or and i am see president of the funeral consumers alliance of eastern massachusetts and i'd like to take this opportunity to thank the belmont health collaborative and sustainable belmont for inviting us and giving us this opportunity to speak today and the organization that i am proud to be the president of is an all volunteer organization and our mission is to educate the public about their rights and options and after death care and this is not everyone's favorite topic obviously but we believe that it's much better to address it the earlier in life the better don't wait until you're sick and then it becomes imperative but it really is it may not come naturally but it's a gift to your family and your loved ones they may not think so at st they may run screaming out of the room but when the time comes the fact that you have given them direction and they know what your final wishes are i is is a comfort at a very difficult time so we educate the public as i said about their rights on options many people don't realize that there are options and rights and we do so in a number of ways we have a telephone call line and an e mail account where people can read questions and we also provide printed brochures and materials we have a very informative website and the all this information will be available after the program and we give informational talks and workshops such as this one and finally and very importantly we monitor legislation and the funeral industry to help make sure that consumer rights are protected so the basic message that we stand for is as i mentioned planning ahead and deciding what your what your wishes are and then secondly is actually sharing it with your family and loved ones a lot of times people forget the nd part but someone needs to know what your wishes are and where they can find the information afterwards you don't want to put your wishes in a will that is often not read till several weeks after  die so it needs to be somewhere that's accessible we also do not advocate prepaying because often that the situation can change we do believe in putting the money aside in an account or an insurance policy but you don't necessarily want to hand the money over to to a funeral home you want to be able to access that money if you need it during your life or if you change your mind so basically the options for after death care is to be buried to be cremated or to donate your body to medical school there are for medical schools we are fortunate in the boston area we have great medical schools and they all accept bodies for it for training purposes for physicians and that i just need to say you need to make those arrangements well ahead of time and you also need to have a plan b because there are certain conditions or the timing may not be right and they may not accept your body when the time comes so you do need to have a plan b the option of burial is obviously the used to be the the way to go cremation has become much more popular and is  becoming more popular as time goes on for it's it's definitely the more affordable of the options and with burial people need to sometimes remember that in addition to the funeral cost there's also the the cost of the plot and there's surprisingly that does not include an opening and closing fee and as well as maintenance and markers and things of or you can keep it in a lovely container or you can scatter it and there are memorial gardens and various ways to to to do that and again if that's what you want done you can specify where you would like that done for cremation there is a forty eight hour wait period before cremation can take place after a time of death that is the state law that is so that someone from the medical examiner's office can sign off on the body of the death to make sure that there's nothing suspicious and and also your next of kin needs  to consent to that so at yet another reason to talk to your family about it ahead of time there are forms you can fill out if you think that your next of kin might not agree with your wishes to try to make certain that what you want to happen does so those are the options and as far as your rights this is the part that i think people find most it's news to a lot of people that you don't even have to use a funeral home in most states massachusetts included you can take care of your loved one after they die all by yourself now of course there are procedures that have to be followed and you're acting as a funeral director in that instance but it certainly can be done and it is on the state website there are instructions on how to not only telling you that it's legal telling you how to go about doing it when at all possible as in the case of a terminal illness we recommend that you plan ahead as you would for any kind of a home a home birth order doing anything that you don't routinely do yourself it's good to  practice it make sure that you know what to do it the right time so in addition to doing it yourself which also is quite a cost savings  but heather my other panel members are going to talk about there are other reasons why families choose to do that and of course that is the way it always been done historically however that's not for everyone and there's always the option of using a funeral home and that is definitely we at the funeral consumers alliance don't support one option over another we just want to make sure that everybody knows what their choices are and that they do what's right for them so a few tips about using a funeral home if you do choose to go that way is to really shop around the we do a price survey every other year in fact we are going to be doing one this year and the pricing can differ by hundreds or even thousands of dollars and you do not need to use the