This Is What Happens to Your Debts After You Die

By Aubrey Cohen

Your debts become the responsibility of your estate.

Coffin on stage

When you die, any debts you leave behind could eat up assets that you had hoped to leave to heirs. In some cases, family members could even be on the hook for your debt. Many people buy life insurance not only to leave something behind for their loved ones but also to help deal with any debt and final expenses.

Will your debts die with you?

After you die, your debts become the responsibility of your estate — which is everything you owned at the time of your death. The process of paying your bills and distributing what’s left is called probate.

Your executor (the person responsible for dealing with your will and estate after your death) will use your assets to pay off your debts. This could mean writing checks from a bank account or selling off property to get the money. If there isn’t enough to cover your debts, creditors generally are out of luck.

But specific kinds of debts have their own wrinkles.

Mortgages and home-equity loans

If a property has a mortgage, the lender has some protection, at least up to the value of the property.

But federal law bars lenders from forcing a joint owner to pay off the mortgage immediately after the death of another co-owner. This also applies to any relative who inherits the home and lives in it. Practically, this means the family member or co-owner can simply take over the mortgage payments.

An outstanding home-equity loan against the property is different. A lender can force someone who inherits a home to repay the loan immediately, which could require selling the house. That said, lenders might work with new owners to allow them to simply take over the payments on the home-equity loan as well.

Auto loans

In the case of an auto that is not fully paid off, the lender has the right to repossess the car. But typically whoever inherits the vehicle can simply continue making payments, and the lender is unlikely to take action.

Credit cards

Once the estate runs out of assets, credit card companies are out of luck, because this debt is not secured by assets the way mortgages and car loans are. Any joint account holder would be responsible for the bill, but people who are simply authorized users of a card would not.

In community property states, listed below, spouses are responsible for any debts incurred during the marriage, including credit card debt.

Student loans

Lenders have no recourse if the estate does not have assets to repay other unsecured obligations, such as student loans.

If your relatives are not responsible for your debts, collection agencies may still legally call to discuss debts and to try to find someone authorized to pay them, according to the Federal Trade Commission. But collectors cannot mislead family members into thinking they’re responsible for the debts.

Caveats

There are circumstances in which spouses or other people would be personally responsible for your debts. These include if they:

  • Co-signed for a loan.
  • Are joint account holders.
  • Are spouses in community property states: Arizona, California, Idaho, Louisiana, Nevada, New Mexico, Texas, Washington and Wisconsin. Spouses are not responsible for debts that predate the marriage, although half of any community property from a marriage could be put toward such obligations.

About 30 states have “filial responsibility” laws that could make adult children responsible for debts related to caring for parents or parents responsible for debts related to care of their children. These laws once were rarely enforced, but there have been recent cases in which creditors have used the statutes to pursue family members.

What’s protected?

Creditors typically cannot go after your retirement accounts or life insurance proceeds. Those will go to the named beneficiaries and are not part of the probate process. But if the life insurance beneficiaries you named are no longer living, your death benefit may go into your estate and can be subject to creditors. That’s one reason why it’s important to make sure your policy names the proper beneficiaries.

Life insurance can help with debt payments

To decide whether you need life insurance to cover debts after your death, consider these questions:

  • Do you have family members who would be responsible for your debts?
  • Do you have debts that would eat up assets you want to pass on to family members?
  • Do you want to pass on money that couldn’t be diverted to pay your debts, even if you owe those debts?

Life insurance can help in any of these scenarios. Term life insurance policies, which provide a death benefit for a set number of years, are suitable for most people’s life insurance needs. NerdWallet’s life insurance tool is a good place to compare prices. If you want to consider a permanent policy, such as whole life insurance, consult a financial advisor.

Complete Article HERE!

My view: Salt Lake City’s homeless deserve hospice care

By Kim Correa

homeless and hospice care
Death is a natural process, and since the dawn of humanity, people have been dying at home. But where do homeless people go to die? The shelters are not equipped to deal with the end of life.

Is Salt Lake City a city of compassion or a city of abandonment? About 50 homeless people die here annually. Death is a natural process; since the dawn of humanity, people have been dying at home. But where do homeless people go to die? The shelters are not equipped to deal with the end of life, hospitals can’t keep these patients for weeks or months on end, and most lack insurance to pay for a skilled nursing facility. Without a stable place to live, they end up in and out of the emergency room, straining our city’s fire, police and hospital resources, and eventually dying on the streets or in parks.

The INN Between provides a real solution to this small but critical segment of our city’s homelessness crisis. We opened in August in the old Catholic Convent on Goshen Street, providing a safe and comfortable place where about 13 of Utah’s terminally ill homeless men and women can experience the end of life with dignity. Our residents are grateful to have a place they can call home for their final time on this earth. Since opening, we have provided death with dignity to three people and provided over 420 housing nights to a total of 22 people. We have beautified the grounds and our presence has reduced loitering and potential criminal activity around a previously vacant building. The INN Between is almost full — a major concern as winter sets in.

