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End-of-life decision making
Enjoying the golden years
Including suicide and assisted suicide
Plus memorials and requiems
Narrative Medicine (or medical narrative) and illness memoir |
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Caskets and Urns
You can buy caskets from the funeral home, or you can buy them directly from the manufacturer or from discount stores such as Costco and Walmart . Here's advice and a price sheet from one wholesaler.
If a lower-cost casket is not on display in the funeral home showroom, ask to see one. You can also rent a casket for the funeral, to house a less expensive container that is used for burial or cremation.
Do not pay extra for a "protective" casket with rubber gaskets. ( Here's why, from 13+ Things A Funeral Director Wont Tell You (Michelle Crouch, Reader's Digest, 6-2011)
Funeria ( beautiful handcrafted containers for ashes)
Kent Caskets, simple pine caskets, biodegradable, designed for natural green burials and cremations and for Orthodox Jewish burials
Natural Burial Company, in its Good Funeral Store offers a range of products that may make you smile, from bamboo pet coffins and dog-bone urns to shrouds and an interesting array of human coffins
Renaissance Urn Company
Trappist caskets and urns . Handmade caskets and urns, from the monks of New Melleray
Urns of Remembrance (urns handcrafted from redwood, by a woodworker in Fort Bragg, California)
Some alternatives:
LifeGem (creates diamonds from locks of hair or cremated remains)
Eternal Reefs (replaces cremation urns and ash scattering with a permanent environmental living legacy)
[Back to Top] Cremation and crematories
Cremation, Consumer Resource Guide (International Cemetery, Cremation and Funeral Association, ICCFA, an industry group)
Cremation Explained, Answers to Frequently Asked Questions (Funeral Consumers Alliance, a consumers advocacy group)
Jewish views on burial and cremation (and other interesting links)
Round Trip to the Crematory (Len Finegold,Funeral Consumers Alliance of Greater Philadelphia). Report on an informal information-sharing tour.
See also Caskets and Urns
Dead Stop . National Public Radio visits strange, funny, historic and notable gravesites and cemeteries across America in this quirky series you can listen to online.
Deep Grief: Creating Meaning From Mourning (Linton Weeks, NPR, 2-9-10). Some parents in deep grief are creating memorials that celebrate the child's spirit in meaningful ways.
Directing Your Final Exit: Lessons from Nora Ephron about Death and Dying (Susan Soper, Legacy.com blog, 7-23-12). And here's a Huffington Post story (with photos) about Nora Ephron's funeral
Do It Yourself Funerals, transcript of a session of NPR's Morning Edition, The End of Life: Exploring Death in America (reporter Jacki Lyden interviewing George Foy, father of a deceased infant, Lisa Carlson, president of Funeral and Memorial Societies of America, Jan Berman, daughter of a woman who died of AIDS, Thomas Lynch, mortician, poet, and author)
Do-it-yourself or pre-need coffins from the oddly named Outhouse Charlie's Tradin' Post ( (here's a story about them in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer). Check out also MHP Casket Kits (apparently a casket is the same as a coffin, but when it's more expensive you call it a coffin. The Sandler casket kit, also from MHP; casket plans from Casket Furniture. Some of these are designer for pre-need use--for example, as a storage box or a coffee table. Can someone who has actually built their own casket or coffin tell me about the experience, and where you got your plans, kit, etc., and if you recommend the process and the source?
Families Turning to Do-It-Yourself Home Funerals (video) Mike Sugarman, CBS5, interviews Jerrigrace Lyons of Final Passages ("I call myself a death midwife"), a video that shows the dignity of the home viewing, or read the story here. There's a more detailed interview, Caring for Your Dead (Ann Kreilkamp's interview with Jerrigrace Lyons in Crone Chronicles).Or go directly to Final Passages, Lyons' website.
FTC keeps Funeral Rule lapses buried: Plain Dealing (Sheryl Harris, The Plain Dealer, 9-8-12). Undercover investigators for the Federal Trade Commission found violations in twelve Cleveland-area funeral homes, but issued its fines in secrecy. Why protect funeral homes instead of the public?