funeral home in your town you do not need to use you know a home that your parents or grandparents used they all have web sites now they're all very accessible and  it it's good to to do this well in advance of anybody's death because then you really can play the part of a consumer and we have a very long name as stacy said the funeral consumers alliance and  we are an affiliate by the way of the national organization every state we have to affiliates in massachusetts the western mass and eastern mass and i just lost track foot but anyway yes we want to shop around and ev but the law says that every funeral home needs to give you g p o which is called the general price list and you can compare and you can ask questions one thing there are two the two most affordable options on every general price list is called a direct cremation and a direct burial the that means that it's just the the basic package the funeral director picks up the body the funeral home they and they take care of it it does not include any  very popular choice for many people it does not mean that you don't have a chance to have a funeral what people do is a they have a memorial service which you can have without the body present and more time sensitive manner as far as people being able to attend so those are the things you should be looking for at a funeral home you should also check if they have refrigeration or not embalming used to be the way in the past century of preserving a body of four for a funeral that is not required by law in almost all instances and refrigeration is a is definitely a more natural alternative however if you have a public viewing most funeral homes make it their own policy that they require embalming however you can have a closed casket and you can have a private family viewing without embalming other ways to save some money for the living is using alternative caskets you can use a creation container which is corrugated many people feel that maybe that's not respectful or disrespectful of the deceased but you could cover it with with a cloth or a family quilt or something you can really personalize it also the and ruth is going to touch on this later if you have a clear gated alternative container people can decorate it  and it can be part of the part of the morning and healing process and other thing if you do choose burial most cemeteries require grave liners or vault those would be the cement i call it the coffin for the coffin and the liners are usually less expensive than the vault it's not as pretty but it's going underground so you have the choice of doing that i'm trying to think that's pretty much our message it's again it's a tough topic  can tell you from personal experience but the more you talk about it the more people become it's never the favorite topic but if people become more comfortable with it and  close by saying the following points choose what feels right and affordable for you we do get a lot of calls from people who have already spent the average cost of a funeral in those countries especially in this part of the countr easily seven dollars to ten thousand dollars if not more so and people have already signed the contract and they are there looking for financial assistance and there is very very little if any financial assistance out there so please don't spend beyond your means and certainly please do not put your your loved ones in the position where they need to do that secondly share your decisions with your family and friends put them down in writing again not in the will tell your family and friends the locations of these instructions and another sign of our times is that you should also provide your online and  accounts and passwords because that can be that all has to be dealt with after you die as well so and my last two comments are that talking about won't actually kill you and and that not talking about it it does not equal no stress in fact it's it's very often you know the elephant in the room and it is it's hard it is very hard but i can tell you from my own personal experience i never thought i'd be doing this but but it it you can it's a load off your your mind when you do so having said all that i know that's a lot of information again it's as josh slocum who's the director of the national funeral consumers alliance says and you'll be meeting him in a film that we're about to show the f c a or the funeral consumers alliance is about protecting our rights as meaningful affordable and dignified after death care including the right to care to not be a consumer at all so we're talking about home funerals and caring for your own dead and we have brought a very short video that illustrates that this is a family on cape cod who chose to exercise their right and care for their mother and they'll be interviews with josh locum and other home funeral god as well i was a weird child and i was interested in dark things and what does death mean and all this sort of stuff so it was probably th or th grade each of us students had to go find a business person in town to interview so you know the baker the butcher the candlestick maker so i went to the undertaker starting with our own families we saw that there were many people who did not want fancy funerals for their loved ones and they wanted to sort of take back this natural family process well i have a friend that i ran into a couple of years ago and she planted a seed that you could do home funeral i didn't think that it was even something that you could do interestingly enough over the past couple of years it's been the cardboard box that has become the most sought after it's less expensive the environmental impact is much less because even the beautiful plain coffins they're often made in china so the