What the World Needs Now is Love

In my city, a young Egyptian boy at the high school has been harassed every day since the Boston bombings. It’s not local news, but his older sister is heartbroken for him. Someone even wrote “terrorist” on his locker in permanent marker, because he looks different. Because people are afraid and that fear trickles down to their children. But this boy and his family fled Egypt because it was no longer safe for them to be there. What happened in Boston was their every day. And an innocent boy is being asked to bear the brunt of our fear because they think he looks like someone else who did an awful thing.

This is what happens when we feed our fear. We create more. Fear breeds fear.  You would think that a city with such a large refugee population would be more tolerant of its diversity. We become strange creatures when we feed our fear instead of our love.

I saw the same thing happen in 2001, when I started my first day of work in a new city on September 12, at a grocery store catering largely to veiled women. I watched an older customer scream when a Muslim woman entered with her three children. She left her cart where it was, grabbed her purse, and ran out of the store. I listened to a woman rant for twenty minutes about how you could never know if it was a man or a woman “under there” and how that wasn’t fair to Americans. The more people fed into their fear, the uglier it became.

We always try to make this about those who are other than us. But Timothy McVeigh, who was responsible for the bombing in Oklahoma City in 1995, was American. He was born in my hometown and raised just outside of it in my working class, All-American blue collar corner of the state. This isn’t about 9/11, Oklahoma City, or the Boston bombings. It’s about the horrible things that happen every day and the tools we use to bear them. It’s about truly believing, beneath the skin, that we are all relations.

If I trace my genetic DNA back far enough, what strange soil might I find their lines journeying through? I know, right now, that there are men and women in Poland, Ireland, Germany, Scotland, and the Netherlands who can trace themselves back to the same ancestors as me. These men and women are my cousins. However distantly, we share blood. We are all relations.

I see the eyes of cousins in the eyes of strangers in the street. I smile at them and wish them wellness and happiness like I would wish it for a loved one. I would not forcefully take anything from them, whether I am in need or not. I deny no one their humanity or personhood.

I see you and I wish you happiness.

We are each responsible for our actions, and for how we respond to events in the world. We are not our race or our gender. We are not where we live or what job we take. We are magic-makers, capable of changing the world with acts of simple kindness. The easiest thing you can do, in times of great stress, is to feed the world your love, instead of your fear and hate.

It is easier to lash out at others from our fear-place. History shows that we have done it and we will continue to do it. We forcibly relocated native tribes, who had already been living here, because of the few tribes that even they were in battle with, who held different, more aggressive beliefs. And we wanted to claim ownership of their land. We held all the indigenous people responsible for a few. We mustn’t forget that. We were wrong.

When Pearl Harbor was bombed in 1941, we responded in fear to the large Japanese-American presence on the West coast. In 1942 the government rounded up 127,000 Japanese-Americans and put them in internment camps. Their crime was having Japanese ancestry. Two-thirds of them had been born here and they were forced to sell off their lands, homes, cars, businesses, etc in order to comply with the government, hoping they could reclaim them when the scare was over. Ten relocation camps were built in seven states. Those families lost everything they had because of choices our government made from a place of fear. They were held for up to four years in inadequate housing with poor food supplies, like prisoners.

I only learned about that when my Interfaith youth group spoke to a man who had grown up inside one of those camps. It was hard for my naïve mind to believe. When I returned home and pulled out my Global Studies text book, I could only find one sentence that said, and I have never forgotten, “For their own safety, some Japanese-Americans were located to camps during the war.” That was it.

In this current time of crisis and fear, it would be easy to segregate ourselves from the unknown things that scare us. It would be easy to jump into the trust-no-one pool of thought. What would be brave and courageous, would be to continue to believe that people are good people, and that people want to be good people. I choose to believe that one smile or one kind word make a difference to someone on the edge of choosing to feed their hate.

I am afraid. I see that you are afraid. We are afraid. Let us not be afraid of each other.

To best honor my ancestors, I will learn from the mistakes they made from their places of fear. I will feed my love and give that to the world. I will ask questions before I assume or accuse. I will be patient and tolerant with the differences between us while working towards a way of living together harmoniously. I choose to be brave.

Read actor George Takei's blog post about growing up in a Japanese-American camp.

