THE DEATH POSITIVE COMMUNITY AND CHANGE IN AMERICAN MORTUARY

RITUAL

by

Taylor Sharrard

A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of

The Wilkes Honors College

in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of

Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Arts and Sciences

With a Concentration in Biological Anthropology

Wilkes Honors College of

Florida Atlantic University

Jupiter, Florida

December 2020
 THE DEATH POSITIVE COMMUNITY AND CHANGE IN AMERICAN MORTUARY

RITUAL

by
Taylor Sharrard

This thesis was prepared under the direction of the candidate’s thesis advisor, Dr. Rachel Corr,
and has been approved by the members of her supervisory committee. It was submitted to the
faculty of The Honors College and was accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the
degree of Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Arts and Sciences.

SUPERVISORY COMMITTEE:

_____________________________
Dr. Rachel Corr

_____________________________
Dr. Catherine Trivigno

___________________________________________
Dean Justin Perry, Wilkes Honors College

_________
Date

ii
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thank you to everyone who made this thesis possible.

iii
 ABSTRACT

Author: Taylor Sharrard

Title: The Death Positive Community and Change in American

Mortuary Ritual

Institution: Wilkes Honors College of Florida Atlantic University

Thesis Advisor: Dr. Rachel Corr

Degree: Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Arts and Sciences

Concentration: Biological Anthropology

Year: 2020

American mortuary ritual, including either embalming and burial or cremation, has

largely gone unchanged since the Civil War. The growing movement of “death positivity” started

by mortician Caitlin Doughty has been educating the American public about funeral alternatives

that advocates believe are better for survivors of the deceased as well as the environment. I

analyze past criticisms that have influenced Doughty to craft the death positive movement’s

ideals and discuss these in terms of capitalistic greed as well as death denial culture. I describe

the downfalls of the current embalming and cremation practices that the death positive

movement opposes. Furthermore, I highlight the eco-friendly and family involvement-based

funeral rituals that the death positive community promotes and how these are changing the

homogeneity of American funeral rituals. I will demonstrate how the death positive movement is

providing ritual change to U.S. funeral rituals, moving past uniformity.

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 TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………………………………...1
CHAPTER 1: CRITIQUES OF AMERICAN DEATHWAYS…………………………………..4
A. Jessica Mitford and Capitalist Greed………………………………………………….6
Mitford’s Mythologies…………………………………………………………….7
Funeral Home Marketing Techniques…………………………………………….8
B. Ernest Becker and the Denial of Death……………………………...……………….11
Existential Heroism and Causa Sui Legacies……………………………………12
CHAPTER 2: CAITLIN DOUGHTY AND THE ORDER OF THE GOOD DEATH…………14
A. How Doughty’s Funeral Experience Led to the Death Positive Movement………....15
Crematory Operator Technician…………………………………………………15
Body Runner……………………………………………………………………..17
Leaving Westwind for Mortuary School………………………………………...18
Belonging to the Death Positive Community……………………………………19
B. The Order of the Good Death Pledges……………………………………………….20
CHAPTER 3: MITFORD AND BECKER’S INFLUENCE ON DOUGHTY………………….22
A. Jessica Mitford’s Influence…………………………………………………………..22
B. Ernest Becker’s Influence……………………………………………………………27
Reasons People Fear Death………………………………………………………28
CHAPTER 4: THE ECO-BURIAL MOVEMENT……………………………………………...31
A. Embalming…………………………………………………………………………...31
Restoration……………………………………………………………………….33
How Did Americans Start Embalming?................................................................34
Public Health Claims…………………………………………………………….37
Embalming and Environmental Concerns……………………………………….39
Embalming Denies Death………………………………………………………..41
B. Cremation…………………………………………………………………………….42
Cremation and Death Denial……………………………………………………..43
Environmental Concerns of Cremation………………………………………….44
C. History of the Eco-Death Sphere…………………………………………………….45
D. Eco-Death Options: Burial…………………………………………………………...50
Exposure Burial………………………………………………………………….50
Recomposition…………………………………………………………………...51
Conservation Burial……………………………………………………………...53
E. Eco-Death Options: Fragmentations…………………………………………………56
Alkaline Hydrolysis……………………………………………………………...56
Green Cremation: Improvements to Flame-Based Cremation…………………..58
CHAPTER 5: DIY/HOME FUNERALS………………………………………………………..60
CONCLUSION…………………………………………………………………………………..65

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 INTRODUCTION

Death is universal, and each culture has its own way of ritually observing death. Cultures

do this in a variety of ways. In the United States, despite having a large, multi-religious

population, funerals have followed a similar standard, almost unchanged, for over a century.

However, due to a cultural movement spreading among the American population, there have

been recent changes in American death rituals. In this thesis I analyze the death positive

movement and how it is promoting ritual change and increasing heterogeneity of the American

funeral ritual.

There have been many past criticisms and acknowledgements of the flaws of the death

care industry in America. Several books have been published that express the concerns with the

modern American funeral industry, especially as it has grown in capital into a billion-dollar

industry. In the year 2019, the market size of funeral homes in the United States was 16.82

billion dollars (Mazareanu 2020). Peter Metcalf and Richard Huntington, in their work

Celebrations of Death, included a chapter that discussed the homogenous death ritual across

America and the criticisms of American deathways including those made by influential critics,

Jessica Mitford and Ernest Becker. Mitford, a British aristocrat whose critique of the American

funeral industry was popular in the 1960’s, and Becker, an American cultural anthropologist who

discussed the philosophical aspects of death denial in the 1970’s, created schools of thought that

were very influential to the founder of the modern day death positivity movement, Caitlin

Doughty.

Distaste for the funeral industry and conventional American death ritual is still alive

today, and the death positive community is an example of this as they push for ritual change.

Barbara Myerhoff in “A Death in Due Time” states, “Ritual conveys its truths successfully when

1
it is performed in a way that sustains this precarious relationship to reality and that enables its

participants – actors and audience alike – to preserve the sense that they are involved in an

authentic experience” (1990: 88). The death positive community strives to create a funeral

experience that feels like an authentic experience for them. The community pushes for change in

the form of green burial options, home funeral wakes and discussions around death. Death

positivity uses ritual freedom to help build the community that wants to implement these ritual

changes. In this context, ritual freedom is used to explain how younger generations are less likely

to do exactly what their parents and grandparents have done traditionally. This allows the death

positive community to exist since it goes against the existing American death rite that has gone

almost unchanged in over a century. All of these aspects of the death positive community go

hand-in-hand with each other when describing their motive. One of the central themes of death

positivity is the eco-burial movement also referred to as green or natural burial. Members of this

movement promote funeral rituals that do not involve harsh chemicals or non-biodegradable

materials. Eco-friendly death options and home funeral wakes, which I will focus on in this

thesis, are two forms of change that easily accompany each other because of their resistance to

the conventional funeral industry that is known for being overly expensive, damaging the

environment, and concealing death through denial of our own mortality. I will demonstrate how

the death positive funeral rites are able to change American deathways and provide ritualistic

choice rather than uniformity in the United States. I will first explain some of the preliminary

critiques of American deathways, then I will explain how these critiques alongside Doughty’s

personal experiences working in the funeral industry shaped the views of the death positive

community. Then I will explain the eco-burial movement, accompanied by home funeral wakes,

and demonstrate how these practices lead to open acceptance of the natural death process and

2
limit death denial. The community’s emphasis on eco-friendly options for the treatment and

disposal of bodies offers opportunities for ritual and social change as they promote

understanding the natural death process, limiting death denial and promoting ritual freedom. This

new movement is promoting change of America’s ritual of death which has been relatively

uniform for over a century.

3
 CHAPTER 1: CRITIQUES OF AMERICAN DEATHWAYS

Although there are small differences within American death rituals according to different

subcultures, Americans’ usual options include embalming the body and burying it or cremating

the body. Anthropologists, Peter Metcalf and Richard Huntington, looked into the reasons that

America had diverse cultural heterogeneity but such a homogenous funeral ritual. In

Celebrations of Death: The Anthropology of Mortuary Ritual, Metcalf and Huntington state that

there were two running explanations for the reason that American mortuary ritual was so

uniform, pointing out that even those who immigrated to America upheld these customs once

they arrived. These two thought patterns were the economic explanation and the psychological

explanation. Jessica Mitford is attributed as the founder of the economic explanation as well as

the Death Awareness movement of the 1960s. The economic explanation argues that greed of

death care industry professionals is what caused the uniformity of American death practices.

