Category: After Death Care

Posted on

Flipflops and tank tops, sockless in sandals…

and dying in Mexico

by Russ Hilderley

USA AND CANADIAN expats face a small mountain of paperwork should someone close to them die in Mexico. An even higher mountain of forms, certified translations, lists of possessions, is forced on loved ones left behind, should the deceased not have any type of ” Last Will and Testament.”

In 2019, 50,000 Canadians were living in Mexico. 182 died. 75% were from natural causes which likely does not include “seasoned” expats sidestepping sidewalk “cenotes”, tripping over abandonned building materials or struck by vehicular traffic while navigating uneven walkways and driveway indentations.

It would seem pedestrians are trampling on private sidewalks originally built by the abutting landholders, but never maintained by them. Uneven heights, slopes, broken curbs and the like can reak havoc on retirees who fly here and walk everywhere thereafter.

Two and a half million Canadians visited Mexico as tourists last year. A significant percentage are in the autumn years of their lives. They may be in Yucatan for six weeks or six months, to escape the colder climate “up north”! Snowbirds(as Canadians and residents from the northern U.S. are called) have an inherent duty to their families “back home”! All expats and tourists alike would be well advised to make it easier to cope, upon the death of a loved one. Important and critical personal information about the deceased must be available to the Mexican authorities from day one. Regardless of your country of origin, the burden is essentially the same.

The whole procedure following the death of an expat residing or visiting Mexico can be daunting for next of kin. The deceased’s identity must be thoroughly established in accordance with Mexican laws.

If the name on the birth certificate is even slightly different from their passport, the transition from one name to another MUST be explained and vertified accordingly. It is particularly cumbersome, should the deceased be a woman. Her birth name could be different through one or more marriages. In each step,the documentation will require translation to “Español” by a registered and authorized translator. The same rules apply to ALL documentation required. “The Last Will”, the identification of all possessions with current valuation held in Mexico by the deceased and the name(s) of next of kin who should be notified, must all be translated in to Spanish .

Expats are urged to maintain a special file back home, or here in Yucatan or Mexico. A designated family member or friend should be aware of this file and where it is stored. The”paperwork” could already be translated and certified. The “executor” of the expat’s estate should be identified with all neccessary contact information tucked away with the deceased passport .

Representatives from the Canadian Consulate in Cancun and similarly designated personnel from the USA Consulate in Merida, appeared before an overflow crowd of over 150 expats at Flamingos Restaurant on the Malecon in Progreso, last Tuesday January 14th,2020.

A funeral home in the Yucatan, is a primary step, to walk you through the process. Cremated remains can be exported within a day or two. A casket requires one or more weeks . The Funeral Director can not forward any valuables such as rings and other jewellry, computers etc..These must be claimed by the contact identified in the Will, or otherwise verifiable family.

Expats living in Yucatan as “Temporary or Permanent” residents should have the LONGFORM marriage certificate which is normally not issued but available in the State or Province where the marriage was performed. This document and your birth certificate should be carried with you as you travel.

Most travellers are optimistic and excited about spending their vacations and retirement without giving much thought to the consequences if they die abroad. Sure,they may have medical and life insurance but forget all the details and information required to repatriate their remains.

To use the now famous phrase quoting reknowned Woody Allen,when asked what would happen to his fortune when he dies, he replied: “If I can’t take it with me, I’m not going” !

We all wish it was that simple!

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

Posted on

Startups Are Dying To Give You A Better Death

By Anes Alic

“Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” no longer.

This phrase, generally used during burial ceremonies, suggests that every life will one day come to an end. Today, the flurry of startups businesses seeking to change timeless traditions is challenging even this. Now, one can obtain eternal life by becoming compost witnessing rebirth as a tree.

Traditional funerals, in the form of cremation, embalming and burial, are now giving way to new alternatives with the emergence of new funeral startups that aim to disrupt the overpriced services sector by offering something cheaper and better.

The market they are targeting is sizable. With nearly 2.6 million deaths every year in the United States, a new class of entrepreneur sees plenty of opportunity to innovate.

Considering the fact that 41.4 million Americans live below the poverty line and that 40 percent of US citizens cannot afford an unexpected expense of just $400, it is clear that a majority of Americans would be unable to absorb the average cost of a funeral, which sits at around $8000.

Due to the nature of the business (that everyone is bound to use the service at some point) it was long believed that nothing could jeopardize the funeral industry. Yet, due to the high cost and availability of cheaper alternatives, it seems that all sectors of the industry have been reporting losses over the past decade.

Currently, the coffins and caskets market is worth some $550 million, but that belies an annual decline rate of 3.6% over the last five years. That rate is expected to accelerate to about 4.1% in the next five years. Skilled embalmers have been particularly hard hit, with employment in that profession declining 28% in less than 10 years.

Back in 2015, cremation surpassed traditional burial rates across the country for the first time, largely because of consumer attempts to reduce costs associated with funerals.

However, for environmentally conscious Millennials, even cremation is out of the question because the process emits some 270,000 tons of carbon dioxide each year. That is equivalent to the CO2 from 22,000 homes, or the emissions of 50,000 cars.

Millennials, as tech-savvy and environmentally conscious consumers, are driving the popularization of “green burials”, which are both affordable and involve fewer synthetic chemicals.

