What is a home funeral?
A home funeral is a family or community-centered response to death and after-death care. Most state laws support the right of the family to care for their own departed. Depending on the specifics of each state’s law, families and communities may play a key role in:
- Preparing the body for burial or cremation (Bathing, dressing, anointing)
- Planning and carrying out after-death rituals or ceremonies such as laying out the deceased for visitation and holding a funeral service in the home
- Filing of death-related paperwork such as the death certificate and disposition permit.
- Transporting the deceased to the place of burial or cremation
- Facilitating the final disposition such as digging the grave in natural burial
For more information on the home funeral movement, please visit: www.homefuneralalliance.org
The Advance Death Care Directive
Joseph Campbell
"The cave you most fear to enter contains the greatest treasure."
- Joseph Campbell
Lao Tzu
"Take care with the end
As you do with the beginning."
- Lao Tzu – Tao Te Ching
Walt Whitman : Song of Myself
All goes onward and outward,
Nothing collapses
And to die is different from what anyone supposed,
and luckier…
- Walt Whitman : Song of Myself
Rumi
Death has nothing to do with going away.
The sun sets
The moon sets
But they are not gone.
- Rumi
Hermann Broch
"No one's death comes to pass without making some impression, and those close to the deceased inherit part of the liberated soul and become richer in their humanness.”
- Hermann Broch
unknown Japanese poet
In times of grief
and sorrow
flowers bloom
even then
- unknown Japanese poet
Sir Francis Bacon
"Death is a friend of ours; and he that is not ready to entertain him is not at home."
- Sir Francis Bacon
Rev. Olivia Rose
"Death invites you to fall in love…it’s the fragility of life that makes you weep with helplessness."
- Rev. Olivia Rose
David Searls
"Seeing death as the end of life is like seeing the horizon as the end of the ocean."
- David Searls
Paramahansa Yogananda
“When I am gone, only love can take my place.”
- Paramahansa Yogananda
Sir William Gladstone
"Show me the manner in which a nation cares for its dead, and I will measure with mathematical exactness the tender sympathies of the people, their respect for the law of the land and their loyalties to high morals."
- Sir William Gladstone
Ram Dass
“We are all just walking each other home.”
- Ram Dass