Odd growing movement: home funerals. They're legal in all but five states (Connecticut, Delaware, Indiana, Nebraska and New York). Link to Washington Post article. Excerpts:
[The decedent's] body, washed and dressed in his favorite clothes, lay in the master bedroom, cooled by dry ice and open windows, and surrounded by fresh flowers, burning candles, family photographs and mementos of his many years as a lawyer, civil servant and father of four. Like a small number of other bereaved in the Washington area and nationally, Judy Saul chose to care for her husband's body for several days at home. . .
. . . Like the hospice movement, which since the 1960s has helped the terminally ill die peacefully at home, the home funeral movement aims to protect what it calls individuals' "right" to care for their own at death. At its most abstract, promoters say, it hopes to dispel the fear and denial that accompany an institutionalized approach to death, and return life's final act to its historical position as a natural, profound and private event.
Our gut reaction: We don't like it. There's something about a wake--the celebratory yet mournful gathering following the funeral--that requires the decedent to be "gone" yet present. We can't articulate it right now, and we suspect the blessings of such gatherings can't be articulated at all, but we'll think about it some more and post something later. There's an anecdote from the Life of Johnson about a gathering following the death of David Garrick that might be apt. We'll dig out James Schall's discussion of it and try to post it later.