carbon footprint is large nothing you buy no casket no matter how fancy can dignify a dead person or insult a dead person you don't love them less if you bury them in a plain pine box coming together with people that you care about and sharing laughter crying with each other having some booze together and sharing memories that human interaction is what we do when we mark important parts of our lives and you can do all that when i was spending a penny on a funeral with my husband was whisked away from me he says taken very soon after he died by the funeral home and i really needed him to be there longer there's no other spear of human activity that i know was where we are in any case compelled to hire an anonymous commercial rd party business to do something private intimate that we wish to do for ourselves a lot of the funeral industry truly genuinely believes the things that it's telling people right it's not that they're necessarily malicious or liars or on the take but they have swallowed their own publicist and one of the big things is the idea that people have a most people don't know and so a funeral home will say you have to be have your person involved and everyone is a lot can say i don't want any involvement or you don't realize how you have a sense of control over the whole process from the beginning the passing how you take care of the body right afterwards all the way through to the end and i think it hits us because that's it we're not going to be there to care for her anymore this is the final goodbye so i think that the video gives a good overview of some of the components of a home funeral i'm an educator an advocate of families caring for their own dead home funerals  in it is a difficult term because it's not about having a funeral service in your home necessarily some families do choose to do that but in general we're talking about a family centered response to death if this is a family directed home based natural after death care it's a family response or community to the loss and by community i mean that that could also be a spiritual or church group it's generally in a home setting but could also be in a church in fact a couple of you you universe unitarian universalists churches here in massachusetts have had  funerals within the church and there is one in michigan that is taking on home funerals as a social justice issue it's more about the time between death and the final disposition so that means burial cremation or don't body donation to a medical school it's where the body is who is caring for the body and how the body is cared for in natural death care also known as home funeral or home and family centered death care the family is acting as the funeral director so they are caring for the body they're making the plans for final disposition and this is legal in all states by the way it is legal in all states to care for the body itself after a deaf however in nine states you are required to hire a funeral director to do some aspects of the final disposition so that means some of the transportation issues or and or paperwork for instance in new york you are required to file hire a funeral director to simply be present at the final disposition so even if you are doing a natural burial and you dig the grave yourself you have to hire a funeral director to be present that simply is the law but that's not the case here in massachusetts some families choose to have their loved one remain at home or brought home from the hospital or nursing home post death for more private and personal mourning time and then choose to hire a funeral home for the paperwork or transportation utilizing more of a hybrid type of a situation others prefer to do it all themselves including the family that you just saw in the video and that includes filing the death certificate obtaining a burial and transit permit so that you can take them to the final disposition and transporting your loved one to the crematory or cemetery the reasons and benefits of home funerals are as many and varied as there are families and individuals who die asians are unique but in general the reasons are social or emotional it's a very personal and private time environmental concerns are among the reasons why folks do so  spiritual and financial reasons do definitely come into play though it's interesting that where whereas financial considerations are important and there is a big difference it's rarely the in terms of the social social and emotional benefits this is a very personal and private time as i said and it gives you the opportunity to honor the transition of the family unit in their own personal way i wanted to share that almost eight years ago now my family and my seven siblings and i were faced with trying to decide what we were going to do with my mother when she died and we ultimately chose to care for ourselves for a variety of reasons one of which is we wanted to honor who she was and there had been a lot of home births and deaths within our family and also she grew up at a time when it was very common for families to care for their own and she in fact had gotten a master's in nursing in the forty's from yale where they taught death care and it was the nurses who did post mortem care and so she then taught me when we cared for one of our elderly relatives at home though at the time we did this which was thirty five years ago with my great honor we did not know about being able to preserve the body longer and keep it at home for a few days it was just that initial day but it was wonderful to be able to do those final acts of love for her so with my mother it was a momentous experience we actually ended up having her for five days just because of the date on the holiday that followed in terms of when