allowing for highly personalized care for each family. 

What motivated you to become a funeral director? How and why did you want to work at the funeral home you are currently with? 

My Father and my maternal grandmother transitioned while I was in high school. That was a weird time in my life. I didn’t know anything about funeral service, but I became intrigued with the possibility of making someone look better in their passing and in the component of somehow helping someone in a way that would help them to come to a peace with the loss.

I always wanted to own my own funeral home, but I didn’t have a clue how to make that a reality and I often feel I still don’t, (Ha Ha). Growth is waking up every day and being able to walk towards what you don’t know. When I left my full time job as a funeral director I knew I could not grow as a professional in that space. Ownership challenges me daily, it allowed me to self express our care and concern through fashion – my previous employers always thought I was a little too over the top – and it also allowed me to give more. Now, I can determine how much to help based on needs in my community. I wasn’t always able to help as much as I can now.

Tell us about the community and people you serve.

We are in NYC, we have clients all over the city. We work like a concierge service and are very hands on with our small client base. We intend to continue service as a boutique firm, as it works better for relationship building. We are able to personally assist where needed because of this. Clothing ready, we pick it up. Help with sorting an obituary, we assist. Whatever the family needs is expedited of that principal.

Give us a “day in the life” overview of what a typical workday is like for you. 

A day in the life of Bullock Funeral Services varies, I’d dare to say there is no such thing. There are days that start at 7 am, because we will have to be in a church for a service that starts at 9 am. There are other days spent in preparation of remains, there are days we are returning cremated remains to the homes of our families who entrusted their loved ones. I can proudly say we don’t have anyone’s cremated remains in the funeral home, most funeral homes have run into this problem.

What do you wish more people understood about your work? 

That it is more about the living and the family. The deceased is a major part of the family but we know about their life from the living family members. I wish they would also see that they help me to live – I really am able to live out my heart’s desire in helping others because I feel like I helped to give a space where closure could be facilitated.

What changes do you think we will see in funeral service over the next 5 years,  both within the funeral industry, and among consumers? 

I operate my business like an uber service, wherever our client is located we can create a homegoing. This is a new concept for most. We work by appointment only. I will not be stuck in an office for 8 hours. My cellphone is my office. I can set up an office while on vacation. I am not like the owners I learned under and this works for me. The people who work with me are contracted based on service needs. I will continue to be present for my children and their major milestones. Bullock Funeral Services will create a legacy with love and support of the families in our care in a new way.

Laura Sussman
Kraft-Sussman Funeral and Cremation Services
Nevada

This Las Vegas funeral director was instrumental in making alkaline hydrolysis, also known as aquamation, a legal option for Nevada residents. 

What motivated you to become a funeral director? How and why did you want to work at the funeral home you are currently with?

 I used to volunteer for the Chevra Kadisha, the Jewish Burial Society. We would help prepare Jews for a traditional burial. I felt honored to provide this care and at the same time, had an opportunity to visit the back rooms of many local funeral homes. I didn’t see the type of care provided in our community which I wanted for my family. Wendy Kraft and I decided to open Kraft-Sussman Funeral Services to provide that higher level of care and dignity.

Tell us about the community and people you serve.

We serve the Southern Nevada community, which includes Las Vegas. Our current population is about 2.2 Million. When we opened, we thought we would primarily serve the Jewish and LGBTQ populations, but we were wrong.  We serve a very diverse group in terms of cultural and religious affiliation.

Give us a “day in the life” overview of what a typical workday is like for you. 

I recently retired, but a few months ago, I would arrive at the office about 8 AM, check the aquamation machine from the night before, meet with families for preneed and at-need arrangements, make sure there were sufficient supplies, and that the facility is clean and nothing needs to be repaired. I would usually leave around 5 PM. Our staff would rotate nights to be on call, as we always wanted a full-time staff member to be available, 24/7.

What do you wish more people understood about your work?

What an honor it is to care for the individuals and families we serve, and that not all funeral homes are in business to make a lot of money. Some are here to help.

What changes do you think we will see in funeral service over the next 5 years both within the funeral industry, and among consumers?   

We see more and more people comfortable with digital arrangements, as well as virtual services. I think these will continue to increase in the coming years. I’d like to see more funeral homes offer alkaline hydrolysis cremation, as it is very eco-friendly.

Lauren Carroll 
The Natural Funeral
Deathwives
Colorado

Lauren’s career as a funeral director has come full circle, from working at a large corporate  owned home, to working as contracted funeral director at an independent funeral home that’s focused on providing eco-friendly options, and teaching others how to care for their dead.

What motivated you to become a funeral director? How and why did you   want to work at the funeral home you are currently with? 

For me it all started when I was 19 working at a funeral home in Southern California typing out death certificates and disposition permits. One day I was asked to do a removal at a hospital for stillborn full-term baby. I felt so unprepared and scared as I had never done this before. I picked up the baby bringing only a blanket. The nurse wrapped him up and I quickly brought him to my car, buckled him into the front seat, and took a deep breath.  In that moment I could feel all the love surrounding him, and what an honor it was for me to be holding this little baby. I don’t think I realized before then how sacred I was to work with the dead and the grieving. Before, I was a goth kid who thought death was scary, and now I knew death was so much more and wanted to support families through that final stage in life-this was my calling.

When I moved to Colorado, I began working as a funeral director for a corporately owned funeral home, I would be rotated among the four locations on the weekends I was on call. I struggled, it was impersonal, I worked funerals for families I had never met, and I was selling cookie cutter funeral packages and putting families into debt.

After a hard day I turned on PBS and found the film A Family Undertaking. This was the second “Aha!” moment in my death care career that led me down the path I am on now. The film introduced me to the concept of family-led funerals and home funerals. It was these stories that inspired me to shift gears. I left SCI and spent five years strictly educating my community about home funerals and family involvement, and to be honest I have never stopped educating.