*** Funeral Consumers Alliance (protecting a consumer's right to choose a meaningful, dignified, affordable funeral--this nonprofit is not connected with the funeral industry). Learn state laws. Order Before I Go Funeral Planning Kit. Keep up to date on the FCA blog, The Daily Dirge
Funerals remain a segregated business in the South. "Helpful Hands on Life's Last Segregated Journey" by Kim Severson (NY Times, 6-23-12). Severson interviews Charles Menendez on the art of embalming and the art of handling different types of grief. "If Sunday remains the most segregated day in the South, funerals remain the most segregated business," writes Severson. "In the same way that generations of tradition dictate the churches people attend, the races tend to bury their own."
Funeral Music. This is an important and often enjoyable (because nostalgic) part of funeral planning. Here are recommended selections, with links to music samples.
Handbook for Mortals (full text online of consumer guide to end-of-life care by Joanne Lynn and Joan Harrold)
The High Cost of Dying: Funerals, Burials Can Be Expensive by John S. DeMott (AARP Bulletin). There are lower-cost options, and ways to resist sales pressure.
How to Inspect a Crematory for Above-Board Operation (Funeral Consumers Alliance)
How to Plan a Funeral and avoid being pressured into unnecessary purchases (Caroline Mayer, Next Avenue, PBS)
In death, a promise for the future. As her world diminished, Elizabeth Uyehara signed her body over to researchers to help unravel the mystery of Lou Gehrig's disease. (Thomas Curwen, Los Angeles Times, 8-28-10, on the course of Uyehara's ALS and on what happens when organs are donated for science)
Letting Children Share in Grief (Catherine Saint Louis, NY Times, 9-19-12). New attitudes toward children and funerals--and grief camps, too.
Living Consciously, Dying Gracefully - A Journey with Cancer and Beyond by Nancy Manahan and Becky Bohan (how Diane Manahan chose to live life fully at the end and die at home)
Military Funeral Honors (site sponsored by the Department of Defense)
Music for Funerals and Memorial Services
My Funeral Choices (simple one-page worksheet, Caring Connections)
Nudity, profanity, and music energize Roger Eberts raucous Chicago memorial (Nathan Rabin, A.V. Club, 4-15-13) "Death has a way of washing away sins and transforming people into paper saints. But the joyous memorial for Roger Ebert at the Chicago Theatre last Thursday night was a celebration of an unabashed sinner, a man of rapacious appetites and a lust for life that carried him through years of intense trauma."
Online cemeteries and memorials:
'Living headstones' use technology to honor the dead (Susan Gilmore, Seattle Times 7-31-11).A Seattle monument maker affixes a small QR or "quick-response" code (like a bar code, but square) to the tombstone. A smartphone with the right application lets visitors read the person's life history online.
High-tech headstones speak from beyond the grave. They use QR codes to link to photos and videos of the dearly departed. (Jeff Strickler, Minneapolis Star Tribute, 7-14-12)
Technology Brings Digital Memories to Grave Sites (Bellamy Pailthorp, NPR's All Things Considered, 5-30-11--listen or read). A Seattle company is adding "quick-read" codes to gravestones, allowing cemetery visitors to connect with the dead's life stories.
The AIDS Memorial at The Body
Eternal Flames
Imorial (create a free online memorial)
Remembered.com
Sadly Missed
The Virtual Memorial Garden
The Virtual Wall (Vietnam Veterans Memorial)
Worldwide Cemetery
R.I.P. Off (Barry Yeoman, in a piece that ran in AARP Magazine in 2008, on funeral-industry scandal that's fleecing thousands of Americans. Read this before buying any "pre-need funerals"--that is, pre-need contracts for funerals)
Symbolism in (Irish) Cemeteries (RIP.ie)
Taking Chance Home (Marine Lieutenant Colonel Strobl's simple and moving account of escorting the remains of Lance Corporal Chance Phelps home from Dover Air Force Base). You can watch HBO's film based on the story, Taking Chance, starring Kevin Bacon. Or check out the Chance Phelps Foundation.
