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.
