Caring for Your Own Dead

Rating:
Summary: Radical and Wise
Review: Lost count of the number of copies of this book I have bought, but I love giving it as a gift, and have used it myself actually when helping friends build plain pine burial boxes and oak burial boxes for loved ones.

It is a subject that needs to be discussed more, since so many people assume that ONLY a funeral home that charges thru the nose in prices, can legally handle a body or a funeral and burial. Fact is nothing could be further from the truth.

The book discusses each states laws, along with what family and loved ones need to know about getting tansport permits to get the body of a loved one either home from the hospital, and prepared for a service and burial or to a local cemetary or cremation facility for handling.

Fact is my Grandma Katy who grew up in rural Montana knew all about washing and dressing family members and the whole life to death process and that death and burial need NOT be a scary and uneasy thing to take part in. The author discusses all the myths of handling the dead, and all the misconceptions people have about death and dying.

This book and the classic The American Way Of Death by Jessica Mitford are MUST reads for anyone who is mature, thoughtful and not so easy swayed to handing all their personal needs over to strangers. Ceasar Chavez' family made his plain pine burial boxes. The Amish make all their own burial boxes and have for centuries. Locally we made our friends Bea Brickeys plain pine box per her wishes.

Bill Cosbys family buried their beloved son who had been murdered, at their home. So the idea that you the average citizen cannot do what the Amish and the wealthy do for their own loved ones, is just not true.

Read the book if for no other reason that to learn something new.

APRIL 2004:

My husband died February 2, 2004 unexpectedly and I know that it was this book and the wisdom it taught me when I bought my first copy in 1990-91, that made the process of spending time with his body, donating his bones, eyes, organs and then choosing cremation so much easier and not at all scary as I once thought it would be. The author became a gift to me in my time of need.