we were able to take her to the crematory but it was a very moving and wonderful experience for all of us as a family and we not only cared for her body to rest her laid her out had time private time to be with her but then we actually got a cardboard box which is what is used for cremation decorated it the grandchildren were involved in this very much so drawing pictures on it writing poetry and so for earth and then we placed her in my sister's family car and drove her to the crematory we were able to actually roll her cremation coffin into the retort and push the button and we left feeling that we saw her all the way through and it was a extremely rewarding experience for us home funeral helps to ease the grief and bereavement by just allowing that extra time to assimilate a loss and process this you know huge milestone in a family's life in terms of spiritual considerations that too varies but there are many faith based traditions that believe that the soul or the spirit needs time to transition from the body and from the physical realm into the spiritual realm and that therefore it's important for the body to be relatively undisturbed in a peaceful and loving environment and for the body itself to be treated with respect and minimally invasive forms of after death care environmental concerns are are really coming to the fore with a lot of folks about what what about the impact with my final footprint in terms of whatever i choose for end of life care and contemporary commercial funeral practices often involve toxic chemicals such as in the embalming fluid natural death care does not involve embalming to preserve the body embalming is highly invasive procedure and is only one form of temporary preservation natural death care by families also preserves the body but it's not invasive and it is basically involves thorough bathing of the body using essential oils to help preserve the body and the skin cooling the body down afterwards and then keeping it cool for the duration of the time that the body is at home and so this really brings us to honestly the most i think the biggest concern and the area that has the most questions for people are the biggest hurdle to overcome when they're thinking about  family centered after death care is considering caring for the body themselves that people are st afraid what is going to be like to have a dead body at home and you know the the answer response to that is really it's not just a dead body like from the movies you know as amir something this this is your relatives your loved one your mother your grandmother in some cases your child and that takes on a whole another feel how the body is is cared for is really rather straightforward it is not rocket science it involves extremely thorough bathing afterwards and that could be compared to a bed bath that you would do with the infirmed relative at home or that of caring for a baby so a lot of attention paid to cleaning folds of skin and making sure everything is just very clean and dry the use of essential oils is really helpful to preserve a body in a home situation and is quite effective to do so we dressed and and or shroud many people choose shrouding of the body or dressing their loved one and then using some sort of fabric two to shroud them with and laying them out that could be on the bed in which they died some people it's it's rather popular right now to use a massage table to have their loved one lying bed cooling down the body is important and helps that in preservation as ryan was alluding to with the refrigeration and and then keeping the body cold is really important so that is done in one of two different ways dry ice i been used for by a lot of homes you know families around the country but there is a new product that's kind of like a gel pack it's called technique i was but it's was made for the deep sea fishing industry actually but it keeps the body almost as cold as dry as that doesn't actually freeze it and it's a lot more user friendly you can keep it in your freezer and you don't have to worry about off gassing as you do with the dry ice and it's a lot easier to obtain and to use in general so the most important things to keep in mind if you're considering this as ryan said is to plan ahead just as you would for instance for a birth  read get books and read about it or take a workshop take a class fully educate yourself about it and also consider who can help you and and having a plan in place for afterwards dividing up some of the tasks so it's not all relied on one person so that's the primary thing is to go ahead and educate yourself in summary this is about reclaiming an ancient and loving tradition you know we've always cared for our own it's really just been in the last couple of generations that we've given it away and many people want to reclaim that and enjoy researching some of their own family traditions or that with their heritage is and and utilizing some of those in after death care and it's about empowering families to respond to a loss in their own way in their own time within the privacy of their home and  with dignity dignity and privacy and in family you know i my background is in medical social work and i really believe and have seen this played out that it eases breve meant to have something to do and to do those final acts of caring for your love wanted you know seeing them through as we did with my mother and otherwise i just wanted to let you know that i am a home funeral consult consumers alliance of eastern mass we have an extensive web site of all the various steps in the things that are necessary and we're available to answer your questions and guide people and haven't responded over the phone or in person whenever we can so that's a little bit