Green burials cost an average of $2,000, which includes a plot and environmentally friendly casket. For those who desire even more eco- and wallet-friendly solutions, there is an option to ditch the tombstone and chose a GPS marker instead.

Composting is also on the rise as a unique way for one to give back to the planet more directly. The process involves sealing a body into a container with wood chips, alfalfa and hay and adding heat to stimulate microbial munching.

There are still a few legal issues to be resolved around the compost funeral, but the world’s first funeral home dedicated to composting human beings is set to open in 2021 in the state of Washington, the first state to legalize such services last year.

An even newer trend is the “tree burial” during which ashes are placed in the soil with a seed to plant a tree that won’t affect the tree’s natural DNA.

There are also green burial options that aren’t wallet-friendly, and far surpass the traditional funeral costs. One such option is the space burial in which ashes are launched into space via a rocket.

And how about Cryonics? At a cost of a minimum of tens of thousands of dollars, a handful of companies are willing to preserve a body in the hope that one day the technology will exist to bring the deceased back to life.

The funeral industry though it was immortal. It’s not. Today’s consumers, even beyond the grave, want options and startups are more than willing to give them those options.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

Posted on

The Rising Cost of Not Living

by Mona Chalabi

Jerry Burton was a frugal man. So frugal, in fact, that his possession of an organ donor card was motivated by his disdain for waste. While he was still in hospice care, Jerry made it clear to his son and daughter-in-law that they should shop around to get a good deal on his funeral. They did. In total, the transportation of Jerry’s body, the cremation, and the pickleball tournament that he wanted to be held before his service cost $695. Such bargains are a rarity in America’s modern funeral industry.

The median pricetag of a funeral in 2017 was $7,360—a cost that would take the typical US worker five months of labor to cover. Because of these high prices, many families are panicking at the same time that they are grieving. 

The death of Kara Killeen’s father was followed by calculations that provide a depressing tally of the average American’s struggles. Student debt bills meant that Kara and her sister had less money in the bank (and much of her dad’s retirement money had gone toward helping them cover those repayments, as well as the family’s mortgage). Limited care provision under Medicare meant that Kara’s mother had lost her job to look after her sick husband (and since her job had been writing for the local newspaper, there wasn’t exactly an abundance of new vacancies for her to apply for later). And, like many American families today, the Killeens don’t all live in the same city, so there were flights to think about, in addition to the funeral costs.

Fortunately, an aunt was able to cover Kara’s flight back from Scotland to Ohio. Unfortunately, the fact that Kara needed an intermediary in another time zone to book her travel meant that she made it back two days after her father’s death. Once reunited, the family looked at their funeral options; they were shocked at the prices they were hearing. A reception in a local bar where her dad had been a regular customer would cost $3,000, including catering. They could have held it at their family home for free, instead, but that wasn’t really viable: Kara had come back to discover the house where her mother had cared for her dying husband was a messy cross between a hospital and a home. An urn would have cost $275, programs $160, and an obituary $200, according to the latest averages from the National Funeral Directors Association.   

In the end, with her aunt’s financial support, Kara’s family was able to pay for the cheapest option available: Kara’s father was cremated and his remains were returned to the family in a plastic bag, and there was no funeral. The family still faced a bill for $2,000. “His final mark on the world was just to not have enough money,” Kara told me, bitterly. Funerals are supposed to be a chance to grieve, mourn, and begin the process of emotional recovery after a death; but when money is tight, they can feel like a second trauma. 

In the movies at least, funerals are a chance to meet old friends that you didn’t even know that your dearly departed had. To hear stories that you had never heard before. “You expect everyone to be there,” Kara said. We infer much about a life from a funeral. For no service to be held might imply some secret shame. A small gathering might indicate a lack of popularity. Cheap flowers suggest, well, cheapness. Each of these sentences could just as easily apply to another of life’s landmark social gatherings—weddings—except that marriage customs have changed faster than our death customs. 

It is a matter of personal prerogative whether a couple spends their life-savings on a Star Trek-themed extravaganza or just heads to city hall with two strangers pulled off the street to act as witnesses. That choice is more likely to be seen as a question of taste rather than of moral character. But when the social occasion requires people to be present to honor someone who is absent, then the rules change.  

The desire not to skimp (or at least, to be seen not skimping) leads us to make bad decisions according to Joshua Slocum, the executive director of the Funeral Consumers Alliance, a nonprofit watchdog. “It’s a distressed purchase,” he explained. “No one wants to buy a funeral.” Our decisions are clouded, not just by grief but by the fact that there is no requirement for funeral homes to email you a pricelist or post one on their website. “I can’t think of any other business sector that doesn’t allow you to shop around,” Slocum added. So families will simply choose whichever funeral home they used the last time they had to hold a service. 

What those families rarely realize is that their local funeral home, once run as a “mom-and-pop” family business, is now probably owned by a Wall Street firm. Service Corporation International, or SCI, for example, operates 1,477 funeral service locations and 483 cemeteries across the country, and is worth $13.3 billion (for comparison, the countrywide clothing chain Gap Inc. is worth $8 billion). Shareholders expect dividends and they have to come from somewhere: according to Slocum, SCI charges between 40 percent and 75 percent more for its services than independent funeral homes do. 

