Dear friend,

I sent much of the following to a number of leaders in the home funeral
movement last November. The silence was deafening. Therefore, I am
sending this out again, to the entire NHFA membership and others,
because it is such a serious issue. I’ve also added a new concern about
FTC violations when some are acting as “funeral providers.”

As a grandmother to the home funeral movement since 1987, I have been
thrilled to see the interest in home funerals taking hold around the
country. And how wonderful that there are significant learning
opportunities to help spread this movement.

However, I am growing alarmed at one of the trends I see: women
(typically) calling themselves death midwives (not just home funeral
guides) and asking to be paid for being present with the body, to help
prepare the body, get the paperwork, and transport the body. Why am I
alarmed? For two reasons. One, it is “acting as a funeral director”
without a license. When the industry gets riled enough (as they have
been in Oregon with a new law now in place to “limit deathcare
consultants” and in Pennsylvania where one woman was threatened with a
$10,000 fine for having a home funeral for her mother with her sister’s
help), there are likely to be measures taken to limit the possibilities
for home funerals altogether, to take away that right that we have in
all but eight states. That would be tragic! [These same hands-on folks
would be considered "funeral providers" by the FTC and are in violation
of the FTC Funeral Rule if they don't have a General Price List of
itemized options and choices from which the family may choose. That's a
$16,000 violation.]

Secondly, the very activities that some of these death midwives are
doing or offering to do thwart the therapeutic involvement for friends
and relatives. Having something to do takes away the sense of
helplessness. Those in the helping professions often have an enormous
need to feel needed, and this can lead to overbearing behavior. In at
least one situation I know of, the personality of the helper was so
aggressive that she offended others. She was also in violation of the
NHFA’s own Code of Ethics: “Home funeral guides do not seek to conduct
the after-death care themselves.”

Of his wife Ann’s death, Jack Manning wrote “No Grey Suits: End of Life
as a Team Sport <http://nogreysuits.org>.” I’ve put together a checklist
of the kinds of activities Jack assigned to those around him when he
needed help. He didn’t pay them. They all felt privileged to be asked,
to be included in such an intimate way. I am hoping that this checklist
will be helpful to the home funeral educators, too. It’s fine to charge
a fee for a workshop or written materials, but any hands-on activities
at a time of death should be *given away for free* in order to stay
within the law. That’s also consistent with the practices of religious
groups that bury their own dead without charge or the Colonial women of
the community who were the layers out of the dead.

When a death occurs, many people don’t know what to say or how to act.
They might add to their condolences, “Please call if I can do
something.,” not being at all sure what they could really do. That is
the time to ask for help, especially*ahead of time* when the death is
expected. Not all of these will apply to every home funeral, of course.

Who will–

  *   Help with notifying family and friends, by phone or e-mail,
    Facebook or Twitter? Website?
  *   Be in charge of obtaining the required paperwork (death
    certificate, burial transit or disposition permit,    permit to
    cremate)?
  *   Contact the cemetery, crematory, or med school to schedule
    delivery of the body?
  *   Bathe and dress the body?
  *   Make or purchase a casket, shroud, or cardboard container?
  *   Obtain dry ice or frozen gel packs if needed?
  *   Arrange for music?
  *   Contact any clergy desired?
  *   Arrange for flowers?
  *   Arrange for cleaning or housekeeping or pet-sitting?
  *   Arrange for meals or other refreshments?
  *   Meet out-of-town guests at the airport?
  *   Provide overnight accommodations for those?
  *   Collect and display photos or other memorabilia?
  *   Plan any service to be held, with or without the body present?
  *   Help if there will be more than one event or more than one location?
  *   Write the obituary?
  *   Write a eulogy?
  *   Video any events for the benefit of out-of-town family?
  *   Serve as pall bearers?
  *   Transport the body?
  *   Send thank you notes?
  *   Apply for veterans benefits such as a marker and flag?
  *   Notify Social Security if not already a part of EDR (electronic
    death registration)?
  *   Extend support to the bereaved after everyone has gone?