In 2018 a Green Funeral Home opened in Colorado Springs that offered no embalming and green burials and more family involvement, including home funerals. When I was hired as a funeral director I was truly inspired by the fact that we can create change within the “traditional” modern funeral home model, and the community agreed and embraced the green aspects fully!  I had a wonderful two years there before moving onto the Natural Funeral where I am a contracted funeral director and I couldn’t be happier. It felt full circle in my life. I took my first home funeral educational course from Karen Van Vurren twelve years prior, who is one of the founders of this amazing funeral home. This spring they laid out the very first Natural Organic Reduction of a client’s compost in the state at the Colorado Burial Preserve.

Tell us about the community and people you serve.

Living in Colorado is pretty amazing because it does have “traditional” funeral homes, but more and more progressive funeral homes and death workers are showing up. Water cremation is growing in popularity and Natural Organic Reduction was legalized last year. Most of the families I serve are focused on the environment or the sacredness of death and having a more hands on approach, which includes bathing and blessing their dead loved ones and holding home vigils.

Currently, I would say the people I serve daily are in communities all over the US, and the world, through my business Deathwives. My business partner, Erin Merelli and I founded Deathwives in Denver, CO almost 3 years ago. We know the only way to have real change in death care comes from the people. It’s a passion project that has turned into a full time job, educating families and communities all over the Zoomland about death doulas, end-of-life care, eco- friendly options, funeral planning, communal grief, death rituals, and much more.

Give us a “day in the life” overview of what a typical workday is like for you. 

Since Deathwives is my full time job I will walk you through that. Daily you will find me returning emails, reaching out to other end-of-life educators – community is key to this work – and posting fun death facts or grief quotes on social media. Each week we teach 2-3 classes through Zoom, and Erin and I are always creating new content and classes, as more and more people look for end-of-life education. Covid devastated our country, and it also opened the door to hard conversations about death. The outpouring of people wanting to share their stories or who are inspired to change how death and dying is handled in their communities is humbling, and continues to affirm how important this work really is.

What do you wish more people understood about your work? 

Death work isn’t scary, it isn’t weird, it is a natural part of our lives that should be honored and respected. Some days it breaks your heart wide open, other days It inspires me to live fully and with joy – this is the truth about death. You have to be comfortable living within all the spaces of death and grief and that takes community and healthy outlets.

What changes do you think we will see in funeral service over the next 5 years,  both within the funeral industry, and among consumers? 

I don’t want to be a Debbie Downer, but I think the funeral homes of the past, you know the ones with the stuffy halls and chapels and casket display rooms….they are dying out, (pun intended). I want to see the corporate funeral homes fail and hybrid family and community owned funeral homes rise again. Cremation rates continue to rise and that does worry me as I truly believe spending time with a body and creating ceremonies is crucial in our grieving process. Fire cremation is also horrible for the environment, so I expect we will see more and more water crematories (Alkaline Hydrolysis) available in America as folks become more educated.

I see the Baby Boomers embracing green burial and water cremation and forcing funeral homes to move in a more green direction. I’ve seen more women called to this work than I ever have and that too will bring immense change. Leaning away from business suits and pre-packaged funeral plans to more family involvement, while holding the space of death with grace and understanding.

 

 

*We are looking to add more funeral director interviews to this piece. If you are a licensed FD in the U.S. and work in 1) A funeral home in a rural area, 2) A large, corporate owned home, or 3) A funeral home that specializes in providing specific religious or cultural services please email us at info (at) orderofthegooddeath.com

The Edge of Mortality

‘The first dead body you see should not be someone you love,’ she said.

About fifty of us are in a large room at University College London, holding a ‘wake’ for a long-dead philosopher on his 270th birthday. His severed head, on show for the first time in decades, is in a bell jar by the Budweisers. Down the hall, his skeleton sits in a glass box as usual, dressed in his own clothes, his gloved skeletal hand perched on his walking stick, with a wax head where his real one was supposed to go, back before the plan for preservation went wrong. Students nearby pay him as much attention as they would a piece of furniture.

Between annual checks to note new stages of decrepitude, Jeremy Bentham’s real head is usually locked away in a cupboard, and nobody gets to see it. Dr Southwood Smith, executor of Bentham’s will and dissector of his body, had tried to preserve it so it looked untouched, extracting the fluids by placing the head under an air pump, over sulphuric acid. But the head turned purple and stayed that way. He admitted defeat and contacted a wax artist to create a fake one, while the real head was hidden. But three years prior to tonight’s wake, a shy academic in charge of Bentham’s care had shown it to me for a piece I was writing. We peered at his soft blond eyebrows and blue glass eyes as his dried skin filled the room with the smell of beef jerky. He told me that when Bentham was alive he used to keep his future glass eyeballs in his pocket, getting them out at parties for a laugh. Here they were now, 186 years after his death, wedged in leathery eye sockets, looking out on a room full of people gathered to talk about society’s backward attitude towards death.

Bentham was an eccentric philosopher – some of his ideas would land him in prison today, or at least get him thrown off the university campus – but he was ahead of the curve on many things. As well as being a champion of animal rights and women’s rights, he believed in gay rights at a time when homosexuality was illegal, and he was one of the first to donate his body to science. He wanted to be publicly dissected by his friends, and everyone here is the kind of person who would have gone to watch. Already we had heard from Dr John Troyer, the director of the Centre for Death and Society at the University of Bath, who talked about growing up in a funeral home, in a family where death was not taboo, another house where death was everywhere. Then a gentle palliative care doctor encouraged us to talk about our own death before it happens, to have our wishes (however mad) in place before we go, like Bentham had done. Finally, Poppy Mardall, a funeral director in her mid-thirties, stood up and told us that the first dead body you see should not be someone you love. She said that she wished she could bring schoolchildren to her mortuary to confront death before they have to. “You need to be able to separate the shock of seeing death from the shock of grief,” she said. She thanked us for listening and sat down, the beer bottles clinking on the table.