Carry In, Carry Out

Earth Day is coming up this weekend, but for me, Earth Day is every day. You can’t see the pattern of revolving humanity and still be selfish about taking what you want for yourself from the earth. There are so many other people and animals to consider, as well as all the species of plants. It would be wonderful if we lived in a culture that was not human-centric, for the world we live on isn’t.

I was picking trash up along the street this week when a neighbor down the way asked me what I was doing. “Picking up cigarette butts,” I said. He was flabbergasted that I was picking up trash in someone else’s yard. I shrugged and told him that technically, my yard wasn’t my yard because I was a renter. Again he seemed surprised at the care we take with the property- we’re the only house that gardens in the summer on our street. What he seemed most surprised by was that I took care of something I didn’t own. His idea of property and possession saddened me. If everyone on my street cared, the curb wouldn’t look like a garbage dump. I believe that the care, or lack of care, we provide ourselves, and our homes, reflects the emotional state we exist in.

I pick up trash when I see it because the earth is not a garbage can, a point to which our landfills would beg to differ. I also do it because I honestly and sincerely care. Non-organic trash chokes the earth. How can living things grow and breathe under layers of plastic bags and concrete? If we want to live in a cleaner world, we have to be willing to clean it. I want to live in a cleaner and kinder world.

I didn’t always feel this way. I was a smoker in college, another young kid who thought it was cool to finish off a cigarette break by flicking my butt into the grass. My friend Jurgen called to me one day and asked me to bring him my cigarette butt. He showed me how to field-strip the extra tobacco and put the filter back in my cigarette box, because the tobacco and paper would decay, but the filter wouldn’t. I had never thought about that before. It’s what he had been taught to do with them in the military. He never chastised me for littering, or tried to make me feel guilty. He just showed me a conscientious way to walk on the earth and I took that lesson and awareness to heart.

In Binghamton, there are six wooden carousels that were built by George F. Johnson, a wealthy businessman and philanthropist. He built these carousels in local parks. As a child, he was very poor, and could never afford to ride the carousel. It was a magic he was denied that he carried into his adulthood. He wanted every child, who wanted to, to be able to ride a carousel so he stated that the price for a ride was a piece of litter from the park, forever, as a way of helping to keep them clean and green. How wonderful is that?

My local community has a basic rule we enforce for ourselves when in nature, because we feel that those of us who are alive to walk it are stewards of the land. The rule is simple: Garbage In, Garbage Out. Everything we bring with us, we take home with us, including dishes, glow sticks, disposable food tins, candy wrappers, empty bottles, etc. I’ve branched that out to a larger concept of carry in, carry out. Whatever I take with me, wherever I go, I am aware of it, and I make sure it all returns home with me, because at home I know everything that can be recycled will be.

What you discover are things you might not have been aware of, like just how many plastic-bottled beverages you go through, or how much waste goes into individually packaging a lot of the food we eat. It helped me make better choices in purchasing products, and over the years my garbage production has decreased. This year for Earth Day, make it Earth Week. Carry a bag around with you and put everything (except actual food) that you would throw in the trash bin in the bag. Do this for a week, and see the actual trail of trash you are leaving on the planet.

Remember that the earth is our mother, our father. It is the planet that gave us life and on which we are still dependent. Find ways of walking softly across her features, and see where you can trim your needs and comforts, sacrificing a little of our modern world to preserve the larger one. Remember that we are children of the earth, not its masters. Put your hands in the earth, play with some worms, plant some seeds, make friends with a tree spirit, and soak up the sun.

My Grackle Friends

photo shared by Factumquintus

Five years ago, a group of birds woke me on an early spring morning, their piercing croak filling the space outside my bedroom window. I had never seen them at our feeder before, the brown-black birds with iridescent green and purple heads. They were substantially bigger than the house sparrows and cardinals we were used to feeding and they did not seem to be able to manage the cedar feeder without almost knocking it over. They were so flashy in the sunlight that I later had to look them up on the Cornell bird identification website. They were my first grackles.

Of the nine grackles that frequented our yard, only one figured the bird feeder out. He was a little larger than the other ones and he found a way to hook one foot on the side of the feeder and a second foot just underneath it. He bent his body slightly sideways to balance his weight, with his tail wrapped around the side corner. From there, he would use his beak to scrap the seed off the side, down onto the ground for his friends, feeding below.