With this in mind, I hope some of you will modify your practices, your
websites, and brochures to reflect your work as educational and
enabling, not as a business. And without a congregation or significant
variety of spiritual activities such as weddings let alone historical
precedence like the Jews and Muslims, claiming a ministerial exemption
is not likely to fly. The state came down on a UU minister in PA.

If any of you would like suggestions for re-wording your promotional
material to make you less vulnerable, I’d be glad to help.

Sincerely,

Lisa Carlson

In 2011, I attended the first day of a two-day Death Midwifery training with a renowned American Death Midwife at a school in Toronto. I was one of about 30 participants. Some of the participants present were students of a broader end-of-life program and this training was part of their curriculum; others in the room were “newbies” there as a general interest initiative.

I have attended a few of these events in the past and am quite fond of the founders of the school and the great work they are doing in bringing awareness to the World’s traditional medical systems, especially their hosting of educational events surrounding rites of passages related to end-of-life.

As you may or may not know, I have a background in End-of-Life care as a Licensed Funeral Director, Home Funeral Guide, and as an educator, speaker, and author of funeral alternatives that are modeled after the midwifery model of care in advocating and supporting continuity of care, informed choice, and choice of death place/home funerals. Also trained and experienced in the fields of hospice work and doula care, I understand the role of offering emotional and physical support and advocacy for individuals who are facing a life in transition. Presently, I am a student of a Midwifery Education Program and am on the Board of Directors with Perinatal Bereavement Services of Ontario.

Before registering for the Death Midwifery Training, I inquired if it would be a repeat of the knowledge & skills I already have, and the response was that it was likely that it was and was generously offered a discounted rate to attend the training as supporters of my work. I decided to register to also show my support of Death Midwifery and as an opportunity to network with the community of death midwives/home funeral guides here in my region.

I have much respect for the Death Midwife who led the training and the incredible advancements she has made in the USA in bringing both the public’s and the media’s attention to the importance of home funerals. She truly is a game-changer to modern-day funeral practices alongside such notables as Lisa Carlson and the late Jessica Mitford. This is the second time I have met this Death Midwife, the first being the evening session last year, where I addressed legislation questions that arose during her presentation that pertained to Canadian practices. This year, I also provided clarification to a document she was to distribute to the participants, as she had obtained the information some years ago, from a source that was unknown. I know that she is a practitioner in the United States, but seeing as this was a training for Death Midwives in Canada, I was disappointed that there was not regionally relevant information made available.

I am concerned that information that is not up-to-date or specific to Canadian legislation is being distributed to participants of this program, one that they have paid a hefty fee to attend, and are perhaps leaving the training without information that is critical to their ‘toolkit’ if they intend to engage with families as Death Midwives. I would expect that though this death midwife is both part of the school’s faculty and a ‘guest speaker’ from the USA, it would be in good faith to the people attending and for the school’s own reputation to ensure that the material being presented would include correct information on current provincial legislation and accurate names of documents required for families to register a death. As a side note, I was also surprised that even an agenda or synopsis of the training was never offered in the initial invitation, registration, on the website or as a handout on the day of.

As a person who has a profound passion for the death midwifery movement in Canada, and is an active participant in its advocacy and publicity, I am concerned that sending ‘trained death midwives’ out into the community without the correct information is detrimental to its advancement and could potentially threaten the light in which we are viewed from those we need the support from if we are to get this movement off the ground such as lawmakers, funeral homes, hospitals, municipal offices, and most importantly, bereaved families and the community at large.

To add to this dilemma, is the way that the information was presented. Our experienced teacher jumped into talking about how to care for the body before the issue of ethics, confidentiality, universal precautions or liability was ever discussed. Even an introductory course, if that’s what this was intended to be, would have included these topics.

I’m not certain if ethics and confidentiality is covered in the broader end-of-life program, (though I can only assume it would be given the background and expertise of the program director in this area), but with the knowledge that some of the weekend’s participants were not students of that program, I feel that this is an area that should have been addressed. We are entrusted with a ton of personal information in midwifing with the dying or dead and it would certainly be important to understand the high respect of ethics and confidentiality required in being with this vulnerable population.