Ernest Becker is responsible for groundbreaking work in the psychological and philosophical

explanation of American death practice, which argues that people engage in death denial tactics

to reach the uniform rituals (Metcalf and Huntington 1991).

Metcalf and Huntington state that it is neither their job to criticize nor justify American

deathways. However, they believe that using strictly economic greed or death denial is not a

justified explanation for the uniformity seen in funeral rites in America. They state that the

economic explanation is faulty because Americans spend significantly more on weddings than

they do funerals yet there is no book saying that those in the wedding industry are corrupt people

or blaming it on the materialistic ways of Americans. They also compare the American funeral

rite to other cultures like the Berawan and Malagasy funeral rituals that proportionally use more

4
resources. However, Metcalf and Huntington agree that the economic explanation provides some

answers to the ritual uniformity. They state, “[T]here is no doubt that the existence of a tightly

organized group of specialists who control every phase of the disposal of corpses is the most

significant single feature of American funerals” (Metcalf and Huntington 1991: 199). They then

point out that while this does partially answer the question, it does not fully explain it. For

example, it doesn’t explain how the ritual came about because there are plenty of other things

that could be done to the body that would be just as expensive.

Metcalf and Huntington also believe that the psychological explanation is inadequate in

explaining the homogeneity in its entirety. They agree that it is undeniably part of American

culture to deny our own mortality, but they don’t believe that it is solely based on a ubiquitous

fear of death. They use embalming as an example of this. If Americans used embalming to

negate death and promote immortality, then why wouldn’t more people want to push for

mummification rather than embalming? They describe embalming as a ritual with a specific

purpose rather than a negation of death as well as something that provides us with a way to avoid

dealing with putrefaction. They mention that if there are multiple reasons for fearing death then

why aren’t there specific rituals for each of these fears rather than just one singular ritual? They

end their analysis on Becker’s psychological theory by stating that there is no doubt that

immense anxiety around death forms the psychodynamics of individuals; however, it is a private

fear and therefore not appropriate to describe a public ritual.

Although Caitlin Doughty, the founder of the death positive movement, is not trying to

deduce the reason American funerals are homogenous, she utilizes Mitford and Becker’s

groundbreaking work criticizing the culture of death in America, to form her own cultural

movement. I also don’t believe that Mitford or Becker wrote their works in hope to deduce the

5
reason for homogenous American death rituals. However, their works have been used by others

to create economic and psychological explanations for the uniformity. I will explain Mitford’s

and Becker’s critiques of American deathways and then show how each was influential to

Doughty’s own criticism.

A. Jessica Mitford and Capitalist Greed

Jessica Mitford in her book, The American Way of Death, in 1963 and her updated

version, finished before her death in 1996, American Way of Death: Revisited, exposed the

abuses of the funeral industry on Americans from the financial anti-capitalist perspective.

Mitford was a well-known communist and raised in England, which she acknowledged in her

book. Her book includes chapters on British funerals in the 1960s through the 1990s. Her

communist beliefs and British upbringing influenced much of her critiques of the American

funeral industry. For example, she pushed for direct cremation as it was the most cost effective

and was a common practice in England. Mitford pushes that the funeral industry has to sell its

new mythology to the public to make them believe that the funeral industry is just doing what the

public wants, and that embalming is necessary to maintain a high standard of living, dying,

public health, and the psychological well-being of the grieving survivors. Morticians and funeral

directors, previously known as undertakers, were selling the idea of the “final memory picture,”

a lasting image of the dead seen by the family after the corpse has been embalmed and

reconfigured with waxes and makeup. In England, open casket viewings were not popular, if

done at all. Mitford tells a story of a British woman who was in America attending a funeral and

became horrified to see her coworker in the casket, done up with the embalming fluids and

cosmetics.

6
 i. Mitford’s Mythologies

Mitford characterizes the funeral industry as selling different mythologies to the

American public. There are three main myths Mitford lays out. The first myth is that the way

funerals are now, the embalming, open viewing, and expensive add-ons done by a funeral

director, are the traditional funeral. This is a myth because the traditional American funeral

before the Civil War did not include embalming and was done in the home. Undertakers, before

embalming became standard, were people who helped with small things that families needed for

their home funeral wake such as making a casket if they didn’t know someone who could make

one. Undertakers were often not strictly undertakers and had other jobs. Embalming is what

transformed undertakers into highly trained professionals that the normal person could not do

within the home.

The second myth is that the American public is just being given what it wants. Due to

things such as grief and lack of understanding of the law, it is hard to tell what the public wants

from funerals. Mitford mentions that it is hard for the public to have a choice in an industry

about which they are ignorant to what needs to be done when someone dies. The average person

does not plan many funerals in their life; therefore, once they have to plan one, it can be

overwhelming. When someone dies, a funeral and/or body disposition is necessary, and for those

who are ignorant to what happens in a funeral home and what all of their options are, they cannot

know what they truly want. The past president of the Funeral Directors of San Francisco justifies

high prices by stating, “In keeping up with our high standard of living, there should be an equally

high standard of dying” (Mitford 1963: 18).

7
 The third myth is based on the psychiatric theories that the funeral industry uses to

promote embalming and other memorial expenses such as caskets. The “final memory picture” is

the phrase used to describe the last image a person gets when they see their deceased loved one

embalmed at the open casket viewing. Funeral directors claim that it is beneficial to the survivors

to see their loved one looking natural and peacefully asleep before being disposed of. Mitford

claims that many funeral directors refer to themselves as grief therapists despite lacking any

psychological training. Mitford cites Professor Volkart, a professor of sociology at Stanford

University, who states that grief therapy is not used in psychiatry, and people have been dealing

with mourning since the beginning of time before experts were around to deal with it. According

to Volkart, there is no evidence that publicly viewing an embalmed body is therapeutic to a

grieving person. Volkart thinks that Americans should rely less on specialists when it comes to

mourning and that a lot of our inability to grieve properly comes from lack of being able to go

through therapeutic roles that the bereaved have (Mitford 1963: 94). On the other hand, Metcalf

and Huntington believe that Americans are not passive consumers of the funeral industry. They

point out that in a survey of midwestern cities, a majority of people approved of contemporary

funerals and believed that funeral directors played an important role in helping the bereaved.

ii. Funeral Home Marketing Techniques

Throughout her book Mitford details the upselling tactics and marketing techniques used

by funeral directors to make people spend outside of their price range. She points out that

something funeral businesses have that no other business does is the extreme disorientation

caused by grief, lack of standards to compare prices, the need to make an on the spot decision,

general ignorance about the laws of body disposal, and the readily available insurance money to

make the transaction. Some of these were problems in the 1960s and have now seen progress

8
either through law or education, while others remain prevalent issues today. For example, the

Federal Trade Commission, which is in charge of protecting consumers, stated that funeral

homes/companies must provide consumers with a general price list, allowing consumers to shop

around and compare prices. If a certain item is required by law, then the item must be listed on

the price list alongside the law that states its requirement. In an FTC policy statement on

unfairness made in 1980, they stated that techniques that made it more difficult for the consumer

to make an informed comparison such as withholding information would be banned,

acknowledging that although it is up to the consumer to look at other options that certain

marketing techniques make this more difficult so therefore they are not allowed (Federal Trade

Commission 1980). Therefore, the lack of standards to compare prices, has been resolved by

these FTC laws.

As for things that the funeral industry still has to their advantage today, the disorientation

of grief is something that comes along with the funeral industry and cannot necessarily be

avoided. Mitford mentions that the funeral industry estimates that people only have to plan a

funeral once every 15 years on average (Mitford 1963: 28). Mitford believes that people either

will die suddenly or if their death is expected, the funeral arrangements that the deceased wants

is something that has not been talked about. The disorientation of grief and need to make an on

the spot decision can still benefit the funeral industry in cases where what the deceased person

wants is not discussed or in situations of unexpected or tragic deaths. Mitford refers to this

situation as impulse buying, something that people shy away from in everyday life but becomes a

necessity in funeral planning.