about home funeral and how that happens and now two fluorite from green baron massachusetts will explore another natural death care option which is green burial rights thank you heather i'm from green burial massachusetts and we are a committee of the funeral consumers alliance of eastern massachusetts and western massachusetts and our mission is really twofold it's to educate an advocate for green burial and it's also to establish massachusetts st natural burial ground open to all so that's really what we are working on and have been working on for a number of years now but before we get into green burial i want to talk a little bit about conventional burial and just throw out some statistics that were developed by mary woodson of the green burial council so in a conventional cemetery typically it's about a one thousand bodies an acre that are buried and what we bury in a year is enough to fill in a lympics sized swimming pool with embalming fluid it's enough  steel to rebuild the golden gate bridge every year it's enough cement to pave a double lane highway between here and detroit so that's a lot of material that's put into the ground and we don't often think about that but really if we take the people out of the equation and the people really are what make the cemetery sacred what we have is kind of a waste dump of all of this material underneath the ground and so in green burial which is obviously very different the essential elements of green burial and i can just i just want to put this casket so it can be there we go we can be made of wicker or cardboard or soft pine or you may have no container at all so you could just be wrapped wrapped in a shroud and there would be no  you're also buried much in a much more shallow grave so that instead of you know what we always hear about is six feet deep and a green cemetery you're buried at three and a half to four feet deep which is where the aerobics bacteria are most active and give you a little bit more here on the slide about the characteristics you wouldn't have a granite headstone rather you would have a flat local stone or maybe you would have no stone well where are the bodies or these would be more one thousand two hundred dollars bodies an acre and there non sequential so the bodies are buried in different places but the most important part of this is also that you're preserving land and you're preserving the land for multi purposes so you could on this land in the cemetery you could go birding you could go hiking you could have a picnic and it's sacred land and so it's also a place for reflection and for stewardship really and so we see that it's really an important it's an important way to preserve land it's an important way to keep all of these chemicals and these materials out of the  out of the ground so the other aspect that characterizes green burial is that in most situations and it really allows us to have a connection to the ritual and heather was talking about this earlier and in terms of having caring for your own in your in your home this is an active way to have one last of love for a person who is who has died so and you can do that by transporting the body yourself you can actually lower the casket into the ground and here you can see on this slide is a green cemetery up in lemington maine which is one of the closest ones to us and a member of our group her husband died and so he was cared for home and they rented a van and drove him up to maine where he has roots and they buried him there and these are her family members so it was a very meaningful and powerful experience for them to be able to take his body and as heather was saying do everything from the time he died until they actually lowered him in the ground and then filled that that grave with with dirt and carolina so again you can see that the family and friends are are very involved in the ritual of the burial and they're lowering the casket into the ground and there is opportunity for lots of ritual  to other slides i just want to show very quickly so you get a sense this is green springs natural cemetery preserve in newfield which is outside of if they go and you can see here the mourners walking past a great grave that was dug recently by going to another service and here they are in this beautiful meadow with these beautiful beautiful tree line and that's how they're honoring their their their loved one and just another picture of the green springs natural cemetery and you can see that there are three mounds and they kind of you can see that sequentially in one is starting to settle with the dirt is starting to settle on the further swung away and then the most recent grave is closest in the photo there so when we talk about green burial we are there there are different ways that you can do this right so one of the ways that's becoming more popular is a conventional  cemetery that allows for natural burial within its conventional cemetery so they might have a an area that is designated or they might have just one or two or three areas where they are allowed to use natural burial without a vault and where there is more interaction with the family and friends who are bearing that that person and there are cemeteries in massachusetts that do allow that although typically there are for town residence some permit non resident so the closest one that you have is your neighbor at mount auburn cemetery which is just been started doing natural burial so you can actually be buried there in the in that beautiful cemetery and as you can see on the list here there are some other towns that do allow for natural cemetery but we are a natural burial but we always tell people that they need to ask a cemetery if there's a cemetery that you are interested in go to