I watched the documentary “A Family Undertaking” last night. It’s about home funerals. I already had a hunch that I was as much of a death radical as I am a birth radical and this video (available on Netlix) confirmed it: bring on the fleshy, life-affirming, love-emanating reality of death!
Of course, I mean “radical” here as in “affecting the fundamental nature of something” because giving birth and dying are not radical in the “departure from tradition” sense of the word. It should be a clue to our profound deviation that recognizing the fundamental nature of birth and death has become such a departure from tradition.
What inspires me about birth and death as sites of cultural struggle is that our life-force is in spades there, in birth and death we have the capacity to be deeply connected to what Audre Lorde describes as our erotic power.* I like to use that phrase because it taps in to a core hunger that we can all lean into and revel in. And we need that core hunger activated to reclaim our birthing and dying.
When we institutionalize these threshold moments we institutionalize our life force. Can you imagine conscripting your erotic power to an undertaker? And yet that is what so many do. While most people in the United States want to die at home only about 30% do (and only 1% of us give birth, or are born, at home).
This movie exposed the myths that lead so many to believe that they can’t die or care for their loved ones in death without the aid of institutional services. We don’t need to be embalmed (in fact it’s better for the environment if we’re not). We don’t need fancy caskets (send me to the light in a cardboard box that we all decorate like a love-package). We don’t need funeral directors (I want Muppets, poetry and silly hats!). We can even hang out at home after we’ve died for a few days while everyone soaks in the reality that our souls are no longer housed in our bodies.
And what’s more, this is deeply, deeply healthy for our individuals but also for our shared ecology. Not only the ecology of living and dying things, but also the ecology of culture and ideas. We are cookie-cuttered in packaged funerals and packaged births. Our communal erotic power is spent like so many loveless pornifications depleting our creative reserves.
But when we die and give birth at home, among loved ones, when we care for these bodies on the threshold with our own hands and hearts (fearful, cracked open, in awe as we may be) we celebrate our erotic power, give birth to ourselves, release the life force, palpable, into the air we breathe. We become the air we breathe.
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* Audre Lorde “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power” in Sister Outsider. She defines the erotic as “an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it we know we can aspire” and in my paraphrasing: An internal requirement towards excellence which does not demand the impossible, but rather invites us into a fullness and depth of feeling that necessitates that we honor ourselves by not settling for the convenient the shoddy the conventionally expected, nor the merely safe.
Some resources on Home Funerals and Death:
Final Passages in California
Crossings in Maryland
Funeral Consumers Alliance, a federation of groups.
Natural Transitions in Colorado
and Dying a Natural Passage by Denys Cope