The INN Between had been approved to operate in our other building, the former Guadalupe School, in May, under the zoning use of Eleemosynary Facility — “a facility operated by a nonprofit charitable organization or government entity to provide temporary housing and assistance to individuals who suffer from and are being treated for trauma, injury or disease and/or their family members.” The school building can house an additional 10 to 20 residents.

On June 19, the Salt Lake City Council blocked our use of the school by excluding “end of life and respite care” from the Eleemosynary definition. Now it is proposing an additional restriction to exclude “facilities not licensed by the Utah State Health Department.” The public hearing takes place Tuesday.

The proposed changes were intended to address a gap in zoning law and ensure people’s health and safety. We agree that there is a gap, but we disagree on its nature. The gap is the lack of housing for terminally ill homeless people. And there is nothing healthy or safe about dying on the street.

The INN Between is an ideal solution that offers safe housing — better than any housing our residents have had in years. In fact, the Utah State Department of Health has determined that our program complies with health and safety standards, exempting the INN Between from licensing. The Department of Health understands that all these people need is a home in which to die naturally.

The council’s proposed changes effectively mandate that the homeless die in state-licensed facilities, like nursing homes. But who will pay the $4,500 to $6,000 cost per month? The city, i.e., the taxpayers? If this were a viable solution, we’d already be doing it.

In order for the INN Between to meet community need, we must be allowed to operate under the pre-June 19 definition of Eleemosynary Facility. If adopted, the proposed zoning changes will demonstrate Salt Lake City’s lack of compassion for people who are dying and discriminate against Utah’s most vulnerable homeless people by severely limiting their access to housing and hospice care. Learn more on www.theinnbetweenslc.org/zoning.

Complete Article HERE!

Green burial movement advocates alternative to conventional interment

By FRAN RYAN

Mary Lauren Fraser
Mary Lauren Fraser, of Montague, with a casket she makes out of Willow branches.

As green living continues to take a more prominent place in the United States, there is now a growing movement that is focusing on green dying.

“Imagine living your whole life as an environmentally conscious person and at the end of your life, they pump you full of embalming fluid,” said Judith Lorei of Green Burial Massachusetts, and a member of the cemetery commission in Montague who spoke earlier this month at the Grace Episcopal Church in Amherst.

Green Burial Massachusetts is a grassroots organization that educates the public about the value and benefits of green burial. Founded in 2008, the group is a committee of the Funeral Consumers Alliance of Western Massachusetts and has formed a collaboration with the Mount Grace Land Conservation Trust in Athol to find a suitable site for the state’s first green cemetery.

“We are an all-volunteer group,” Lorei said. “Green burial may not be for everyone, but it is important that people know that they have choices.”

In the U.S., with the exception of certain religious traditions, a conventional burial involves the embalming of the deceased and placing the body into a metal or hardwood casket which is buried in a cement vault that lines the grave.

This practice of preserving the dead became popular during the Civil War when families of the Union war dead wanted the bodies of their loved ones brought home from the battlefield, and embalming was the only way to preserve the remains for the long, often hot trip back north.

Today, many environmental advocates say conventional burial is an unsustainable endeavor that uses too many chemicals, land and resources, including an estimated 827,060 gallons of embalming fluid nationally each year, according to the Green Springs Natural Cemetery Preserve at naturalburial.org. It also estimates that 90,272 tons of steel, 2,700 tons of copper and bronze, and 30-plus million board feet of hardwoods, much of it tropical, are used to make caskets every year in the U.S., with another 14,000 tons of steel and 1,636,000 tons of reinforced concrete going into burial vaults.

The green burial movement advocates interment that is easier on the earth. This involves natural burials that are chemical-free with no embalming, use of biodegradable caskets or simple shrouds, and grave sites that do not contain cement vaults.

Unlike conventional burials designed to stave off decomposition, green burials are frequently at a depth of three to four feet to permit access by aerobic bacteria and enhance decomposition.

According to the National Funeral Directors Association, in 2014 the national median cost of a conventional adult funeral with viewing, burial and vault was $8,508.

Jay Czelusniak, owner of Czelusniak Funeral Home in Northampton, said the average conventional funeral in western Massachusetts costs less than the national median, at between roughly $5,000 and $7,000.

A green burial may cost thousands of dollars less, depending on how and where it is done. “A lot of it depends on the products, but most do come out to be less expensive,” Czelusniak said.

Czelusniak added that his funeral home is happy to offer formaldehyde-free embalming fluids that he said can adequately preserve the body for up to several weeks, as well as eco-friendly caskets and urns which vary in price and can lower costs to about $3,000.

Cemeteries set rules

Currently, there is no green burial cemetery or preserve that is open to everyone in Massachusetts, though some municipal and private cemeteries do allow for green burials.

The closest all-green cemetery to Massachusetts is Cedar Brook Burial Ground in Limington, Maine.

“We do get a lot of calls from people asking about green burial,” Czelusniak said. “Funeral directors don’t have any problem with green burial, it is just that many cemeteries will not allow it.”

Czelusniak noted that individual cemeteries set the rules and regulations for burial, with most requiring cement vaults.

“The public needs to contact their mayor, DPW and the individual cemeteries to let them know they want to make green burial available,” Czelusniak said. “If they hear from enough people, it will happen.”