The head of Jeremy Bentham

In all of my thinking about death, I had never considered this idea – that you could deliberately separate these specific shocks to save your own heart. I wondered what I would be like now, if I had met her as a child and she had shown me what I had wanted to see. I was always curious about what dead bodies looked like, but I assumed that when I saw someone dead it would be because I had known them in life. It’s not like anonymous dead bodies were easy to come by – I hadn’t even been shown the one I did know, nor did I see the ones that came in the years after: more school friends (cancer, suicide), four grandparents (natural causes). The psychological impact of losing someone you love and confronting the physical reality of death at the same time, and the tangled mindfuck that might be, was not something I thought I could swerve. 

A couple of weeks after Bentham’s wake, I was sitting on a wicker chair in a brightly lit room in Poppy’s funeral home, an old brick gate-house by the entrance to Lambeth Cemetery. Colourful Easter eggs filled a small bowl in the centre of the table, poppy flower decals stuck to the vast Victorian windows. Outside, snow was gathering on the sandalled feet of a stone Jesus. Lambeth Cemetery is less grand than the famous seven that form a ring around London – Kensal Green, West Norwood, Highgate, Abney Park, Brompton, Nunhead and Tower Hamlets – those large garden cemeteries built in the nineteenth century to deal with the overcrowded parish churchyards in the middle of the growing city. Unlike them, Lambeth has no extravagant mausoleums, no grand promenades, no tombs as big as houses to flaunt the wealth of its dead inhabitants. It is practical, small, unpretentious, and so is Poppy. She’s easy to talk to – you can imagine her being a therapist, or a good mother. I had been so struck by what she said in her speech that I wanted to hear more. She clearly thought of her role as much more than a job. Also, as I had never seen a dead body before, in person – decapitated philosophers notwithstanding – I wondered if she might be the one to show me. It’s not a favour you can ask of most people.

We don’t open the fridge doors just to see people,’ she says, matter-of-factly. ‘I want us to be careful with the behind-the-scenes thing – it’s not like a museum. But if you had a spare couple of hours, you could come back and help get someone ready for their funeral. Then you’re actually having an engagement with the body, rather than just seeing a load of dead people.’ I blinked at her. I didn’t think she’d actually say yes, let alone invite me to be involved in someone’s funeral preparation. I’m here because she said it’s something she wishes she could share, of course, but even so, there are some doors that have been closed for so long it can seem impossible to imagine them opening. ‘You would be very welcome,’ she insisted, filling my stunned silence.

In the UK, a funeral director needs no licence to handle the dead, as they do in America. Here, all of Poppy’s staff come from places other than the funeral industry: Poppy herself used to work at the auction house Sotheby’s, until she felt the meaninglessness of her work life bearing down on her. Aaron, who now runs the mortuary, a short walk across the cemetery from where we sit, used to work at the greyhound track nearby; the body collection van driver, Stuart, is a firefighter, and says that working here part-time is like going back for the ones he couldn’t save. Poppy said I could come and be trained like they were, as if I was starting work here too.

‘Had you seen a dead body before you became a funeral director?’ I asked. ‘No,’ she says. ‘Isn’t that insane?’

I try to figure out the path between hectic art auction house and running a funeral home and I cannot begin to make a guess. ‘I meet people who have a much clearer reason for doing this kind of thing,’ she says, laughing. ‘For me, it wasn’t like that at all.’ The way she tells it, the route may have been winding, but her motivation is lucid, even if she couldn’t see it at the time.

Courtesy of Hayley Campbell

It was Poppy’s love of art that got her into the world of auction houses – first Christie’s, then Sotheby’s – and it was the fun that kept her there: the adrenaline, the socialising, the unpredictable nature of where in the world she could end up. ‘A guy called saying he thought he had a Barbara Hepworth sculpture in rural Texas, so the next day I was on a flight,’ she says, picking an example she says wasn’t even particularly unusual. ‘I was twenty-five, I had buckets of responsibility, it was fun, fun, fun. But quite quickly, I felt like there was a vacuum of meaning.’ Her parents, one a social worker and the other a teacher, had instilled in her an obligation to help people in need, and her job at Sotheby’s was – while exciting – not fulfilling that need in herself. ‘From a sustenance point of view, I couldn’t live off selling paintings,’ she says.

In her spare time she became a Samaritan, volunteering to answer the phones at the charity that provides emotional support to those feeling lost or suicidal. But as her job became busier, as the travel kept her further away from home, her shifts would get missed or moved. ‘It made me very sad. I spent about two years just not having the answer. I was having a sort of quarter-life crisis.’ She knew she wanted to engage with regular people on the frontline of existence, to do something that mattered – birth, love or death, it wasn’t important which – but she couldn’t figure out how, or what, until life began to make the decision for her.

The fact that everyone we love will one day die often doesn’t dawn on us until something bad happens. Poppy hadn’t processed it herself until both of her parents got cancer diagnoses in quick succession. ‘Our family is super open about everything,’ she says. ‘My mum was rolling condoms onto bananas when I was five, which didn’t make any sense to me, she just loved the idea of breaking taboos. But we didn’t really talk about death. We’d never had that discussion, or not in a way that I understood it. I was twenty-seven when my dad got sick, and it was genuinely the first time I realised he was ever going to die.’

This realisation arrived in the maelstrom of her crisis about her job. Conversations long ignored were now being had. When it was clear that both of her parents were going to survive, she saved some money, quit the art world and went to Ghana for a break. There she got typhoid and nearly died too.

‘Jesus Christ,’ I say.

‘I know! Anyway, I was sick for eight months, so it gave me this very long period of inactivity and a chance to think. The job I would have picked if I hadn’t got typhoid would have been a lot safer. This,’ she says, motioning to the funeral home around us, ‘was definitely the craziest thing on my list.’