The price of dying is also high because there are simply too many funeral homes. Slocum gives me the example of Montpelier in Vermont, the smallest state capital (by population) in the country. The city has two fully serviced funeral homes that, between them, handle an average of seventy-six deaths a year. These businesses have to keep prices high if they want to cover their mortgages and pay their staff. 

I asked Slocum why he became involved in funeral consumers’ rights. He replied simply, “I love Mitford.” It was after reading Jessica Mitford’s classic muckraking polemic on the American funeral industry, The American Way of Death (originally published in 1963), that he became fascinated by the industry and wanted to know more. Little of substance has really changed in the business since Mitford’s book was published except for the escalating prices. Back in 1960, the cost of a funeral was around $700—still a considerable amount of money in real terms, amounting to about seven weeks of a typical worker’s wages at that time (as noted above, by the same measure, today’s figure is at least twenty weeks).

Funeral charges have risen for the same reason that prices have always risen: a disconnect between demand and supply. For a combination of reasons—cost, changing mores, and environmental concerns—more consumers now want their remains and those of their relatives to be burned rather than buried, but the US funeral industry is largely stuck in the past. In fairness, this cultural change has come relatively quickly: in 1960, when Mitford was researching her study, just one in twenty-eight people who died in the US were cremated; today, it’s one in two—half of all funerals. Yet mortician schools still place a heavy emphasis on embalming skills, and more than two thirds of states (thirty-six out of fifty) require funeral establishments to maintain an embalming room (or access to an embalming preparation room); and nearly half of states require a funeral director to be a certified embalmer. Those laws directly contribute to higher prices. In a study published last year, two economists at Kenyon College in Ohio, David E. Harrington and Jaret Treber, calculated that embalming regulations in New York State cost consumers an additional $25.8 million each year.

Although American business traditionally hates regulations, regulating how companies handle and dispose of cadavers makes sense—there are too many public health and public safety considerations involved, let alone consumer rights, for this to be otherwise. “Now, death is seen as an emergency: a dead body has this association of being a biohazard,” explained Caitlin Doughty, who started working in deathcare in 2008 and today owns and runs Undertaking LA. This contrasts sharply with the way a decease was handled 150 years ago, in a pre-industrial era. “Death was a domestic task,” she said. “The women would prepare the body, the men would prepare the casket.”

States began to legislate to control funeral directors around the same time they set professional standards to govern doctors and lawyers, in the mid-nineteenth century. The main aim was to protect the vulnerable—in this case, the bereaved—from charlatans. But many state laws about deathcare now appear outdated or nonsensical. Four states prohibit funeral homes from serving food and beverages entirely, and in New Jersey until very recently, homes could only serve water and peppermints (it is unclear whether such rules arose for reasons of decorum or public hygiene). In five states, funeral directors have exclusive rights to sell caskets, in effect a protectionist measure that blocks cheaper competition—such as Amazon’s “Premium Cardboard Coffin for Adult Funeral,” for just $235.

The outlook seems bleak for customers with few choices and facing high costs. But after sixteen years working in funeral consumer rights advocacy, Slocum doesn’t see it quite this way. “There are two sides to issues like this,” he argues, “and in order to make funerals that are affordable, you need to have both oversight of the industry by the government, but you also need consumers that act with agency rather than being helpless victims.”

It is difficult, though, to think of any other purchase that is quite so unavoidable as paying for a funeral, nor one that demands decision-making at a time when emotional distress is a given. One way to feel empowered in the way that Slocum suggests is to lean, if you can, on your community.

Askia Toure and his two sisters, Sakina and Zahira, were able to turn to the Islamic Society of Greater Houston, Texas, when their mother died of uterine cancer in 2015. The society helped Sakina, who was the only sibling that lived close to her mother when she died, to wash and shroud her mother’s body according to Islamic practice. Two days later, their mother was placed in a plot she had pre-chosen. “That’s how we’ve been raised,” Askia said, “to bury each other with dignity as soon as possible for the least amount of pain or debt inflicted on those who are still here.” When families can’t cover the cost, the community that makes up the membership of the Islamic Society pitches in. Even before Askia’s mother died, the society’s members had contributed to cover the medical costs of her final illness, using a crowdsourcing page. 

Crowdfunding for the funerals themselves is now common. Just one site alone, Go Fund Me, boasts that every year it raises $330 million for some 125,000 memorials (a level of contributions that averages out at $2,640, about a third of the typical funeral’s costs). These sites are especially important for families like the Toures because black American households have less wealth than any other racial or ethnic group in the country. When a large, one-off expense like a funeral needs to be paid, the choice facing such families is often brutally simple: ask for help or sell the car.

Even with a community behind you, bargain-hunting is still important. Non-funeral home options are still limited—and, in fact, can often be even more expensive. You can, it is true, order a cardboard casket from Amazon for as little as $235, but then what? Most states have strict laws about where and how you can dispose of a body. Shopping around for professional funeral services is still the better option for most people. “You can find prices that range from $700 to $4,000 for the same basic service,” said Slocum. “The grief will come, but the terror [of financial ruin] doesn’t have to.”