I watched them every morning when they rolled through for breakfast. I would sit quietly and after a while, they didn’t even startle when I slid the window curtain to the side. My friend, the grackle acrobat, slowly learned some more skills with balancing on the feeder. When he spied me through the window, he would run through all of his tricks and land on the clothesline, staring at me. After a while, he even started calling to me in the morning from the feeder if it was empty, which was one thing the other grackles picked up. Still, above the din, I was able to discern his fuller rusty hinge croak from the others.

When they moved on in the summertime, I was sad to see them go, but grateful for the time I was able to spend with them. The next spring, they returned, my friend front and center, and I was overjoyed. We picked up where we had left off and shared our morning times together. Two years ago, when the grackles returned, my friend was no longer among them. Even though none of the others could manage the feeder, they kept returning, and I spread seed out on the ground to encourage them.

A week and a half ago, I knew spring was finally here when I woke to a sharp grackle cry outside. It is a small group this year, but strong. There is one among them who figured out the feeder first, a smaller female. I found her hunched over the landing strip of the feeder, tucking her tail underneath it for counterbalance, skipping seed down onto the ground for her grateful friends. She unabashedly jumped up onto the clothesline and looked through the window at me.

Over the days, others have mastered the feeder, each in their own way. There is a large pair of males who discovered that if they each land on a side of the feeder at the same time they can keep it from swinging wildly beneath them. I don’t claim to know anything about bird genetic memory, but even still, I allow myself some musings. I know that in the wild, grackles can live eight to twelve years. Maybe there will come a spring that they don’t return. And maybe the grackles will keep coming long after the ones who came with my old friend are dead. Maybe they’ll keep coming long after we move away from where we live now. Maybe the fact that our lives intersected at all have linked our journeys somehow.

I wonder if the young grackles in the group knew my old friend, or if he passed before they were born. I wonder if they remember, and if they do, if they remember him. And then I realized that it doesn’t matter whether or not they do, because I do. These grackles are here and I remember the first grackle that brought them here and found them food. These grackles are living their lives in the moment, eating sitting and throwing up leaves in the dirt. I am bearing witness to the larger journey of their small group. Their lives come and go and I remain.

It is like that with our world, we come and go and the trees in their lengthened years bear witness to our passing. Watching the grackles outside my window, I am reminded that the whole pattern I am watching unfold is what my ancestor work is about. I hold my hand to a thread of ancestral energy that is the pattern of birth, life, and death we humans keep marching through. I hold my hand to that thread, keeping it present and connected to the action of living my life now. That energy is there for all of us to connect into, waiting just on the other side of the curtain, hiding beneath the rusty creak-song of an early spring grackle.

The Danger of Genealogy

Anyone who has done their own genealogical research will find themselves, after a moment of discovery, at the same crossroad that I have reached numerous times. After either a lengthy period of research or the goldmine of stumbling onto a family tree that someone else has already done the legwork for (score!), when the bliss and adrenaline-rush of the breakthrough wear off, I find myself momentarily overwhelmed by the sheer number of new names suddenly awaiting my transcription.

I have so much gratitude for the family trees that I have found, especially when they add multiple generations of unknowns to my own tree. That gratitude is part of the reason I offer what information I have to those who stumble onto my page because we share a common ancestor. It’s my way of paying it forward.

At the same time, to suddenly have over a hundred new names and dates waiting to be organized and inserted into the existing hundreds of names I have, can be darkening. Weaving your way through family trees, lineages, and dates is like using a loom for the first time. For example, you hold the thread of a wife and mother in the back of your brain so that you can continue up the father’s line. When it reaches an end point, you can return to the past, to that woman, and follow her thread backwards.

You do this, two by two, generation by generation, sometimes finding ten or more names before retreating back to start all over. In the end, you have woven a fuller tapestry of your family’s journey through the ages. But if you miss a thread, or if you pull it into the wrong spot, the tension is off and something just doesn’t look quite right. It requires such focus and intention that it is easy to lose yourself in another world, where time is more fluid and interchangeable.

Once a year I halt my search for new names, usually around spring equinox. Once a year I stop searching for more and focus my research on learning more about the ones I have. It is always at this point, when my brain is swollen with the names and dates of those who have come before me and learning how they interconnect with each other and how they end in me that I feel overwhelmed. Sometimes it hurts.

