A Family Undertaking: Documentary on the Modern Home Funeral Movement from POV

From Netflix.

Yesterday we posted the most recent Seed and the Story column about the “Rest in Peace” Exhibit” at the Shiloh Museum of Ozark History.  I’ve gotten great responses to this piece and several people have told me stories about home funerals they remember from their own childhoods in Arkansas and beyond.  They told me about folks building coffins, creating the coffin liners, sitting up with the death, and grave digging.

I’ll be posting more about this in coming weeks and sharing some of these stories with you.

This has also sparked several interesting conversations about the nature of community, death rituals, and what makes for  meaningful ways to say goodbye.  One question comes up again and again: Have we lost something in our desire to professionalize death?  They’re are a variety of different opinions on this subject, all of them worthy of attention.

As a folklorist and community activist, I’m a firm believer that how we mourn our dead is just as important as how we welcome our youngest into the world.  The ways in which we honor our elders, attend to the grieving, and support those who’ve lost someone suddenly, is an instrumental part of what makes a strong and sustainable community.  I’d say it’s the foundation, really.  Or at least a big part of the foundation.  After all, a community can’t sustain itself without healthy ways of saying goodbye.   Certainly there are countless ways of doing this, and only a family can decide what it right for them and their loved one.  One tradition that’s very important where I live and work is Decoration Day.  There are countless others.

But all these discussions reminded me of a film I saw a few years ago entitled A Family Undertaking.   It’s a documentary about the home funeral movement throughout the United States.  Featuring interviews with families who choose to keep their dead in their homes, forgo funeral homes and embalming, and dig graves and make their own caskets, this film explores the decisions of families who bury their dead in much the same ways people did at the turn of the last century.  They sidestep the funeral industry and take part in all the details of burial.  For these families this way of saying goodbye is more personal and therefore healing.  The film also explores the options families have for the burial process in our modern age.

I checked online and was excited to see that if you’re a Netflix account holder you can currently watch the 2003 POV documentary online.  Just visit Netflix and type in the title in the search engine.

Here’s a brief summary of the film from the POV webpage:

What is old is often new again. Most funerals today are part of a multimillion-dollar industry run by professionals. This increased reliance on mortuaries has alienated Americans from life’s only inevitability — death. A Family Undertaking explores the growing home funeral movement by following several families in their most intimate moments as they reclaim the end of life, forgoing a typical mortuary funeral to care for their loved ones at home. Far from being a radical innovation, keeping funeral rites in the family or among friends is exactly how death was handled for most of pre-20th century America . . .

A Family Undertaking makes clear that the heart of the home funeral movement is the desire to rescue funerals from the impersonality of a mass-market industry, and to reshape them according to personal beliefs or family and community traditions. The film introduces us to individuals like the Carr family of South Dakota, preparing for the death of 90-year-old family patriarch Bernard, and Anne Stuart and Dwight Caswell of California, preparing for the end of Anne’s struggle with terminal cancer. Through their stories we see that “hands-on” care for the dead by family members, including children, can aid in grieving, bring a sense of fulfillment, and help loved ones to grasp the reality of a death. Their home funerals are remarkable documents of death made intimate, meaningful, and even joyful.

To read the entire synopsis, go here.

You can also read an excellent interview with filmmaker,  Elizabeth Westrate.  To read the entire interview click here.   She is also the producer and director of the film Passing on the Gift:  Heifer International’s Mission to End Hunger. 

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