Funeral directing was on the list not only because it involves one of the big life events Poppy wanted to be part of, but because her mother had made it clear what she did and did not want in a funeral. Researching options as her parents became sick, Poppy had seen how stuck in the past the industry was, how little room there was for personalisation. The shiny black hearses and top hats, the stilted formal processions, were not right for a family like hers. Now she wanted to play a part in changing the world of death, but even she didn’t know what, exactly, she meant by that. It wasn’t until she started her training by shadowing existing funeral directors, at the tail end of her own sickness, when the fatigue had lifted enough to leave the house, that she understood what she had been missing. She stood in a mortuary and saw death for the first time in all its unterrifying banality, and it struck her that she was angry. She had been forced to face the idea of death – in her family, in herself – without ever knowing what it looked like.

She stood in a mortuary and saw death for the first time in all its unterrifying banality, and it struck her that she was angry. She had been forced to face the idea of death – in her family, in herself – without ever knowing what it looked like.

‘It would have been really helpful to have had dead people in my life before then,’ she says. With two small children, Poppy likens the intensity of her fear to pregnancy. ‘If I was nine months pregnant and I was going to give birth any minute, but I’d never seen a child under the age of one, it would definitely be more scary for me. I would be giving birth to something that I’d never seen before, and could not imagine.’

I ask about the bodies we do imagine: the ones that aren’t just pale and sleeping, the decayed, bloated corpses our minds serve up for us. They do exist. Should there ever be a limit placed on what the family can see? ‘Suggesting people shouldn’t see the body comes from a good place of care and concern, but I think it gets very patriarchal and patronising about what people can cope with,’ she says. ‘Not everyone needs to see the body, but for some it is a primal need.’

There was a man, years ago, who came to Poppy with a question. His brother had drowned and had been in water for a long time – long enough that every funeral home he spoke to said that the body could not be viewed. ‘The first thing he asked us was, Would you stop me from seeing my brother? It was a test. He was asking, Are you on my side or are you not on my side? It’s not our role to tell people what they can and cannot do. We’re not here to force a transformational experience on people who don’t want it. Our role is to prepare them, to gently give them the information they need in order to make an empowered decision. You don’t know them; you don’t know what the right decision is.’ The man got to see his brother one last time.

She tells me when I come back the mortuary will be beautiful, because it has to be: it’s critical that she keeps the dead somewhere lovely because she wants to let the living in. ‘Lots of people who visit our mortuary say things like, “Why have you put the mortuary here? This is the most inspiring space.” I just feel like that is the point.’

Back I went. The snow had long since melted.

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Poppy Mardall

This is not how I expected a mortuary to smell. I had pictured a room without windows, squeaking linoleum floors, the stench of bleach and rot. I had predicted an assault of fluorescent strip lights that buzz and blink, not a place bathed in warm spring sunlight making everything shine and glitter, steel and wood alike. I’m standing by the door in a disposable plastic apron, my hands sweating inside nitrile gloves. Roseanna and Aaron, wearing matching green fleeces and the same crinkling plastic as me, are readying the room: she’s rolling a gurney out from the corner, he’s making neat notes in a black ruled logbook. A shopping bag of folded clothes sits by the sink, waiting to be worn for the last time. I lean awkwardly against a shelving unit of polished wooden coffins, trying not to get in the way. It smells of pine.

There are thirteen bodies in the house today, their names written by different hands on small whiteboards stuck to the heavy doors of the mortuary fridge. Soft-lit lamps dangle from the crossbeams above, but it’s so bright outside they were likely only switched on by habit. Everything that is not metal is made of wood. The door of the cupboard by the sink is ajar; inside, a bottle of Chanel No. 5 stands by bamboo headrests. The new coffins stand upright in their rows, catching the light, their corners bound in cling film for protection from bumps. There are two wicker caskets acting as bookends, and on a high shelf, a Moses basket for babies – blue-checked print, small, waiting. A picnic basket, but not.

It wasn’t always a mortuary. Below the arched, lead-lined window, the wall of white refrigerators hum low and steady where the altar might have been back when this was a burial chapel, before it fell into thirty years of disrepair, abandoned but still standing in the middle of this cemetery in south London. It was rescued from slow dilapidation by Poppy when she was a new independent funeral director in need of a place to house her dead. Long ago, the dead would spend the night before their funeral in this building. Poppy has restored it to its original use.

She’s not here today with me – I’ve been left in the hands of two trusted employees. Poppy has had her experience of meeting the dead, and now she’s leaving me to mine. But as I look around the room, her presence is everywhere: it is practical, unpretentious, welcoming. I see a kitchen sink and bench in one corner, all that is required for the kind of body preparation done here, and remember her telling me, as the snow fell outside, that there is no embalming done on the premises. ‘We want to provide what’s useful for the public, and when we set up I wasn’t sure that embalming is happening for the family’s sake,’ she said. ‘I think it’s happening because of how funeral directors are structured.’ She explained that not every high-street funeral home has their own wall of fridges, not everyone has space like she does, so bodies are kept in a central depot and ferried to and from other locations as required. If a family wishes to view the body, the chances of it needing to be transported and therefore out of refrigeration for a period of hours – maybe ten, maybe twenty-four – are high.

Embalming, which preserves the body and allows it to be kept at room temperature for a longer period without decomposing, makes the admin of moving bodies easier on the funeral home – it gives them more time. Here, if a family specifically asks for a body to be embalmed, Poppy would facilitate it, and the process would take place elsewhere. But in the six years she’s been running her business, she is yet to be convinced that it is as important as some claim it to be. She is, as always, ready for someone to change her mind.

In these fridges, everything that needs to be done has been done. All the medical interventions have been completed, the autopsy incisions sewn up, all the evidence has been gathered and weighed. Here they become people again, not a patient or a victim or a fighter in a battle against their own body. Here they are finished, just waiting to be washed and dressed, then buried or burned.