Funerals are hard because they force us to manage a very practical matter that is simultaneously a profoundly emotional one—to make arrangements amid tumultuous feelings. One thing that can help is to have talked to a loved one before she dies about the kind of funeral she’d want. When it was time for the conversation that Jerry Burton wanted about his desire for a cheap send-off, his daughter-in-law, Melody Burton, a marketing and communications manager from Gresham, Oregon, was apprehensive. But it turned out to be a blessing, not a trauma. “You don’t get to talk about things that are so deeply personal like that very often,” she told me. “It was a beautiful time.”

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

Posted on

The woman whose job it is to prepare people to die

She arranges everything, from finding long lost families to organising organ donation

by Abbie Wightwick

 

She’s only 26 but Claire Wretham is employed by a Welsh hospice to help people face death.

She is the youngest person in any of Marie Curie’s nine hospices nationwide in the role.

Watching her own grandmother have  “a beautiful death” inspired her to help others do the same.

“We all deserve a good death that celebrates life. I am helping people feel at peace,” she said.

As full time spiritual care co-ordinator at Marie Curie Hospice, Cardiff and the Vale , Claire answers any questions patients and their families have about life’s greatest mystery.

Marie Curie spiritual care coordinator Claire Wretham with her grandparents Maura and John Brosnan. Maura’s death in 2016 inspired Claire to take up her post.

“My grandmother died at home, a really beautiful death with all her family around her. We were able to facilitate for her the perfect death.

Penarth with everything from tracing lost loved ones to special religious or cultural requests, officiates at funerals and goes to local mosques,synagogues and church groups to talk about death and dying.

In an increasingly secular and diverse society her role at Marie Curie has replaced the traditional one of chaplain, although Claire still uses that term when first meeting patients.

“I introduce myself as chaplain because it really is a modern interpretation of that,” she explained.

“My age is mostly irrelevant. People often comment on the fact I am young but I don’t think it hinders my role.

“People my age group see the world differently and approach things in a different way.

“Part of my role is asking people “what makes you you, how would you describe yourself and how do you find peace?

“As younger people we often have lots of spaces and experiences to express ourselves, but some older people don’t feel the same freedom to express themselves, so I ask “who are you, what makes you you and what makes you comfortable and at peace?.”

A practising Christian, Claire was appointed to the job two years ago and is an “allied health professional”, not a medic, although she knows and can explain what may happen during dying and immediately after.

Her role as spiritual adviser was created in response to research that Marie Curie did in 2015 investigating how to improve access to palliative care for people with dementia, learning disabilities and people with different or no religious beliefs.

Sarah Lloyd-Davies, hospice manager at Marie Curie Hospice, Cardiff and the Vale, explained: Hospice care and chaplaincy services have long been rooted in the Christian tradition, as both developed at a time when Christianity was the majority religion in the UK.

“As the country has grown more diverse there has also been a trend in growing numbers of people identifying as nonreligious.

“The hiring of a spiritual care coordinator to replace the traditional chaplain role at the Marie Curie Hospice Cardiff and Vale reflects the feedback from our local community, which recognises that one person and one approach cannot meet everyone’s spiritual needs.

“In order to make sure our services are truly inclusive and person-centred, we need to focus on connecting with belief-based communities and exploring new ways of providing spiritual care so we can ensure people feel supported in the best way for them at the end of their life.

Whatever background people come from death and dying are still taboo subjects which Claire must help them face.

“A lot of my job is myth busting and explaining to people how it works at the hospice and what they can expect as they come to the end of their life,” the 26 year-old said.

“Questions I would normally ask are whether they have any spiritual or religious needs and whether they have a faith or anything that’s a source of comfort.

“If they are religious I will discuss that with them – for instance if they are Catholic and want the last rites I liaise with their priest, if they are Muslim and want their bed facing Mecca and halal meals my job is to arrange that and liaise with nursing staff about it.”

There is “no formula or prescription” for talking about death so Claire begins with a few questions.

“It’s about asking questions to get people to explore death or go away and think about it.

“The sort of questions I’ll ask are things like – have you got any unfinished business or anything you want to tie up? That can be relationships, writing a will, funeral planning, making amends with estranged family members , and how we can help with that, if we can.”

When patients tell her they are scared of dying she tries to remove some of the mystery around it to reassure.

“If someone is scared of dying a big part of it, from my point of view, is explaining what will happen when they die.

“There are lots of misconceptions about pain relief. They want to know what it will feel like. I explain that they will probably just fall asleep more.

“I explore with them what they think that will be like. There is nothing you can say really, ultimately it’s something people form their own ideas about.

“I may also ask people what they want their legacy to be. Some people think there is nothing after you are dead so I’d ask them how they want to be remembered.”

But she doesn’t push it if people don’t want to talk.

“We live in a culture where it’s normal to talk about things but the idea of a chaplaincy and spiritual support is so alien to some people that they say no, they don’t want to talk to me.”

As she doesn’t have all the answers Claire tries to keep things practical when explaining what happens after death in a hospice.

“I know what a dead body looks like, where you go after death and what the crematorium looks like.

“My main technique is to remove any confusion. I do ask people if they are frightened and how I can help them not feel afraid.

“Most of the time people are worried about “what’s happening next and what about the pain?”

“I think death is so difficult to talk about because we don’t see death often. The majority of deaths happen in hospital. People don’t know what death looks like.