And it occurs to me that this work is somewhat dangerous. You can’t unknow what you know. It’s not necessarily about what the knowledge is, but just how much of it there is. Once I realized that I had over 1,400 names of ancestors, fourteen-hundred names of people who lived, loved, and died, that I know of, so that I could be here… no, not could. Would. So that I would be here. So that I am here… I become less meaningful. It’s humbling, frightening even.

I matter because I have breath. All living things matter. I matter because I am here and this is my life that is impacting the world around me. But when you pull back on the view and look at the larger picture, I am just one more human. I am not going to have children. No one will ever search for me on their family tree. My line dies with me when I take my last breath. After that breath, I will cease to matter to anyone but those who loved me who are still alive. I will no longer impact the living world.

My family bloodline will continue, for now, in the children my sister and brother have. Some of the blood that runs in me will continue, though I am not sure whether or not I even think that’s important. But it’s a thought. That idea marks me as outside of the slipstream of my bloodline; I am of this family, but not of its greater ancestral journey.

I could allow that logic to consume me, to count me as ineffectual. And I might believe it. And there is the danger, the precipice of ‘why bother?’ The danger is two-fold. We must not let our study of the past overwhelm us from remembering that we are change and that we can change and that each voice can be counted in the now. We must use the knowledge we glean from the mistakes our ancestors have made to make better decisions today. And we must not immerse ourselves in the past so much that we forget to live in the world. It’s all happening around you. Right now.

When I find myself in these shadowed moments, I meditate with my ancestors and the answer is always the same. Remember to come up for air from the past and bring what you learn into practice in the present. The best way we can honor them is to live now, to be kind to each other, to treat this earth in a way that is sacred and symbiotic, so that those who come after us may also have the chance to live. We must all be good ancestors now, while we are alive and while we are breathing. 

When the Dead Wake Up

Some of my childhood nightmares involved zombies rising from the dead at night searching for brains. We’ve all heard the folklore of people being buried alive, of graves being dug up with claw marks on the inside of the coffin. We’ve heard of Irish wakes permeating the rest of culture, and about how they sat with the body to be sure of the death of it. When I was researching death, I did some fact checking to see just how common a thing burying someone alive was, and discovered the details of a dozen documented cases in history.

In the late 1500s, Matthew Wall of Braughing, England was being taken to his grave when one of the pall bearers tripped and the coffin fell. Matthew was revived by the blow and celebrated his ‘resurrection’ every year until his actual death in 1595.

In 1587, Stowe’s Annals tells of a man who was hung for a felony on February 20^th. His body was supposed to be taken to Chirugeons Hall after his death, to be used for anatomy lessons. When they opened his chest, they found he was still alive, kept so by the cold temperatures. He lived for three more days before dying from the complications of his chest being opened.

In the 1600s, Marjorie Elphinstone was buried in Ardtannies, Scotland. When grave robbers tried to relieve her corpse of its jewelry during the night, she startled them by groaning. They fled in terror as she got up and walked home, where she later outlived her husband by six years.

On February 14, 1650, Anne Greene was hung for a felony charge, after which her body was sent to the anatomy hall to be used for dissection. She woke up before they could cut her open and lived for many more years.

In 1674, Marjorie Halcrow Erskine of Chirnside, Scotland was buried in a shallow grave by a sexton who intended on returning later to dig her up and steal her jewelry. She woke when he tried to cut off her finger in order to remove the ring. She lived to give birth to, and raise, two children.

A rapist-murderer named William Duell was hung at Tyburn in November 1740. His body was also taken for dissection but was found to have a faint pulse. He was breathing shallow. He was in great pain but was sitting and drinking wine two hours later. He was sent back to prison and, when he got out, was later exiled for life.

In the middle of the 1700s, Professor Junkur of Halle University received a bag with a hanged criminal for his use in dissection. During the night the professor woke to find the naked man shivering in his doorway, the body bag in his hand. The professor helped him escape and many years later, chanced to encounter him on the street. The man had become a wealthy merchant with a wife and two children.

It is written in records from the early to mid 1800s, that surgeons working on an anatomy body in Germany, had reason to consider whether or not the body brought to them was still alive. One surgeon suggested that they should not take measures to save the life of a murderer who would then be alive to kill again, and the others concurred. They chose to proceed with the dissection.