The only mention of universal precautions came via a question from a participant asking if gloves are to be worn. This was answered as “make a judgment call.” Although I am aware that we all make our own judgment calls, I feel that it would have been prudent to address the topic of universal precautions, if even briefly, and especially so assuming that some of the participants perhaps come from a background that has not required them to attain this knowledge. It is one thing to care for our own without a barrier of protection, but even family members can carry hospital-acquired viruses or bacteria which are highly communicable – even after death. To not include even a mention in this area, I think, is to do a disservice to the participants who are leaving the weekend expecting to ‘work’ with the dying or the dead and potentially expose themselves to risk unnecessarily. It is irresponsible to not have had this information discussed and to give the impression that something such as tissue gas , for example, was a condition that ‘just happened’ without further clarification to its serious consequences if not dealt with correctly rather than the nonchalant context in which it was very briefly explained as “some kind of bacteria” that “causes the limbs to swell.”

We must acknowledge that we live in a culture of liability. For an emerging ‘profession’ (which also has problems in and of itself), it is even more critical that we protect ourselves from being held liable for transmitting disease (to ourselves, the families we work with, or our own families), but more importantly, to protect the families that we work with from being held liable should we acquire an illness due to our own failure to apply universal precautions when handling the human remains of their loved one, or helping to guide them in handling the remains themselves.

I know I wasn’t there for the second day as I voluntarily decided not to attend, so perhaps these topics were eventually covered. My concern is that they were not covered prior to the workshop on caring for the body. Though caring for the body is a very interesting aspect of the training, it is premature to do so before we can fully understand the importance of working with human remains and family members in an ethical and confidential way.

Perhaps in the future, the training would be offered as two separate sessions: one with the students of the end-of-life program, and one for the general public as a way to ensure the critical points are covered with the public group who might not have any prior or related experience with these standard practices in both medical and alternative health care settings.

As a critique to the instructor,I found many of her stories were told with an  emphasis on her role in working with the dying/dead, rather than how she encouraged families to be involved, how she guided them to care for their own. I am sensitive to language in teachings as it sets the tone for what we are learning… if the language surrounds the experience of the family, rather than the experience of the death midwife, then I believe we set the course for true family-centered and family-led rituals, which is the intention of Death Midwifery, is it not?

Finally, I would like to address the importance of collaborative care, rather than an ‘us’ vs. ‘them’ mentality wherein the Death Midwife is ‘us’ against ‘them’: the Funeral Home and/or Hospital. If we are to succeed in bringing death back home, and putting the rituals of death back into the hands of families, then we must develop strong relationships with hospitals, coroners, RPN’s, hospices, and funeral homes. Death Midwifery is about choice. When we have relationships with our collaborators in death care, families are afforded continuity of care and choice.

In future weekend trainings on death midwifery in Canada, I would like to see the inclusion of discussion on issues specific to death midwifery in Canada such as ‘working’ outside of regulation, a National consensus on scope of practice, vision, code of ethics and the like.

I look forward to continued discussion on this topic and invite you to post your thoughts.

Respectfully,

Kory McGrath

Guelph Unitarian Church, 122 Harris Street, Guelph

Service Leader: Aspen Heisey

Speaker: Kory McGrath

Hello, my name is Kory McGrath and I am here to talk to you about my spiritual journey through my career in caring for the dead. But first, for a little background on how I came to be invited to this talk. Last fall, I met Aspen and Rick while attending a talk by Jerrigrace Lyons on Death Midwifery and we had the opportunity to chat a little bit afterwards and have been in touch ever since. My talk today follows on the very subject that Aspen has discussed within these walls prior – A lively conversation on Death and the matters that surround it.

What if you were asked to care for your own dead? Would you? What leads a person to want to care for the dead? Some people are born into the “business” of funeral service, and the others, so they say, are called to it. And sometimes, we are just plain asked (or expected) to do it. Historically, we all cared for our own, there was no “business” about it. How have we lost our way in caring for our dead and why is it important, not only to our spirituality but also to our humanity, that we rediscover this sacred rite of passage?