But many people are not aware that this is a choice that may be available to them.

“We talk to people all the time that think embalming is a state law and it is not,” Lorei said.

And the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has never prescribed embalming as a public health measure.

Conservation burial

While a green burial in an existing conventional cemetery is a more eco-friendly final departure, Lorei said that a “conservation burial is really the gold standard for green burial.”
Conservation burial involves being buried on land that has been established as a nature preserve or is designated as permanently protected conservation land.

Bodies are unobtrusively buried in the natural landscapes and, depending on the individual preserve, graves may be marked by native plantings, a rock, a small flat wooden plaque, or have no marker at all. Some graves may contain GPS markers so that people can find their loved one’s final resting place.

Money raised from burial fees go back into the preserve or land trust.

Many see this as a win-win situation.

“To be able to be buried in a beautiful natural place, in a very natural way and to know that you are also contributing to the future preservation of the land, that’s a wonderful thing,” said Alicia Pike Bergman of Minneapolis, who was at the event in Amherst during which Lorei spoke this month. “It makes your last act on this earth a very meaningful one.”

Matthias Nevins, a land conservation specialist for Mount Grace Land Conservation Trust, agrees, saying that conservation burial on is an innovative way to leave a lasting legacy for future generations.

Roughly two years ago, Green Burial Massachusetts formed its partnership with Mount Grace.

“We are pretty excited to be working with Green Burial Massachusetts,” Nevins said. “We are currently looking for a property that has significant conservation value for wildlife habitat and recreation. The cemetery would resemble a natural landscape with partially open fields and meadows.”

Nevins said a property has been identified for the project but the sale of the land is still in negotiation.

If things go as planned, this would be the first conservation cemetery in Massachusetts. Mount Grace Land Trust would own the land and Green Burial Massachusetts would run the cemetery operations.

“We are very optimistic about this,” Lorei said. “We see this as a beginning step. Our goal is to eventually have lots of green cemeteries around Massachusetts.”

Willow coffins

Massachusetts may also have the first producer of natural willow coffins in the country.
Mary Lauren Fraser, 21, is a basket weaver who apprenticed with Karen Collins, a traditional weaver and basket coffin maker in Forres, Scotland.

“The UK is about 30 years ahead of us on this,” said Fraser, who lives in Montague where she is establishing her coffin-making business.

“I have been talking to other people in the green burial business and as far as I know, I am the only one in the country who makes these,” Fraser said.

While there is a selection of wicker caskets and coffins available through Mourning Dove Studio in Arlington, they are imported from overseas.

Fraser said it takes about 3½ days to complete a coffin, which uses roughly 20 to 25 pounds of willow that is locally sourced.

She said she is eager to take her work to different fairs and markets to let people know that there is a local green alternative to standard caskets. “I want people to be able to check it out, climb in and get excited about it,” she said.

Film showing

On Nov. 1, Lorei led a discussion following a showing of the film “A Will For the Woods” at Grace Episcopal Church in Amherst, which was attended by some 30 people. The film chronicles the journey of Ohio psychiatrist Clark Wang who sought a green funeral and burial after being diagnosed with lymphoma.
In attendance was Janet Bergeron, a cemetery trustee in Sunderland.

“There has been a lot of interest in green burial lately, so I wanted to get as much information about it as I can,” Bergeron said. “It had never come up before, but within the last year it really has.”

Lorei said that people choose green burial for many different reasons ranging from simplicity to ecological and spiritual motives.

She also noted that people can work with funeral directors to request that their loved ones not be embalmed or to perhaps arrange for a wake at home.

“There are people who do want to take care of the body of their loved ones at home and be more involved in the ritual and care of that person,” Lorei said. “The point is, people don’t have to take the whole burial package from a funeral home, they can do it sort of a la carte.”

Joan Pillsbury of Gill, is a member of Green Burial Massachusetts and on the board of the Funeral Consumers Alliance of Western Massachusetts.

When Pillsbury’s husband Dennis died, she had a wake at home and her family then drove his body to Cedar Brook Burial Ground in Maine.

“We don’t like to think about death, but more and more people want to have that public conversation,” Lorei said. “We encourage everyone to ask questions and if you are in need of support, we at green burial can work with you.”

Complete Article HERE!

For Jewish Students, Field Trip Is Window on Death and Dying

By

Rochel Berman
Rochel Berman explained traditional Jewish burial shrouds to students from Yeshiva High School during a visit to the Gutterman Warheit Memorial Chapel in Boca Raton, Fla., on Tuesday.

 

Two yellow buses pulled away from Yeshiva High School here with a couple of class periods still left and the 77 seniors aboard giddy with the words “field trip.” They texted. They posed for selfies. They sent up clouds of chatter about weekend plans.

Then, less than a half-hour later, they walked into a cool, tiled room at the Gutterman Warheit Memorial Chapel and stared at the pine coffins and the inclined metal table used for cleaning a corpse.

