Home funerals -- the right to control your after-death

By Cory Doctorow at 11:30 pm Tuesday, Jun 7

The rising cost of death has sparked a nationwide trend to home funerals. It's being compared to the hospice movement, "which since the 1960s has helped the terminally ill die peacefully at home" -- home funerals let people control what happens after they die, too. However, some lawmakers are raising barriers to home funerals that are intended to send more business to funeral homes.

His body, washed and dressed in his favorite clothes, lay in the master bedroom, cooled by dry ice and open windows, and surrounded by fresh flowers, burning candles, family photographs and mementos of his many years as a lawyer, civil servant and father of four. Like a small number of other bereaved in the Washington area and nationally, Judy Saul chose to care for her husband's body for several days at home.

Once the hospice nurse who came to certify the death had convinced the D.C. coroner's office that keeping the deceased at home was legal -- as it is in the District and all but five states (Connecticut, Delaware, Indiana, Nebraska and New York) -- Saul and a friend, Sally Craig, had prepared her husband's body with the assistance of Beth Knox, a "funeral rites" educator whom Saul had met two months before.

Link (via Futurismic)