In this talk, I will share my personal experiences in being “called” to caring for the dead and how I eventually chose the alternative path after having had many years to reflect on a funeral service career and intersecting spiritual journey.

“They wrapped Nathan in a blanket and just before they took him away my mother said she gave us “the privilege of kissing him.” So began my spiritual and cultural immersion with death.” These are the words from a talk Aspen did about this time last year entitled ‘Predicaments of Mortality.’ I recently read the notes from this talk and was overwhelmed with emotion at her recollection of witnessing the aftermath of her young brother drowning – perhaps as a mother to young children, the story really struck a chord with me. I hope you don’t mind, Aspen, but I have used some of the themes from your talk to inform my talk today – a way of quilting our stories together into a tapestry of life and death, awe, spirituality and how we have come to do the things we do.

I wanted to reflect on Aspen’s story from last year because it is but one example of an early life experience that led her to her interest in death and ritual. Similar to my own childhood, there is memory of loss and intensity and the vivid pictures of what was going on in those moments of time. I believe “we become who we are because of what we’ve seen and done” perhaps as a way to work things out later in life, to make sense of it all. So what did I see and do as a child that I see as my influence to go the way of funeral services?

I used to make caskets out of shoe-boxes & would bury little dead birds and rodents that I would find in the field next to our house. Then I’d bury them by the stream and set stones on their graves. Why? I suppose I have come to interpret it as if I were burying little pieces of me that had broken in a turbulent childhood – loss does come in many forms. In my case I had lost my mother to alcohol and because of the alcohol, I lost my father when he left. I realize that then, and since then, I have always tried to find meaningful ways to cope with a life in transition. In wanting to be near to others who were in some walk of fear, of change, of transformation maybe became my own way of therapy, of finding my way to the surface through their journey and somehow tapping into the bigger consciousness that is humanity.

When I was in high school, I learned that an older student was doing his co-op at a funeral home. A funeral home. A Mortician. An Undertaker. A place of wonder and mystery. Some kids from broken homes turn to drugs or crime. I chose death. Finally, a place of a familiar family drama and chaos. And yet, a place of untold stillness. Of other people’s pain.

After my own coop a year later at a local funeral home, it was time to decide on career aspirations when the colleges and universities came to town. I thought maybe I wanted to be a midwife, to be surrounded by cries of happiness, but the representatives from the university said to go and get some life experience first. So I applied to the program that matched the only skill I had developed – the funeral program at Humber. And so began a life determined to find experience.

Here are some of those experiences:

The Lady and her Budgie: One of my first encounters while apprenticing at the funeral home, was with a lady who had come in on a Saturday and asked to see some urns and keepsakes, otherwise known as cremation jewellery. I led her to the “Casket Selection Room” where the merchandise was displayed and pointed her to a shelf of keepsakes. She seemed awkward. Then started talking about her dead budgie. She talked for almost an hour about how much she had loved him, some times they had together, and how she was going to have him cremated and wanted a place to keep his remains so he would always be close to her. I’m telling you about this story because it really demonstrates the gamut of what’s entailed in a day in the life at a funeral home, but also because it relates to my earlier story about burying birds as a child and the irony of this. It was also my first lesson in listening. We all have our stories about loss and none are lesser than others.

The Harmonica Player: One day, at the conclusion of a funeral arrangement for an elderly lady, her son asked if it would be possible for him to witness the embalming procedure. A bit stunned, I thought for a moment and in a separate room shared the request with my boss. He said that as long as a waiver to protect us from him potentially experiencing ‘psychological damage as a result of witnessing the embalming’ was signed, that the gentleman could do as he wished. It ended up that I was the embalmer also, so one afternoon, this man accompanied me into the preparation room where we both donned our protective gear and I explained what I would be doing. With extreme dignity and the tactful placement of cloth, I washed his mother and started the embalming process. At which point, he pulled out a harmonica and for the remaining 2 hours of the process, played her favourite songs while circling her body. This was my first lesson in being open to the wishes of others in how they needed to mourn, or to ritualize, no matter how ‘unusual’ the request. There had to be no judgement. It ended up becoming one of the most profound acts of love I have ever witnessed.