Mitford highlights upselling techniques when she describes the different casket

arrangements that occur in the selection room that funeral directors use to get people to pay for a

9
higher priced casket. One of the casket arrangement methods, for example, is the four-quartile

method developed by W. M. Krieger, author of Successful Funeral Management. The set up

involves two caskets listed below the median price and two above, and the goal of this

arrangement is for the customer to buy the third one, or the first casket above the median line.

The funeral director leads the customer to the second casket above the median line first, the

highest priced one, and if the customer does not approve of this price, the director will bring the

customer to a casket below the median line that is much cheaper but also much lower quality.

Then if the customer does not want to go that low on the price, that is when the director brings in

the casket just above the median line. Krieger calls this the “Keystone Approach”; however,

Mitford referred to it as the “Human Tennis Ball Approach,” as she criticized it for bouncing the

customer around the showroom. There are many other details that go into the selling techniques

that funeral directors use such as keeping the four-quartile arrangement of caskets on the right

side of the selection room as people tend to turn to their right. Mitford states that these methods

all have one goal in mind, “selling consistently in a ‘bracket that is above average’” (Mitford

1963: 24).

Mitford criticizes Forest Lawn Memorial Park as a cemetery that has created the use of

euphemisms surrounding death as well as many fancy add-ons in the funeral industry, calling the

burial ground a “memorial park” rather than a cemetery. Mitford mentions that euphemisms are

used to hide the meaning of what someone is buying to drive sales even more. Forest Lawn

promoted removing oneself from the dead even more by using their new words such as casket

instead of coffin to help the memorial park feel like a business, Mitford argues. Many celebrities

are interred at Forest Lawn as it is seen as a prestigious and expensive place to get buried.

Important people of society get buried at Forest Lawn. Hubert Eaton, the founder of Forest

10
Lawn, decided to remove tombstones from the area and decided that brass plaques looked nicer.

Eaton essentially changed most aspects of what people considered a cemetery to look like.

Restrictions are placed on what can be put on the grave and are told to customers when they buy

a plot. Balloons, stones, or ornamentation are prohibited in order to keep the cemetery looking

uniform and manicured throughout the 300 acres of land. Forest Lawn has almost single

handedly transformed the funeral industry’s selling tactics as other cemeteries and funeral

directors try to emulate their business outline of upscaling prices, euphemisms, and making the

dead seem immortal. Many people, such as the Los Angeles magazine, paraphrase Mitford when

discussing Forest Lawn as they called it a “theme-park necropolis.” Hazlitt magazine’s Larissa

Diakiw called the cemetery the “Disneyland of death” (Diakiw 2019). Mitford helped inspire

skepticism towards Forest Lawn as well as the entire funeral industry with her writings.

B. Ernest Becker and the Denial of Death

Philosophers throughout history have always looked at death and how people deny and

fear it. Socrates' point of view on death, shown through Plato’s Apology, states that, “Death is

one of two things. Either it is an annihilation, and the dead have no consciousness of anything;

or, as we are told, it is really a change: a migration of the soul from this place to another. Now if

there is no consciousness but only a dreamless sleep, death must be a marvelous gain.” This

illustrates that death should not be feared and that speculation of what happens to someone when

they die should cease. Another example is Epicurus’ philosophy on death. In Letters to

Menoeceus, Epicurus states that if we are alive, death is not present and when we are dead, we

are not. This statement illustrates that death itself should not be feared.

Ernest Becker is one of the main people promoting death denial as a reason for how we

react to death and structure our death rituals in America. Becker was a cultural anthropologist

11
who wrote the philosophical and psychological book called The Denial of Death, in 1973.

Inspired by Becker’s work, in 1993 the Ernest Becker Foundation was founded to continue

researching the “unconscious denial of mortality” and how it influences human behavior. Their

website also states that they are a central hub for people influenced by Becker’s work including

those who are a part of the death positive community. Ernest Becker states that a human being’s

ability for conceptual thought is what makes us different from the rest of the animal kingdom,

which allows us to think about things that are not currently happening to us. Conceptual thought

led to large scale innovation in the human timeline, but it also has led humans to an existential

dread of death as Becker believes we are the only animals capable of understanding that we will

one day die. He believes that humans want to deny that they are creatures and try to differentiate

themselves from animals such as rodents or worms. Becker states, “The creatureliness is the

terror. Once you admit that you are a defecating creature and you invite the primeval ocean of

creature anxiety to flood over you. But it is more than creature anxiety, it is also man’s anxiety,

the anxiety that results from the human paradox that man is an animal who is conscious of his

animal limitation.” (Becker 1973).

i. Existential Heroism and Causa Sui Legacies

Ultimately, Ernest Becker’s main argument that influenced many after him and was

influenced by many before him was that we have a biological need to control our anxiety and

this manifests itself in denying our extreme fear of death. He believed that if we truly understood

the significance of our own mortality, we would be distraught with anxiety and despair over our

impending death. The escape to this overwhelming anxiety, according to Becker, was to

convince oneself that your life was of utmost importance (Academy of Ideas 2013). Becker does

this by describing immortality projects, also called causa sui, and heroism. Becker describes

12
humans as dualistic, consisting of the physical and symbolic self. The symbolic self is interested

in defending itself from the knowledge of its own mortality. The way humans deal with this

terror is through pursuing immortality projects referred to as causa sui. Humans create these

projects to have something that will outlast them once they die physically. Becker mentions that

this need to have a legacy that outlives oneself after death is a problem because a human animal

in the grand scheme of the universe cannot make their life count for anything.

Becker talks about heroism quite frequently and how this relates to human beings

viewing themselves as gods in a way, not realizing their own mortality at times. In the new age

of reason where religion seems to be less important and gods less heroic, humans must create

their own meanings and hero systems that they themselves partake in to receive this feeling of

immortality. However, Becker mentions that the average person also needs heroism to deter their

fear of death, therefore the average person finds heroism in their day to day actions such as their

job or their family (Academy of Ideas 2013). He refers to different types of heroism as illusions

and that people tend to choose an illusion that provides them with the best outcome for

themselves. Individuals shape their lives around the causes that they deem the most important,

usually what would be deemed their causa sui, as immortality projects and heroism go hand in

hand. These projects tend to be things that involve others as well so that it is more likely to live

on after your own death. Ernest Becker’s psychological breakdown of why humans deal with

death anxiety has contributed to Doughty’s school of thought about American deathways.

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 CHAPTER 2: CAITLIN DOUGHTY AND THE ORDER OF THE GOOD DEATH

Caitlin Doughty, the founder of “The Order of the Good Death,” has been influenced by

Mitford and Becker’s work during her time in the funeral industry as a crematory technician as

well as in mortuary school. Although Mitford and Becker influenced her ideology in different

ways, Mitford providing Doughty with mixed thoughts, enlightening her yet showing her what

she did not want to happen to the funeral industry, and Becker being the main driving force, they

both provided stepping stones into the creation of the Death Positive community which I will

further elaborate on. “Death Positive” was a term coined by Doughty on Twitter in a tweet

stating, “Why are there a zillion websites and references to being sex positive and nothing for

being death positive?” on April 28th of 2013. This was tweeted two years after starting the blog,

The Order of the Good Death, and the YouTube channel, “Ask A Mortician,” that answered

people’s various questions about death, dying, and body disposition. At one point in Doughty’s

life, while walking in the forest contemplating taking her own life, a woman stopped her and

asked for directions, acknowledging that her husband used to be the one who would do the

directions before he died. Doughty ended up talking with this stranger about the process of

cremation, what exactly happened to her husband’s body, and it provided the woman with relief.

It made people feel better to know what was actually happening with their loved ones, sparking

the creation of the Ask A Mortician channel. Doughty’s YouTube channel has over one million

subscribers and has amassed 129,839,532 views as of June 5, 2020. Doughty’s book, Smoke Gets

In Your Eyes & Other Lessons From the Crematory, written in 2014, highlights her journey at

14
Westwind Cremation and Burial and onto mortuary school, which provided her a foundation for

her ideology that became a cultural and philosophical movement.

Doughty now owns her own funeral home, originally named Undertaking L.A.