“I thought I was cool about death,” one girl whispered to a classmate. “But this ——”

“This” meant more than the contents of the room, which is used at the Jewish funeral home for the body-washing ritual called tahara. It connoted the entire mini-course that she, along with the rest of Yeshiva High School’s graduating class, is taking about the Judaic practices and traditions surrounding death, dying and grief.

Few subjects run more powerfully counter to an American teenager’s innate sense of immortality than a confrontation with the reality of life’s end. The study of death became more common at the college level with the publication of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’s influential book, “On Death and Dying,” in 1969. But it is rare that the subject is discussed at the high school level, particularly with an approach that includes fairly explicit instruction in caring for a cadaver.

Yeshiva High School
Yeshiva High School sent 77 senior students to the funeral home as part of a course teaching Judaic practices and traditions surrounding death, dying and grief.

 

“As a senior, you’re thinking about going to college, and as a teenager you have this feeling of invincibility,” Daniel Feldan, 17, said the morning after the visit to the funeral home on Tuesday. “I’ve never had that other feeling — of mortality, that life might end soon.”

Bailey Frohlich, also 17, nodded at hearing her classmate’s words. “It’s given us a reality check,” she said. “For us, it’s usually about college and friends and extracurriculars. You don’t focus on the grittier things. But even if you don’t have a personal connection to death, thank God, it affects the whole community.”

The 10-hour, eight-session course, titled “The Final Journey: How JudaismDignifies the Final Passage,” aims for sensitivity even as it provokes a certain degree of shock. Besides going to the funeral home, where they received detailed explanations of washing and dressing a corpse, the students have classroom lessons on topics including the history of the Jewish burial societies known as chevra kadisha, the Talmudic foundations of end-of-life practices, and issues involving autopsy and organ donation.

“When we started the program, there was a lot of hesitation and curiosity at the same time,” said Rabbi Jonathan Kroll, 45, the yeshiva’s head of school. “Jewish tradition for dealing with burial and the process of tahara is not that well known. Even for a lot of well-educated Jews, the chevra kadisha is like a secret society. But once you start talking about the values involved or the practical aspects, there’s a fascination.”

The program at Yeshiva High School began with Rochel U. Berman, a 79-year-old author and a former nursing home worker who moved near the school 13 years ago. Her well-regarded book on Jewish burial rituals, “Dignity Beyond Death,” was published in 2005. Over the years she lived in South Florida and the New York metropolitan area, and she served as a chevra kadisha volunteer in both places, preparing the bodies of about 1,000 women and girls, from centenarians who simply wore out to an 18-month-old baby felled by cancer.

In broad ways, Jewish rituals around death and dying trace back to antiquity, and they have been central to Jewish continuity in the diaspora. The system of chevra kadisha emerged in Central Europe in the 16th century. Initially almost a social institution composed of the elite, chevra kadisha groups transformed over the centuries into an example of communal or congregational voluntarism.

An unlikely adopter of religious tradition, Ms. Berman grew up in Winnipeg, Manitoba, as the child of secular socialists. Her Jewish language, rather than the Hebrew of worship and Zionism, was the Yiddish of the Old World shtetl and the New World slum.

By the time Ms. Berman’s father died in 1985, she had grown observant. Even so, between the final kiss she planted on his forehead in his deathbed and the lowering of the coffin into the ground the next day, she had no idea what had been done with her father’s body.

Jewish funeral process
From left: Sarina Solomon, Ariella Mamann and Jolie Davies, students at Yeshiva High School, practiced the Jewish funeral process that would be used to cleanse a body before burial.

 

“I didn’t know what I was missing, but I knew there was a hole there,” she recalled. “And the not-knowing made me even sadder.”

While living in New York, she and her husband, George Berman, both started volunteering in their Orthodox synagogue’s chevra kadisha, which has separate units for each gender. The processes of washing and purifying the body, of dressing it in a white linen shroud, of moving it into a plain wooden coffin filled her with a sense of communal purpose.

Not content with her own years as a volunteer or with her book, Ms. Berman resolved to reach young people as a way of imbuing the next generation with those Judaic values. “It’s a gift to give them, a part of the Jewish life cycle they didn’t know about,” she said. “And once they know it, they’ll be the ambassadors in sharing it.”

Rabbi Kroll assumed the leadership of Yeshiva High School in Boca Raton, Fla., three years ago. Coincidentally, it turned out that he, somewhat later than Ms. Berman, had belonged to the same synagogue and volunteered in the same chevra kadisha in New York’s Westchester County.

With $21,000 in grants from foundations and religious organizations, Ms. Berman devised a curriculum. Rabbi Kroll tested it last year with half of the seniors in the class of 2015.

“We had pushback,” he recalled, “but it wasn’t serious pushback. Several parents questioned the priority: ‘Why not use the time on something more pertinent, more relevant?’ My impression is that the pushback was about their own discomfort with mortality.”

As for the first batch of students, half of them reported on evaluation forms that, as a result of the course, they would consider being in a chevra kadisha. That response was more than sufficient for Rabbi Kroll to expand the program to this year’s entire senior class. Among the 78 students, he said, only three have had an immediate family member die. (One of those three was excused from the funeral home trip.)