I remember the filmmaker David Lynch, in an interview, talking about visiting a mortuary when he was a young art student in Philadelphia – he had met the nightwatchman in a diner and asked if he could come see it. Sitting on the mortuary floor, the door closed behind him, it was the stories in all of these bodies that got to him: who they were, what they did, how they got there. Like him, it’s the scale of it, both large and small, that sweeps over me like a wave: all of these people, all of these individual libraries of collected experience, all of them ending here.

The fridge door opens with a clunk and a body is pulled out on a tray that slots into the gurney, raised by a hydraulic pump with a loud metallic hiss to waist height. The fridge hums louder, the machine whirring to correct the temperature rise. Aaron wheels the body into the centre of the room and looks at me, backed up against the coffins, fidgeting with my apron. From where I stand, all I can see is the dome of a shaved head resting on a white pillow. His name is Adam.

‘We need to remove his T-shirt, the family want to keep it,’ Aaron says. ‘Could you come hold his hands?’

I step forward and take the man’s cold hands in mine, raising his long, thin arms above his body so his T-shirt can be inched over his bony shoulders. Holding them there, I lock on to his face, on his half-open sunken eyes that clung to the corners like oysters in their shells. Aaron will tell me later that they always try and shut the eyes when people arrive here – the longer you leave it, the drier the eyelid becomes, the harder it is to move and manipulate. These eyes are not round like marbles, they are deflated, like what- ever life was there had leaked out. You can look into the eyes of the dead and find nothing, not even a familiar shape.

Adam had been clutching a daffodil and a framed family photograph in the refrigerator – that was how he was positioned when he had been collected from his home, where he had died in his bed – but both were lifted off his chest and placed to the side, out of the way, while I wasn’t looking. I think, later, that this was the only chance I would get to see this man alive, but I was so fixated on Adam, as he was then, that I missed it. I wish I had seen it, but I can’t blame myself: this was the first dead person I had ever seen, and here I was holding his hands.

I had wanted to see what death looked like, and Adam looked dead. Unembalmed, naturally dead. He had been in these refrigerators for two and a half weeks and it showed, even though in terms of decomposition, his had been a best-case scenario – the interval between his death and cold storage had been kept to a minimum. His mouth was half open, just like his eyes. I could not tell what colour they had been in real life, or if any of the colours he was now would relate to anything that he looked like a month ago. He was a sickly yellow from jaundice, but it wasn’t the brightest colour on his body. As his T-shirt slid over his head, I could see that each protruding rib was highlighted in an even brighter yellow, contrasting with the lime green of his stomach and the darker black-green in the spaces between each jutting bone. The stomach is usually the first place to show signs of decomposition, filled as it is by design with bacteria, but I didn’t know that death, something so emotionally black, could be so bright: the sight of microbial life taking over a human one is almost luminous. His back was purple from where the blood had pooled; no longer pumped around the body by the heart, it oagulate and darken where it stands. His skin was bunched in places from being stored in a position a live person would have wriggled out of for comfort, but without life and movement to keep skin supple, a fold remains a fold, an indent an indent. His legs were yellow-white at the top and purp- lish behind the knee. He wasn’t old. Forties, maybe. His family wanted his shirt back. It was blue.

I couldn’t tell if his ribs had stuck out like that in life, or if he had – like his gaunt face – generally sunk. The muscles on his slim legs said he was a fit man, possibly a runner. You don’t need to know how someone died when you’re only there to dress them, and you rarely find out, but the fentanyl painkiller patches on his arm and sticky outlines on the skin where previous patches had been removed suggested a long illness. Roseanna gently rubs at the places where the patches used to be, trying to get rid of the glue. ‘We remove as much as we can without damaging them,’ she says.

‘If we start removing a plaster and someone’s skin starts to come off, we’ll just leave it.’ She tells me that as much as possible, they make all evidence of hospitals and medical intervention vanish. Nobody needs to go to their grave wearing compression socks and the disconnected end of an IV drip.

The shopping bag is fetched from the sink and emptied onto the bench. Trainers, bunched-up socks, grey boxer shorts with a hole in the crotch. All of his clothes were old and casual, picked out of his closet by his family. Everything was worn except for his trainers, which looked like they’d been owned for maybe a week at most. I flip them over in my gloved hands and wonder when he had bought them, whether he felt well enough to believe he had time to warrant new shoes. What’s the joke about the old guy not buying green bananas?

Aaron removes Adam’s underwear, carefully keeping a sheet over the groin, trying to keep the body covered at all times out of respect. ‘After we remove the underwear, we check he’s clean. If he’s not, we clean him.’ We roll him on his side, Aaron checks the situation, we roll him back. Roseanna takes one side of his fresh underwear and I take the other, each of us edging them up his yellow legs inch by inch. His skin is so cold I comment on it, then feel stupid. ‘After a while you become accustomed to them being cold,’ says Aaron, reassuringly. ‘Then you go on a home collection for somebody who’s just died and they’re still warm. It’s … quite a strange feeling.’ He shoots a look like the warmth is unnerving, an unwelcome sign of life in a situation where a drop in temperature helps him mentally separate the living from the dead. Here, the fridges are cooled to 4 degrees Celsius.

We roll Adam on his side again, edge the boxer shorts up. We roll him the other way and do the same. Dressing the dead is all pretty self-explanatory, you’re just dressing a man who isn’t helping. ‘I like the way they haven’t bought new or fancy clothes for his funeral,’ I say. ‘They’re probably his favourites,’ says Roseanna. It’s hard not to piece together a personality from the scant details provided in a shopping bag.

Aaron asks me to lift Adam’s head in my hands so he can slip the clean T-shirt on. I’m leaning over the gurney, holding the sides of his face as if I’m about to kiss him, thinking, Unless somebody hauls him out of his coffin tomorrow, I’m the last woman on earth to hold him this way. How did we get here?

Unless somebody hauls him out of his coffin tomorrow, I’m the last woman on earth to hold him this way. How did we get here?

