Reimagining Death: Stories and Practical Wisdom for Home Funerals and Green Burials

by Lucinda Herring, David Spangler (Foreword by)

Overview

Honor your loved ones and the earth by choosing practical, spiritual, and eco-friendly after-death care

Natural, legal, and innovative after-death care options are transforming the paradigm of the existing funeral industry, helping families and communities recover their instinctive capacity to care for a loved one after death and do so in creative and healing ways. Reimagining Death offers stories and guidance for home funeral vigils, advance after-death care directives, green burials, and conscious dying. When we bring art and beauty, meaningful ritual, and joy to ease our loss and sorrow, we are greening the gateway of death and returning home to ourselves, to the wisdom of our bodies, and to the earth.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781623172923
Publisher:	North Atlantic Books
Publication date:	01/08/2019
Pages:	296
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

LUCINDA HERRING has worked at the cutting edge of the green funeral movement for more than twenty years, beginning with others in the 1990s to quietly care for loved ones after death. Today she is one of the leading voices for more healing and ecological ways to care for our dead. Herring is a home funeral/green disposition consultant and guide, an interfaith minister, and a licensed funeral director in the state of Washington. She speaks regularly about her work, and through her company Limina LLC—Thresholds Consulting and Ministry, she offers Advance After-Death Care planning, home funeral/green disposition education and trainings, and celebrant/ministerial services for families and communities who are reclaiming their innate right to care for each other and the earth at the end of life.

Table of Contents

Illustrations ix

Foreword David Spangler xv

Prologue: The Calling 1

Practical Wisdom: Home Funerals Lost and Found 10

Chapter 1 Return to the Mother 17

Practical Wisdom: Discerning if a Home Funeral Vigil Is Right for You 48

Chapter 2 Greening the Gateway of Death 51

Practical Wisdom: Choosing a Home Funeral: What You Need to Know 73

Chapter 3 Partnering with Nature When We Die 81

Practical Wisdom: Co-Creating with Nature: An Exploration 96

Chapter 4 "Bury Me Naturally": Stones and Guidance for Green Burials 105

Practical Wisdom: Natural and Unnatural Burial Practices 123

Chapter 5 "You're Dead. Now What?" Humor and Laughter at the Threshold 133

Practical Wisdom: Helpful Field Notes 142

Chapter 6 Sacred Care of the Dead 147

Practical Wisdom: Discovering Your Own Way 157

Chapter 7 When We Die in the Hospital: Field Notes for Finding Our Way Home 169

Practical Wisdom: Navigating Hospital Policies 173

Chapter 8 Conscious Dying: A Death with Dignity 181

Practical Wisdom: Making the Choice: What You Need to Know 197

Chapter 9 Reimagmmg the Future in Ecological After-Death Care 201

Practical Wisdom: The Environmental Cost of Cremation 210

Chapter 10 Be Prepared: Creating a Plan with Family and Friends 221

Practical Wisdom: Advance After-Death Care Directives 227

Epilogue 235

Resources 241

Appendix A The Three Stages of Death's Threshold 255

Appendix B Being a Home Funeral Vigil Case Manager 259

Index 261

Acknowledgments 267

About the Author 271

Contributors 271

Editorial Reviews

11/26/2018
Funeral consultant Herring urges readers to shun the impersonal, environmentally taxing approach of modern death in her stimulating debut. She draws from a highly syncretic new age approach to highlight the positive impact of vigils, caring for one’s own dead, and green burial practices. Opening the book with the death of her own mother, Herring writes of having to coax her resistant father and siblings to have a funeral service in their home. She shares stories of clients and friends who have buried loved ones without using traditional funeral arrangements, including a Tibetan Buddhist with exacting preparation requirements. Herring also includes an affecting story of a home vigil for a young woman who died in a car crash. The range of traditions, approaches, and styles Herring describes attests to the versatility of home funerals, and the practical information at the end of each chapter guides readers through, for instance, the legalities of transporting bodies, the least environmentally harmful body disposal methods, and how one can prepare for the end of life. With clear advice and reasoning, Herring helpfully nudges readers toward less clinical, more personal, and more active planning for the deaths of their loved ones and themselves. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

