(A five part series airing daily on CKTZ ,89.5 FM, April 4-8, 2023.)
For the last several years, a small but dedicated group of Cortes Islanders have been taking practical steps towards an ambitious goal for themselves and their community: a healthier relationship with death and dying. Their projects include regular meetings for discussion and support, humane and family-led funeral arrangements, and green (natural) burials in our local cemeteries.
The DeathCaring Collective was kickstarted by Margaret Verschuur, in collaboration with Quadra Island’s similar effort (Way To Go). The two groups share an informational website, communityleddeathcare.ca, and the Cortes group now includes over a dozen volunteers and a larger membership connected by email list and regular meetings. The core group of volunteers offer several kinds of assistance for islanders dealing with a death (or anticipated death) in the family.
Topics covered in each episode (this may help readers find the podcasts of most interest):
Part 1
- What is the death care collective; what’s a regular meeting like?
- How did it begin (history from 2016-today) — Denman, Quadra, Salt Spring, Cortes
- An alternative to the funeral industry. Death-phobia in our culture.
- Catharsis and grieving. Kinds of help the collective can offer to bereaved families.
- Costs involved in a community-led funeral?
Part 2
- Finance, relationship with other Cortes organisations; not a BC nonprofit society.
- Transport of bodies; bodies often released from medical care in distressing condition.
- Industrial vs humane practises. Challenges of “alternative” practise.
- Hope for wider acceptance, becoming the norm not the alternative.
Part 3
- What inspires a person to take on this emotionally demanding work?
- Natural Burial: what is it, how does it work? How is it different?
Part 4
- Choices in dying: the idea of a “good death.” MAID, alternatives.
- Importance of planning.
- Limits to choices: legal restrictions on burials. Rehearsing one’s own funeral.
- “Perpetuity” of grave sites, green burial meets conservation?
Part 5
- Breaking new ground: dealing with a care facility. Sharing information, web site.
- How can people help if they want to? Volunteering, donations?
- Training and mentoring available. Mailing list.
- Benefits of facing death realistically instead of with denial and avoidance.
In mid-June I had the pleasure of interviewing two members of the group, Margaret Verschuur and Emma Tius. (Emma chose to keep a low profile during the interview, only occasionally expanding on Margaret’s answers to my questions.). This interview turned out to be so full of interesting information, history, anecdotes, and philosophical reflections that it became a special Currents radio series; five episodes are scheduled for broadcast, at 3pm every day of the week of July 11th. This text article summarises some of the key points, but interested readers will find far more detail in the broadcast or podcast episodes.
Volunteers Helping the Bereaved
For most islanders, the most visible aspect of the DeathCaring Collective is the assistance they have provided to bereaved families. That assistance has included not only help with the inevitable official paperwork following a death, but also the transport and laying-out of bodies, and arrangements for burial in one of our island cemeteries. One of the options offered by the Collective is “green” or minimalist burial, in which the deceased is not artificially preserved by embalming, but returned to the earth “as simply and naturally as possible.”
All the Collective’s support services are volunteer-based and free to islanders; they do ask for reimbursement for ferry fees if they transport a body home from Campbell River however, and it costs about $300 to dig a grave using a hired power digger. Because our cemeteries are community-owned and managed by volunteers, there is no purchase cost for a grave site.
Thanks to the Collective’s efforts (with support from Cortes Seniors Society) Cortes residents have a local, personal, simple and affordable alternative to the conventional experience of funeral homes and urban cemeteries.
A loved one who dies in hospital in Campell River, for example, can be brought home to Cortes by a local volunteer driver, the body treated with gentleness and respect and transported in a hand-made box created by a local craftsman.
Volunteers are willing to guide and support families as they wash, prepare, and dress the body. The deceased may be buried in a hand-made coffin if the family choose to commission one, or a simple inexpensive cardboard box that friends and family may choose to decorate, but it’s also perfectly legal to be interred wrapped in a simple shroud or a favourite blanket, as long as the bylaws of the cemetery permit it (Cortes does).
Friends & Neighbours vs Corporate Deathcare
During the interview, Margaret, Emma and I discuss the dissatisfactions people often experience when funeral arrangements are handed over to strangers — some wonderfully compassionate, others more interested in profit margins.
“We love these people, and now we’re allowing their bodies to be tended to by strangers, we’re allowing strangers to guide us in making decisions that might not even be ‘who we are’. I think we’ve all had experiences of funerals that have been done by people who don’t know our loved ones. I know when I saw my Dad embalmed with make-up on — he’s a farmer, it just felt so wrong.
“And yet prior to that, I didn’t know there were alternatives. After that experience, I learned that there are alternatives. And then when my nephew died — 25 years old, in Comox, my sister’s son — we did it differently. We had his body at home. We had the casket built in the garage by people who knew him…”
Margaret discusses the value of personal engagement with death, the catharsis of being able to express love and grief by practical physical action: tending to the body, building a coffin, having family and friends do the physical and ritual work of burial.
“Tending to the body, building a casket, I mean… having an actual burial, and I’m not talking about, like, with a priest and with a whole bunch of words — just the simplicity of six people each with a rope in their hand, lowering the casket into the earth, perhaps the widow, you know, shoveling the first bit of earth…
“I mean, we have a ceremony there, a very, very rich, powerful ceremony that is helpful for the bereaved.”
