Rewriting rules at life's end

Gail Franklin

- For the CDT

After Bryn Hammarstrom's 90-year-old father died at a hospice, he filed the death certificate, brought the body home in his truck, made a simple coffin and lowered it into a grave on the top of a hill on his 58-acre property in Wellsboro.

Because he buried his father within 24 hours of his death he did not have to refrigerate, embalm or otherwise preserve the body.

The entire process was legal. Contrary to common belief, funeral directors are not a required part of after-death care in most states.

Supporters of home burials and home funerals say caring for the body of a loved one can allow a more natural and intimate grieving process.

It also allows a family to easily avoid embalming, and can save thousands of dollars in mortuary and funeral service costs.

“There’s a body, it has to be disposed of and as humans we can figure out what to do in the meantime,” said Laurie Mulvey, the local go-to woman on do-it-yourself funerals. “We’re all prepared really ... We’ve just come to expect it must be handled by a professional and there’s a skill to be learned, but I don’t think that’s the case.”

Group offers support

Mulvey is president of Last Rights of Central Pennsylvania, a State College-based nonprofit organization that has become increasingly active in getting the word out about Pennsylvania’s laws regarding burials and funerals.

Pennsylvania is one of 44 states where next of kin or a designated agent may care for the body of their deceased loves ones, said Josh Slocum, president of the nonprofit Funeral Consumers Alliance, a national advocacy group.

“There’s a lot of misinformation out there,” he said. “I think a lot more people would consider a home burial if they realized it was legal and they had an alternative to the high cost of funerals.”

While FCA does not advocate one type of funeral over another, Slocum said the option of a home funeral should be preserved as a basic right.

Last Rights provides information about many after-death care options, including the use of funeral homes, but is one of the few local sources of support for those seeking a home burial.

Its Web site,www.lastrights.info, includes state law, phone numbers of local authorities and ideas for building or buying an inexpensive container.

Home funerals can include a brightly decorated cardboard casket buried in the backyard or a time where the body is kept at home before it’s moved to a cemetery or a crematory.

“We just separate ourselves from all the good of life in our culture it seems, and that’s strange and upside down,” Mulvey said. “Most just choose to do it the way it’s always been done.”

Home burial ‘more joyful’

Jean Forsberg, an artist and Penn State instructor who lives in the Julian Woods community outside of Julian, said she chose home burial because she could not bear to separate herself from her mother, who lived with her for her final eight years of life.

When Forsberg’s mother, Grace Fisher, died in April 2002 at home and under care of hospice, she asked a neighbor to build the casket and men, women and children in the community helped dig the grave. Forsberg chose a spot in the backyard under a pine and a crabapple tree, near the clothesline where they enjoyed hanging wash together, within view of the pond, garden and house.

“She’s in the center of what was her life for a lot of years,” Forsberg said. “That feels good to me.”

She remembers her 3- year-old granddaughter helped arrange pine needles and flowers in the open casket, and was not scared of the body.

“Rather than being helpless you become an active participant,” she described. “This makes it less hard and more joyful.”

In Wellsboro, Hammarstrom, a hospital nurse, said Mulvey helped him with information and encouragement when he had to make decisions about his father’s end-of-life care and, eventually, his death in July 2008.

He fought to get his father — who had broken his hip twice and been infected with MRSA, among other complications — out of the hospital. He then had to argue to be allowed to drive him from Allentown to a nonprofit hospice group near his home in Wellsboro rather than pay thousands of dollars for ambulance transportation.

With Mulvey’s help he was able to do both. During that last drive his father, who shares his name, got to see the old factory where he once worked and sit by a portion of his beloved Appalachian Trail.

When he died, Hammarstrom found he couldn’t donate the body for medical research, his father’s first choice. Mulvey talked him through the process of a home burial and he was able to reach the right people in Tioga County to get permission, file the death certificate and get a burial permit.

“It was just being a little knowledgeable,” Hammarstrom said. “I called a township supervisor who has a back hoe and he dug a hole. I built a wooden box and laid dad in it in the sheet from hospice and there were 11 of us friends, family and members of his Quaker Meeting.”

Hammarstrom and Forsberg both said this hands-on approach to dealing with death felt natural.

Laws, rights vary

Mulvey, a Penn State sociology professor, sought out Last Rights years after she spent a surprisingly therapeutic day helping family members bury their pet dog at their home in New Jersey. She said she was haunted by the question: Why wouldn’t I do the same thing for a dead loved one?

She joined Last Rights five years ago. The group held a do-it-yourself funeral primer at its annual meeting in May that drew a crowd that packed a room in Schlow Centre Region Library.

The group cautions consumers considering a home burial or funeral to know their rights. Many well-intentioned hospital workers don’t know the law and refuse to release a body to anyone but a funeral director, Mulvey said.

Pennsylvania law allows a family member or friend to act as their own funeral director, said Janice Tummavichakul, of the Pennsylvania Department of Health’s Division of Vital Records. She oversees the state’s local registrars, who handle death certificates.

“We do have a provision in commonwealth law to allow a family (or friend) to bury their own,” Tummavichakul said. “I always inform them to get approval from (the) county and, specifically, a municipality.”

Centre County Planning Director Robert Jacobs said in July he helped supervisors in Marion Township rewrite a portion of its new zoning code to exclude private burial sites and cemeteries only from commercial and industrially zoned areas.

“When we develop zoning, we try to allow for that type of use in all the districts except commercial,” he said. “It’s an essential use and function.”

‘An important last act’

Still, outside of Amish and Mennonite communities it appears to be anything but common practice.

Centre County Coroner Scott Sayers has never been asked to release a body to a family, he said. When asked what he would do with such a request he paused, and replied that he’d want to know how the body would be handled. Various factors — the person’s medical history, the time of year — help determine how quickly a body will begin to decompose, he said.

Sayers, who is licensed to act as a funeral director but doesn’t practice, said he would caution those considering a choice to care for a loved one’s body.

“I’ve seen people on hospice with cancer and their mothers or daughters thought they were prepared but when that time comes they’re not always prepared as much as they think,” he said. “They’re very emotional.”

Steven Neff, a funeral director in Centre County since 1981, assists Amish communities with burials on their property and has occasionally helped other families that want a home funeral, but most clients choose to let him take care of the body and almost all the other details.

“It’s a stressful time enough,” Neff said. “They call it undertaking because it’s vast in all we do. We arrange things like an event planner so the family doesn’t have to deal with that.”

Mulvey agrees that for traumatic deaths, for people with few relatives, or those who don’t want to care for a body, a professional can offer helpful services.

She just wants people to know it’s not their only choice.

State Rep. Kerry Benninghoff, who was Centre County coroner for 12 years, said he can understand why a home burial would be more meaningful to some people.

As coroner, he was invited speak to the Julian Woods community about home burials in the 1990s and later helped a family bury a husband and father on property there.

Jacobs and Benninghoff both said that if zoning and other officials are consulted regarding water and land issues, home burials are generally supported.

“It’s just my observation, but for as progressive a country as we are, I think we’re still very backward about talking about death and dying,” Benninghoff said. “We think if we don’t talk about it, it won’t happen.”

The Bellefonte Republican said he found solace in his own family’s experience with home burial when his brother Scott died in 2003 and the family buried a handful of his ashes under a white pine known as “pappy’s tree” because it was planted by their grandfather.

“I think people want to have those options in life,” he said. “It’s the beginning of the grieving process and an important last act.”

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