“For us in a hospice a huge part of our role is pulling the curtain on that. Lots of people come in asking really big questions and having misconceptions.”

These include controversy and suspicion surrounding syringe drives to administer pain relief and the mistaken beliefs about how they are used.

“People are horrified by the syringe driver. It’s in a locked box and nurses replenish pain killers. It is controlled pain relief. Some people think it is a death sentence, but it’s not. Sometimes people have a syringe driver for pain relief and then have it removed.”

“On the other hand some people say “can I have the drugs now?”. That’s not legal and not what hospices are about.”

“When we talk to people here about donation it’s usually only corneas because they can’t donate anything else. Some people say “you can take anything but not my eyes, but I have watched eyeball removal and it is really amazing because one cornea can be used to help eight people.”

It is Claire’s job to arrange any donations. She recalled one case when she arranged for a motorbike to collect the brain of a patient with motor neurone disease who had requested it be donated to medical science – something that had to be arranged within 72 hours.

“I spent all day organising brain removal and that afternoon someone came down from London on a motorbike and took it back for donation to medical science.”

Although her job does involve these practical matters it is also a matter of listening to people at what can be the hardest time of their lives.

“My job is varied Once a man came in and said his father had died here 28 years ago. He said he had never visited Wales and now lives in Canada but had flown into Cardiff to see where his father died.

“I showed him around the hospice and talked to him about his grief and about Penarth. He was very tearful, he had flown all the way from Canada to see where his dad died, but he was able to resolve his grief.”

Surrounded by grief and death on a daily basis Claire says it is not morbid but a privilege to help people.

“Death happens to everyone. It’s coming to all of us. We should look to normalise it.”

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

Posted on

Ashes to Ashes and Into Trees

This Bay Area start-up wants to change how we think about death

By Austyn Gaffney

Five miles inland from the rocky coast of Mendocino County sits 20 acres of forest. The trees—redwoods, Douglas firs, tan oaks, madrones—line old logging roads. Ferns and rhododendrons soften the forest floor. On a clear day, from a crest in the wooded parcel, there’s the blue snap of ocean.

It’s near this crest that Sandy Gibson, founder and CEO of Better Place Forests—a company whose mission is to conserve land by turning it into natural cemeteries—showed me his gravesite. Trees marked by orange, pink, or blue ribbons were available for burial plots, but Gibson’s redwood, towering above a dry creek bed, was ribbonless, signifying its purchase. Nearby trees with small copper plaques at their base, reminiscent of US Geological Survey markers, served as people’s tombstones.

Gibson has been yoked to death from an early age: When he was 10, his father died of a stroke, and a year later, cancer took his mother. As a child, he remembers leaving their gravesites before they were even filled in with soil, and later visiting a shiny black tombstone along a busy street in Toronto, Canada. With a voice gentle but earnest, like he’s intimately familiar with the octaves needed to discuss death, Gibson explained on this foggy morning in August how he now finds comfort in seeing a ceremony to its end.

“We’ve been burying our dead for 50,000 years in cemeteries,” Gibson told me. “The earliest things we can find are basically tools in caves and burial sites. The idea of a permanent sacred space for the people that you love is something deeply and innately human.”

Better Place Forests takes cremated ashes, which are, essentially, bacteria-free bone dust, and spreads them in forested properties. When mixed with bacteria-rich soil, the nutrients in the ashes break down and feed a tree’s root system. On a bronze table next to the visitor’s center, forest stewards sift cremated remains with soil. Then, they lead a “spreading ceremony,” ushering loved ones into the forest and up to the base of the selected tree. There, the sifted soil is mixed with more dirt. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, the dead are returned to the earth.

Now 36, Gibson is the epitome of a start-up CEO—gray hairs pepper his temples and his beard. He’s clean-cut but practical—a button-up shirt, slim pants, and walking shoes. For seven years, Gibson and one of his two partners at Better Place Forests, Brad Milne, ran a software company in Toronto. But Gibson was dissatisfied. Software could disappear one day. He latched onto the idea of creating something physically beautiful that might endure a technological collapse. (In the 45 minutes Gibson and I spent touring his Point Arena property, he referred to beauty, on average, once every 60 seconds.)

“I used to think about nothing, about blackness,” Gibson said, turning to face me beside his redwood. “Now there’s certainty. And that certainty is beautiful.”

Depending on traffic, Point Arena lies three to four hours north of San Francisco. A second site, slated to be open for burials in 2020, is two hours south in Santa Cruz. Better Place Forests is purchasing as much land as it can, as fast as it can, with plans to expand into Washington, Oregon, Colorado, and Arizona. Although Gibson claims he started his company in California to be near the redwoods, it probably doesn’t hurt to be close to Silicon Valley. The biggest challenge, though, might be getting investors excited about death.

“It’s a scary topic,” Gibson admitted. “But people love nature. They love protecting nature. You’re changing the discussion from one about death to one about conservation and beauty. That one’s a lot more accessible.”

Along with the promise of closure, Gibson and his team are selling the notion of legacy through conservation. If cemeteries take up space, Gibson wondered how death could do the opposite. How could it give space back? By purchasing a tree, customers invest in the preservation of a natural landscape. Each purchase also triggers an “impact trees” program, which commits to replanting a certain number of trees—between 25 and 400 depending on the price of the purchased tree—in wildfire-affected areas of California.

