There are but few things that break a heart like the death of a loved one. Here in North America, the cultural norms around death have grown increasingly more impersonal. Talking about and planning for death are not popular topics, of course. But not so long ago, hand-digging the grave for a loved one was an experience shared by family and friends, a communal endeavor that gifted deeper connection among those still standing, and with the lineage of ancestors. Lives were not extended torturously through medicine and gadgetry. There likely was less anxiety about death, for in a world before hospice care and skilled nursing facilities, familes nurtured their loved ones during their dying time, and then they cared for the corpse before covering them with earth. There must have been more intimacy with death, and intimacy tends to produce connection and meaning, lessening worries.
Also not so long ago, there was no embalming, no toxins in the coffins (if coffins were even used), no need for a cement slab or a perfectly manicured lawn created with artificial fertilizers and life-killing herbicides. You buried your loved ones on your land, or in the local cemetery. Their bodies fed the soil as did the bodies of all our kin. But when burial became manditorily commodified, and embalming became the norm, Western cultures started putting poisoned bodies in the ground, and when cheap ammonia fertilizer took hold, they started poisoning the soil at the surface as well. And doesn’t the artificiality of embalmed bodies give you an eerie feeling?
So then there was a big shift toward cremation, but the industrialization and pollution required to do this at a large scale is yet another unappealing step away from dealing with death up close and personal. Cremation is relatively cheap and you get the “ashes” mailed to you. How can you even trust they are the cremains of your loved one with such an industrialized process?!
Regrounding aims to be part of a small movement that is bringing beauty and intimacy back to the painful process of death and burial. For those of us who feel unrepresented in the typical societal approaches to spirituality and meaning, natural burial and local, hand-made funerary objects are one way to make connections with others who find the death and burial norms of this society dispiriting. So we, the founders of Regrounding, have begun making sconces for cremains and will soon start our first soul boat, both made from willow primarily grown and harvested by us. We will be showing these at an event later this year, which we’ll announce on this website.
Compostable funerary arts can be a tiny step toward understanding cræft. Cræft seems to be an essential component of human cultures that have persisted in place for thousands of years without greatly eroding the fecundity of the land. Find more on cræft here.
For a wealth of information about home-based funerals, end-of-life care options, green burial, advance directives and so much more, please see the Full Circle of Living and Dying Collective website.
There are few Green Burial Council certified cemeteries in California. The nearest ones to this region are The Forest Conservation Burial Ground in Ashland, OR, and the soon to open Sacred Groves Memorial Woodland in Humboldt County.