FAMILY
UNDERTAKING
HUFFINGTON
03.03.13
“We would like to see New York state
the Funeral Home in Twentieth-Century
change its funeral law to allow family to
America. It was a time before modern
handle such matters as filing death cerhospitals, “a kind of mediator between
tificates, home viewing and preliminary
the living and the dying,” he says.
care of the deceased, and transportaBut the war and the need to transport
tion of the deceased without the interbodies from the South to the North led
vention of a licensed funeral director as
to widespread embalming. The practice
prescribed by current law,” says Bentley, was even more popularized after Abrawho’s on the board of the Memorial Soham Lincoln’s embalmed body was taken
ciety of the Hudson-Mohawk Region, a
on a 13-city tour after his assassination
group that monitors New York
in 1865. Mourners gawked at
funeral laws and counsels famhow well it was preserved, acThe
ilies interested in home funercording to Laderman.
average
als. “There is no public need
“The most common thing
funeral
that is satisfied by such laws.”
used to be hands-on family incosts
The public need for funeral
volvement. We Americans have
$6,560,
homes — there are 19,680 in the
completely forgotten that there
while
U.S. today — is relatively new.
is nothing universal about calla
home
Until the Civil War, death
ing the mortuary at 3 in the
funeral
was largely a home matter and
morning,” says Josh Slocum,
can
cost
home funerals were the norm.
executive director of the Funeral
close
to
It was common at the time for
Consumers Alliance and co-aunothing.
unembalmed bodies to be put
thor of Final Rights: Reclaiming
in simple caskets and buried in
the American Way of Death.
cemeteries that weren’t treated with pesSlocum thinks there are two reasons
ticides. (It’s a growing trend today, known that home funerals haven’t taken off:
as “green burial.”) Historians say that our “people not knowing they have the option
culture’s approach to death in the preand the ways laws in many places are writCivil War years had much to be praised.
ten to favor the funeral home industry.”
“Death was much more ingrained into
It’s nearly impossible to do a home
daily life and cultural life. People were
funeral in some places, but the funeral
rural-living, mortality rates were higher.
homes and home funerals can often coMost people died at home,” says Gary
ordinate activities to get around that
Laderman, a professor of religious studies hurdle. Like the Kirks in Nashville who
at Emory University and author of Rest
hired a funeral director to guide them on
in Peace: A Cultural History of Death and how to take care of Caroline’s body and