Even those like Maya Borzak, 18, whose grandfather served in a chevra kadisha, found there was plenty to learn. In fact, the funeral home visit occurred just five days before the unveiling of that grandfather’s headstone, which in Jewish tradition takes place after a year of mourning.

“I always knew that, in general, it’s important to have a Jewish identity, that you’re born a Jew and you need to die a Jew,” Maya said. “You have a circumcision if you’re a boy, you have baby-naming if you’re a girl, and then, at the end, everyone is buried in the same way.”

“Now I know more than the sources for the processes and rituals,” she said. “I know the dignity that is supposed to be provided for everyone who dies. It’s the great equalizer. We’re all in this together.”

Complete Article HERE!

Why Humans Care for the Bodies of the Dead

By Julie Beck

Why Humans Care for the Bodies of the Dead

In tracing the history and culture of corpses, a new book shows the importance of remembrance to our species.

The ancient Greek Cynic philosopher Diogenes was extreme in a lot of ways. He deliberately lived on the street, and, in accordance with his teachings that people should not be embarrassed to do private things in public, was said to defecate and masturbate openly in front of others. Plato called him “a Socrates gone mad.” Shocking right to the end, he told his friends that when he died, he didn’t want to be buried. He wanted them to throw his body over the city wall, where it could be devoured by animals.“What harm then can the mangling of wild beasts do me if I am without consciousness?” he asked.What is a dead body but an empty shell?, he’s asking. What does it matter what happens to it? These are also the questions that the University of California, Berkeley, history professor Thomas Laqueur asks in his new book The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains.“Diogenes was right,” he writes, “but also existentially wrong.”

This is the tension surrounding how humans treat dead bodies. What makes a person a person is gone from their bodies upon death, and there’s really no logical reason why we should care for the empty container—why we should embalm it, dress it up, and put it on display, or why we should collect its burnt remnants in an urn and place it on the mantle.

Humanity’s answer to Diogenes, Laqueur writes, has largely been “Yes, but…” People have cared for the bodies of their dead since at least 10,000 B.C., Laqueur writes, and so the reason for continuing to do so is a tautology: “We live with the dead because we, as a species, live with the dead.” And the fact that we do so, he argues, is one of the things that brings us as a species from nature into culture. (The taboo against incest is another example.)Despite the rationality of Diogenes’s logic, it’s unthinkable that we would just throw the corpses of our loved ones over a wall and leave them to the elements. Dead bodies matter because humans have decided that they matter, and they’ve continued to matter over time even as the ways people care for bodies have changed.

Laqueur’s book makes this argument with a dense, detailed sketch of a relatively small slice of time and space: Western Europe from the 18th to 20th centuries. The story begins with churchyards, which “held a near monopoly on burial throughout Christendom … for more than a thousand years, from the Middle Ages to the early 19th century and beyond in some places.” People would be buried (and generally had a legal right to be buried) in the yard of the church of the parish where they lived (or in the church itself if they were wealthy or clergy). This was a messy business. The yards were constantly being churned up as new bodies were buried, and they got lumpy. There weren’t many grave markers, and if there were, they were likely to read “here lies the body,” not a particularly personal epitaph.

“The churchyard was and looked to be a place for remembering a bounded community of the dead who belonged there,” Laquer writes, “rather than a place for individual commemoration and mourning.”Though bodies were jumbled together in churchyards in a way that it made it almost impossible to find any one individual, there was some method to their arrangement: They were buried very deliberately along an east-west axis to line up with Jerusalem to the east, the direction from which the resurrection was expected to come. John Calvin, the Protestant theologian, thought the very act of burial showed faith in a corporeal resurrection.

In the early 19th century, the dominance of churchyards began to wane, for a number of reasons. They were crowded, for one. Rotting bodies piled up in churchyards and church vaults also produced the kind of odor you might expect, and activists began to argue that they were unsanitary. But Laqueur points out that churchyards had always been crowded and smelly, and “for centuries the smell … was tolerable.” The rise of cemeteries as an alternative to churchyards, Laqueur writes, was really part of a massive cultural shift, one that owed a lot to the industrial revolution and the Protestant reformation.

During and after industrial revolution, unpleasant things of all kinds were being removed from people’s sight. Butchers and slaughterhouses delivered meat while keeping the blood behind the curtain; London constructed a massive sewer system, getting people’s waste off the streets and out of the River Thames. With this as the backdrop, it stands to reason that people might want the dead bodies out of their cities as well—while they didn’t pose a real public-health threat, people successfully argued that they did, and that was enough.

The first great cemetery of the West was Père-Lachaise in Paris, built by Napoleon, and it inspired the building of others in Copenhagen, Glasgow, and Boston, among other cities. Unlike churchyards, these cemeteries were stand-alone places for the dead, open to the public and largely separated from the crowded areas of cities.They were also disassociated from religion. “To some degree this is about the rise of negative liberty: the right to a grave in a neutral civic space irrespective of one’s beliefs or lack of beliefs, and the right to a choice in rituals of burial,” Laqueur writes. The waning dominance of the Catholic Church had a lot to do with that. Burying bodies right by the church would remind people on their way in to pray for the dead as a way of helping those souls stuck in purgatory. But many Protestant reformers rejected the idea of purgatory, and argued that the dead did not need the prayers of the living.

