Ever Consider What Kind of Send-Off You Want?

Meet Sara Williams of the Shrouding Sisters

Sara Willliams, right, at a gravesite with clients. Courtesy of Shrouding Sisters

            A previous post was a sort of meditation on the human body, living and dead, not to mention the mysterious transition from one to the other. I was pretty cavalier about the disposition of corpses, saying I didn't care in the least what happened to mine since it would be nothing but an empty shell. I  quoted flippant conversations with my daughter: "You can bury me in the garden. You can compress me into a diamond, make me into a pretty vase, burn me up, or bury me in an expensive plot. You can keep a box of my ashes on the mantel or scatter those ashes to the wind. Whatever you do, I won't be there and I won't mind."

            This did not sit well with Sara Williams founder of a North Carolina organization called Shrouding Sisters which, according to the website, provides "education and resources about natural death care and green burial. I work with the family to provide the guidance they need to make informed choices. This includes bathing and dressing the body for a home vigil, planning meaningful rituals or after-death ceremonies, and providing guidance in completing and filing legal paperwork."

            "It's an act of love," Sara tells me when I call her. "As painful as this conversation is to have, when things are laid out and there's some kind of understanding it'll be the greatest gift you give your family.

            "I am here to help families experience this time-honored tradition of caring for our own at death," she continues. "We are invited into a sacred space where we experience grief in our own time. We become fully present and completely connected during a home funeral."

            Usually, Sara has met with the family ahead of the death to reassure them that death at home isn't an emergency, there's no need to panic, and it's good to stay with the body for as long as you feel the need to do so. This can be a few hours or three days.

            "I will go to them when they say they're ready."

            Once there, she clears the space around the body of medical equipment and makes it pleasant: "I want it to reflect the home for naturalness. I gather the family around the bedside and tell them we're going to ask Aunt Bessie to excuse any fumbles or mistakes because she'll know we're doing the best we can. I have readings after that blessing the space."

            She shows the family how to keep the body cool, and a washing of the corpse follows, involving touching, essential oils, flowers, and rosemary. "I have them bring out the most beautiful bowl they have, dip the cloth and start with head and end with feet. They're working through their grief. I've never seen this not happen. Though there may be one person who resists in the beginning."

            She remembers that during her first such visit, the deceased person's sister wanted nothing to do with a home ceremony, despite numerous invitations to join in. "I invited her one last time," Sara says, "and she came forward with thyme oil and said, 'This reminds me of the woods where my sister and I played. Can we use it?'

            "She used that oil and then started to feel comfortable enough to brush her sister's hair. As she did, she began telling all the stories of their childhood. " Sara laughs: "And then you couldn't stop her.

            "It was beautiful."

            Last year Sara got a call from hospice explaining that a patient wanted to be buried in a little glade in the backyard. First she researched the rules for this and explained them to her clients. Then she visited the home. "It looked like Sanford and Son," she says. "There were eight vehicles in the yard and when we knocked, a pit bull came to the door."

            She was nonplussed. But during the ceremony the atmosphere changed.

            "We were doing the blessing for eyes, hands and heart," Sara explains, "and friends and family members came forward, saying, 'Let me do the heart. She meant the world to me.'

            "A friend had made the coffin, and it was gorgeous, cherry wood with a big cross. Someone dug the grave with a backhoe. There were big strong ropes to lower the coffin.

            "It all taught me not to be so judgy. This was just what their mother wanted and they handled it perfectly."

            Sara is not a fan of cremation and dislikes the standard procedures of most corporate funeral homes. The green burials and rituals she advocates are aeons old, she says, with bodies laid out at home, a neighbor building a pine box and the family borrowing a cart to transport the corpse to the family cemetery. Such cemeteries exist all over the country, Sara points out, adding, "It's organic. Leave the body as it is and let it go back to nature."

            I ask how Sara came to choose her profession. She tells me she's been obsessed with death for as long as she can remember. When she was in middle school one of her classmates, Louis, had cerebral palsy. Even in a wheelchair, she says, he was very active and their class would parade with him around the schoolyard and designate him their general. But then he died, and his classmates saw his corpse in the open casket of a big funeral home.

            "Of course he was embalmed," says Sara, "And I thought that is not Louis. He just looked so waxy and fake."

            And then there was Dante's Inferno, which she studied in high school. "I was just fascinated by the levels of hell, the river Styx, all of it, and I couldn't stop asking question after question. I heard this boy, Tom, sighing,  probably thinking, When will she shut up? After class, he said, Sara, you're obsessed with death." She laughs. "I irritated the hell out of Tom.

            "But I was just realizing, Oh, yes, I'm going to die some year. And the cemetery--what a beautiful space it is. That will be all of our destinies someday.

            "Only please, no AstroTurf, no mechanical device--there's got to be a better way.  

             "That's when I found out there was a movement. It was like I had found my tribe."

            She has been active in that movement ever since, serving on the Board of Directors of the National Home Funeral Alliance from 2014 to 2017, and currently president of Funeral Consumers Alliance North Carolina.

            Sara was raised in the Presbyterian church with, she says, "a wonderful Sunday school catechism class. I was fascinated with pictures in the Bible. I was extremely misbehaved and got other people in trouble but at the same time I knew that I was loved. There was a higher power. There was God.

            "Through the years I'm not so reliant on church services or how God can have a human son. But that never made me feel any less sure that we do have souls, and I hope when we die there's a whole beautiful world out there and we are reunited with those we love.

            "I remember reading an article once that said you have to remember that every time you think of your dead they are thinking of you."

You can find Shrouding Sisters at https://shroudingsisters.com/      

For Boulder people, help is closer. Natural Funeral in Lafayette offers a range of services, including green funerals, body composting, green burial and cremation: https://www.thenaturalfuneral.com/