After-Death Care: Do It Yourself or Do It with Support?

My gramma was born in 1916 in rural Manitoba to a farming family. During one of my many visits with her, she began reflecting on experiences she remembered having with her mom (my great-grandma) as a young girl at the age 4 or 5 years old when a neighbour died. It seems that my great-grandma was one of the women in the community who would be called upon to help lay out the dead and it wasn’t unusual for her to bring one of her children with her, including my grandma. My grandma talked about watching her mom, and other women of the community, bathe and dress the deceased on the dining table in the deceased’s family home, and ready them to be placed into a handmade coffin. The deceased, in their coffin, would be carried to a horse-drawn cart, and all who had gathered would travel to the cemetery for burial. There were many aspects of my grandma’s musings on this practice of community deathcare that struck me, but most of all, that this was a common practice in (likely) many rural communities in Canada within the last 100 years!

This training had ingrained in me that professionals are the ones who care for our dead, not the community of the dead.

Why were my grandma’s revelations so remarkable to me? I had been working in conventional funeral service for a number of years by this time and had been largely influenced by all that I had been taught in funeral school and by my mentors in the funeral homes I worked for. This training had ingrained in me that professionals are the ones who care for our dead, not the community of the dead.

We were taught about “exceptions” to this, usually as it related to certain cultures and faith-based communities who still tend to their dead. Even then, however, it was assumed that those families would first contact a funeral home to help them with some of the logistics involved with after-death practices (in some cases, this would also include physical care of the deceased, such as embalming). This monochromatic view of funeral practices has also become a “norm” in how the public understands after-death services to be offered and have become heavily reliant on conventional funeral homes to wholly look after their dead.

My curiosity grew around this concept of community deathcare (a term I learned after I had left the world of conventional funeral service and started my own deathcare practice), particularly as I also compared it to my Maori lineage and their deathcare rituals (Tangi) which are also highly community led, leading me to learn about modern home funerals, home vigils, and all that those rituals involved.

If you’ve never had the opportunity to attend or be involved in a home funeral, they are, in a word, incredible. Incredibly beautiful. Incredibly real. Incredibly healing. Incredibly supportive. Incredible.

The very first home funeral that I participated in was led by one of the daughters of the deceased (I’ll refer to the daughter as “Dee”). Dee had been caring for her mom at home as she declined cognitively and physically, allowing her time to consider how she wanted her mom to be cared for when she died. Dee couldn’t imagine strangers taking her mom’s body away from her home after death and having a funeral home looking after her, not after all the loving care that Dee had so willingly provided to her mom as she was dying. As she explored her options, Dee came across the concept of having a home funeral and knew this is what she wanted for herself and for her mom when she died. Dee took a home funeral course, teaching people how to provide physical care for a deceased body, how to incorporate rituals and ceremonies at home and where home funerals intersect with conventional funeral operations (such as registering a death, providing transportation for the deceased and coordinating the burial or cremation with a cemetery or crematorium). She shared her learnings with her family, some of whom were not at all comfortable with the idea of the family doing this work and not a funeral home. When her mom died, Dee drew on what she had been learning about home funerals and leaned into the tasks ahead. She knew to keep the room they would keep their mom in as cool as possible. She and other family members cleansed and laid out their mom for a multi-day vigil and home funeral ceremony. The tasks they were practising turned into rituals and ceremonies. When they weren’t directly with their mom in her funeral bed, her essence was all around them in the photos, the knick knacks and the food being prepared. The comfort and familiarity of being in the home their mom had been living in with Dee for several years eased the initial awkwardness and uncertainty of how to “home funeral”. By the end of their vigiling and ceremonies, Dee exuded a grace and deep appreciation for the healing and acceptance that was transforming her grief and sadness.

In my role as a deathcare provider, I was invited to help Dee’s family coordinate a day and time for a witness cremation and drive her mom to the crematorium. Dee was in the car with me, her mom in a cremation casket in the back and the rest of the family driving behind our car. As we drove, Dee talked freely about what the past few days had meant for her and then, with a deep exhale, she turned in her seat, gazing at her mom’s cremation casket, and said that she was ready for her mom’s cremation to take place, she was ready to let her go. This was a profound declaration for me, as in all my years of working as a professional in the deathcare space, I had never witnessed this level of acceptance in such a relatively short period of time.

Since my first home funeral experience with Dee and her family, I’ve come to appreciate how much learning Dee had to do and support she needed to garner to be able to pay such a loving tribute to her mom. It’s a lot and it’s not for everyone or even accessible to everyone. Most people aren’t aware that home funerals are even possible, let alone have the gift of time to prepare to do it. A lot of planning in advance needs to take place to be as prepared as you can to keep one who has died at home under any kind of circumstance and also manage the administrative requirements to look after the burial or cremation. Most importantly, you need to have a community of support around you so that you are not overwhelmed with the experience. My training as a funeral director prepared me to understand how professionals can handle all aspects of deathcare. Realizing that people like Dee, however, who want to continue their care of their people even after death, aren’t equipped with the knowledge, experience and access to practical details of looking after the dead without intense “training” beforehand, I saw that I could authentically support people to benefit from aspects of community deathcare with my experience as a licensed professional, by expanding my offerings to help where help was needed, giving a modern hybrid home funeral approach. This is quite a departure from most conventional funeral home services that I had experienced, where, once asked to help with looking after “funeral arrangements”, the funeral home almost entirely takes over on behalf of the family of the deceased.

I hold two licences in BC’s funeral industry, one as a funeral director and the other as an embalmer. For anyone who knows my work and what my deathcare business values are rooted in, eco deathcare practices, it may seem contradictory for me to continue to keep an embalming licence. Embalming, afterall, is not an environmentally friendly procedure. However, what my embalming licence gave me was extraordinary experience with and important knowledge about working with deceased bodies. Once I understood that I had a role to play in reintroducing my client families to a modern version of community deathcare, I began to encourage client families to participate as much as they wanted and were able to, in caring for their dead. I leaned on the knowledge and experience I gained as an active embalmer to guide client families through cleansing and preparing their dead. I began taking stock of the knowledge I had from conventional embalming and decedent care practices and altered them to suit a natural method of preparing our dead, one that was approachable for the non-professional, one that would be more recognizable by my great-grandma.

I am not alone in this modern approach to community deathcare. We are in a fortunate period of having deathcare practitioners, death doulas and end of life educators who are eager to share their learnings and experience with folks, providing them with information so that they can make informed decisions about the after-death care they would like for their dead. However, despite this resurgence of interest in end of life matters, there still exists a barrier in our choices today preventing what was common practice, community deathcare. To that I say, “keep spreading the word!”.

I’ve now spent almost half of my 23 years in funeral services working as an independent deathcare provider and in that time I’ve altered my approach to after-deathcare. I’ve shared with client families the idea that they can have a home funeral or a home vigil and not be breaking the law, I’ve encouraged families to help prepare their dead and to spend as much time as they can with them, whether that’s in a private home, in a local hospice setting, or at KORU’s place of practice. All of these experiences leave me seeing great value in the concept of bridging the old ways of community deathcare with the modern conventional funeral services so that people can be supported to freely be with their dead, on their terms, helping them reach a level of acceptance (as Dee did), of deeply acknowledging that their person has died and their bodies need to be let go of. To get there, without feeling destroyed or in denial of either of those realities, is indescribably healing when the rawness of grief seems bottomless.

I encourage anyone who reads this blog to reach out to me, to another trusted community deathcare practitioner or death doula to find out how you and your people can blend the old timey after-death practices into your modern end of life plans.

In community,

Ngaio Davis