Faith and Ritual: I cannot say how much I have learned from the worlds faiths when it comes to caring for their dead. I believe they have contributed to my spiritual development to move away from the present day model of funeral care to a more community-and family-centered approach to caring for our own. From the burial societies and their rituals for cleansing, sitting with, and sending their dead off in the simplest of ways to the more elaborate wailers and adorners – filling caskets with goods for the afterlife, there is something to say about ritual, symbols, and the proximity and attention to the dead. This was my lesson in diversity and alternatives. That we can take direction from others and that funerals need not be so closed-off and cookie-cutter in our own culture.

The Auctioneer: One of the most memorable funeral arrangements I engaged in was with a family of Auctioneers. The fact that the name of their company was Love’s Auctioneer’s is kind of sweet too. The widow was stricken with grief. Her adult daughter took the reins while in the arrangement while her mother emptied the tissue box, but the entire process was filled with their sharing stories of him and their interest in creatively contributing to how the funeral would go. It seemed like weeks of consulting and planning and testing out different ideas, not unlike the planning of a wedding, and many more hours of tears and pleading to have one more night of visitation with her beloved husband. On the day of the funeral, the building had been transformed into a romantic, loving, perfumed room of their love for him. They had the entire room stand and hold hands in a circle around his remains and it moved us all. This would be one of many lessons in the benefits and importance of having families be as involved as they wish to be in how the services will unfold, as it was testament to their love and resolve.

Closing the Casket: It might go unnoticed to some, but it affects me deeply – the final closing of the casket. Because it is me, the funeral director, not the husband, the child, the parent that has the last look. It’s me. And why? There were times when I invited the widow, the bereaved to do the honour, but each request was met with decline. Why? We have become so uncomfortable with death that most of us don’t want to be near it. Or our ego takes over and we tighten at having to be in front of a crowd in a tender moment. Afraid we might break down. Afraid we might feel. That others will see. I learned that this distance from death is unsettling and that I wanted to do something about it. I interpret this question of ‘why me’ as a sign that I am supposed to translate these experiences and educate the public to feel empowered to take charge on closing the door for the last time on their loved ones.

The Baby: This story falls on the tails of the last one, but is a little more intense. Most of us are parents or have children that we love in our life. When you see a baby in the morgue at the funeral home, life doesn’t make sense anymore. Sure, adult remains are cumbersome, they need to be lifted with lifts or many hands. Sometimes deceased adults have no survivors to come and be with them, so you get used to them being alone. But babies are little. They fit in your hands. And generally, when they are new, have parents that belong to them. So why do they go to funeral homes? Again, because somehow we have learned to fear them when they stop breathing, and so we hand them over because we don’t know what else to do. Being with these babies made me promise I would do something in life to ensure that they had a more intimate goodbye. It was a lesson in dedication to helping people truly be with death so they could truly move on with loving wholeness, not from a place of absence and fear and mystery.

The Autopsy – This is not a gruesome story. It’s a story about going the distance. About putting together the pieces of a mother, as if it were my own. After arranging a funeral for an older woman, her son shows up and wants to see her. Her remains have just arrived from the Coroner’s office and are in no state to be seen, but her son is impatient and angry. There is something bigger going on but I don’t know what it is. So I tell him to give me 2 hours (a procedure which would normally take 6 or more.) Suddenly I am carried away to the night my own mother died, and I frantically dialed the number to my brother’s house, knowing the pain he would feel but that he had to be a part of. Like my brother, this man was so obviously full of anger and grief. This was my first lesson in doing what it takes, no matter how challenging,  to getting the loved ones, the hurt ones – together with their dead.

