www.sacredcrossings.com
My new Alternet story delves into the world of after-death care and our legal rights to choose a home funeral over sending the body of our loved one to a funeral home to be “bled and pickled” by strangers. Here is an excerpt:
“When Beth Knox lost her 7-year-old daughter in a car accident, she was told the hospital could only release her body to a funeral home. At the time, Knox didn’t know she had the legal right to drive her daughter’s body from the hospital to her house in the same van in which she took her to school every day. What she knew was that her family needed time.
“I was required by law to care well for her,” she writes on her Web site, “but now that her heart had stopped beating, I was being told that her care was no longer my concern.” Finding it unacceptable, she found a funeral home that agreed to bring her daughter’s body back to her house. “I cared for her at home for three days, bathing her, watching her, taking in slowly the painful reality that she had passed from this life, and sharing my grief with her classmates and brothers and grandparents and our wonderful community of friends, before finally letting go of her body.”
For more than a decade, a growing number of Americans have resurrected the ancient practice of “do-it-yourself” funerals. Like Beth Knox, now a funeral rights educator in Maryland, these home funeral guides and educators are spreading the word that after-death care is not the funeral industry’s birthright. You have the legal authority, in most states, to care for your loved ones after they die. It will transform your life, with the added bonus of saving you money.”
Click here for the full story.
A message from a friend of the Towers:
Dear friends,
The fiscal crisis in the government of the City of Los Angeles has led its Department of Cultural Affairs to ignore its fundamental mission. It is directing its available funds away from its community arts centers, ending years of educational classes and programming vital to the communities it serves. Most of the arts centers will be forced to shut down. Those remaining open will not be able to maintain their arts classes.
As of Friday, March 26, the employment of the educational coordinator of the Watts Towers Arts Center will be terminated. Eight on-going educational programs that serve over 6,000 individuals—many of whom are at-risk youth—will be forced to close down. This will effectively dismantle the functioning of a community cultural gathering place and a vital host to the world renowned Watts Towers .
The local City Council representative has cynically called for the privatization of the Watts Towers Arts Center while she is actively working with the Wasserman Media Group and the Tony Hawk Foundation to develop funding for a Skateboard Park to be built immediately adjacent to the Watts Towers themselves. This construction would deprive visitors of a full view of Rodia’s monumental work of architectural sculpture and destroy the aesthetic ambience of a National Historical Landmark. This is like building a skateboard park on the steps below the Lincoln Memorial or at the entrance of the Statue of Liberty . Requests for this Skateboard Park to be placed farther away from the Watts Towers have been ignored.
Please help us save the Watts Towers , the Watts Towers Arts Center and the arts of Los Angeles .
WRITE and CALL these public officials in support of the continuing integrity of the Watts Towers and its Arts Center :
Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa
Los Angeles City Hall
200 N. Spring Street, Rm 303
Los Angeles , CA 90012
(213) 978-0600
mayor@lacity.org
Councilwoman Janice Hahn, District 15
Los Angeles City Hall
200 N. Spring Street, Rm 435
Los Angeles , CA 90012
(213)-473-7015
councilmember.hahn@lacity.org
Olga Garay, General Manager
Department of Cultural Affairs (DCA)
City of Los Angeles
201 N. Figueroa Street, Ste 1400
Los Angeles , CA 90012
(213) 202-5500
Olga.Garay@lacity.org
ALSO please click onto this site to sign a petition in support of the Watts Towers Arts Center :
www.thepetitionsite.com/1/stopculturalgenocide
AND click on to this site to help support all of the affected Cultural Affairs arts sites:
http://www.artsforla.org/take_action/culturalcenters