‘Place your hand up through the trouser leg and take hold of his foot,’ directs Aaron next. With his light blue jeans bunched over my wrist, I grip his toes. As we move him, rolling one way and then the other to pull the jeans up, trapped air escapes from Adam’s lungs with a sigh. There’s a smell of slightly-off chicken, raw, still cold.

It’s the first smell of death I’ve encountered today and it’s instantly recognisable. Denis Johnson wrote about this smell, in a story called Triumph Over the Grave: he said that ethyl mercaptan, the first in a series of compounds brought out in the process of putrefaction, is routinely added to gas to make leaks detectable by scent. The practice originated in the 1930s, after workers noticed vultures in California would circle the thermal drafts around leaks in pipelines. They ran tests on their product to see what had attracted these birds, ordinarily lured by the odour of decay, and found trace amounts of this compound. The gas companies decided to amplify the effect, deliberately adding larger quantities of something that happened accidentally, so that humans could smell it too. It’s a perfect Denis Johnson fact, a writer whose stories could seem nihilistic and bleak but could end on a line of strange hope. He found the life in the smell of death, the hope in birds ordinarily cast as omens of doom; he found that something so funda- mental in our fear – death and decay – could be quietly repurposed to save our lives. I thread Adam’s belt through the loops, buckling it at a belt hole only recently broken in.

We line up the coffin on another gurney beside him and position ourselves to move him. Each of us grips the waterproof calico sheet under his body – a legal requirement in unsealed wicker coffins – and we lift him in. His head is cocked quizzically on his pillow, the coffin just long enough. He’ll only stay like that for a night. Tomorrow, he’ll be cremated. This whole person will no longer exist.

Aaron places the photo and the daffodil back on Adam’s chest – the yellow flower has lost its spring perkiness and slumps against the fabric of his clean T-shirt, this one crisp white. We lay his long fingers over the stem. Dressed and packed in his coffin, we slide him back into the fridge, on a shelf adjusted to accommodate the height of it. Beside him, in the dark, more heads rest on pillows beside rosary beads, flowers, picture frames. A single crocheted Rasta cap. We only get one ending, one ritual – whatever it might be – and I was part of Adam’s. Aaron writes his name on the door and I stand silent with a lump in my throat. I’ve never felt more privileged and honoured to be anywhere in the world.

The artist and AIDS activist David Wojnarowicz wrote in his memoir Close to the Knives how the experience of his friends dying of AIDS in accelerating numbers, with no government action to stop it, left him feeling acutely aware of himself being alive. He saw, as he put it, the edge of mortality. ‘The edge of death and dying is around everything like a warm halo of light sometimes dim sometimes irradiated. I see myself seeing death.’ He felt like a runner who suddenly finds himself in solitude among trees and light, and the sight and sounds of friends are way back in the distance.

On the Tube home from the mortuary, I am aware of my own breathing, conscious of the fact that there are people lying in fridges who cannot. I am aware of the mechanism of life: the fact that this meat machine moves, somehow, and then it doesn’t. I look at people in the Tube carriage and I see death. I wonder if they own the clothes they will die in, I wonder who will take care of them when they are dead. I wonder how many people hear the clock tick as loudly as I do right now.

I go to the gym, but this time it feels different. Usually I come here to quieten my mind; today it is irretrievably deafening. The sound of the living is unbelievably loud when you’ve been in the company of the dead. In a spin class I hear people gasping, heaving and shouting. It’s the sound of survival, the impermanent and unlikely state of being alive. Everything is more vivid than usual, every sense heightened. These vocal cords being used, these hearts beating and lungs inflating, monotonous and vital. I feel the physical warmth radiating off strangers, fogging up the windows. I feel the blood rushing through my veins. ‘Nobody dies in spin class!’ shouts the instructor. ‘Push yourself to failure!’ I’m thinking that one day all of these bodies will fail and everything will fall silent but for the hum of the mortuary fridge.

I lie on my back in the heat of the sauna, each bench barely bigger than the tray that held Adam, and I make one of my arms go limp. I pick it up by the hand and imagine someone is peeling the T-shirt off my dead body. But it doesn’t matter how hard I try, I can never fully relax my arm to the point where it’s a dead weight. It doesn’t feel the same. Lying next to me, a sweating, live woman tells me that she’s started Botoxing her feet. Botox your feet and you can numb the pain enough to stand in heels all day, she says. When did we forget that pain is a warning, a scream from the voiceless parts of our bodies saying it needs help, something is wrong, something requires our attention? I’ve got this great way of dealing with things that might be damaging me – I just switch off the notifications. I drop my arm again. Today was the first death I’ve experienced where none of it was mitigated or obscured in some way, none of the notifications were turned off. It was all there. It felt real and meaningful, like I would be missing something crucial if I put any of it on mute. I think of Adam holding his faded daffodil, and how the bulbs, if eaten, can numb the nervous system and paralyse the heart. 

The Funeral Concert Where the Body Performed

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Memorializing the More-than-Human: Grief as a Form of Activism

Cheyenne Zaremba

On a cold but sunny day in February, I meet Rex. Rex is a good boy, his kind eyes look up at me from where he lays, paws and tail reclining peacefully, cast in bronze, alongside the cemetery roadway. Rex has been a resident at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn for over 100 years, where he resides next to his owner, facing out toward the road to greet visitors who are on a stroll. Even in the afterlife, Rex continues to collect sticks from visitors who pick them up along their walk through the almost 500-acre cemetery and bring them to rest on his paws. Rex only has two sticks on his paws when I visit him, but it’s not odd for Rex’s pile of sticks to tower over his head, which I’m sure that visitors reach down to pet just as I do.

Rex is just one example of the urge to memorialize more-than-human others. From memorials to family pets like Rex, to public mourning spaces for more abstract entities like the environment, humans have historically and are increasingly utilizing the work of memorialization to recognize the grievability of more-than-human others. Scholar Judith Butler defines grievability as a prerequisite for “the life that matters.” In other words, if something or someone isn’t grievable, then their life does not have value in our culture and they will be prone to oppression, mistreatment, or their needs will simply be ignored.