My own Mother: After funeral school and before the birth of my first child, my mother died. She had been in the hospital for a few months with brain and bone cancer. I would visit her and wash her hair, bring her an Iced Cap from Tim’s, and watch as she talked silly, an effect  from all the morphine I suppose. It was there, in her childlike innocence and suffering that I forgave her. When I got the call in the middle of the night, I didn’t pick up. I had too many glasses of wine hours earlier with my brother. After several attempts, I finally decided to answer – it was the hospital. They said to come quickly. I was worried about smelling like booze, so I brushed my teeth before calling a cab. I should have picked up the phone sooner. I shouldn’t have brushed my teeth. When I arrived, she had already left, the sweat on her shirt still warm and damp. But in some way, her death opened the floodgates of love I had been too afraid to give into. Our mutual suffering was over. As Aspen puts it, “In that hush of the newly dead. And in the presence of her dying and death, I felt an awe of the mystery of death, and wanted to linger in the body and soul transition taking place,  and take it in, feel it fully,  before the undertakers came and helped our predicament, our helplessness.”

For me, this was my first lesson in the fragility of life and forgiveness. It was also my first lesson in being with a death that was mine – not someone else’s.

It is with these encounters and lessons from my professional life, together with the threads from my personal experiences with death that set me on my way to where I am now. I woke up there, in the funeral home, where other souls are fast asleep.

I started to grasp that death and dying are bigger than any of us, that it gets bigger the closer you are. So I started searching for ways to get closer – closer to death, closer to that “Predicament of Mortality.” I trained and worked as a hospice volunteer, looking for the pieces that fell between life and death. Simultaneously I also trained as a birth doula – knowing that here also was a place between darkness and light. And then it clicked. My swirling soul connected these two places, birth and death, and here is where I truly began my spiritual journey. I realized then that one must inform the other and vice versa. In essence, the great circle of life was showing me that the skills required in one aspect could transfer to the other. Here, I will quote Aspen again: “a predicament of mortality, in the most basic sense, would have to do with birth and death – the 2 experiences whereby we encounter what it means to be mortal, to have life, or to not have life.” (Aspen) And this is where I get back to the midwifery bit.

How have we lost our way in caring for our dead and why is it important, not only to our spirituality but also to our humanity, that we rediscover this sacred rite of passage? “What does it mean in our culture when we are not permitted to see death? FEAR. We can also ask ourselves the same questions surrounding birth. I have decided to borrow from the midwifery model of care to inform my funeral education practice: Continuity of Care / Informed Choice / Choice of Death/Funeral place. I have become part of a small group of like-minded people that call ourselves death midwives (or my preference, home funeral guides) to help educate other people in how to care for their own. Presently, we are in the early stages of defining our scope of practice and forming an association for Canadians seeking guidance in home funerals, in being closer with death.

“we become who we are because of what we’ve seen and done” AND SO: imagine the humanity we could instill in our society if we could be near death, have the honour of caring for our own. A death midwife friend of mine said that the only way to reach people to care for their own is through education, through linking the idea with a history of their ancestry – for this is what they did only a few generations ago. It was the only way. Let’s take direction from this and from our earlier “Story for All Ages”: to keep Storytelling, like Aspen and I have done, about our experiences with being near death so no one will forget the honour it is to be there and how it contributes to our spiritual journey and thus, our humanity.

Here I wish to conclude with a song, performed by my young niece, Courtney Seguin. The song is from the montage in the finale of the HBO series Six Feet Under. One of our society’s only references to the funeral ‘industry’ is via this pop-culture HBO series, which is a bit sad. But what I love about it is how in the montage we watch as a young girl travels through a space in time where she sees how she will encounter death – both with the people that she loves and eventually her own – as she sets out on her own spiritual journey. Please enjoy Courtney’s rendition of Sia’s “Breathe Me” and thank you for the opportunity to speak to you this morning.