that cemetery and ask them what their rules and regulations are because what's true is that it's there's no state law that says you can't have a natural burial ground it's really up to the town board of health and it's up to the cemetery to create those rules and regulations and so as more and more people ask about this option there's more of an opportunity to for cemeteries to to expand this this option so so you can you can go there is a hybrid situation where you can go to an existing cemetery and ask for a natural burial plot natural or conservation cemetery is also something that we are working toward and this is a cemetery that is about minimizing practices and protocols and you can't have altar liners and this is the entire cemetery itself so it's not a hybrid and and then the gold standard of green cemeteries is the conservation cemetery so it takes care of all of these aspects and there's an established conservation easement on on the on the land so  and this the rd option for natural burial of course is your own your own land so that you can you can if you go through the proper channels and paperwork it is legal in massachusetts to bury on your own property but you have to get the approval from the board of health it may require department of environmental protection approval that it could be green or it could be conventional burial but that is an option for people who do have land so we want to just let people know that that's that's an option as well and what we're doing in massachusetts now is that we are teaming up with the mt graceland conservation trust and we are looking for an appropriate parcel of land to establish massachusetts st cemetery and so of course if this is always a good opportunity to say that if you or anyone you know as a parcel of land that you think might be suitable we would be happy to talk with you we are getting closer i think to being able to do this and and we really believe that once this happens once we have one cemetery that it's just going to take off people are asking for this a green burial massachusetts we have a web site we get we get e mails to our web site every week asking about if this is an option for them and so we know that the time is coming and we know that there are twenty six other states that have green cemeteries conservation cemeteries that are approved by the green burial council so massachusetts is st in many things we were st in this but we hope that we won't be that we won't be too much too much longer in the waiting for this and finally just to to say that our web site is screen burial  org and you can also if you're interested in green burial you can go to the green burial council which that website is also listed here grave matters by mark harris is a wonderful book that really explores the history of the modern green burial movement in this country so that we're very optimistic about being able to have that massachusetts so now i would like to introduce ruth fos of mourning dove studio thank you so james joyce wrote mr duffy lived a short distance from his body when i came across that i thought i was i know what that's like that's how i felt after everything while i've loved has died it would have helped if i had known about some of these options here but i didn't and so i started obsessing about caskets and i still care about them even knowing about these options but at the time i was just wishing i i thought you know what would have helped me stay more emotionally present would have been if there had been a casket that was you know had some element of beauty about it and it's never going to be great to see anyone in a casket right but i thought if it was painted with some colors designs that i might have drawn some small measure of comfort from it a lot of people and so i thought about a pine box that was decorated and a lot of people tell me i just want to be buried in a pine casket and there are religious reasons sometimes for choosing wood casket i also think that for a lot of us it harkens back to an older tradition right of simplicity dignity that an image of a pine box evokes so you can hear that i thought about this st about something that was going to help me emotionally and i had no idea about the environmental impact of the typical choices that we we make nowadays i just didn't know and i think that's true for many of us in many areas of our lives we we've come to do things in certain ways and i have an uncle and cousins who are funeral directors and i love them and i really respect the care that they have given to families over the years and you know none of us have really known that you know baring enough metal to rebuild the golden gate bridge every year you know if we had to do that if that's what we had to do to our loved ones then we'd do it but we've gotten a little bit far away from the reality of the cycles of life and death right so i understand the impulse though about using mail caskets i saw a picture on the front page of the globe about a young child being brought out of a church in this powder blue metal casket and he'd been killed in crossfire gangs and i immediately thought yes that's right protect that child but you know the time for protecting that child has passed right and we could have helped the legacy of protecting other children from this fate but for that child's body it's time to lay it to rest and for all of us it's time to remain present to stay present with you know the ashes to ashes dust to dust reality so that's really why my work focuses on caskets and shrouds because i think it's helpful for motion only it's you know using readily biodegradable and nontoxic caskets is just crucial it's crucial for our environment we can't keep doing what we've done and the caskets are