A young girl visited Edisto Island, South Carolina in 1850 and died of diphtheria. She was interred in the family’s mausoleum for fear that the disease would spread. When they opened the mausoleum to bury a son during the Civil War, approximately thirteen years later, they found a small skeleton on the floor behind the door.

From a British Medical Journal in 1877, a case was brought to court against a doctor who signed a statement declaring a woman had died. Days after her formal burial, the family tomb was re-opened to admit a new body and the initial woman’s body was found, clothing torn and limbs broken, now dead for real, where she had tried to break her way out of the tomb. The doctor was sentenced to three months involuntary manslaughter.

T.M. Montgomery, overseeing the exhumation of bodies at Fort Randall Cemetery in 1896, stated that “nearly 2% of the bodies exhumed were no doubt victims of suspended animation” due to the number of claw marks discovered on the inside of the burial boxes.

Count Karnice-Karnicki, Belgian Chamberlain to the Czar and Doctor of the Law Faculty of the University of Louvain in 1897, was horrified at the screams of a young girl, believed dead, who awoke as the earth was being dumped onto her coffin. Due to this experience, he patented a coffin that had a 3.5 inch hermetically-sealed tube extending to a box up on the surface. At any movement of the chest, a spring-loaded ball would push the tube up, lifting the box lid to allow air and light into the coffin. A flag would rise from the box and a bell would sound for a half-hour. After dusk a lamp would burn. It was not the only “life saving” coffin that was patented during this time period. Others in this time period made a lot of money preying on people’s fears of being buried alive.

Over the centuries, there have been 219 documented cases of narrow escape from premature burial. There have been 149 cases of actual premature burial, 10 cases where a body was dissected before death naturally occurred, and 2 cases where the body was embalmed before (and caused subsequent) death. Most of these cases likely occurred because the advent of medical science had not yet caught up with obscure responses to illness and injury.

Your Options After Death

If anything has become clear to me while doing this research, it’s that we need to start rethinking what place death, grief, and the disposition of the dead have in our culture. I would hate to lose the solitude of cemetery parks. In some cities, they are among the last vestiges of undisturbed, though manicured, green left. But cemeteries have physical boundaries and eventually all the plots will fill. Only in America do we think that if we purchase a plot, it’s ours for life, death, and afterlife.

Our country is fairly new and other countries have been dealing with this issue for centuries. In many large cities, after a certain time period had passed, allowing for natural decay, graves were disinterred so that newly dead could take their place in consecrated ground, and the bones were placed in ossuaries or charnal houses. Ossuaries allow for bones to be placed and stored in smaller boxes. In catacombs and charnal houses, the bones would often be broken up, skulls stored together, long bones stored together, etc.

Maybe we need to move away from permanent monuments and resting places. How much time do we need after death? How many generations pass until no one remembers us? Why bury your loved ones in a cemetery if you never visit them there? As an amateur genealogist, I have spent many afternoons reading and searching for the tombstones of my ancestors. I have felt the joy and thrill of discovering their resting places. But there are too many of us, to each own a piece of land for life.

I will have no descendants. And I will have no gravestone. So I need to rethink what I need and what I want. As well as what to leave behind to best serve those who love me when I die.

Funerals serve many purposes. They confirm the reality of death for those left behind. In theory, they aim to provide a contained environment for the living to come together and process through grief and mourning. It is a time for the living to remember and pay their respects to the dead, bringing closure to that life. It is the end to a story.

Most people don’t think about the details of planning a funeral until they are thrust into the crisis of death. In that moment, we don’t think to shop around and we are easily talked into traditional standards. So think about it now. Choice of funerals and services are largely influenced by family preferences, religious beliefs, and traditions. If you start the dialogue now, you could pre-empt any squabbling between loved ones after the fact. So, what do you want for your body when you die?