Song “Breathe Me” by Sia (Guitar & singing by Courtney Seguin)

There are memorial observances in small towns that you just don’t find in a metropolitan cityscape. Where in the city a funeral procession can either go by unnoticed to passerby’s or jam-up traffic thereby irritating busy business people, in a small town the locals stop and bow their heads at the passing of a funeral car. You respectfully remove your hat when walking on the sidewalk past mourners at the corner funeral home.

On the main street in a town I know, one can find a glass window displaying the names and obituaries of townsfolk who have died that week. For the living, these postings provide an awareness of neighbours or community members who might be linked in some way to the death – a granddaughter, a son, a friend. It outlines the details of where & when they can pay their respects, and offers a gentle reminder of a life lived, a story told, to take a moment of pause to remember.

The post office is another example where deaths are communicated to residents taking care of their daily errands. In this photo, a table top displays memorial folders from recent services of local funeral providers.

In addition to Jacobs’ thoughts, I would argue that the disappearance of funeral homes & burial grounds from urban neighbourhoods further removes us from our own understanding and acceptance of death, funeral rites & ceremonies, and compassion towards bereaved members of our communities.

In May this year, as part of Jane’s Walk, an annual event to celebrate the ideas of Legendary Urban Thinker Jane Jacobs, I will be guiding a walking tour where participants will be introduced to one of Toronto’s remaining urban funeral parlours and learn how it has remained a vibrant part of a bustling west end neighbourhood. We will take a walk around the neighbourhood and with the help of historical facts and archival images, imagine the route of a funeral procession and how the ritual allowed members of the community to support one another through their collected grief.

The walk will end with a memorial tribute to Jane Jacobs in the essence of the “Public Celebration” that was held for her shortly after hear death – where with music & thought, community members came together to honour and remember her life.

Some themes we will be exploring on the walk:

• How is a location of a funeral home or burial ground important to the living?
• How does a visual reminder of death affect the bustle of city life?
• What do we learn about our neighbours and ourselves when sacred buildings and spaces are a part of our urban landscape?
• Why have funeral homes & cemeteries moved out of the city?
• With the secularization and multiculturalism of cities, how can funeral providers and burial grounds be redesigned to integrate meaningfully into a diverse community and become part of the fabric, not a place that is taboo or morbid?

I am open to your feedback and what you would like to see on this walk. Please leave a comment here, and/or register for the walk by clicking here.

Shocked and saddened, her coach and fellow Olympians have commented on the devastating news, remarking on the ‘unthinkable burden’ and their willingness to support her no matter her decision to go on.

Losing a mother is hard to articulate. As a person who has also experienced this type of loss, I liken it to the feeling of having lost my ‘vessel’ into this World. Losing a mother before a major life milestone can be even more distressing – The realization of the hopes and dreams she had for you will forever go unknown to her, your accomplishments becoming but your own triumphs. Thinking day after day: “If only she knew/saw/met/held…..”

A friend posted on his Facebook page about the recent loss of his parental figure. I think it’s beautiful and relevant to this conversation:

“Happy trails Pop. Where you’re headed the trout are always running, the Leafs win the cup every year, and they only play old-time dusters on TV. Good bye old chum, I’ll see you soon. LK”

There is pain in losing someone you love, but there is also the selfless hope that they are at peace. For Joannie’s mother, she died with the belief that her daughter would win Gold. And like my friend would say, wherever she is headed, no matter the outcome in Vancouver, her daughter will be a Gold-medalist.

You heal when you can divert the energy of your pain to finding meaning in their departure. The strength to go on comes at every turn – to continue on with the life they have given you, to achieve your own hopes and dreams, and to honouring the memory of them through acts of love and remembering.

I expect that her performances in the days to come may be her most heartfelt and personally memorable. Often we say nothing when we lose someone we love. Occasionally, we are afforded 20 minutes to deliver a sometimes-awkward eulogy. Rarely, are we able to give to the World a truly intimate tribute to the memory of our mothers. Joannie has this gift. We are cheering for you, Joannie, and know your mother died proud in her journey to the Olympics with you.