beautiful you know they can be made of wicker bamboo even banana leaves which sounds odd to our ears but they're pretty elegant seagrass recycled paper and i'm very very moved to hear stories from people about how personally meaningful like the wicker has been if i go old willow tree on the family land  but i'm also more and more drawn to cardboard cask i didn't know they existed it's not for everybody but let's consider it because it's already recycled product product and it's a great service for decorating and i go to this week long summer institute for a number of summers now and the more i go the more and more i'm convinced of the value of doing things with our own bereavement group after my father died but instrumental grieving doing things with our head so intuitive grieving used to get you know prioritized is the thing to do but now the instrumental grieving is is getting the the way that it should have because if you think about it you know we can really grapple with grief in a different way from my thinking mind we can you know the hands on nonverbal coming to terms with our l important and the important thing to be able to remember we don't have to be a fine artist to use art and creativity i have an example as an example the quote from the mother of a seven y girl that was killed in the sandy hook school massacre the couple then described the moment they saw their daughter's white coffin at the funeral home you felt like the floor was falling beneath you mrs mcdonnell said but the coffin became a canvas when she her husband chris and their surviving son jack took out the sharpie markers they had brought with them and began drawing all of grace's favorite things by the time we were done mrs mcdonnell said it was so covered by all the things she loved including ice cream cones lighthouses and siegel's we had peace when we left she said noting that the coffin was full of colorful drawings and notes from those who knew and loved her best so bereavement therapists and researchers focused on people after after a death and burial or cremation but we can benefit i think from what they've learned there by applying it before hand while someone's dying and when we're planning a commemoration and i think we don't do that enough so i'm seizing the moment here to tell you what i've heard and how it strikes me and for your consideration one of my favorite works jeffries and he had three bullet points to consider said almost everything is normal don't do nothing and don't do everything yourself so and when he  says almost everything is normal that brings up another tenet that i've heard over and over again and emphasize everyone grieves differently and the more we can be respectful of that the better for all of us right so  you know when it's not normal is suicidality an extended period of grieving that's you know makes you not functional but we should and we can get help for all of these things too don't do everything yourself well of course that brings to mind family and friends right and for me it does give me a chance to plug the f c a because i really think of them as a great resource not only with the phone number the hotline for immediate help but also a lot of free downloadable brochures that are there and books that detail the legal rights in every state so i have to put a blog plug for you on their web site and don't do nothing  well in addition to the grammar what catches my attention is that you know the people who many people tell me they just don't want to have anything done a number of people anyway and and i think about that because rituals are supposed to be holding us and within our community in this long continuity continuity between the past and the future but if you're if that doesn't work for you with the rituals are are not meeting your needs and meaningful to you then it's even more alienating and i see some people i think of some people as taking a pass on that for that reason but that doesn't have to be because we could talk more about funerals and rituals but there are people called funeral celebrants that you can google round and round saying my uncle doesn't want anything like this he doesn't want them but the last pass she said you know i think if he knew that something like home funerals were possible to just be private home that he would like that and it would me a lot to my mother to be able to honor him in some ways so i'd love to keep going on and on about what the bridgeman literature have to say in trying to encourage a slow pace because you have to remember shock is experienced physically as well as emotionally emotions and flow donna scharf who runs the children's room in arlington  i asked her what would she want you know she says include the kids ok so for now i'll just because we all want to grieve together that's part of being human so planning ahead we have millions of times here but  it's easier to to say than to do right so some advice structure it in one woman advocates talking about it at thanksgiving you can talk about the weather about football and about things that make life meaningful if not if thanksgiving just pick another time that just jog your memory right i got to work on this now and you can do it in just placement with these books and you know saying how you came here and heard this presentation just to start a conversation going so i want to thank you for coming and you know that's not just a spurious you know close up the talk thank you right because it makes a difference not only for your loved ones after you die but it makes a difference for how we live our own lives and you know the values that we have here too and the steps that we take for our own legacy for you know for ourselves our loved ones and the earth in general thank you