Cremations and Funeral Home, co-founded with mortician Amanda Carvaly. The funeral home

can now be found under the name Clarity Funerals and Cremation because of the

straightforwardness of their approach to death care. The funeral home offers a variety of services

that would be considered alternative death practices in America and are for people who want

more involvement in the process of taking care of their deceased loved one. They offer home

funerals as well as a similar comfortable experience in a room inside of their funeral home that

has couches and other furniture to make it feel like home for those who cannot have the funeral

inside of their home. They also offer cremations and place emphasis on witness cremations

where the family is able to watch the body be loaded into the cremation machine and push the

button that starts the cremation process. Their third option is a natural or green burial. The person

is directly buried in the ground in a biodegradable shroud with no casket or concrete vault. They

have partnered with Joshua Tree Memorial Park to accomplish this style of burial. They do not

offer services like embalming, but Doughty has stated that they are non-judgmental and are

willing to refer you to someone who will perform the embalming. The services offered at

Doughty and Carvaly’s funeral home illustrate their beliefs when it comes to what is important

during death care with an emphasis on family involvement, not hiding death, and eco-friendly

options.

A. How Doughty’s Funeral Experience Led to the Death Positive Movement

i. Crematory Operator Technician

15
 In Doughty’s book, Smoke Gets In Your Eyes & Other Lessons From the Crematory, she

explains how she went from a crematory operator technician to a mortuary school student to

owning an alternative funeral home and being the voice of the death positive community. She

describes her work in the funeral industry as breaking her “webs of significance,” a concept from

anthropologist Clifford Geertz. Geertz uses the term webs of significance to describe culture

based on symbolism. The webs are symbolic or mythic representations that people have spun for

themselves to have meaning in life (Nelson 2007). The more that Doughty learned about death,

the more her mythic representations of her death culture began to fall out of place. Her first six

years in the world of death care were in the conventional funeral industry as a crematory operator

at Westwind Cremation and Burial. Crematory operators load the body into the cremation

machine and do other various tasks for the funeral home such as wash and prepare bodies for

viewings. This was Doughty’s first job as a college graduate with a degree in Medieval History,

when she realized that she wanted to work with real dead bodies rather than write about them. As

a crematory operator she was able to experience engaging with her own mortality daily,

cremating a large variety of corpses. These included but are not limited to, babies, children,

people with varying degrees of decomposition, people who died tragic deaths, people who knew

they were going to die, and anatomical body parts used in a moving exhibition.

Doughty often mentions throughout the book that she is surprised, in a sense, that as a 23-

year-old with no experience, she is allowed to do such an intimate job of performing a death

ritual, which often involves just her and the corpse, except on the occasion that there would be a

witness cremation. When Doughty began doing her very first witness cremations, she realized

how important it was for the family to be involved in the process of taking care of their own

dead. Although the most action the survivor of the deceased got was to push the button on the

16
cremation machine, being in the room while their loved one is cremated and being involved was

moving and symbolic for many people. Doughty notes that during Western history, cremations

started as open pyres, then evolved into cremation machines that had peep holes for people to

watch as the body burned, and currently, except the seldom time a family wants a witness

cremation, cremations have no holes to watch and the family is not present. Doughty watched

her first witness cremation of the father of the Wang family. The witness cremation also involved

traditional Chinese rituals such as hiring ritual wailers and not wearing red because the color red

represents happiness.

It made Doughty jealous that the Wang family knew what to do in a funeral based on

their customs and beliefs, something that conventional American death rituals were severely

lacking. This was the opposite of the online cremation service that was also a part of Westwind

Cremation and Burial. Bayside Cremation was an online cremation service that was operating

under Westwind at the same time. A family could type in all of their information that Bayside

needed to perform the cremation, type in their credit card information, and then two weeks later

they will receive their deceased loved one’s ashes delivered in the mail. Doughty notes that most

people choose this option to avoid funeral prices as it is the cheapest option for survivors. She

described it as a total avoidance for just 800 dollars.

ii. Body Runner

One of Doughty’s other occasional tasks was to pick up a corpse from a home with the

body runner named Chris. If the corpse was to be picked up from somewhere like a hospital,

nursing home or other medical facility, one person was enough to retrieve the body. However,

when retrieving someone who has died inside of a home, two people are required to go.

Although most deaths don’t happen in the home, Doughty was often the person that Chris chose

17
to accompany him on a body run to a house. She found herself on her first body run, not

knowing what to say to the family and trying to dance around the issue of a death. Chris told her

that she would get used to it and panic less. Whenever they would go to pick up a corpse from a

house, the people who saw them taking the body out on the gurney would react as if they were

carrying out a murder victim instead of the body of an elderly woman who died of natural

causes. This is when Doughty really noticed that people aren’t used to seeing dead bodies, which

she contrasted with the time of the bubonic plague, where the death rate was so high that dead

bodies were piled up on the streets for a person with a cart to come pick them up. Now, bodies

are hidden from us so much that the van that they use to transport bodies in are unmarked and

drive along the highway alongside you without you knowing. In hospitals, dead bodies are

disguised as empty gurneys where the person is hidden inside a metal chamber on the base level

of the gurney. These instances of death denial and discomfort with corpses showed Doughty that

many people had never seen a body or had wanted to get rid of it as fast as possible if they had

seen one. She realized that she didn’t want others to think it was morbid to spend time with your

dead loved ones or that the people retrieving the dead from homes were cynical, dirty people

because they inherently thought death was dirty.

iii. Leaving Westwind for Mortuary School

After years at Westwind Cremation and Burial working as a crematory operator and

occasional body runner, Doughty realized that mortuary school seemed like the next step in this

field. She had viewed many embalmings before but was not licensed to perform one herself.

Doughty, after forming her more death positive views, was not a fan of embalming due to its

negative environmental impact as well as her feeling that it perpetuates the cultural fear of

human decomposition. Embalming was not the reason that Doughty wanted to go to mortuary

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school, however, it was her curiosity as to what they actually taught in these programs to future

morticians. She wanted to know where the conventional funeral beliefs and death denial came

from and if morticians were taught these things in their preparatory programs. During mortuary

school Doughty noticed that the professors seemed like they truly believed in what they taught

their students, describing embalming as an “ancient art” that doesn’t necessarily need to be done

but it is done because it is who we, as embalmers, are. Mortuary school ended up being the

culprit of spreading the notion that not embalming is a public health issue, even though it has

been proven to be unnecessary and that dead bodies, unembalmed bodies, are completely safe.

Trade magazines promoted using their chemicals to create a natural or lifelike look which was

another sign of death denial within the embalming culture. During her second semester, they

began the embalming lab and had to do their work on the unclaimed dead of the Los Angeles

homeless population. This experience really brought to light the difference between the

celebrity’s bodies that were treated as relics in Forest Lawn Memorial Park, an expensive and

uniform cemetery, and the homeless bodies that were treated as burdens.

iv. Belonging to the Death Positive Community

As you can see there are various instances in Doughty’s career that made her question the

efficacy and value of the conventional funeral industry, leading her to develop the desire to

create a movement that embodied this newfound knowledge and eventually her own funeral

home that illustrated her death care philosophy. The Order of the Good Death blog as well as the

Ask A Mortician YouTube channel have provided a foundation for the death positive community

that many people have found to be helpful. There are a wide variety of people who are a part of

this community from people involved in the death care industry, medical professionals, and

people whose daily lives don’t involve death at all. A lot of the people who are in the death

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positive community as well as the death care industry are involved in alternative funeral care that

the Order promotes. These people usually are natural burial morticians and funeral directors or

death doulas and midwives. Many of the medical professionals involved are people who work in

areas of medicine centered around death that were looking for better ways than current American

culture provides for their patients and families to deal with death such as hospice care workers

and those who work with geriatric and terminally ill patients. A death doula or a death midwife is

a person who often works alongside medical professionals to accompany the dying in their home

and help the family have a home funeral once the person has died. The rest of the community is

largely people whose job has nothing to do with death and dying as death affects everyone.

Many are interested in analyzing their own death fears, how to have an affordable funeral, what

all of their options are, what the embalming and cremation process are actually like, and fun facts

on the culture and history of death around the world. One commenter, “Rat From Space,”

commented, “My grandmother died just this morning. Remembering all the advice from your

videos is really helping me get through this. I just wanted to say thank you” on one of Doughty’s

videos called, “What Happens to a Body During Cremation?” (Ask A Mortician, 2018). This

comment received 2.5 thousand likes and many replies agreeing that this video amongst others

have helped them cope with a loss in their life. Another example, one that particularly stood out

to me was, “SINCE I found YOU, I have NO FEAR! Thank You!” from, “sandramorrison99,”

on a video discussing why people fear death. This comment stuck out in a sea of comments of

people talking and being open about specifically what aspect of death scares them the most on a

video titled, “Why Are You Afraid of Death?” (Ask A Mortician, 2017). The fan base of

Doughty’s videos refer to themselves as, “deathlings.”