A Smattering of Options

You could find a place that would allow you to put yourself in the ground in a simple box, or natural fiber blanket or shroud. The purpose of a green burial is to return to the way things used to be; returning the body to the ground in a manner that does not hinder decomposition. Natural burial is where the body is returned to the earth to decompose in the soil. It has been practiced in Islam for almost 1500 years. It was reintroduced to the UK in the 1990s by Ken West and has gained popularity in Australia, China, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, and North America. Find more information at The Green Burial Council and The Natural Burial Movement 

You can try your hand at a home funeral, where states allow. You can care for your dead and tend to their body yourself, seeing the entire process through, reconnecting to the event as a rite of passage. All but eight states in the U.S. have won the right to home funerals if they want them. Check out the Home Funeral Directory and the Home Funeral Alliance

This is a good article about a family who took on a performing a natural burial in 2007. It chronicles the choices they made, how they went about it, and how the different family members responded to it. It’s very thought provoking. Click on this Smithsonian article to read a real-life story of people finding closure in tending their own dead.

Thinking Outside the Box

One of the options available is to send your loved ones’ cremains to be pressed and heated into jewelry. You can have them made into earrings or rings, big gems for yourself or smaller gems to divide up into separate pieces for you and children or other loved ones. I like this idea, because you can leave a legacy, an heirloom that can be passed down through the family. No need for a tombstone, you become a travelling wearable memorial. You can read more about it, including testimonials, at the lifegem website.

You could merge your ashes with the seed of a tree and find new symbiosis as you feed its growth. You can truly become one with nature in a way we couldn’t in our bodies. At least until the tree dies and becomes something else. But trees are good. There aren’t enough of them anymore and they feed off of our carbon dioxide and provide us with oxygen. Do you want to Become a Tree After Death? If you want more of the metaphor, this other version, though pricey, allows you to see a visual shift as the tree grows, cracking the ceramic cover of the cremains, found at the Spiritree site.

You can simply scatter the ashes of your dead. Check out the laws here.

For something different, if you’re really invested in feeding the earth, you can have your body turned into liquid fertilizer. Not kidding.

You could gift your body to medical science. It’s important to note that most facilities have a weight cut-off limit. Some can’t accept a body more than 170 lbs max and others top out at 250 lbs. It’s something more people are looking into, as the facility will cremate the body for you, free of charge, when they are done, and send them to you, though you may have to pay for shipping or pick it up yourself. When used for medical science, your body must be embalmed and the formaldehyde adds a lot of weight. Many facilities don’t have the equipment or manpower to lift and shuffle around the bodies. They have to be easy to store and move. Check out the options at Life Legacy or Science Care or Bio Gift.

Death as an Industry

Death is a rite of passage that touches each of our lives, either through the death of a loved one or our own eventual demise. No one escapes. For that reason alone, we should talk about it more, but we don’t. We don’t value our emotional bodies in this society. Grieving is dirty and uncomfortable for everyone, and we have come to expect that it will happen behind closed doors. We prefer to leave it at the funeral home, as if we are pretending that death doesn’t happen to us all. That we don’t all grieve at some point in our lives.

We let the professionals handle death and it becomes something that happens to us, with little involvement from us but our grieving. Outside assistance with death will always be helpful, but the industry we’ve built around funerals allows for people to stay in denial. It allows for us as individuals to let our grief overwhelm and paralyze us, when the challenge is to claw our way through it. What closure can be found in viewing a corpse we have tried to make appear as lifelike as possible? How does that reinforce the reality of the death of the human body to our rational minds?

Why has it become its own industry? When did we allow outside parties to tell us how to handle the passing of our dead? I’m not dogging funeral home directors or morticians. I want to make that distinction clear. I have met some who were simply stepping into their family business and the legacy of caring for the dead. It is sacred to them. And others have felt a calling and a pull towards helping be in service in that way. We all try to find the place in this world where we best fit in. That’s not the concern for me. What I’m interested in is the way turning death into a third-party industry has affected the way we process it as a culture.

“Americans have lost the desire to be active participants in

funerals so we have very little exposure to the dead. I think that

if we were to witness the peaceful death of a loved one and play

a larger role in their funeral proceedings, Americans would be

less afraid of death and more at peace with themselves.”

 ~Loretta M. Alirangues,

“Funerary Practices in Early and Modern America”

In Judaism and Muslim deaths, when a body dies, it is buried as soon as possible. At death, the family stops to care for the dead before resuming their lives again. There is no need for embalming or refrigeration. They allow the clock of their worlds to stop. The way our culture works, we don’t allow for people to stop their lives at the death of a loved one. We are all part of a larger machine that we have given over power to and it infiltrates every aspect of our lives. When my Grandma died, I did not get bereavement time. I took it but I took the time off of work without pay. I informed my boss that I would be out for a week while I grieved with my family. It could have cost me my job if my boss had decided to be cruel. But I knew then that it was important to be part of it, to be there with my family through the transition. Our entire way of being a family shifted when she died. I knew that it would be a moment I could never reclaim. I chose my family first. We need to get back to putting people first.