**** 13+ Things A Funeral Director Wont Tell You (Michelle Crouch, slideshow from Reader's Digest Magazine, June/July 2011). The first of many excellent money-saving secrets provided: Don't pre-pay for your funeral; the firm can go out of business. Keep your money in a pay-on-death account at your bank. Another tip: Many funeral homes don't offer a refrigerated holding room because they want you to pay for the more expensive option: embalming.
The Undertaking (PBS Frontline program featuring Thomas Lynch, funeral director in a small Michigan town, documenting funeral arrangements and families' reactions to grief), watch online, buy the DVD, or read the transcript. You can also read the online chat with producers Miri Navasky and Karen O'Connor (Washington Post, 10-31-07)
Veterans death and survivor benefits. The following sources vary in clarity, level of detail, user-friendliness, so check them all and let me know if you find something better:
Veterans resources (Funeral home Money & King's useful page: Who is eligible? How do you apply? Reimbursement of burial expenses. Burial Flags. Burial in national VA cemeteries. Headstones and markers. Presidential memorial certificates.)
Survivors and Dependents Benefits (Death After Active Service) (U.S. Dept of Veterans Affairs) and a page to lead you to info particularly for benefits for a veteran, parent, spouse, or child
Veterans' burial in cemeteries . Many state veterans cemeteries provide free burial for veterans and often for veterans' spouses.
Military Connections on Veteran Burial Benefits. Click on links for Military Funerals, Veteran Headstones or Marker, Presidential Memorial Certificate, and so on.
Survivors' veteran burial benefits (click on button for whether service member died in service or after)
Death Pension Benefits (for Widows,Widowers, and Dependent Children
How to Claim Veterans Death Benefits
Who Has the Right to Make Decisions About Your Funeral? (Funeral Consumers Alliance, state laws on personal preferences)
Your last chance to be a big spender: The Funeral A willingness to cater to individual tastes is helping the funeral industry hold its own during the recession.
Green Funerals
See also Home funerals and family-directed funerals
"There are about 20 'green' cemeteries in America right now, essentially open fields," writes John S. DeMott, in The High Cost of Dying: Funerals, Burials Can Be Expensive (AARP Bulletin). "Markers are made from local rock, and some families dispense with them in favor of GPS coordinates. "Joshua Slocum of the Funeral Consumers Alliance says theres nothing really new about 'green' funerals except calling them that. 'Its the oldest, most traditional form of burial,' he says. 'A simple burial in a simple wood box without chemicals or a concrete vault. Jews and Muslims have practiced it for thousands of years.'"
Aquamation: A Greener Alternative to Cremation? (Marina Kamenev, Time Science, 9-28-10, on an approach being tried in Australia)
Centre for Natural Burial (locate a natural burial site, operating or in development)
Dying to Be Green (Susan J. Tweit, Audobon Magazine on Green Funerals)
Green Burial Council FAQs and Fiction
Grave Matters (a journey from the funeral industry to home funerals and natural, green burial)
A Guide to Green Burials (Reader's Digest)
Green Planting: Eco-Friendly Burials Catching On (Frank Nelson, Pacific Standard, 5-14-09). "The numbers are still small and even proponents admit to a whiff of fad, but backers of green burials see their way of death as the wave of the future." Every year the death care industry "buries millions of tons of valuable resources wood and metal coffins, and concrete grave liners along with embalmed bodies containing countless gallons of toxic formaldehyde." But "cremation, with its discharge of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide and other airborne pollutants, including a few nasty ones like mercury vapor from teeth fillings, is not especially kind to the environment either."
Natural Transitions (a nonprofit resource center providing education about conscious, holistic, and green approaches to end of life, including family-directed after-death care)
Options for Green Burials on the Rise (Newsweek, The Daily Beast, 8-26-10). More Americans are choosing to decompose directly into the earth.