B. The Order of the Good Death Pledges

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 The Order of the Good Death offers clear guidelines as to how to be death positive. This

comes in the form of eight pledges. The pledge provides a structured outline for what being

death positive means to keep the community focused on its goal. The eight pledges are as

follows (The Order of the Good Death, 2011):

I believe that by hiding death and dying behind closed doors we do more harm than
good to our society.
I believe that the culture of silence around death should be broken through
discussions, gathering, art, innovation, and scholarship.
I believe that talking about and engaging with my inevitable death is not morbid, but
displays a natural curiosity about the human condition.
I believe that the dead body is not dangerous, and that everyone should be
empowered (should they wish to be) to be involved in care for their own dead.
I believe that laws that govern death, dying and end-of-life care should ensure that a
person’s wishes are honored, regardless of sexual, gender, racial or religious identity.
I believe that my death should be handled in a way that does not do great harm to the
environment.
I believe that my family and friends should know my end-of-life wishes, and that I
should have the necessary paperwork to back-up those wishes.
I believe that my open, honest advocacy around death can make a difference, and can
change culture.

I will discuss further how these pledges are utilized in further chapters. The eight pledges are

comprehensive and cover everything from legal understanding to social justice to analyzing

death denial. Of the topics these eight pledges cover, I will thoroughly discuss eco burial and

home funerals and how these two topics relate to the death positive movement’s want for

reshaping our culture of death denial and current deathways in America. First, I will analyze

Jessica Mitford’s argument against the funeral industry and how that shaped Doughty’s view,

then I will do the same for Ernest Becker’s argument about death denial in humans and how that

thought process shaped Doughty’s view. Mitford and Becker helped shape the eight pledges that

constitute the death positive community in their own way.

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 CHAPTER 3: MITFORD AND BECKER’S INFLUENCE ON DOUGHTY

A. Jessica Mitford’s Influence

Doughty admits that Mitford was a large influence on the funeral industry and herself as

a young funeral industry worker. Mitford was an iconic revolutionary for the death awareness

movement of the 1960s. Doughty does agree with some of what Mitford said about American

deathways. However, Doughty did not like the outcome of Mitford’s work and what she

promoted as the solution because Mitford and Doughty saw the root of the problem differently.

Mitford blamed capitalism and greed of undertakers for the uniformity across funeral ritual in

America while Doughty agrees with Ernest Becker’s philosophy of death denial. As a mortician,

Doughty wants to put herself out of business, putting the money and ritual power back into the

hands of the family who feels empowered by having a home funeral wake and spending time

with the body. Mitford believed in a movement towards direct cremation because it was the

cheapest option and the body just seems to go away. Thomas Long and Thomas Lynch, two of

the many who have responded to Mitford’s writings, have met with Mitford’s children after her

passing and learned from them that their mother was not fond of seeing dead bodies. In their

book, The Good Funeral: Death, Grief and the Community of Care, they explain that Mitford

wanted bodies to seemingly vanish, promoting her love for direct cremation as the best option of

death care (Long and Lynch 2013). This supports Doughty’s view that Mitford was largely

influenced by her British upbringing and communist beliefs and also that death denial is a

contributing factor because of Mitford’s fear of seeing dead bodies and decomposition. Long

and Lynch also state that Mitford’s myths of the funeral industry are not one sided. The public

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and its general confusion on the meaning of death and the place of funerals in society help

uphold the myths (Long and Lynch 2013). The combination of being able to avoid dead bodies

and save money is what caused the boom in cremation rates once Mitford’s book was published.

Of Mitford’s arguments, Doughty does agree that the economic model of the funeral

industry is in no way beneficial to us when it comes to embalming. Mitford showed that

embalming was an add-on that made funeral directors, in the public eye, highly trained

professionals after its increase in popularity after the Civil War. Mitford also mentions that

embalming is taught as a public health necessity despite the fact the unembalmed bodies are not

dangerous. In a TedTalk given on April 3, 2017, Doughty mentions that the funeral industry, as a

multi-billion-dollar industry, is perfect for helping you avoid decomposition. She described the

economic model of the industry as, “based on the principles of protection, sanitation, and

beautification of the corpse” (Doughty 2017). Doughty, during her mortuary school career, also

acknowledged that the illusion of embalming as a public health need is taught to embalmers,

funeral directors, and morticians through mortuary education. Doughty acknowledges however

that many of Mitford’s beliefs about open casket viewings were heavily influenced by her British

upbringing and not because she thought avoiding decomposition was detrimental to people’s

relationships with mortality. Although Mitford and Doughty both want to dispel the myth that

embalming is necessary for public health, Doughty acknowledges that embalming also helps the

public avoid their fear of human decomposition while Mitford promotes avoiding viewing

decomposition altogether through no open caskets and direct cremation.

Mitford, in The American Way of Death, showed that members of funeral industry refer

to themselves as grief therapists even though they have no psychological training for this role. I

previously mentioned Professor Volkart, who said that the reason many people feel the need for

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assistance while mourning is because the bereaved are not able to go through therapeutic roles

that a funeral ritual can provide. This argument supports Doughty’s push for home wakes and

family involvement and goes against Mitford’s push for direct cremation, however.

Mitford believed that even when the death of someone is known, most people would have

not talked with the person about what their funeral desires were before they died. Doughty’s

motives are to push people to have those conversations with those who are terminally ill and

know they are to die. She also believes that it is an important conversation for everyone to have

as well in case of an unexpected or tragic death. Knowing your own end of life wishes and your

loved ones end of life wishes falls under the seventh pledge of being death positive: I believe that

my family and friends should know my end-of-life wishes, and that I should have the necessary

paperwork to back-up those wishes. Mitford uses the excuse that funeral homes are taking

advantage of the customer for being disoriented by grief or by having to impulsively buy funeral

items, while Doughty believes it is up to the consumer to make sure that they have these

conversations with their loved ones so that it is not an impulse buy but a laid out idea of what the

deceased person wants. Also, to avoid impulse buying, as well as making sure you get the best

and cheapest option for what the person desires, Doughty believes that people should comparison

shop when looking for the best funeral price. Mitford believes that people should comparison

shop for cars but believes it is unacceptable to do so for funeral home services. In Doughty’s

YouTube videos on the Ask A Mortician channel, she mentions many times in her affordable

funeral advice videos that you should call various funeral homes and that you should know that

sometimes cheaper is just cheaper, mentioned in the video “3 Ways to Save on Funerals.”

Doughty however does acknowledge the reality of grief, referring to the disorientation as “grief

brain,” where you seem to be in a daze or foggy because you are distraught. Grief brain can

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cause someone to be more complacent with a more expensive funeral price that they agree to

because they aren’t one hundred percent there and they might not have the strength to do

anything about the price. Unlike Mitford however, Doughty provides a solution to this problem.

Due to education on Doughty’s part through her YouTube channel, she explains to her viewers

that if you are experiencing overwhelming and debilitating grief and also looking to compare

prices of funeral homes for the cheapest option, you can always have a trusted friend or a more

distant relative do this for you.

The ignorance of the law seems to still be present as one of the ways the funeral industry

can profit off of the consumer, mentioned by Mitford as one of the benefits funeral homes have

that no other business does. Doughty provides multiple examples in her book, Smoke Gets In

Your Eyes & Other Lessons From the Crematory, of people in California and Hawaii blindly

stating laws about corpses when they were not actual laws. When Doughty’s own grandmother

died in Hawaii, while Doughty was working at a funeral home in California, she was the one

summoned by her family to help make the funeral arrangements as she was a funeral home

worker. They decided on a simple viewing and a witness cremation. However, the funeral

director in Hawaii had told her family that her grandmother’s body was not allowed to be kept

any longer than two hours within the home. This simply was not true and Doughty wished that

she would’ve fought harder to keep her grandmother’s body at home. A second example was a

woman who came into Westwind Cremation and Funeral and informed Doughty that she felt as

if she wasn’t able to properly grieve because of a misinformed police detective. The police

detective told the woman, whose mother just died, that she immediately needed to call the

funeral home because her mother was a diabetic whose dead body could harm the living,

therefore assuming it was a public health law. Then, when the woman called the first funeral

25
home she contacted, they stated she had to have her mother embalmed which was something she

clearly did not want but the funeral home pushed that it was the law that her mother be

embalmed. Yet again, this was not a law in California. Doughty and Mitford both show that there

is a general lack of knowledge about what is legal in regard to dead bodies and funeral rights.