The focus of cemeteries was not, as it had been in churchyards, on a community of faithful dead, but on remembering the individual. It allowed for families to be buried together, which hadn’t really been possible in the tangle of the churchyard.

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“It was a place of sentiment loosely connected, at best, with Christian piety and intimately bound up with the emotional economics of family,” Laqueur writes. “In it, a newly configured idolatry of the dead served the interests less of the old God of religion than of the new gods of memory and history: secular gods.” Cemeteries allowed for gravestones, monuments, epitaphs, the carving of names in stone. This provides a little insurance against the fear of death—that one’s name, at least, will outlast them. Carving in stone is a powerful metaphor for permanence, even if it’s just wishful thinking.

The advent of cremation as a popular practice took some of this enchantment away from the dead body. But while in some ways people who opted for cremation were finally recognizing the body as a shell, just like Diogenes said, deference towards bodies was often just replaced by deference to its ashes. Ashes are scattered, interred, and revered in many ways, just as bodies are. And cremation has obviously not completely replaced burial by any stretch.If care for the dead is one of the quintessential things about being human, fear of death is another. Being the only animal with constant awareness of its own mortality has significant effects on how humans behave. Often, according to terror-management theory, the thought of death will lead people to seek out and to value more highly things that they think will bring them immortality, in the metaphoric sense. Living on in the memories of others would do the trick, even though we must on some level know is only a reprieve against eventually being forgotten.On this matter, Laqueur turns to the 17th-century poet John Weever:

Every man, Weever writes, “desires a perpetuity after his death.” Without this idea “man could never have awakened in him the desire to live in the remembrance of his fellows.” And without it, human life in the shadow of death would be unbearable and unrecognizable: “the social affections could not have unfolded themselves un-countenanced by the faith that Man is an immortal being.” Our love for one another differs from the love animals might feel for one another in that an animal perishes in the field without “anticipating the sorrow with which is associates will bemoan his death,” whereas we “wish to be remembered by our friends.” Naming the dead, like care for their bodies, is seen as a way to keep them among the living. And maybe it is a way around Diogenes.

So yes, Diogenes, the body is technically nothing once void of its soul, or consciousness, or however one conceives of the essence of a person. We get it. But it’s a physical emblem of that person, and in caring for it, we offer the person’s memory a chance to linger, as we hope our own will.

Even if physical death is quick and final, social death takes time. And through communal effort, people offer each other the chance for their names to last a little longer on Earth than their bodies do. “There is also another way to construe the dead,” Laqueur writes: “As social beings, as creatures who need to be eased out of this world and settled safely into the next and into memory.”

Complete Article HERE!

Career Spotlight: What I Do as a Funeral Director

By Andy Orin

What I Do as a Funeral Director

Making arrangements after the death of a loved one is an inevitable part of life, and for some people it is also a job. Funeral directors help grieving families navigate the daunting, and perhaps unexpected, bureaucracy of death.

It is easy to let your imagine run wild when picturing the work of a funeral director, with television shows portraying macabre drama in gothic funeral parlors, but of course the truth is much more down to earth. (And more about paperwork than anything else.) To learn a little about the work of a funeral director we spoke with Jeff Jorgenson, who owns a funeral home in Seattle.

First, tell us a little about your work and how long you’ve been at it.

I am owner and funeral director at Elemental Cremation and Burial in Seattle. We opened up January of 2012.

What drove you to choose your career path?

When I was at the end of undergrad and applying to graduate schools, I needed to get a job to cover the bills and get me through the second half of schooling. I had a background in restaurants as well as aviation. I didn’t want to go back to restaurants and aviation was a really tight job market. I took, what I thought would be a temporary, position selling cemetery property and pre-planned funeral and fell in love with the industry.

How did you go about getting your job? What kind of education and experience did you need?

Truth is that getting a job doing anything in the industry outside of funeral directing/embalming is actually pretty easy. If you don’t mind being in a funeral home and you have great customer service skills, there are a lot of positions out there. As to the current position, in Washington state, you need 1800 hours of internship, 90 college credits and 25 arrangements with families to get a funeral director’s license. The biggest hurdle people usually face is getting the education—people who want to be funeral directors typically aren’t the type of people that are in love with academia. After that, it can be a challenge to find a funeral home that wants to take you on in an open funeral director position.

Did you need any licenses or certifications?

The funeral director license is for arranging for the disposition (cremation or burial) of the deceased. They are the party planners, so to speak, of the industry. Embalmers [do] the preparation of the body and require an embalming license to care for the deceased. For restaurant readers, they are “front of the house” and “back of the house,” respectively.

What kinds of things do you do beyond what most people see? What do you actually spend the majority of your time doing?

Most of the behind the scenes of funeral directing is nothing like what people think it would be. A funeral director can go months, sometimes years depending on the firm, without seeing a dead person. The reality is that it is a lot of paper pushing and managing the inflow and outflow of paperwork for permits and death certificates. I would say it is 10% meeting with families to go over arrangement details and the other 90% is trying to manage the chain of events and paper.