Green Options (People's Memorial). " The Industrial Revolution brought us formaldehyde-based embalming and the rise of the modern funeral industry with a plethora of manufactured merchandisecaskets made of painted steel, precious metals or hardwoods; concrete burial vaults and granite cemetery markers. . . In most cultures, what we now call green burial was standard practice."
Memorial Ecosystems (green cemeteries--see its FAQs)
Forest of Memories (natural burial funeral and cemetery associations)
Natural Burial Company
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Home Funerals and Family-Directed Funerals
See also Green Funerals
National organizations important to home funerals:
National Home Funeral Alliance
Green Burial Council
Funeral Consumers Alliance (see its FAQs).
Caring for Our Own Dead (Ann Kreilkamp's interview with Jerrigrace Lyons of Final Passages (("I call myself a death midwife," birthing death) in Crone Chronicles). Or go directly to Final Passages, Lyons' website.
What is a home funeral?
A movement to bring grief back home (many grieving families are opting to bypass the funeral industry), story by Rachel Cox for the Washington Post 2-5-05
Bringing Funerals Home (personally decorated caskets shown in videos of home funerals, Sacred Crossings)
My Ideal Funeral . Tenderness. Trust. Mortician Caitlin Doughty closes with a luminous photo essay on home care (Fortnight, 3-5-12). A series of photos shot in Topanga, CA, showing Caitlin help a family wash, dress, and shroud the dead, then take her to a grave and put her directly into the ground to let her body decompose naturally. Photos by Darren Blackburn.
Do It Yourself Funerals, transcript of a session of NPR's Morning Edition, The End of Life: Exploring Death in America (reporter Jacki Lyden interviewing George Foy, father of a deceased infant, Lisa Carlson, president of Funeral and Memorial Societies of America, Jan Berman, daughter of a woman who died of AIDS, Thomas Lynch, mortician, poet, and author)
Crying and Digging: Reclaiming the realities and rituals of death (Nancy Rommelman, for Los Angeles Times Magazine, 2-6-05)
Everything you need to know about funerals, cremation, burial, embalming, green funerals, and much more (FAQs, many helpful articles from Funeral Consumers Alliance)
Home Burials Offer an Intimate Alternative (Katie Zezima, NY Times, 7-20-90)
Home Funeral Directory
Organizations in several states that help consumers navigate a home funeral (Funeral Consumers Alliance)
Crossings: Caring for Our Own at Death
Home funeral directory (resources for home funerals or family-directed funerals, by state)
Books and Stories About Family-Directed Funerals
If you purchase anything after clicking on an Amazon.com link below, we get a small commission, which helps support the costs of maintaining this site.
A movement to bring grief back home, a Washington Post story by Rachel Cos, suggests sources of more information on family-directed funerals.
Caring for the Dead: Your Final Act of Love, Upper Access, 1998, by Lisa Carlson. A complete guide for those making funeral arrangements with or without a funeral director. Covers funeral law state by state. $29.95 from the Funeral Consumers Alliance or $18.87 from Amazon.com. Available at many libraries.
Celebrating a Life: Planning Memorial Services and Other Creative Remembrances by Faith Moore (foreword by Letitia Baldrige)
Funerals Without God: A Practical Guide to Non-Religious Funerals by Jane Wynne Wilson, a handbook geared to humanist ceremonies in Great Britain, where they are more common.
Final Rights: Reclaiming the American Way of Death by Joshua Slocum and Lisa Carlson
Grave Matters: A Journey Through the Modern Funeral Industry to a Natural Way of Burial by environmental columnist Mark Harris (a well-written and informative survey of the costs, processes, and effects of various burial options (from traditional funeral with embalming to cremation to various eco-friendly green-funeral options, including burial at sea or on ones own land), with graphic descriptions of embalming, rotting, etc.