Doughty pushes for people to know that a body can be kept at home for a funeral, be

unembalmed and that a mortician is not necessary by law, despite what others will tell you.

Forest Lawn Memorial Park, discussed earlier, is a cemetery that both Mitford and

Doughty have experience with. It is a cemetery that hides all signs of mourning and depressing

views such as headstones from the cemetery and it is where a lot of death denial euphemisms had

their start. A few examples of euphemisms started at Forest Lawn were calling the corpse, “Mr.

Smith,” as the name of the deceased person, using their last name, and the room where the

embalmed corpse lies to be viewed as the slumber room. Forest Lawn was very influential in the

1950s, promoting embalmers as highly trained medical professionals and funerals as a way to

show off your fancy hearse or casket which attracted a lot of celebrities. Jessica Mitford was

very much anti-Forest Lawn and influenced by them and their high prices when writing her

book, “The American Way of Death.” When Doughty finished mortuary school and passed her

exams to be a licensed mortician, Forest Lawn was the only employer at the job fair her college

was holding. One of the women representing Forest Lawn spoke to the graduating class about

how their founder was such a leader in a revolution of the death care industry but this was not a

revolution Doughty wanted to be a part of. She filled out an application, talked to an interviewer

and realized she did not want to belong to the “cult” of Forest Lawn as an embalmer. She knew

she had to get another job to save up money and pay off debt before being able to open her own

alternative funeral home. Forest Lawn is a topic that intersects in the work of Mitford, Doughty,

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and Becker because death denial is at the center of the business tactics of the Forest Lawn

Memorial Park. Forest Lawn promotes trying to make the deceased immortal in the form of

expensive and unnecessary mortuary add-ons.

Metcalf and Huntington refer to Mitford’s book starting the death acceptance movement,

however, Doughty would likely say that Mitford’s push for direct cremation and avoidance of

the body are not accepting of death and certainly not death positive. In a Collector’s Weekly

article found on Doughty’s blog by Hunter Oatman-Stanford, he compared Doughty to Mitford

stating, “Following in Mitford’s footsteps, Doughty is working on a book documenting the

insights of her first year working with the dead[.]” In another article on the blog from the

University of Chicago Magazine, Michael Washburn compared Mitford and Doughty but also

acknowledged their differences and what Doughty did not like about Mitford’s message.

Washburn states, “For Doughty, Mitford, like many funeral industry critics, focuses almost

exclusively on the price gouging and disinformation that pervade the profession, ignoring the

necessity and benefit of funeral ritual.” Many people have compared Doughty to being a

modern-day Mitford. Although they seem to have quite differing beliefs, they both are leaders in

changing American deathways. Mitford and Doughty touch on many of the same topics about

death, but Doughty believes death denial is the root of these issues rather than capitalist funeral

directors. Doughty also promotes more involvement from the family rather than hiding more

behind closed doors.

B. Ernest Becker’s Influence

Doughty, Metcalf and Huntington would agree that Mitford’s economic explanation is

not perfect. Metcalf and Huntington argue that the high prices of funerals and the fancy add-ons

are not a product of ruthless capitalism but of the people who utilize them, trying to display their

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affluence in gifts to others and that there are still status levels that distinguish what is

appropriate. Doughty agrees that it is not correct to place all the blame on funeral directors and

act like consumers are merely passive pawns. However, Doughty blames this lack of consumer

involvement on the death denial culture that prevents people with the same mindset that they

shouldn’t have to think about their death options at all, something Mitford believes. Doughty’s

beliefs are based on Becker’s view on the denial of death. She utilizes death denial to explain

aspects of the funeral industry that she agrees with Mitford on as well as the parts that Mitford

leaves out such as environmental impact and the importance of ritual.

Doughty’s devotion to Becker’s work is shown on the Ernest Becker Foundation’s

website. There is a section for Becker’s fans that lists influential people who support his work.

Doughty’s picture sits on this page alongside names such as Bill Clinton, Woody Allen and

Jason Silva. On the Order of the Good Death blog there is an FAQ page with the question, “Who

is Ernest Becker and what does he have to do with the death positive movement?” to which the

response is that the work of the death positive movement is inspired by Becker’s work. Doughty

acknowledges Becker’s influence in social psychology with his influence in the development

later on by psychologists of the Terror Management Theory and his ability to explain how

American’s are terrified by death. Terror Management Theory or TMT is explained in one of

Doughty’s YouTube videos called “TRUMP & THE FEAR OF DEATH”. Doughty does not

mention Becker by name very often apart from on her Frequently Asked Questions section on

her blog and this video. However, she does show that Becker has inspired the death positive

movement by virtue of explaining how death denial shapes the funeral industry and the public’s

interaction with death.

i. Reasons People Fear Death

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 Doughty’s death positivity movement being largely influenced by Becker’s work, not

only acknowledges the denial of death as a cultural downfall but works to help people recognize

their fears and accept their mortality. Doughty acknowledges that fearing death is standard in

America but that mass hysteria around death is not normal. She has compiled a list of seven

reasons people fear death (Doughty 2014):

My death would cause grief to my family and friends.

All of my plans and projects would end.
The process of dying might be painful.
I can no longer have experiences.
I can no longer care for my dependents.
What might happen to me if there is a life after death.
What might happen to my body after death.

This list was created for people to be able to use and analyze why they fear death and how to

work through those fears. Doughty even notes her own fear of death falling under number two,

fear that her plans and projects would end, because she is proud of the work being done by the

death positive community and doesn’t want it to end. One could say that The Order of the Good

Death is Caitlin Doughty’s causa sui in this case. The Order is based on making death denial not

the cultural norm of America and as a manual on how to achieve a good death as best as

possible. Her definition of a good death includes being prepared to die, having your affairs in

order, having good and bad messages delivered, dying while your mind is sharp and aware,

dying without large amounts of pain or suffering, accepting death as inevitable and not fighting

death when it comes. This definition of a good death utilizes Becker’s death denial theory and

helps people live fuller lives being aware of their own mortality. The biggest influence that

Becker had on Doughty was that he showed her how prevalent death denial was in every aspect

of her funeral industry careers and how denial facilitated a lack of thoughtful rituals and choice

in American deathways. From a lack of family involvement in cremation, to people being

29
unaware of their ability to keep their deceased loved ones in their home, to professionals trying

to tell people that embalming is required by law when it is not, Doughty saw death denial and a

lack of meaningful rituals. Doughty believes that death denial is tied to why Americans choose

the uniform death rituals they do and she wants to educate people of the other death options that

are eco-friendly, facilitate an awareness of human mortality, and emphasize the importance of

ritual.

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 CHAPTER 4: THE ECO-BURIAL MOVEMENT

The death positive movement utilizes the distaste of Mitford’s obsession with direct

cremation and avoiding decomposition alongside Becker’s death denial theory to promote

Americans’ finding a new death ritual that comes from a place of reconnection with the deceased

rather than denial of mortality. The focus is built on close kin caring for their dead as well as

caring about the environmental impact of one’s death care choices. I will discuss the death

positive movement’s push towards educating mainstream culture on eco burial methods and

home-based care/wakes for the dead. One of the main aspects of the death positive movement is

the eco burial movement as it promotes and accepts awareness of the natural death process and

tries to limit the role of death denial culture. This movement pushes for people to have access to

death options that have a low impact and are environmentally friendly. Doughty’s eight pledges

of death positivity include number six, that my death should not do great harm to the

environment. Currently, Americans, for the most part, are either embalmed and buried or

cremated, which pose environmental threats. Proponents of eco burial, also referred to as natural

burial or green burial, want to change the current death rituals Americans partake in the majority

of the time. To understand this type of burial method we must first understand the two processes

currently in use and how they impact the environment.

A. Embalming

Embalming is a chemical process that preserves the body for varying amounts of time.

