Some Schmo wrote:I've told my wife that if she spends more than the absolute minimum on disposing of my body, I'll come back and haunt her ass. I can't stand wastefulness. Find a cardboard box and bury me in the backyard.
Google: caring for your own dead...which was originally the title of a book by Lisa Carlson (for which I will always be grateful)...as well as, now, an actual movement in North America.
During the time when I had three relatives dying in the same general time period, I was standing in line at a health food store, flipping through one of their magazines for sale (which I bought, after I saw the article)...and this was my first encounter with the "caring for your own dead" movement. Lisa Carlson, who was probably one of the first to do this in contemporary times, had---by necessity---learned to do this when her husband unexpectedly died and she did not have the money to do the normal things. It turned out very well for her and for everyone in her family.
At that point, two of the three relatives I spoke of above had already died (both had been cremated; both sets of ashes were delivered to me for scattering)...but in each case, the standard "going through a funeral home" had been done.
When I read this article, my father had already been diagnosed with terminal cancer...so I just followed what Lisa Carlson said in her book, step-by-step, and it worked out
incredibly well. Including everything, the entire after-death process from the moment I pronounced his time of death (he was under hospice care, as we all knew it was going to be "in the next few hours") was just me following each of the steps she laid out (modified as necessary by instructions, both legal and practical, I received along the way.
A couple of weeks prior to my father's death, I had gone to the county office which is responsible for issuing Death Certificates, explained that my father was terminal and was going to die fairly soon and I was doing "everything" myself---and the county employee I was talking to said: "I've always wondered why more people didn't do this." She gave me the blank Death Certificate forms to fill out, gave me the instructions I needed (NO erasures AT ALL---if I made a typing mistake, I had to bring back the forms I had mistyped and get a new set of forms from them), told me what to do if my father died during their regular office hours, and also what to do if he died when they were closed (including weekends and holidays). Basically, the first thing after I, in effect, pronounced my father dead (noting the to-be-forever-official time of death), then getting a "Coroner's Case Number" assigned to my then-deceased father---after which, I would be "legal," even though I had a dead human body in my possession.
When he did die (it was around eight at night...on a Friday night), I made sure he was dead...I then phoned hospice to send over a hospice nurse...then I phoned the county Coroner's office to get that case number assigned (from a really nice guy on the other end of the line), and I turned up the air conditioning to maximum cool as I had been instructed. (My father's body had to stay in place until Monday morning, after I had his Death Certificate filed and after the crematory opened, so keeping his body as cool as possible for those couple of days was essential.)
I phoned his doctor's emergency number and made an appointment (for Sunday, at the golf course; between the doctor's rounds of golf) so the doctor could sign the Death Certificate form. The hospice nurse arrived, she checked my father's body to make certain he was dead (listened to his heart, etc.), then asked me what she could do to help. I told her I was doing "everything" [after death], but I would REALLY appreciate it if she would watch my father's poodle while I went across the street to the supermarket to get "party ice" to ice down his body (especially his abdomen) until we could transport his body to the crematory on Monday. (We already had the long piece of cardboard which folded into a cardboard "coffin" which was a requirement of the crematory.)
I went to the supermarket and brought back some big bags of party ice, and the hospice nurse helped me ice down his body (still "clothed" in what he was wearing when he died: a diaper and socks), then she left, I checked the air conditioning to make sure it was at maximum cool, turned out the lights, locked the doors, and took my father's poodle with me to my own home (about an hour away). It was the first night I had slept in my own bed in about six weeks, I think.
Saturday (the next morning) I typed out the Death Certificate forms...got them signed by the doctor on Sunday...and Monday morning, just after I had the Death Certificate legally certified at the county coroner's office, we were at my father's apartment (in a rented van) to take my father's body to the crematory. We put the cardboard "coffin" together (a mortuary had given it to me free, though I was most willing to pay for it---it was just a big piece of flat cardboard before we folded it on the pressed-in lines), got his body into it, carried it out to the van, and we drove his body to the crematory where I had already made arrangements for his body to be cremated. When we arrived at the crematory, they checked his Death Certificate, made their notations, gave me a receipt for the body, and then took his body (in the cardboard "coffin") away on a gurney. We turned in the van...and a couple of days later picked up my father's ashes.
Total costs (including legal fees at the county Coroner's office, cremation, and van rental for a few hours) was under three hundred dollars. (The biggest cost was the cremation fee...followed by van rental...followed by the required legal fees for the Death Certificate. This was a few years ago; it might cost a couple of hundred dollars more now.)
You can do this is most states, but not all of them. (I think there are about eight states where "caring for your own dead" is not possible.)
Lisa Carlson:
Caring for Your Own Dead.
Google: caring for your own dead
For me (and everyone I know of who has done this), it was an extraordinarily healing experience---and it used to be the way nearly all deaths were handled up to about World War I times. This is not a new thing, which is obvious when you think about it...this used to be how all families dealt with the deaths which occurred in their families.
