Reimagining Death: Stories and Practical Wisdom for Home Funerals and Green Burials

(Paperback)

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For all those seeking to reclaim their innate and legal right to care for their own dead, create home funeral vigils, and choose greener after-death care options that are less toxic and more sustainable for the earth More natural after-death care options are transforming the paradigm of the existing funeral industry, helping families and communities recover their instinctive capacity to care for a loved one after death and do so in creative, nourishing, and healing ways. In reclaiming these practices and creating new, innovative options, we are greening the gateway of death and returning home to ourselves, our bodies, and the earth. Lucinda Herring reminds us of the sacredness of death itself; her compelling stories, poetry, and guidance come from years of experience as a home funeral/green burial consultant and licensed funeral director dedicated to more natural and healing death practices. In Reimagining Death she shares with readers her experience caring for her own mother after death. Through storytelling and resources Herring also reveals to families the gifts of partnering with nature, home funeral vigils, sacred care at death, conscious dying (through the story of a Death with Dignity with accompanying photos of one man's planned death and after-death care), bringing laughter and a greater lightness of being to death, natural burials, and emerging eco-conscous dispositions. A valuable resource in planning for all deaths in all circumstances (with a chapter on what to do when a death occurs outside of the home), this book also guides readers on how to create an advance after-death care directive.

Reviews

Interfaith minister and licensed funeral director Herring has become a champion of ecological ways to care for the dead. Here she presents stories, photographs, and plans for home vigils and natural burials that affirm contributions to a healthier, more harmonious life....Recommended for all readers but especially those whose loved ones are facing death in the near future.
Library Journal

"With clear advice and reasoning, Herring helpfully nudges readers toward less clinical, more personal, and more active planning for the deaths of their loved ones and themselves."
Publishers Weekly

Stories are fuel, and balm, to social movements. Thats why we need more stories about reclaiming death care practices that heal our connection to death and recognize our relationship to the earth. With hands-on knowledge, Lucinda Herring heeds the call.
Suzanne Kelly, author ofGreening Death: Reclaiming Burial Practices and Restoring Our Tie to the Earth

For all who long to experience death as a natural and sacred part of life,Reimagining Deathis the ideal handbook to inform, inspire, and ignite a new vision for our final passage. It is a beacon of hope, possibility and renewal.
Karen M. Wyatt, MD, author ofthe award-winning What Really Matters, hospice physician and founder of End of Life University

"Death will come for all of us, but Herring makes it a little easier to live with."
The Stranger

Read this book to understand the vast possibilities for beauty around the event of death.Lucinda Herrings writing is clear and precise and infused with love.It mayevenchange your life!
Katrina Spade, founder of Recompose, a project working to transform the end-of-life experience

We cannot heal our relationships with the natural world, others, and ourselves until we heal our relationship with death and grief. WithReimagining Death, Lucinda Herring charts a course for this essential healinga course that is both practical and spiritual, personal and universal.
Brian Flowers, funeral director, founder of The Meadow Natural Burial Ground, past president of the Green Burial Council

With her innate wisdom, depth of understanding and compassionate approach Lucinda Herring embodies the sacred, and offers us the possibility of an honoring, transformative and loving experience of death. This book offers 'peace of the green' and is a profound gift to us all.
Claire Turnham, UK-based founder ofOnly with Loveand Chair of theHome Funeral Network, recognized internationally as a leading home funeral guide, advocate, celebrant, and natural death care educator

This is the book we have all been waiting for! As a sacred partner in this complex journey of living and dying, Herrings wisdom and poetic renderings resonate completely with what is in my heart. Her stories remind us that nature is our constant companion, offering solace, mystery, possibility, and at times absolute proof that there is much more to life and death than what most people believe. This book can help us transcend our fears of death and find the authenticity and beauty in life that is always there.
Jerrigrace Lyons, founder and director of the nonprofit Final Passages, the Institute of Conscious Dying, Home Funeral, and Green Burial Education

Lucinda Herring embodies the emerging ethic of natural, meaningful, and conscious threshold and after-death care. Her book empowers us all to trust our intuition and find ways to say goodbye that are both practical and transformative. She has captured the generous spirits of the home funeral and natural burial movementsperfectly.
Lee Webster, former president of the National Home Funeral Alliance, education chair of the Green Burial Council, and founding member of the Conservation Burial Alliance

With her innate wisdom, depth of understanding, and compassionate approach, Lucinda Herring embodies the sacred and offers us the possibility of an honoring, transformative, and loving experience of death. This book offers peace of the green and is a profound gift to us all.
Claire Turnham, UK-based founder of Only with Love and chair of the Home Funeral Network

As an active, long-time member of the National Home Funeral Alliance and the founding director of Heart Land Prairie Cemetery, a prairie restoration burial ground in central Kansas, I have longed for a book that I could give to people interested in what lies at the very heart of this work.Reimagining Deathis that book. I am so grateful for Lucinda Herring for sharing her stories and practical instruction and for reminding us all of a deep abiding wisdom we share as human beings. Caring for our own dead in tender, environmentally friendly ways has the power to help heal our souls, our relationships to each other, and to reinstate our place in the cycle of life.
Sarah Crews, president of the National Home Funeral Alliance and director of Heart Land Prairie Cemetery

Author Bio

LUCINDA HERRING has worked at the cutting edge of the green funeral movement for over twenty years, beginning with others in the 1990s to quietly care for loved ones after death and going on to become one of the leading voices for more healing and ecological ways to care for our dead. Herring is a licensed funeral director and runs Thresholds Consulting and Ministry. She also regularly speaks about her work and offers advance after-death care planning, home funeral/green disposition education and trainings, and celebrant/ministerial services for families and communities who are reclaiming their innate right to care for each other and the earth at the end of life.