Before Better Place Forests came to Point Arena, this former logging parcel was full of dense underbrush that made it more susceptible to forest fires. By establishing conservation easements on purchased properties, Better Place Forests promises to pay for the ongoing management of the entrusted land. Furthermore, if the start-up goes under, the land will be protected in perpetuity. But the process is a bit complicated. Negotiations for the easement on the Point Arena property are still incomplete, though as of October approximately 100 spreadings had taken place.

For the past 150 or so years, the United States has developed a far-reaching death industry. Before the Civil War, families mourned and buried their dead at home. But the staggering amount of dead bodies from the war, needing to return home for one final ceremony, led to embalming and undertakers. Business began to boom, introducing more elaborate coffins and making engraved stone markers more common.

The price tag of death spiked, damaging both pocketbooks and the environment. According to Mary Woodsen of Cornell University, in the US alone, conventional burials account for 20 million board feet of wood, 1.6 million tons of reinforced concrete, 17,000 tons of copper and bronze, and 64,500 tons of steel each year. Over 4 million gallons of embalming fluid are used annually, almost one-fifth of which contains formaldehyde, a toxic substance linked to increased cancer risks among funeral-industry workers.

In her 2015 book, Greening Death: Reclaiming Burial Practices and Restoring Our Tie to the Earth, Suzanne Kelly laments the “walled-off city of contaminants” that will flood her own father’s body after he is embalmed, placed in a wooden casket, and then a metal casket, before being encased in a concrete vault inserted into the ground and then buried beneath the dirt. Kelly fears his grave will become a problem, instead of a place of mourning. Mounting awareness of these impacts has led to a growing movement for green burials, which the Green Burial Council defines as “a way of caring for the dead with minimal environmental impact.”

The process of cremation—which accounted for less than 10 percent of US burials in 1980, but today plays a role in over half—isn’t great for the environment either. Along with emitting carbon dioxide and mercury, cremation uses enough natural gas to power a 500-mile car trip, though, according to Kelly, advocates are pushing for renewable forms of energy and crematory filters to limit contaminants. Water cremation, or alkaline hydrolysis, is also on the rise, using a water-based solution, instead of heat, to speed up decomposition. It uses one-fifth the energy of fire cremation and better retains the body’s nutrients.

Today, there are approximately 93 green burial sites across the US. The first cemetery certified by the Green Burial Council was a preserve in South Carolina founded to protect a quarter mile of Ramsey Creek. Opened in 1998, it now encompasses over 60 acres, and over 400 natural burials, both whole body and cremation, have taken place on the site. Management practices on the land are permanently restricted so it remains wild.

Along with better environmental standards, green burials tend to be less expensive than conventional ones. In the past 30 years, funeral costs have risen almost twice as quickly as any other consumer items. According to the National Funeral Directors Association (NFDA), in 2017, funerals with a burial, viewing, and vault cost an average of $8,755. But green cemeteries, like Honey Creek Woodlands in Georgia, advertise natural burial plots for $3,200. For natural burials involving cremation, those costs drop between $1,150 and $2,700, depending on the location.

Though trees in Better Place Forests are hardly cheap. While community trees (in case you’d like your ashes to mingle with those of a bunch of strangers for eternity) start at $950 per spreading; individual trees begin at around $3,000 and can go upwards of $17,000. Each tree includes one to two ceremonial spreadings, and each additional spreading is an additional cost. But if all your relatives agree to be interred beneath the same tree, that spreading fee can be about an eighth of the cost of a conventional burial.

Most natural burial sites, including Better Place Forests, don’t include the cost of cremation, which ranges widely from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars. The number of funerals involving cremation is expected to rise to almost 80 percent of burials by 2040. And although more baby boomers are choosing cremation, they’re not all choosing cemeteries.

It’s a good thing, because we’re running out of space. According to a 2012 study, if all Americans who reach 78 years old (the average life expectancy) chose to be buried in standard plots, by 2042 we’d need 130 square miles of pure grave space, an area about the size of Las Vegas.

The green burial movement subverts the major economic interests of the funeral industry in other ways besides circumventing traditional funeral services. Returning people to the earth in a more natural way doesn’t surround death with sales of land, resources, and facilities. Service Corporation International, the largest multinational funerary business, reported a revenue of over $3 billion in 2018 alone. It’s estimated to comprise at least 15 percent of the death-care industry in North America, operating almost 1,500 funeral service locations and close to 500 cemeteries. Their report to the United States Securities Exchange Commission stated that they were “poised to benefit from the aging of the American population.”

Kathee Pfalmer, a baby boomer from California, had a hard time talking about her eventual passing with her family. She’d brought up various unconventional burial methods with her four children. Would they like mom’s ashes pressed into stones reminiscent of diamonds and made into rings? Or perhaps a nice piece of pottery with her ashes worked into the glaze? Unfortunately, she couldn’t imagine her children saying, “Let’s go pick up mom’s vase.” Then she stumbled across a Facebook ad for Better Place Forests.

When she visited the Point Arena forest in October, she, like Gibson, connected with a redwood tree. Although genetically the same, her tree has two trunks that appear distinct, and the pale stump of a burned tree, left over from a 1906 forest fire, leans against them. Pfalmer says the trio resonated with her because of her eclectic mix of family members, who though not all biologically related, are very loving and supportive of one another. Her decision has shifted the conversation with her children.