Interfaith minister and licensed funeral director Herring has become a champion of ecological ways to care for the dead. Here she presents stories, photographs, and plans for home vigils and natural burials that affirm contributions to a healthier, more harmonious life.... Recommended for all readers but especially those whose loved ones are facing death in the near future.”
—Library Journal

"With clear advice and reasoning, Herring helpfully nudges readers toward less clinical, more personal, and more active planning for the deaths of their loved ones and themselves."
—Publishers Weekly

“Stories are fuel, and balm, to social movements. That’s why we need more stories about reclaiming death care practices that heal our connection to death and recognize our relationship to the earth. With hands-on knowledge, Lucinda Herring heeds the call.”
—Suzanne Kelly, author of Greening Death: Reclaiming Burial Practices and Restoring Our Tie to the Earth
 
“For all who long to experience death as a natural and sacred part of life, Reimagining Death is the ideal handbook to inform, inspire, and ignite a new vision for our final passage. It is a beacon of hope, possibility and renewal.”
—Karen M. Wyatt, MD,  author of the award-winning What Really Matters, hospice physician and founder of End of Life University

"Death will come for all of us, but Herring makes it a little easier to live with."
—The Stranger

“Read this book to understand the vast possibilities for beauty around the event of death. Lucinda Herring’s writing is clear and precise and infused with love. It may even change your life!”
—Katrina Spade, founder of Recompose, a project working to transform the end-of-life experience

“We cannot heal our relationships with the natural world, others, and ourselves   until we heal our relationship with death and grief. With Reimagining Death, Lucinda Herring charts a course for this essential healing—a course that is both practical and spiritual, personal and universal.”
—Brian Flowers, funeral director, founder of The Meadow Natural Burial Ground, past president of the Green Burial Council

“With her innate wisdom, depth of understanding and compassionate approach Lucinda Herring embodies the sacred, and offers us the possibility of an honoring, transformative and loving experience of death. This book offers 'peace of the green' and is a profound gift to us all.”
—Claire Turnham, UK-based founder of Only with Love and Chair of the Home Funeral Network, recognized internationally as a leading home funeral guide, advocate, celebrant, and natural death care educator
 
“This is the book we have all been waiting for! As a sacred partner in this complex journey of living and dying, Herring’s wisdom and poetic renderings resonate completely with what is in my heart. Her stories remind us that nature is our constant companion, offering solace, mystery, possibility, and at times absolute proof that there is much more to life and death than what most people believe. This book can help us transcend our fears of death and find the authenticity and beauty in life that is always there.”
—Jerrigrace Lyons, founder and director of the nonprofit Final Passages, the Institute of Conscious Dying, Home Funeral, and Green Burial Education
 
“Lucinda Herring embodies the emerging ethic of natural, meaningful, and conscious threshold and after-death care. Her book empowers us all to trust our intuition and find ways to say goodbye that are both practical and transformative. She has captured the generous spirits of the home funeral and natural burial movements perfectly.”
—Lee Webster, former president of the National Home Funeral Alliance, education chair of the Green Burial Council, and founding member of the Conservation Burial Alliance
 
“With her innate wisdom, depth of understanding, and compassionate approach, Lucinda Herring embodies the sacred and offers us the possibility of an honoring, transformative, and loving experience of death. This book offers ‘peace of the green’ and is a profound gift to us all.”
—Claire Turnham, UK-based founder of Only with Love and chair of the Home Funeral Network
 
“As an active, long-time member of the National Home Funeral Alliance and the founding director of Heart Land Prairie Cemetery, a prairie restoration burial ground in central Kansas, I have longed for a book that I could give to people interested in what lies at the very heart of this work. Reimagining Deathis that book. I am so grateful for Lucinda Herring for sharing her stories and practical instruction and for reminding us all of a deep abiding wisdom we share as human beings. Caring for our own dead in tender, environmentally friendly ways has the power to help heal our souls, our relationships to each other, and to reinstate our place in the cycle of life.”
—Sarah Crews, president of the National Home Funeral Alliance and director of Heart Land Prairie Cemetery

From the Publisher