This is usually done so that the body will look natural and alive for the public viewing as well as

extending the time period of attaining this alive look so that family members can travel from

31
faraway places for the funeral. Many people describe the embalming process as a medicalized

death ritual and for good reason. The embalming room has the tiled floors and metal table

resembling an operating room. The tools used are also very similar to surgical tools, such as

scalpels, needles, scissors, pumps and forceps. Mitford, Doughty and James Green provide a

sufficient explanation of the embalming process so I will use a combination of these accounts to

describe the embalming process.

To begin the embalming process, first a scalpel is drawn to the deceased person’s neck

and a small incision is made to gain access to the arteries. The mortician then sticks a gloved

finger inside the incision to find the carotid artery where the tube will be inserted. This tube leads

to a machine filled with the embalming fluid that will replace the blood of the dead person.

Embalming fluid is a mixture of different chemicals including formaldehyde, glycerin, borax,

phenol, water and alcohol contained in a large glass tank with a tube attached to it. These

chemicals can be used in varying concentrations and amounts depending on the age, size, cause

of death, and amount of time until the funeral. The embalming fluid enters the carotid artery and

exits through the jugular vein. However, it is to be noted that morticians can and do use other

entry and exit points for draining blood such as the femoral artery and subclavian vein. The

blood then enters down the drain at the end of the metal table and into the sewer system. In the

earlier days of embalming, people were less afraid of being buried alive because the embalming

process removes all blood from your body, making the chance of being buried alive nonexistent.

Once the fluid is throughout the whole body, the mortician will soap up the body to wash

and massage it. The massaging helps distribute the fluid evenly into the limbs, so the skin seems

more supple and lifelike rather than hard. A metal trocar, a long hollow needle with a tube

attachment, is then used to aspirate the abdominal cavity that contains the organs. The trocar is

32
used to suck out the fluids of the abdominal cavity by jamming it in and out of the torso with

force. The trocar needle must enter each organ of the abdominal cavity and suck out the fluid of

each of them. Then the trocar switches directions and pumps the embalming fluid inside the

cavity. The fluid entering the abdominal cavity has a higher concentration of chemicals than the

fluid used for the limbs of the body. After the chemical and internal aspect of embalming is

complete, restoration is the next step in making a dead person look as if they were alive and

peacefully sleeping.

i. Restoration

Many morticians refer to themselves not only as embalmers, but as restorative artists and

they view embalming as much an art as it is a science. When people die tragic deaths or are

found after a long period of decay has set in, it is up to specialized morticians to restore them as

best as they can to how they looked when they were alive. All morticians use restorative

techniques like color correction and eyelid caps, but few morticians perform extreme restorative

work. For the more extreme cases, these specialists get the body rather than a normal mortician.

One mortician of this caliber is featured on Doughty’s YouTube channel often. Monica of the

YouTube channel “coldhandshosts” appears on the Ask A Mortician YouTube channel to talk

about her restorative work in videos such as, “Preparing Severely Decomposed Bodies for a

Viewing” and “Mortician Does My Makeup for the Casket.” Although Doughty’s funeral home

does not provide embalming services, both Monica and Doughty believe that it is important for

people to know what happens to your deceased loved one’s body whether you choose an eco-

burial or to embalm them.

Each person requires different restorative practices depending on their cause of death,

however, most deceased people do not die in a tragic or disfiguring manner so I will describe the

33
basic restoration process that occurs during the embalming practice as a base. The person’s

mouth will hang open when they are dead so the mouth must be sewn together with the needle

going up between the upper lip and gum and then out through the left nostril. The mortician will

use this to thread to make the corners curve upwards slightly to make the person’s facial

expression seem more pleasant rather than neutral or sad. If the person’s teeth are showing after

this process then the teeth are cleaned with Bon Ami and are coated with a clear polishing layer.

The eyes also remain open on a corpse and therefore require skin colored eye caps to be placed

underneath the eyelids. The eye caps have spikes on them so they do not slip and allow the eye to

open during a viewing. A cream is placed all over the body to protect it from any leaking of the

chemicals that may occur. The body is covered with a white sheet for eight to ten hours to ensure

the best results in the restoration process. Other forms of restoration now may occur that require

sculpting, remodeling, and cosmetics to create a healthy and alive version of the deceased

individual.

ii. How Did Americans Start Embalming?

Many people think of the ancient Egyptians when you talk about preservation techniques

and many morticians view embalming as an ancient trade and art that we are utilizing and

modernizing from the Egyptians. However, Doughty mentions that the ancient Egyptians

embalmed for religious purposes, Americans embalm people for marketing and consumerism.

Egyptian mummification and American embalming are also different because mummification is

meant to preserve the body forever so that the body can be utilized in the afterlife, yet American

embalming is meant to preserve the body simply for the funeral viewing process. It is hard to

pinpoint exactly where Americans’ burial beliefs and practices originated. Mitford points out that

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the National Funeral Directors Association (NFDA) took the opportunity to push what they

believe to be the origin of the practices by writing books on the topic.

The NFDA states that our burial practices have roots in the history of Western

civilization and Judeo-Christian belief systems. Mitford believes that the NFDA promotes this

idea of a long-rooted history so that people are less likely to question going against a

fundamental belief that comes from ancient practices. However, Western faiths often don’t place

much emphasis on the remains left after death. Ancient Greeks practiced cremation and believed

that the fire would set the deceased person’s soul free. Jews and early Christians did not believe

in embalming and believed that it was a pagan ritual. Historically, in Protestant and Catholic

religions, embalming would be considered a sin and defilement of the body. Egyptians utilized

embalming but throughout history there was a steady decrease in the practice of embalming until

20th century Americans revived the tradition. Embalming was used for the elite leaders in certain

parts of Rome and Europe, but it was not widely utilized. Mitford does acknowledge that there

were people throughout every time period after the Egyptians who were interested in

rediscovering embalming, the lost art of the Egyptians. Eighteenth century French and English

scientists tried to use preserving techniques to study human anatomy.

In the United States, the Civil War is when embalming came to be for Americans.

Thomas Holmes is considered the father of embalming as he led Americans in the move from

keeping bodies on ice to preserving them with strong chemicals. Holmes was kicked out of

medical school because he was too fascinated by cadavers so he jumped on the opportunity to

make money by learning how to preserve the dead so that families of dead soldiers that lived far

from the battlefields of the Civil War could see their deceased loved ones without severe

decomposition during the funeral. The Civil War was the deadliest war on American soil and left

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dead bodies all over the battlefield bloated, maggot ridden and decomposing. At the time, bodies

were transported by train which took a long time and during the summer months meant high

temperatures that would promote faster decomposition. Seeing their loved one’s face for one last

time was more important to families than their religious beliefs. Holmes charged 100 dollars per

person and even had a preserved unclaimed person outside of his tent as advertisement for his

superb abilities to halt decomposition. As people caught on to this lucrative job, multiple

embalming tents started to appear on the battlefields during the Civil War. Embalmers would

burn down the tents of other embalmers and put out ads targeting others as bad and promoting

their own embalming techniques. Doughty described this as the entrepreneurial impulses of

men.

Early American embalmers used more poisonous chemicals than the embalmers of today,

although the chemicals of today still pose ill health effects on embalmers and the environment. In

the past embalmers experimented with injecting the arterials with chemicals such as arsenics,

zinc chloride, bichloride of mercury, salts of aluminum oxide, sugar of lead, salts, alkalis, and

acids. If someone could not afford full embalming the discounted option would involve the

organs being taken out and the abdominal and chest cavity being filled with sawdust.

Both Mitford and Doughty mention that embalming is what led to the professionalization

of morticians. It turned the body into the product on top of casket sales. Before embalming

Americans believed that anyone could be an undertaker but once embalming became

commonplace, people began to respect them and consider them a practitioner. This led to other

business opportunities for people who created embalming fluid, restorative make up, and

embalming tools. Embalming, now seen as a necessary part of a funeral, is viewed as something

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only morticians can do despite families taking care of the dead inside their own homes for

decades.

iii. Public Health Claims

The switch to professionalism also helped morticians and funeral directors promote

themselves as a necessity to ensure public health. They made themselves look like experts on

sanitation to the public, as well as artists. Dead bodies were viewed as a dirty public health crisis

and morticians were employed to help save the public from the disease associated with the

deceased unless they are embalmed. It makes sense why people would believe these ideas, as

embalming stops decomposition, a generally unpleasant process associated with bugs, bad

smells, and decaying skin. These fears promoted by funeral directors do not acknowledge the

past history of funerals where families took care of unembalmed bodies in their own home safely

up until the Civil War. Doughty takes the fears, assumptions and unanswered questions about

corpses and makes informational videos addressing them.