“Something about buying this tree and having a place helps me talk to my kids about it,” Pfalmer told me over the phone. “They can imagine my passing without thinking about me dying.”

In a 2017 study by NFDA, over 60 percent of respondents felt it was important to communicate funeral plans, but only 21.4 percent had done so. More than half of all respondents wanted to explore green funerals as a way to reduce their environmental impact. Or perhaps, to become a positive contribution to an environmental web.

“I thought it was a really good way of introducing the finality we all come to,” says Pfalmer, who brought along her 14-year-old granddaughter to pick out her tree. A lifelong gardener, Pfalmer is familiar with the cycle of life and death. She wants the cycle of her life honored in a natural way, and she hopes that for her granddaughter, the experience “might help her feel more at peace with the inevitability of death as part of life.”

Cody Sanders, a Baptist pastor and theologian who specializes in how death care impacts the environment, believes our corpses aren’t dying in a natural way but instead are being withheld from the ecosystem to which they belong. He argues that in death, our corpses can be in tune with the earth’s own cycles of life and continue living through the transformative process of decomposition.

“We’ve done everything we can in the last 150 years or so to deny the earth the life it could receive through our dead bodies,” Sanders writes in a paper for the journal Pastoral Theology.

Sanders suggests that how we treat our dead “mirrors ideologies and theologies that have arisen that suggest humans are not a part of the earth,” and that this “has strong ties to the practices that are contributing to the climate collapse at this point.”

Suzanne Kelly, author of Greening Death, claims sustainable death choices could provide a new tool for engaging in climate anxiety—a more intimate connection to the earth. In her book, she quotes Bob Fertig, a green-friendly funeral director, who says, “The focus on the environmental aspect [of the green burial movement] is wonderful, but I think what sometimes gets lost in that is the potential for closeness with death and the way it makes people feel.” 

In other words, green funerals aren’t just good for the environment. In an age of climate crisis, strengthening the bonds between people and the planet can be good for the human psyche too.

*

Weeks after visiting the Point Arena forest, I called my dad and asked him, “Would you like to be buried beneath a tree?”

My father has had a rare form of stomach cancer for over half a decade. I found out after graduating college while lying on the floor of the apartment I was subletting—not because I was awaiting bad news but because it was midsummer in Kentucky and I had no air conditioning. I thought my father had gone in for a minor surgery, but my mom called, saying they’d found tumors. They’re the kind of tumors that can be stalled but not the kind that go away. He has since retired on disability. He tires often and can suffer stomach pains that send him to the emergency room. He’s taken up meditation and spends time in a condo in Ontario to be closer to family. I often hesitate when he brings up his death. I get tongue-tied in the company of mortality, but now, when referencing another living being, like a tree, I found the discussion flowed more easily.

Of course he’d like to be buried beneath a tree, he said. Since childhood, he’s explored thousands of miles of the outdoors. On his first canoe trip, he was in diapers, and he hitchhiked out to the Canadian Rockies the summer he was 16. He still has the steel-frame, faded red backpack he used to traverse Jasper National Park. We don’t stroll too far from home these days, but we often manage to find our way to a riverbank or some nearby woods. On the phone now, he repeated his desire for cremation, and while he liked the tree idea, he balked at the cost. “Why wouldn’t I just donate what I’d spend reserving a tree to a conservation group?” he asked.

The cynic in me wants to critique Gibson’s model: the continued commodification of the natural world, and of burial sites. The idea that a San Francisco–based start-up is finding capital gains in something as tender-hearted as death. But somehow I keep falling short. Sure it’s just a tree. Sure it’s a lot of money for the ritual of saying goodbye. Aside from the small fact that it’s illegal, I could spread my father’s ashes wherever I like. But the idea of being able to visit his remains while also conserving a natural space? It sounds a little like solace.

“People still need a sense of place. You want to know there’s a place for your family to come,” Gibson told me, echoing Kathee Pfalmer’s wishes for her tree. “You want to know there’s a ceremony that will make it easier for your family to grieve.”

In May, months before I met Gibson in Better Place Forest’s tract of trees, I traveled to the gravesite of my great-grandfather in Nova Scotia with my father and my paternal grandmother. The cemetery was camouflaged along a backroad of birch trees and brambles, but my grandmother recognized the turn-off immediately. She’d visited her father here since he died when she was five years old, and she wanted me to pay my respects at his burial site. There was an intimacy in picking flowers to lay on the graves of our relatives, fenced off between two small fields and curtained with trees. There is a sweetness to these spaces.

Death is part of the ongoing web of life that humans are ecologically tied to by virtue of being mammals on this earth. For Sanders, privileging these alive human bodies “allows us to maintain the destructive fiction that all that is lifeless is inert and without significance or desire. The dead body—lifeless as it may be—is not finished revealing to us our roles and responsibilities for care.” The earth still desires something in relation to our body, Sanders writes—its return to the “aliveness” of the ecological world.