What misconceptions do people often have about your job?

See above. Everyone seems to paint their own little macabre job descriptions of what we do. The reality is far less Victorian and dark. The Emo/Gothic set ends up pretty disappointed.

What are your average work hours? Did you have to be on-call or is it more of a 9-5 thing?

As an owner, it’s 24 hours a day. As a funeral director, I try to keep it as close to 9-5 for myself and my team. Death does happen at all hours, so there are positions that have odd shift work, but funeral directing and embalming follows bankers hours pretty well.

What personal tips and shortcuts made your job easier?

Shortcuts are a bad idea in the funeral industry, and I’ll go on record as saying that trying to find and use them leads to really unfortunate outcomes. That said, finding ways to be more efficient with workflow of permits and scheduling cuts down on a whole host of conflicts.

On the emotional side of things, people coming into the industry have to be empathetic, otherwise they make really poor funeral employees. The challenge with that is that it is easy to fall into the well of grief. Taking on the grief of families that you meet and connect with can be a really hard hurdle to overcome. Finding where your boundaries are so that you can be healthy and still be a good funeral director is something that people coming into this field should be ready to address.

What do you do differently from your coworkers or peers in the same profession? What do they do instead?

That’s a good question, and honestly, I’ve been on my own long enough that I’m not sure how to answer it—as a funeral director. We do a lot of things systemically different than other funeral homes, and our operations are pretty unique in our environmental standards, and back office operations.

What’s the worst part of the job and how do you deal with it? I would imagine there’s an emotional toll to helping grieving families, but also that helping them through it is part of the appeal.

It depends on the day, but usually the worst parts crop up when you’re so busy that you make mistakes. The systems, checks and balances, and chain of custody measures in place are very stringent for the care of the deceased in almost every funeral home, so the “big errors” happen very rarely in reputable firms. Where mistakes crop up is with typos on death certificates or scheduling with families. They are little things that may be non-issues in the grand scheme of things, but at the time of someone’s death, it’s stressful to have an apartment number incorrect on a death certificate. The worst part is having things like that erode credibility when you’ve done so many other things to make life easier for the family.

What’s the most enjoyable part of the job?

Hugs and thank you’s from the families that I serve. It’s such an amazing win when you’ve made things better for people. I’ve never had another job that continually rewards you in that way.

What kind of money can one expect to make at your job? Or, what’s an average starting salary?

It’s a labor of love, because you’re never going to get rich doing this job. A funeral director can expect to make between $32,000 and $60,000 depending on experience, license, and location. $60k may even be on the high side. Funeral home owner? Ugh. for the first few years, you can pretty much bank on not getting a paycheck. After that… hell I don’t know, I’ll let you know when I get there.

How do you “move up” in your field?

The difference between bottom and top (outside the major corporations) is pretty shallow. From the owner to the funeral assistant or removal person (transfers bodies) may be one, or max two, layers. In the major corporations, it’s about six. It sounds so trite, but the reality is hard work and a mastery of craft. With any job, there’s the networking and political component. [It] isn’t any different than any other industry on how you climb the ladder.

What do people under/over value about what you do?

I think that people overvalue the care of the deceased. There is nothing mystical, difficult, dangerous, or surprising about caring for the dead. Anyone can do it. The problem is that they don’t have the tools for transportation and refrigeration. What I think people undervalue is the capacity of funeral directors to get things done efficiently. Everyone has a timeline that they think is realistic, and often times people want us to move huge mountains to get things done, but they think that it’s the way it is—that their expectations are realistic (e.g. dad died today and we want his ashes tomorrow). I think if I want a house, I should be able to pick one out and move in next week, but if you talk to a real estate agent or escrow officer, they might give you a little different perspective.

What advice would you give to those aspiring to join your profession?

Read this blog post and continue with further research. This business is probably nothing like you think it will be, so you need to have your head screwed on straight and have realistic expectations. This is not some kind of gothic forensics horror show. It isn’t a profession to shock your friends. It is an opportunity to help people navigate the bureaucracy of death. Which, if you step back and think about it, is a pretty profound opportunity to let people get to grieving and healing without the worry of handling the affairs themselves.

Complete Article HERE!

Death Is Way More Complicated When You’re Polyamorous

By Simon Davis

death become her
Screencap via ‘Death Becomes Her’

In February, Robert McGarey’s partner of 24 years died. It was the most devastating loss McGarey had ever encountered, and yet, there was a silver lining: “I had this profound sadness, but I don’t feel lonely,” McGarey told me. “I’m not without support, I’m not without companionship.”

That’s because he has other partners: Jane, who he’s been with for 16 years, and Mary, who he’s been with for eight. (Those are not their real names.) And while his grief for Pam, the girlfriend who died, was still immense, polyamory helped him deal with it.

There’s not a lot of research into how poly families cope with death—probably because there’s not a lot of research about how poly families choose to live. By rough estimates, there are several million poly people in the United States. And while polyamory can bring people tremendous benefits in life and in death, our social and legal systems weren’t designed to deal with people with more than one romantic partner—so when one person dies, it can usher in a slew of complicating legal and emotional problems.

