The Movement to Bring Funerals Home

By Maggie Jones, The New York Times

22 December 19

Home-funeral guides believe that families can benefit from tending to — and spending time with — the bodies of their deceased.

eidi Boucher loaded two big straw baskets into her Toyota Highlander. She always kept them packed, ready for death. Inside were a pair of leather work gloves and a hammer, a bunch of bed pads, a few adult diapers (dead bodies sometimes leak), Q-tips for cleaning ears, noses and mouths and for applying lipstick, cotton balls, disinfectant spray, a plastic zip bag of safety pins to help drape silk and other fabrics around a gurney or casket, a small screwdriver to tightly close a casket, latex gloves, a hairbrush and oils infused with rose, lavender and rosemary.

Boucher also had her black attaché case of paperwork on funeral planning, which included a few funeral-home price lists for cremation and other services, as well as the files of 20 or so clients who had already made plans for Boucher to help with their bodies after death. Among them was Susan L’Heureux, a 79-year-old wife, mother, grandmother, reading teacher at a community college, lover of nature, spontaneity and books. L’Heureux had died about an hour earlier in her home in Oakland, Calif., and Boucher was on her way to her.

Over the last few decades, Boucher has helped more than 100 families take care of loved ones’ bodies in the hours and days after death. Some of their deaths were long expected, whether from cancer, multiple sclerosis or another chronic disease. But she also helps families with the sudden, inconceivable loss. The teenager who jumped from the Golden Gate Bridge. The man who shot himself. The children and adults killed in car and motorcycle accidents. The people who died of drug overdoses. They have been atheists, Christians, Buddhists, Jews.

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