Crying and Digging

For centuries in America, we tended to our dead. People died at home, and relatives prepared the body, laid it out in the parlor and sat by as callers paid final respects. The body was buried in the family cemetery, if there was one, or on the back 40; pieties were spoken, and life went on until the next person died. Death, if not a welcome visitor, was a familiar one. This changed, incrementally, during the Civil War, when others were paid to undertake the job of transporting the bodies of soldiers killed far from home; this is when formaldehyde as an embalming agent was first used. But it was only 100 years ago that we began routinely to hand over our dead to the undertakers. Soon the gravely ill as well were deemed too taxing, and moved to hospitals to die. Within decades, what had for millennia been familial responsibilities were appropriated by professionals.

"People think we're not emotionally capable, let alone physically capable, of carrying this out," says Jerri Lyons. "Well, what were we doing before when we weren't supposedly able to take care of people?"

Lyons is making tea in the small cottage she shares with her husband in a leafy glade in Sebastopol. Bookshelves overspill, a computer is crammed into a nook and there is no room for a dining set, so Lyons sets the teacups on her massage table, which, in any case, is multipurpose.

"We use it to turn people during seminars," she says. "We use it for reiki, and we also lend it to families that want to have a showing at home."

What she means by "a showing" is a wake. But Lyons, a 57-year-old former Costco rep and cafe owner, is not an undertaker, or, in her euphemistic parlance, a "well-intended grief choreographer." In fact, there is as yet no title for what she does, which is to teach people about their right to a home funeral and how to prepare the body for it.

There's an alternative-death movement fomenting in Northern California, one that leaves the funeral industry out of the picture altogether. Proponents of home funerals and of green burials, wherein bodies are interred in natural environments and in ways that promote decomposition, insist that this country's "death-denying tradition," in Lyons' term, is not merely costly but corrosive to body and spirit, to land and communities. Fear and doubt, they say, crept into the space left when we handed death to others, and our attendant helplessness supports the multibillion-dollar death-care industry. And they know, even if we don't yet, just how badly we want to bury our own dead.