The Casketeers -- Maori Funeral Directors, Now on Netflix

Plan Your Funeral -- Now

A mortician urges us to acknowledge that death is inevitable and make our wishes known:

Every mortician I know has a bevy of similar horror stories—but they’re probably not the stories you’re imagining. They are not stories about zombies. Our stories are much worse because they actually come true. We can recount in detail the terrifying tales of what goes wrong if you die unexpectedly and your family is unprepared to make your funeral arrangements. I know most of you don’t think you’re going to die, but I’m here with some rough news: Death is the appointment none of us can cancel.

Most important--talk to your family and get the right forms signed:

First and foremost: paperwork! Without a legal document authorizing someone specific to handle your funeral arrangements, there’s an order of priority for people who are authorized to make these decisions for you. Your legal spouse comes first. If you don’t have a spouse, your adult children come next. After that are your parents and then your siblings. In fact, there’s a legal hierarchy that you can follow all the way down to your second cousins, if need be.
Luckily, paperwork is an easy way to supersede the next-of-kin list. You can specify exactly who you want to make your funeral arrangements and honor your wishes in a legal document. The most effective document to accomplish this is called a Durable Power of Attorney for Health Care (DPOAHC). This document also allows for your designated agent to make medical decisions for you, which makes it different from a regular ol’ Durable Power of Attorney. You can have one drawn up with a lawyer or you can simply get one online, but there needs to be an included paragraph that specifies you are also designating your agent the right to control your funeral arrangements.

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Funeral Industry Seeks Ways to Stay Relevant - WSJ

As more Americans choose cremation—often dispensing with the need for caskets, burial plots and dreary rituals—the funeral industry is reinventing itself. The goal: stay relevant and avoid a plunge in profit. 

“This industry was really built around selling a casket,” Thomas Ryan, chief executive of Service Corp. International, the largest U.S. operator of funeral homes, said in an interview. “Now it’s really about remembering the person.” 

That can mean elaborate pageantry. “We don’t call it a funeral service,” said Brad Rex, chief executive of Foundation Partners Group, which owns 50 funeral homes and nine cemeteries in 14 states. “We call it a gathering.”

Funeral Industry Seeks Ways to Stay Relevant - WSJ

At Their Request, There Will Be No Service | Eunice Friesen | TEDxGrande...

Hey Funeral Directors, Get the Hell Out of the Way! | The Order of the Good Death

I love this description of different ways that this funeral director worked with families to make the funeral process individual and meaningful, like this one:

A family came to me recently after they lost their son in a tragic accident. All they wanted was to create some kind of meaning in the face of the total chaos of emotion that they were swimming through. They had gone to another low cost funeral home that had no interest in listening to the family’s questions or entertaining any kind of notion out of the standard operating procedure: pick-up, cremate, return ashes.

The family only had a couple of needs: They wanted to be sure they got their son back from the mysterious cremation process, and they wanted to make the container that he was going to be cremated in. It wasn’t a very tall order – they just needed us to walk them through the exact process of identification, transport and cremation, so they could have the assurance that at every point there was a procedure to identify him. The family did not want to use the cardboard container used for most cremations, as they strongly felt their son needed something more personal. After 45 minutes of brainstorming options the dad came up with a brilliant idea – he was going to handcraft a surfboard shaped cremation tray. The family could come together to decorate the surfboard and write messages on it. What they came back with was beyond my wildest expectations. It was a beautifully handcrafted surfboard that was perfect to be used as a cremation tray. It was decorated with as much precision, love and care as anyone could ever muster and it was covered in loving handwritten messages to send him off on his next journey. This wasn’t another numbered body being shuttled into the cremation chamber, this was a life cut way too short, and he was riding a stunning example of craftsmanship and dedication on a wave of love to the other side.

Hey Funeral Directors, Get the Hell Out of the Way! | The Order of the Good Death

Caitlin Doughty, Artisanal Undertaker - The New Yorker

An excellent article about the movement to reclaim the way we deal with death -- to literally bring it home.

Caitlin Doughty, who was about to open her first funeral parlor, in Los Angeles, gazed at a skull that she had put on display above the desk in her office. Although it was plaster, the skull was a provocative presence in a room where Doughty planned to receive grieving families. It was mid-June, and that afternoon John Gettys, a field representative of the California Cemetery and Funeral Bureau, was coming to give the business a final inspection. Doughty, who is thirty, said, “I want the office to look like me, but I don’t want it to look too Arty Death Hipster.” 

Caitlin Doughty, Artisanal Undertaker - The New Yorker:

Working: How does a funeral director work?

 "Slate’s L.V. Anderson interviews James Donofrio, a funeral director at Blair Mazzarella Funeral Home. Donofrio explains the effects of always being on the clock, how he prepares for an overseas funeral, and why a funeral director needs to know about every religion.

In a Slate Plus extra, Donofrio talks about a call he received to disinter 50 bodies, and where he gets the urns and stones used for his services. "



Working: How does a funeral director work?

Reinventing Death for the Twenty-First Century

 "Increased longevity paired with ageing baby boomers means that our older population is growing at record speed — a phenomenon in developed countries from the UK to Japan. According to Professor David Clark, a researcher in end-of-life care at the University of Glasgow: “We’re seeing what we regard as a massive global issue. There’s a huge wave of dying, death and bereavement.” At the moment about one million people die each week around the world; within 40 years, that number is expected to double.



 Compounding the impact of this wave of death is the fact that, for many, the rituals, artefacts and meaning once found in religion no longer provide emotional solace. In the most recent UK census from 2011, the proportion of the population who reported they have no religion reached a quarter — growing to 25.1 per cent from 14.8 per cent a decade ago. A rising trend of agnosticism, atheism and non-affiliation with religion has also been surveyed in countries including France and the US.



 Dissatisfaction with legacy service providers and striking shifts in demographics have converged to make alternative ways of dealing with death — that universal experience — in demand. Today’s broadly secular society, especially one in which more of us will soon be dying than ever before, has to find contemporary strategies for death.



A new generation of designers are responding to this call, with novel and challenging ways of thinking. When well-designed technology can help improve our every living moment, why should it desert us in death?"



Reinventing Death for the Twenty-First Century — Medium

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Mourning a Mother by Helping Others Who Mourn

Grief Has No Age | National Alliance for Grieving Children: "Every day I think of her and what could have been, but I also know that I would be different, my path in life would have been different. Death is a part of life, but when you experience the loss of a parent as a young child without the proper tools grief is very hard to work through.

This life was handed to me because I am strong enough to live it and if I can be of help to just one person, one child, then it has been worth all the pain.

This is my life's purpose, this writing (righting) here, right now.... My story.

Grief has no time limit, no age.

I was put on this earth to change the future for someone, and in a beautiful way I am finally finding closure -- because I too, am still a grieving child.

"



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