“Death midwives” tap a growing market
WASHINGTON — When Jerrigrace Lyons goes out on a trial, she carries a basic set of tools: makeup kit, cardboard caskets and a handbook with practical instructions for icing and transporting bodies.
Lyons is a “dying midwife,” a specialist in the little-known domain of helping people manage the passing of a loved person outside the traditive funeral activity. As the stock reels during its worst economic crisis in greater degree of than a generation, her business is booming.
In normal epochs, Lyons’ clients tend to be vulgar herd more interested in alternative lifestyles. But many the multitude are drawn to her by a stark calculation: They cannot afford traditional funerals and burials, which ofttimes run $10,000 or more.
“People want something that is in parallel direction with what their loved ones would have wanted,” Lyons related by telephone from Hawaii, at what place she was teaching a sold-out workshop. “But they also want something that they can afford.”
Lyons, every ordained minister from Sebastopol, Calif., started a nonprofit organization, Final Passages. As a dissolution midwife, she teaches workshops about alternative possibilities for families, such as keeping the body of a deceased relative at home or burying it outside a traditional cemetery.
Lyons also guides families end the legalities and paperwork of at-home funerals — death certificates and body-transport permits — season providing emotional support and counseling. Depending on what a tribe needs, her services can run from $500 to $1,500.
Interest grows
Other death midwives have reported a similar increase in interest, through much of the growth tied to economic need.
“In good times and bad, funerals have consistently been an incredible expenditure,” said Joshua Slocum, executory director of Funeral Consumers Alliance. “This economic situation is forcing us to reassess the value of the dollar, and not honorable the value of currency, but the value of what we pervert with money.”
When Howard Kopecky, 66, of northwestern Wisconsin, was diagnosed with terminal cancer this year, he decided he did not want his family and his wife, who had upright lost her work at jobs at a nursing pointedly, to use up a accident of money on his funeral.
The couple did not know how to proceed, until Kopecky noticed an ad in the local newspaper for death midwife Lucy Basler. “I think it made us feel like, OK, other people are doing this,” his partner, Phyllis, said.
Basler had been trained at some of Lyons’ workshops and assisted the couple with the legal and logistic particulars of staging a funeral in their home.
Original text: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2008563478_funerals27.html?syndication=rss