Recently, I joined a new yoga class. I’ve been practising for 10 years now, but with each new studio I attend, I feel a renewed sense of inspiration in my practice. The other night, as I lay in “Corpse Pose” – the pose that brings the class to its conclusion, (also known as Savasana in Sanskrit), and is said to be the most difficult pose – I discovered the parallels between yoga and funeral rites. And it’s not just in the name.

Letting Go

As we do with a difficult pose in yoga, so too comes a time in life when we need to ‘let go’ – to take the pose deeper, to be able to move past the pain of the moment so we can experience what else is taking place. Letting go does not erase the memory of the pain or of the person, rather, it provides us with an understanding that nothing in life is permanent but that there is hope in moving forward to the next moment – and to tomorrow.

Suffering

Yoga is hard. An hour passes and you think to yourself, why do I come here? But dying is harder. So is grieving. If you have ever lost someone you love, you wonder how you will ever be able to go on. But you will go on. Viktor E. Frankl, Holocaust survivor and psychiatrist who wrote extensively on the experiences of suffering wrote: “When we are no longer able to change a situation – we are challenged to change ourselves.”

Community

Funeral rites provide opportunity for a community to come together and lend support to one another at a time when it is needed most. There is a truth to the adage “There is strength in numbers.” When we are accorded the right to mourn and share our memories, we are left with the sense that we are not alone in our grief and that our loss is shared, and normal. When I fall down from a pose in yoga class, I try again because I see others around me that inspire me to go on and I know I will not be judged, but encouraged to become stronger. When I do yoga alone at home, if I fall, I go to the fridge and get a piece of cake or find another distraction.

Renewal

As with the World around us, so too are there seasons in life – birth, growth, aging, and death. More abstractly, if you look at the life cycle and experience it in any of its dimensions, you know that after a period of death, comes time for renewal – a renewal of hope, sense of self and place in the World, of relationships and re-integration in society. After a time of grief and funeral rites, the same can be said of what follows a yoga class: you feel renewed in health, in spirit, and in a commitment to engaging in positive human interactions. In a sense, in both experiences, the opportunity exists to be reborn a better person as a result of your triumph to overcome pain.

Enlightenment

When my mother died 8 years ago, I too became mortal. That was my enlightenment – to become responsible for my actions so I could be spared a longer life. Suddenly, I appreciated the beauty of children, the fortune of having good health, and the awareness of the possibilities around me. Death and funeral rites does this to people. So does yoga. It wakes you up from your slumber and has the potential to catapult you to a place of stillness and clarity.

“Appreciate what you have in the present, because it may be gone tomorrow” the instructor says in a soft voice as I resurface from a state of silence. Words that hold many truths indeed.

The “Ethically Speaking” columnist suggests that she not go on the basis that funerals have lost their meaning. He then goes on to describe the original intent of the funeral as a sacred occasion that has been replaced by a bastardized version that involves “binges of self-indulgent, self-congratulatory excess” where one will be succumbed to cliché music, mandatory sobbing, and buffet sandwiches “while trying to avoid talking about what the old fella was really like.”

And this is why I think she should go.

What happens when people stop going? For whatever the reason – out of spite, or dislike, or a conflict of schedule, if people stop going to funerals the dead will become nothing but the brunt of our own selfish priorities. They will be warehoused in factory-like funeral centres and disposed of in a manner that does not wreak havoc on the demands of our daily lives. Entire lives will go unnoticed. Our sense of immortality and disregard for the life cycle will increase, consequently affecting how we make decisions and treat other human beings, animals, and the environment around us.

She should go even if the old fella was an awful man. He was once a child, and he himself the parent of a man she once loved. She should go if not for the sole reason of sharing her sentiments about him with whoever might listen, if even it is only herself. We all have skeletons in our closet, and though some are unable to rid of them prior to their death, why continue to punish them when they are meant to be finally at rest?

What skeletons do you have that would determine who would celebrate your life when your time comes? What criteria even determines a life ‘worth’ celebrating? If funerals have lost their meaning, why aren’t we demanding that the way they are held be changed?

“You must be the change you want to see in the World.” – Ghandi