“Whether people realize it or not, the partner to whom they are married will have more benefits and rights once a death happens,” explained Diana Adams, who runs a boutique law firm that practices “traditional and non-traditional family law with support for positive beginnings and endings of family relationships.”

Since married partners rights’ trump everyone else’s, the non-married partners don’t automatically have a say in end-of-life decisions, funeral arrangements, or inheritance. That’s true for non-married monogamous relationships, too, but the problem can be exacerbated in polyamorous relationships where partners are not disclosed or acknowledged by family members. In her work, Adams has seen poly partners get muscled out of hospital visits and hospice by family members who refused to recognize a poly partner as a legitimate partner.

McGarey and his girlfriend Pam weren’t married, so the decision to take her off life support had to go through Pam’s two sisters. The money Pam left behind—which McGarey would’ve inherited had they been married—went to her sisters too, who also organized Pam’s funeral.

This kind of power struggle can also happen among multiple partners who have all been romantically involved with the deceased. The only real way to ensure that everything is doled out evenly is to draft up a detailed prenuptial agreement and estate plan. Adams works with clients to employ “creative estate planning” to ensure that other partners are each acknowledged and taken care of.

Adams is a big proponent of structured mediation as a way of minimizing post-mortem surprises, like when families discover the existence of mysterious extra-marital partners in someone’s will. It’s much better to have those conversations in life than on someone’s deathbed, or after death.

But many poly people remain closeted in life and in death, according to sociologist Elisabeth Sheff, who has studied polyamorous families for 15 years and authored The Polyamorists Next Door: Inside Multiple-Partner Relationships and Families. A person might have a public primary partner—someone they’re married to, for example—plus other private relationships. That can make it harder to grieve when one of the non-primary partners dies, because others don’t recognize the relationship as “real” or legitimate in the way the death of a spouse might be.

Take, for example, something like an employee bereavement policy. Guidelines from the Society for Human Resource Management spell out the length of time off given in the event of the death of a loved one: a spouse, a parent, a child, a sibling, in-laws, aunts, uncles, grandparents. Unsurprisingly, extra-marital boyfriend or girlfriend is not on the list. (Actually, “boyfriend” and “girlfriend” aren’t on the list at all.) It’s possible for an employee to explain unique circumstances to an employer, but in her research, Sheff has found that some poly people prefer not to “out” themselves this way. People still disapprove of extra-marital affairs and some poly people, according to Sheff, have even lost their jobs from being outed, due to corporate “morality clauses.”

It’s similar, she says, to the experiences of same-sex couples who are closeted. “It’s much less so now because they’re more acknowledged and recognized, but 20 years ago, it was routine for [the family of the deceased] to muscle out the partner and ignore their wishes—even if [the deceased] hadn’t seen their family for years and years,” Sheff said. “They would come and descend on the funeral and take over. Or when the person was in the ICU. That same vulnerability that gays and lesbians have moved away from to some extent is still potentially very problematic for polyamorous people.”

Legal recognition of polyamorous unions could provide some relief. After the Supreme Court struck down the Defense of Marriage Act in 2013 and legalized same-sex marriage in 2015, calls for legalizing plural marriage have only become louder. Adams noted that an argument put forth in Chief Justice John Roberts’s 2015 dissent may provide a legal foothold for legalization advocates. “As Roberts points out, if there’s going to be a rejection of some of the traditional man-woman elements of marriage… those same arguments could easily be applied to three or four-person unions,” she said in an interview with US News & World Report earlier this year.

In 2006, Melissa Hall’s husband Paul died at the age of 52. Both were polyamorous, but Paul’s death presented “no special problems,” since they were legally married and Hall had all the rights of a spouse. Instead, she found unexpected benefits in dealing with her husband’s death: In particular, she told me that “being poly made it easier to love again.” Since they had both dated other people during their life together, Hall knew her husband’s death wouldn’t stop her from dating again.

In traditional relationships, it’s not uncommon for people to impose dating restrictions on themselves to honor the desires of their dead spouses, or to feel guilty when they start dating again. Of course, you don’t win if you don’t date either, as people eventually get on your case to “move on with your life.” All this goes out the window when you’re polyamorous, where dating doesn’t necessarily signal the end of an arbitrary acceptable period of mourning.

More partners in a relationship can certainly mean more support. It can also mean more people dying, and with that comes more grief. In an article about loss among polys published in the polyamory magazine Loving More, one man wrote: “Those of us who have practiced polyamory through our lifetime must be grateful for the abundance of love in our lives. But having those wonderful other loves means we must accept a little more grieving as well, when our times come.”

Is the trade off worth it? McGarey certainly seems to think so. “There is more grieving, but… we are held and cradled in the love of other people at the same time.”

He compares his relationship to the Disney movie Up, which starts with a guy falling in love and marrying his childhood sweetheart. “And then [she] dies, and he turns into this grumpy old man because he lost his love,” McGarey said. “I don’t see myself turning into a grumpy old man. I don’t know if I can attribute that to poly, but maybe that’s why.”

 Complete Article HERE!