In 2012, Creative Nonfiction’s book imprint, In Fact Books, published a collection of essays about end-of-life care. It was an incredibly meaningful experience for everyone who worked on the book, which paints, as Francine Prose wrote in her introduction, “a complete, if disquieting, image of what the end of life is like at this point in our collective history.”
A decade later, having reached a different, and even more disquieting, point in our collective history, we thought it would be interesting to revisit one of the works from At the End of Life. In “The Business of Grief,” grief counselor and former hospice chaplain Joe Primo considered how we might better care for the dead and console the bereaved, and emphasized the importance of being present for each other.
Of course, that’s been one of the cruelest consequences of the COVID pandemic, which left so many people to die in isolation, unable to be with their loved ones at the end of their lives.
We invited Primo to write an update, or companion piece, to “The Business of Grief,” which follows the original essay.
Some years back, shortly after graduating from divinity school, I joined a few colleagues in the backroom of an Italian restaurant in rural Michigan to discuss formaldehyde and the embalming of babies with a funeral director, a “death midwife,” and a couple of “tree-hugging” experts in green burial. We talked for hours—about laying out bodies in living rooms over bags of dry ice, sawing off heads for cryogenics, and alternative funerary practices. At the time, I was a hospice chaplain, and my colleagues at dinner were others in the field who shared my concern about how we care for the dead and grieving. During four years of working at the first hospice in the United States, located just outside New Haven, Connecticut, I had seen plenty of dead patients roughly handled and stuffed into body bags minutes after death. I had witnessed the dead become hostages to outdated laws, such as regulations about who can handle the dead and when and where they can be visited, and common funeral rituals like embalming, which I found bizarre. I saw the separation of the family from the deceased during the first days after the death, a time when touching and seeing the dead can help the reality of death settle in for the survivors and when significant and beneficial grieving can occur. I wanted to work toward changing the ways we handle the dead, the earth, and the grieving. I believed then, and I still believe now, that funerals, like most rituals, are essential to the mourning process. What is not essential, however, are the merchandise and accoutrements that accompany a funeral. In fact, these are downright wasteful.
It was midspring of 2007 in Michigan, and I had traveled from New Haven, Connecticut, to speak with a farmer who faced bankruptcy because the educational programs he ran at his farm were unattended. But now he’d come up with a new savvy business plan to protect his property from development, a scheme that utilized green burial practices and would replenish the local ecology as well as protect his one hundred acres, a corridor to a state park.
Every ten acres of cemetery has approximately one thousand tons of steel, twenty thousand tons of