I am not a fan of viewings. I do not appreciate the embalming process. I do not enjoy the lifelike tint of the corpse. When my Grandma died, I went to the funeral home to have some alone time with her because I had not gotten home in time to say goodbye. It actually threw me that she did not appear dead. The fact that she appeared to be sleeping made it harder for me to grasp. There was no death pallor, only an orange glow and too-much rouge.

It was putting my hands on her that brought reality home to me. It was feeling the cold of her body that made me understand. I touched her skin and I could not feel her vibrant energy. I could not feel the familiarity of her hugs. Whatever made her who she was, was gone. My Grandma was dead. I had to go to the funeral home to have that moment. I had to go to where her body was, in a strange place.

There are currently about 15,000 funeral homes in operation in the US. According to the National Funeral Directors Association, the average cost of a funeral in 2006 was $6,200, up twenty percent from $5,180 in 2000. I don’t know what costs are covered in their average, but it fits the prices people I know have been quoting me. For a minimal cremation, no frills, including obituaries, it cost a friend $1,600 in 2011. For a funeral with cemetery burial, as cheap as possible, it cost another friend $5,000 in 2012.

You know that death became in industry when they passed the Federal Rule of 1984. It was put in place by the Federal Trade Commission to require all funeral homes to provide consumers with price information over the phone, and, upon request, a written itemized list of their fees. This was done to insure that no funeral home could gouge the mourners in their time of grief. And with this rule came a way for people to learn how to navigate the industry that taking care of the dying had become.

For instance, funeral homes cannot embalm the deceased for a fee without permission from the family unless required by law. In history, homes would do an embalming and then pad the bill with the expense. Some funeral homes have a policy that if you want to hold a viewing, you have to embalm the body, but embalming isn’t legally required. That is the specific funeral home, and many directors and morticians have bought into the belief that embalming bodies saves the living from disease. If you need to delay, refrigeration is another option, where dry ice is used for the viewing. The trouble then may come in finding a place that has the ability to refrigerate.

Funeral homes cannot require you to purchase a casket for cremation. A cardboard box is all that is needed for the body to set in. Some crematoriums do not even require that much. And just because a funeral home doesn’t have any of its catalog’s cheaper caskets on hand does not mean they cannot get you one within 24 hours. You actually don’t have to buy a casket from the funeral home. You can acquire one on your own, and under the Federal Rule of 1984, the home is not allowed to charge you a handling fee for accepting one from an outside source.

Don’t be afraid to shop around and compare prices. Even better, do it now, before you need to. Obviously prices will increase, but you’ll get the feel for who you’d want to give your business to. Better still, not all states require the use of a funeral director or funeral homes for viewings. Unfortunately (for me) New York, Connecticut, New Jersey, Louisiana, Nebraska, Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan are some of the ones that do. In other states, it’s legal to plan and organize your own funeral. Right now you’re thinking, why would I want to? But maybe death is supposed to be hard. Maybe preparing the way for others is the spiritual-yet-not-religious thing missing from our lives that would naturally help us greet our own end more peacefully.

Standard funeral costs are made up of the services of the funeral director, the use of the funeral home facilities, embalming, the casket including linings and pillows, burial vault, obituaries, the disposition of the body including the cost of the grave site, the opening and closing of the grave, the cremation, transportation of the body, flowers, clergy, grave markers or plaques, and various other incidentals. Often in our grief we worry about being seen as cheap, as if the amount of money we spend displays how we felt about them. That myth is a by-product of our death services becoming its own industry, like how Hallmark Cards make a mint off of perpetuating Hallmark as the brand that says you care the most.

In this current economy, it is foolish to fall into that trap. We should do for our dead to the best of our abilities, but the dead would not want the living to bankrupt themselves on memorialization. When a person dies, their spirit moves on and only the body remains. Do for that body, as it was the sacred vessel of your loved one, but remember them in your actions. Speak their names to the winds and tell their stories. Truly the best way to honor the loss is to remember them by living.