Viewing Rex’s grave prompts me to ask: how does recognizing the value of more-than-human others as worthy of grief improve our relationship with the more-than-human and make us better co-habitants of Earth?

The phrase “more-than-human,” popularized by ecologist and philosopher David Abram, seeks to recognize all forms of life and realms of existence—from the most miniscule mushrooms and smallest insects to the grandest mountain ranges and deepest bodies of water—as valued co-habitants alongside humans. More-than-human studies endeavors to treat more-than-human others with equity and respect in line with the relationships modeled by Indigenous communities in and beyond the Americas. This equity and respect extends not just to finding ways to live more peacefully alongside more-than-human others, it also encompasses careful consideration of more-than-human suffering and death.

Marian Blair

As a rhetorician, I encountered the more-than-humaness of Rex through the lens of communication and relationality. Rhetoric is a specific sub-field of communication that focuses on the power of civic discourse and cultural practices to influence the way that we make meaning of life or—in this case—death. More-than-human rhetoric intersects with rituals of death and dying every time we consider how we are going to treat a shrinking natural habitat or handle the death of a creaturely friend.

With pet ownership on the rise, memorializing our household pets like Rex has become an increasingly common practice in the West. In fact, pet-ownership is one of the easiest avenues for an introduction into more-than-human relationships. We take more-than-human animals into our homes and yards, forming relationships that are in many ways mutually beneficial with cats, dogs, fish, rodents, birds, and even domestic farm animals. We make decisions that impact our more-than-human companion’s lives and when they die we find ways to continue remembering them through pet cremation, funerals, and memorials.

Part of the great power that resides in more-than-human memorials is their ability to evoke general feelings of remembrance and mourning despite being specific. The sticks that stack up on Rex’s paws are a testament to this notion. Each stick is simultaneously an act of remembering Rex as the specific dog the memorial is made to while also remembering and grieving the loss of pets in general. As I leave a stick on Rex’s paws to reward him for being a good boy, I’m also leaving a stick for Gitcha who my dad used to call “Catdog” because of the way she would fetch small toys and bring them for you to throw again.

I’ve never had a dog but growing up my family had a cat named Gitcha. Gitcha was really my dad’s cat, though she tolerated my mom just as well. She did not, however, have much interest in children. Gitcha was already middle-aged in cat years when I was born and started to become senile by the time I was in middle school. One day, my dad took Gitcha away and she didn’t come back. Part of the great power that resides in more-than-human memorials is their ability to evoke general feelings of remembrance and mourning despite being specific. The sticks that stack up on Rex’s paws are a testament to this notion. So, as I leave a stick on Rex’s paws to reward him for being a good boy, I’m also leaving a stick for Gitcha. It’s not hard to imagine that other visitors to Green-Wood Cemetery stop while on their walk to leave sticks for Rex and then carry on their way while reminiscing about their own more-than-human companions who have come to pass.

Madison Alworth

The Fallen Tree City Memorial created by Creating Egan.

It is perhaps easier to recognize the grievability of household pets because we live so closely alongside them, but all animals and more-than-human others deserve to be grieved and remembered. In London, the Animals in War memorial stands as a reminder of all the horses and dogs that have given their lives as mounts, scouts, and guides during wartimes for the sake of human betterment. Observing the memorial does not invoke a specific animal but instead asks us to consider all the more-than-human sacrifice that our daily comfort and routine has been built upon and in many ways continues to depend upon. Countless more-than-human animals and others are slaughtered around the world each day in the name of feeding our ever-growing population or allowing us access to valuable materials such as silk (from silk worms) or carmine (from beetles). There are no memorials to these small creatures, who nevertheless give their lives so that we can have luxurious textiles, vibrant make-up products, and food dyes.

My reflection here is not meant to persuade a total attitudinal shift toward militant veganism or some other ideology like ahimsa that advocates for total nonviolence toward all creatures. Rather, I ask that we consider the ways in which memorials like Rex’s, like Hachiko’s in Japan, like the Animals in War memorial, can bring our attention to the validity of grieving and memorializing more-than-human others as a form of activism. It’s unlikely that we will stop eating burgers here in the United States and start consuming only plant-based meals, but we could open conversations about more ethical ways of raising, treating, and killing livestock and other more-than-human creatures that provide us with resources.

A memorial plaque in Iceland for glacier, Ok.

Memorials like Rex’s still give us pause. We are not used to seeing animals memorialized in the same spaces as humans. Why? Why shouldn’t animals who are appreciated in life be grieved in death? They are worthy of such treatment.

The same can be said, by extension, about the environment. In 2019 there was a public mourning and memorializing for the glacier Ok in Iceland. Like many glacial bodies that used to cover vast stretches of Earth, Ok was shrinking in size, melting in hotter-than-ever summers and barely accruing any additional ice during short-lived winters. In our lifetime, glaciers like Ok are rapidly shrinking and vanishing, taking with them habitats for animals and stores of water that have been regulating ocean levels for longer than humans have walked the Earth. And yet most of the human population has paid very little attention, let alone grieved. Events like the public mourning for Ok demonstrate the desire and readiness to memorialize and grieve more-than-human others that we recognize as co-habitants of this Earth with us.

How did I get from a simple bronze statue of a dog named Rex to talk of memorializing glaciers? This is the power of more-than-human memorials. When we are stopped in our tracks by a memorial that mourns a group of others that we do not normally think about in death, we are forced to reconsider how we understand mourning and grievability to begin with. While the entry point to understanding the value of more-than-human life and the grievability of more-than-human death for many may be through memorials to pets and other animals that closely cohabitat with humans, the potential of these memorials to open up conversations and acts of recognition for far larger, greater, and more pervasive more-than-human others that are otherwise invisible is grand.

It would seem that it’s not just sticks resting on Rex’ paws, but potentially our whole relationship with more-than-human others as we know it.