There is a natural order to things that ugly interruptions like cancer, addiction, car wrecks, and other tragedies take away from us. Nature reestablishes that order. It reminds us, especially the nonreligious among us, that there is life after life. Those nutrients in my father’s bones, in my bones, could enrich the soil. I imagine worms eating bits of me, and birds eating bits of worms. I imagine the process of my decomposition spiraling out beyond me. And I admit, it brings me comfort.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

Posted on

Conversations change around death, dying and funeral planning:

‘It’s not going to bring on your demise any sooner’

By Quinn Ohler

Conversations around death and dying are changing, and those in the funeral industry say it’s the baby boomer population leading the charge.

“You used to just have four funeral homes and you could choose between one or two things, [and] everybody charged basically the same thing,” says Brandy Rollins, family service manager at Trinity Funeral Homes.

Many people are looking for more options in every aspect of funeral planning from cost, to service options and final dispositions.

You are now able to personalize every aspect of your service to include what is most important to you. There’s also several options when it comes to how to dispose of your body from a traditional burial, from casket and concrete linings placed in the ground to cremation.

There’s also a movement in support of what’s called green burials, which don’t use concrete liners or embalming. Bodies are placed in a biodegradable shroud or casket.

Because there are so many options, Rollins says it is imperative that people have conversations with their loved ones about exactly what they want.

“If you don’t know what is important to the person that you are ultimately responsible for, it’s a burden to decide that,” she says.

Rollins suggests pre-planning your funeral to make it easier on your family.

“It’s a very loving act [and] it’s a very kind act,” Rollins says. “Some would argue it’s the last act of kindness you can provide.”

There’s also a push to get more people talking about their own deaths, not just for pre-planning reasons.

Death Cafes are being held around the world. The creators of the pop-up events state on their website, Death Cafes are meant to “make the most of our finite lives.”

“It’s just an aspect of life,” says Gina Vliet who has hosted Death Cafes in Edmonton.

Vliet is a member The Order of the Good Death, which encourages “staring down your death fears.” She is also an advocate for death positivity.

“Our culture is focused on living and prolonging life,” Vliet says. “I think acknowledging mortality is something people come to very organically.”

Vliet encourages people to get over the “cultural taboo” of not wanting to talk about death and dying. She is an end-of-life planning consultant who helps people plan for the final stage of life .

Vliet says that planning for your death and talking about it gives you more freedom and energy to enjoy life.

“It’s not going to bring on your demise any sooner,” Vliet says.

Both experts agree that talking about your death or the death of a loved one is a very loving act for your family, even though it can sometimes be uncomfortable.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

Posted on

Floating ice urn makes for a unique eco-friendly memorial

This one-of-a-kind urn floats on the water while slowly returning cremated remains to nature.

By Melissa Breyer

As you may have heard, humans have a death problem. It’s not that humans die; it’s that once they do, the still-alive humans of many cultures bury the newly-dead humans in the ground. Given that there are some 7.7 billion of us on the planet currently … well, you can see where this is going. Add in the environmental impact of burying a casket’s sturdy materials and a few gallons of toxic embalming fluid along with it and it’s no wonder that more people are looking into alternative funeral ideas.

There have been some really beautiful, eco-friendly memorial products designed over the last decade or so, like biodegradable urns that use one’s ashes in which to grow a tree. But my jaw dropped when I saw this one, the Flow Ice Urn, which floats on the water while slowly releasing ashes in an unapologetically pure way. It is simple yet beautiful; and it brings to mind other funeral traditions that are intrinsically tied to the idea of returning the body to nature.

And while scattering ashes on a body of water is understandably popular, I love the inherent ceremony in watching an ice urn, and the ashes within, float and gradually dissolve into the sea. It would be just as ephemeral as scattering, but a bit more formal – and just so poetic.

The ice urn was designed by Diane Leclair Bisson, who approached the design with the creativity of an artist and the thoughtfulness an anthropologist. As her website notes, “her research into contemporary burial practices, and the preservation or the scattering of ashes has also engaged her in a reflection about materiality, which has guided the design of a new typology of objects and materials.”

Bisson notes, “The Ice Urn is a deeply sustainable object in its essence. The concept of making a dissolvable memorial object through the transformation of water into a solid form of ice – while encapsulating cremation ashes within it – is truly innovative. It is the most immaterial urn ever created, and it inspires new types of water ceremonies as well as a completely new approach to the idea of burial itself – emphasizing new thinking about the return of the body to the natural environment, and of water back to its original source.”

The Flow was originally designed for Memoria, a progressive funeral home group based in Montreal. But now Biolife, LLC, the developer of other eco-focused urns, has obtained the exclusive license to produce and market the patented ice urn in the United States.

Julia Duchastel, Vice President of Memoria explains that they spent years developing and perfecting the ice urn, noting that is is a proven and patented product that has been well tested tested at their funeral home locations in Montreal.

“Many people form a strong connection with the ocean, lakes, or rivers throughout their lives. Water is a truly extraordinary molecule – it is what makes life on earth possible,” says Duchastel. “Throughout history and across cultures, it has persisted as a symbol of life, renewal, and purity. With this connection to water, many people choose to have their ashes freed in the water after they pass. With the Flow™ ice urn families have a new and improved water burial option to honor a loved one and say goodbye in a more beautiful, meaningful, and memorable way.”

The urn is available at funeral homes; you can see more information on the ice urn page at The Living Urn.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!