Having attended a natural burial in Whaletown cemetery this last winter, I can attest to the power and authenticity of what Margaret calls “community-led deathcare.” My own mother’s body disappeared into a bureaucratic/professional maze after her sudden death — it was almost two weeks before I was allowed to see her — so I also can attest to the bizarre impersonality and industrial flavour of the conventional, urban morgue/mortuary/crematory system. Margaret’s account of compassionate, personal deathcare by friends and neighbours made me wish, very much, that it had been available to me at that moment.
Green Burial on Cortes
A major project for the new organisation was to discover and fulfill the legal requirements to establish green or natural burial as an option for Cortes Islanders.
“We went to Denman island, several of us on a, on a trip — there was a lovely day. Denman island has an amazing natural burial cemetery. And we got to talk to the people there and see the cemetery; we got to meet Glenn Kraushar, who weaves these amazing Willow caskets from Willow that he grows on his own property.
“Natural burials just resonated with a lot of people. So then we formed a subcommittee to see if we could get natural burial to be an option on Cortez island…. So we worked with the SCCA, in that we said we really want to bring natural burials to the community, we are willing to do the work involved. So they were, very gracious and grateful. And they’re the ones that did the paperwork and the necessary steps to bring natural burial there and to Whaletown.
“The community club is in charge of the Whaletown cemetery, and they too are eager to have a natural burial section in the Whaletown cemetery. And there have been two natural burials in the Whaletown, cemetery to date.”
In Part 3 of the series, we discuss natural burial in some detail. “Natural burial is about returning the body to the earth as simply and naturally as possible. And then returning the earth to nature.”
Planning Ahead
Margaret repeatedly emphasises the importance of advance planning.
“I think what what we really would like people to know is that planning goes a long ways.
“If you want to do things for your loved ones yourself, if you want to empower the people around you to help you at the time of death, it’s really important to open up conversations. Talk about it, figure out what it is that you want, what’s important to you– because then it’s so much easier for people to help you.
“When a death is sudden and there’s no planning around it, it’s really challenging to know what the actual person wanted…. you know, there’s so much emphasis put on people’s possessions and making sure you have a will, making sure you have a power of attorney — and those things are important, but it’s also important to share your wishes for yourself after death.”
The Collective is willing and able to hold “my wishes” documents for community members, so that their wishes will be remembered and carried out after they die.
“We have some documents called My Wishes, and it gives a framework for outlining what people want. It also gives some authority to the volunteer group — because as volunteers, we are not next of kin, we don’t have the authority in some cases to act.
“So it’s the executor named in the will that has authority over the body. Now, when a lot of people make their wills, they’re simply thinking about their earthly possessions, not realising that it’s also their earthly body that they’re putting into the hands of the executor.
“The executor may not be the person they actually want to have authority over their body. Maybe they want community led death care volunteers to have that authority. Maybe they’ve had discussions with us and told us what they want, and we’ve documented it.
“So yeah, we do ask them to say, ‘Okay, dear executor, these are the people that know what I want done with my body after death.'”
We discuss some of the other options for “disposal” of bodies: cremation (very resource intensive) and “aquamation” (a water-based method for reducing bodies to manageable remains); aquamation is not yet legal for human remains in BC. We also discuss some of the limits on final wishes — only a narrow range of options are allowed by law. We cannot, for example, expect to be launched onto the Strait in a burning Viking longboat, no matter how appealing that ceremony might be.
Looking Death in the Eye
For most people, death is a phobia. It’s a topic that we shy away from, skate over, joke uneasily about, avoid engaging seriously. The conventional treatment of death is to hide it away, hand it over to professionals. Margaret recalls being present at the death of her father:
“Because of the stroke, a lot of the parts of my dad that weren’t heart centred just fell away until it was only his heart that was left. And I sat by his bedside, and I remember I would write poetry and there’s one line that still really resonates. And it’s, ‘I have never seen love naked before.’
“And that’s really what I felt with my dad. And I mean, I was 50 years old and that was my first real experience with death…
“It’s gonna be hard no matter how we do it, but I think if we can do it in a way that aligns with our values — in a way that involves our community — then we can also find the beauty in it. Because that was my experience with my father’s death … there was beauty there too.
“And because I was able to be present to the challenges of it, I also got to experience the beauty of it; and the more I’m involved in this, the more people I talk to, the more I learn there is a lot of nuggets for us in death, and we’re missing out on them because we’re not aware of what we’re allowed to do for ourselves.
“Death is a part of life. We wish it were optional — it’s not. It is part of our human journey, whether we want it to be or not. So opening ourselves to it, learning more about it, having conversations, doing things differently … if we don’t like the status quo, then we need to learn about what the alternatives are, and prepare for them.
“Thich Nhat Hanh said, unless you can look death in the eye, you can’t really live either. And the poet Rilke: ‘if we can hold death gently against our hearts, we cannot refuse to go on living.’
“We need to accept that death is a part of life — whether we like it or not. And instead of turning from it, we turn toward it. And in that sense, embrace it. And to have it conscious as opposed to unconscious, that can make a big difference. Not only in how our own death plays out, but in how we live our lives today.”
A five part series that originally aired between July 11 and 15, 2022 and was repeated on April 4-8, 2023.