WASHINGTON — When Jerrigrace Lyons goes out on a case, she carries a basic set of tools: makeup kit, cardboard caskets and a handbook with practical instructions for icing and transporting bodies.
Lyons is a "death midwife," a specialist in the little-known field of helping people manage the passing of a loved one -- outside the traditional funeral industry. As the nation reels through its worst economic crisis in decades, her business is booming.
In the past, Lyons' clients have been drawn by the alternative nature of her service. Now many simply cannot afford traditional funerals and burials, often more than $10,000.
"People want something that is in line with what their loved ones would have wanted," Lyons said by telephone from Hawaii, where she was teaching a sold-out workshop. "But they also want something that they can afford."
An ordained minister from Sebastopol, Calif., Lyons started a nonprofit organization called Final Passages. She teaches workshops about such topics as how to care for a body while it's in the family home and about burials outside traditional cemeteries.
Lyons also guides families through the legalities and paperwork of at-home funerals -- death certificates and body transport permits -- while providing emotional support and counseling. Her services can run from $500 to $1,500.
"As a death midwife, I'm helping to usher a person out of this world and into the next," said Lyons. "It is really the same threshold as birth. I think of it as the comings and goings of our spirit. We come in and we go out. But it is the same doorway."
She's not the only death midwife to report increased interest in the service.
"In good times and bad, funerals have consistently been an incredible expense," said Joshua Slocum, executive director of Funeral Consumers Alliance. "This economic situation is forcing us to reassess the value of the dollar -- and not just the value of money, but the value of what we buy."
When Howard Kopecky, 66, of northwestern Wisconsin was diagnosed with terminal cancer this year, he decided that he did not want his family to spend a lot of money on his funeral.
"We thought, 'Why should we put all that money into the ground, when we could leave it to our children and grandchildren?' " said Howard's wife, Phyllis, who had just lost her job at a nursing home when he was diagnosed.