Living Into Dying: A Journal of Spiritual, Practical Deathcare for Family and Community, 2002, by Nancy Jewel Poer. $23 from crossings.net or from Amazon.com
Planning a Celebration of Life, A Simple Guide for Turning a Memorial Service into a Celebration of Life
Rest in Peace: Insider's Tips to the Low Cost Less Stress Funeral by R. Brian Burkhardt
Crossings publishes a resource guide containing educational, inspirational, and practical tools needed to plan a home funeral. Available for $55 at crossings.net.
Dying: A Book of Comfort
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~ The Book of Common Prayer
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Planning for a Funeral
(Advice from the Federal Trade Commission)
1. Shop around in advance. Compare prices from at least two funeral homes. Remember that you can supply your own casket or urn.
2. Ask for a price list. The law requires funeral homes to give you written price lists for products and services.
3. Resist pressure to buy goods and services you don't really want or need.
4. Avoid emotional overspending. It's not necessary to have the fanciest casket or the most elaborate funeral to properly honor a loved one.
5. Recognize your rights. Laws regarding funerals and burials vary from state to state. It's a smart move to know which goods or services the law requires you to purchase and which are optional.
6. Apply the same smart shopping techniques you use for other major purchases. You can cut costs by limiting the viewing to one day or one hour before the funeral, and by dressing your loved one in a favorite outfit instead of costly burial clothing.
7. Plan ahead. It allows you to comparison shop without time constraints, creates an opportunity for family discussion, and lifts some of the burden from your family.
BUY NOW: Dying: A Book of Comfort
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BUY NOW: Dying: A Book of Comfort
MOVIES about death, dying, funerals, farewells, and departures
If you purchase anything after clicking on an Amazon.com link below, we get a small commission, which helps support the costs of maintaining this site. You can also rent the movies from Netflix, among other options (for example, many libraries have good video collections)
As It Is in Heaven. "Romantic and funny, this deeply felt ode to love is a roller-coaster ride of emotions," wrote Variety, and I agree. As a bonus, the hero of this lovable Swedish film is played by Michael Nyqvist, co-star of the movies based on the Stieg Larsson "Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" trilogy.
Departures. A Japanese film about a very tender way to say goodbye.
Four Weddings and a Funeral. A romantic comedy starring Hugh Grant and Kristin Scott Thomas.
Taking Chance, HBO's gem of a film, starring Kevin Bacon. Based on Marine Lieutenant Colonel Strobl's simple and moving account of escorting the remains of Lance Corporal Chance Phelps home from Dover Air Force Base. Shows the dignified way marines, airmen, and sailors are escorted home to their families and loved ones. Based on Taking Chance Home
Tuesdays With Morrie, with Jack Lemmon and Hank Azaria, based on Mitch Albom's nonfiction bestseller. See also the movie based on Albom's The Five People You Meet in Heaven
After Life (in the days between whatever killed them and the moment they're buried, characters in this movie are no longer alive but can still move and communicate -- only with the character played by Liam Neeson). This film got mixed reviews.
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Green Funerals Are Nothing New
"There are about 20 'green' cemeteries in America right now, essentially open fields," writes John S. DeMott, in The High Cost of Dying: Funerals, Burials Can Be Expensive (AARP Bulletin). "Markers are made from local rock, and some families dispense with them in favor of GPS coordinates.
"Joshua Slocum of the Funeral Consumers Alliance says theres nothing really new about 'green' funerals except calling them that. 'Its the oldest, most traditional form of burial,' he says. 'A simple burial in a simple wood box without chemicals or a concrete vault. Jews and Muslims have practiced it for thousands of years.'"
Tell all my mourners
To mourn in red --
Cause there ain't no sense
In my bein' dead.
~ Langston Hughes, "Wake"
"Green burial provides us with a way of getting in sync with the natural process of death, decay, and regeneration, rather than having to stave it off, as conventional deathcare demands."~ Joe Sehee, Founder/Executive Director, Green Burial Council
"I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man if he spent less time proving that he can outwit Nature and more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority."
~ E.B. White
"When I die dont bury me
In a box in a cemetery
Out in the garden would be much better
I could be pushin up homegrown tomatoes."
~ Guy Clark, Homegrown Tomatoes
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