How the Anti-Abortion Movement Co-Opts Our Fear Of Death and How the Death Positive Movement Can Help

Photo by Jemal Countess | for Supermajority

Last month, we witnessed the overturning of Roe v. Wade when the U.S. Supreme Court undid decades of precedent by ruling that abortion is no longer a constitutionally guaranteed right. This decision has been decades in the making, with the anti-abortion movement undermining our reproductive freedoms and healthcare for years, using what may be a surprising tool to achieve their goals–our fear of death.

How the anti-abortion movement co-opts death phobia

The anti-abortion movement has been leveraging our society’s fear of death, and our reluctance to discuss death openly and factually to advance their agenda and scaremonger about abortion.

The most blatant example of their invoking of death phobia is by branding themselves as “pro life.” By doing so they make clear how they want you to think of them – and more critically, people who support abortion. The implication is obvious: abortion is “pro-death” and supporting it is compared to murder. However, medically – abortion is the end of a pregnancy, not the end of a life; as a fetus is not a person and abortion is not murder – neither legally, nor medically. To be sure – people certainly feel differently about their abortions and pregnancy losses and many of them do feel there is loss involved; and while those feelings are absolutely valid, what isn’t valid is weaponizing our immediate and visceral fear of death by branding people who support abortion as associated with it.

It doesn’t stop there. Anti-abortion advocates commonly advocate for laws such as fetal burial laws, which require fetal tissue to be treated the same as human remains, provided with a disposition or “funeral” and buried or cremated, instead of being treated as medical waste as it is in most cases. While these laws are designed to ensnare providers in a nightmare of red tape and logistical hurdles, they also have a more insidious impact which also equates abortion with death. By requiring fetal tissue to be treated like human remains and provided with a “funeral” they want providers and patients to feel like they are ending a life.

These laws also take advantage of our lack of awareness, and the funeral industry’s lack of transparency around death care by exploiting the complicated nature of funerary practices, forcing reproductive health care providers to navigate a cumbersome and often incredibly old school industry. Funerals can be fraught enough to plan for a person, but figuring out what they look like for a fetus brings on an entirely different level of challenges.

At the heart of the anti-abortion movement’s obsession with death is single concept: fetal personhood; explained in A Brief Guide to Fetal Personhood as “the idea that every fertilized egg is entitled to full protections of the law, and is a constitutionally-protected entity separate from the pregnant person.”

Fetal personhood laws center this belief – that life begins at conception, arguing that the end of a pregnancy, under any circumstances, is a death. Take for example, Texas’ SB8 which bans almost all abortions in the state after about six weeks, and criminalizes doctors who perform them. Increasingly, abortion restrictions are also founded on this concept of personhood, taking the form of later abortion bans, mandatory ultrasounds, and waiting periods – laws that are designed to shame patients and entrap clinics in as many arbitrary regulations as they can in order to make providing abortion as difficult as possible.

While voters have been assured that their plan is not to prosecute pregnant people and will instead focus on the doctors who perform abortions, the outcomes of these policies tell a very different story.

The criminalization of pregnancy loss in the United States is a harrowing phenomena that largely impacts marginalized people of color and the poor. For years, pregnant people have been facing prosecution, criminalization, and state surveillance for miscarrying; something that will only become more common now that Roe has been overturned and pregnant people are without the constitutional protections it ensured.

To reiterate: for many who experience pregnancy loss, it is something to grieve or mourn; something that many people experience as a death. But it’s also widely stigmatized and mired in taboo and shame; which makes it ripe for anti-choice lawmakers to co-opt for their own ends. Pregnancy loss, like abortion, like pregnancy and parenting – is a nuanced and personal experience, incompatible with the blunt instrument of legal regulation and criminalization. And as self-managed abortion becomes increasingly more common and more necessary with the lack of availability of in person abortion post-Roe, so will the legal risk of criminalization; while medication abortion is incredibly safe for patients to undergo, the liability lies not in the medical risks but in the reality that  pregnant people with historically marginalized identities will be more likely to face criminalization.

It’s truly a perfect storm with providers cast as “murderers” under laws like SB8; pregnant people being held liable for pregnancy losses like they’re a death; and now, the overturning of Roe intersecting with the longstanding criminalization of adverse pregnancy outcomes to create an even more volatile environment for people who need to manage their own abortions – and it could not happen without death-phobia.

How can death positivity help us fight back?

For the answer to that, we have to look to the tenants of death positivity – many of which are centered on being open and honest about death. Removing stigma and taboo from conversations about death disempowers death-phobia, which in turn will disempower the anti-choice movement. If we could have more frank conversations about death and dying, and if we removed the mystery which fuels so much of the scaremongering around it, anti-choice politicians would not be able to manipulate constituents by capitalizing on those fears. It would be much clearer how absurd it is for a movement of people who oppose bodily autonomy to call themselves “pro-life”; the impact and non necessity of things like fetal burial laws, and the prosecution of pregnancy loss would be even more apparent.

Beyond a call to honesty, the tenants of death positivity also call for an acceptance of personal autonomy in death and dying – that your wishes for things like disposition of your remains are respected. These are traditions shaped by so many things in our life; our culture, religion, family – the country we call home, the amount of money we have. Like abortion, and like pregnancy – dying is a deeply personal experience; under the tenants of death positivity, having control over what we do with our bodies in life and in death is central to societal and personal wellbeing.

Finally, embracing death positivity and having more open conversations about death and dying means we will be able to confront the true threats to the lives of pregnant people – like medical racism, abortion restrictions, and poor maternal mortality rates. All of these are actual threats to life, contributing to a culture in which Black women are dying during childbirth at alarming rates, in which people cannot access the prenatal and postnatal care they need to keep themselves and their children safe. Anti-choice politicians do not want us to have those conversations though, because they would reveal them for who they really are: and that too, is the power of death positivity.

Let’s Visit the Churches Made of Human Skulls

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