One of the main fears associated with dead bodies is that they are going to spread

illnesses to the living. The public views those who die from transmittable diseases to be vessels

that harbor the disease and therefore label them as dangerous and infected. People often fear the

dead more than the living when it comes to transmittable illnesses, however, Doughty states that

this fear should be reversed as the living are much more dangerous. During the embalming

process when the blood, abdominal organ fluid, and feces are drained from the body they go

down the drain into the same sewer that living people’s bodily fluids drain into but Doughty

mentions that many people express concern when they find out that a corpse’s blood is entering

the same drainage system. In the video “Where Do Gold Teeth & Blood Go After Death?”

Doughty explains that although our innate fear of blood as a contaminant is to protect us, there

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are two reasons as to why there is nothing to be concerned about with corpse blood. The first

reason is that this water goes to waste treatment facilities where harmful contents are removed,

and the water is then able to be reused in factories or farms. The second reason is that the blood

of living people is more dangerous than the blood of corpses. Living blood has the perfect

environment for pathogens to survive. Most viruses can only survive a few hours in a dead body

and rare viruses like HIV can survive for up to sixteen days, however once the blood leaves the

corpse it can only survive for a few minutes (Doughty 2019). Doughty’s slogan when referring to

handling blood is “the older, the deader, the better.” Many also view embalming as necessary

because decomposition involves bacteria that can be dangerous, and these bacteria are what

cause the smell and nasty look of a decomposing body that many want to avoid witnessing.

However, the bacteria that inhabits the body during decomposition is not the same type of

bacteria that is capable of infecting human beings. According to Doughty and the death positive

community, handling dead bodies is less dangerous than handling living bodies.

In the beginning of the novel coronavirus pandemic, Doughty made multiple videos

addressing people’s concerns about death tolls and dangers of workers interacting with people

who tested positive for COVID-19 and died because of it. Just as people feared HIV from

corpses, they were also concerned about COVID-19 as morticians were running low on personal

protective equipment to protect themselves while retrieving bodies. Doughty mentions that it is

unknown how long the novel coronavirus can survive within a dead body and the risk it poses for

people transporting freshly dead bodies, however she bases an assumption that it would likely

not be able to survive for very long as most viruses cannot. At the time of writing this there is no

further information on how long the novel coronavirus can survive in the body of a deceased

person. Doughty was also able to answer people’s concerns about whether it is sanitary to have

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bodies in refrigeration trucks and other public health anxieties people had. Although Doughty

cannot predict the future of what scientists will learn about the novel coronavirus within corpses,

she is able to provide relief in an easy to comprehend and largely accessible nature. Doughty’s

resources are an important part of the public understanding that dead bodies are safe to handle

within a home and safe to put in the ground without embalming.

iv. Embalming and Environmental Concerns

Due to the public health claims perpetuated by the public, funeral industry and healthcare

professionals, people view embalming as a necessity for sanitation and view decomposition as

dangerous to witness. What many people do not consider is the health impacts embalming has on

the people who use them and the ecosystems they seep into. The chemicals used in embalming

are a concern for the people who use them and for the environment once these embalmed bodies

are placed into the ground for burial. Formaldehyde is used in embalming fluid and is considered

a carcinogen. Embalmers must use personal protective equipment such as respirators, face

shields, and gloves to protect themselves from formaldehyde exposure when they are pumping

the fluid into the arterial system and into the abdominal cavity. They also have improved

embalming rooms to include better ventilation.

The average cemetery around ten acres in size can hold up to a small swimming pool’s

amount of embalming fluid (Blakemore 2016). This embalming fluid is able to seep into the

ground ecosystems and water systems that end up affecting wildlife as well as human affairs.

Conventional embalming style burials include a metal heavy duty casket and a concrete vault to

convince the customer that their deceased loved one will be untouched by the elements and the

fluids put into the corpse will also be encased in this double heavy duty layer of material. These

caskets and vaults are very resource intensive and waste metals and concrete, not allowing the

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body to come anywhere near the dirt it is buried in. However, these measures do not stop

embalming fluid from entering into the ground or keeping the body from decomposing. Bodies

that are sealed in steel caskets decompose within an anaerobic environment which makes the

decomposition process different. Many bodies that decompose in the anaerobic sealed casket

have mold that forms a spike formation that comes out of their orifices (Doughty 2014). Both

Mitford and Doughty provide accounts of this spiked mold decomposition.

Carcinogenic formaldehyde, found in a 5% concentration in the arterial system and up to

a 50% concentration in the abdominal cavity, is able to enter into the ground (Martin 2011).

According to Seven Ponds, a green burial organization, around 800,000 gallons of formaldehyde

based embalming fluid is buried into the ground each year in the United States. Formaldehyde is

classified in the top 10 percent of the most hazardous chemicals according to the Environmental

Protection Agency (EPA 2019). About 115 million tons of steel and 2 billion tons of concrete are

used to make burial chambers (Doughty 2017). Eco burial advocate Elizabeth Fournier, also

known as the Green Reaper, suggests that of the 900,000 people that are buried in steel caskets

every year, if the steel used for their caskets was used to rebuild bridges it could rebuild our

nation's 56,000 failing bridges. Many death positive activists not only speak of the harmful

formaldehyde entering the ecosystem, but also how resource intensive it is to be buried with the

traditional styles of steel caskets and concrete vaults.

As for morticians' health, they are at a higher risk of developing myeloid leukemia due to

the formaldehyde. According to the New York Times, many morticians believe that using

formaldehyde is the only way to have effective short-term preservation that looks life-like and

lasts until the open viewing. They also believe that with the improvements that they have made

with ventilation ducts and wearing respirators that they have significantly decreased their

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chances of getting myeloid leukemia (Martin 2011). Steel caskets will disintegrate over time but

the steel, along with the varnishes and sealers used on them, will also lead to toxins entering the

ground and water systems. Even the wooden caskets that traditional funeral homes provide use a

sealant that is ranked in the top 50 most hazardous chemicals (Fournier 2019). Doughty and her

death positive community support green burials because they are less resource intensive, don’t

involve carcinogenic chemicals, and don’t hide decomposition and the processes of death from

the survivors.

v. Embalming Denies Death

The death positive community, alongside Mitford, Metcalf and Huntington, believe that

embalming is a process that hides decomposition from survivors of the deceased. The public has

been convinced that decomposition is dangerous to witness and due to the smell and often putrid

look of the body during later stages of decomposition it is not something that many people would

like to watch their loved one do. Due to the death denial and fear of mortality that people face,

this makes witnessing decomposition even more difficult. The embalmer will restore the body’s

appearance so they seem peaceful and sleeping so the family will not face the reality that the

person has died. Decomposition is an unpleasant but natural and safe process. Doughty’s funeral

home not only promotes green burial but also a home funeral wake. Green burials and home

funeral wakes often go together as they are both tactics that diminish death denial and promote

more involvement. Embalming only mitigates decay temporarily and every corpse will

eventually fully decompose. Doughty believes that being involved in the process of your loved

one’s funeral is important and she could never imagine someone else handling her mother or

father's death besides her and her family. Embalming gets in the way of families taking direct

care of their dead as it is something only a licensed professional can do. With a green burial it is

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possible for people to directly care for, wash, wrap and bury their dead within their home or a

safe place. Embalming promotes the idea that death and decay are not natural processes for every

organic material on the earth (Doughty 2017).

B. Cremation

Embalming and burial is not the only form of body disposition that warrants

environmental concern. The cremation process, although it hides the decomposition process if

chosen to do before the funeral, is still an option that death positive advocates think can be

helpful in accepting the death process if done correctly.

Doughty describes the details of the cremation process in her book, The Smoke Gets in

Your Eyes. The cremation machine is called a retort by those in the industry and is heated to

1500 degrees Fahrenheit before the body is placed inside. The cremation operator then checks

the permit list to ensure they are cremating the correct person and then proceeds to retrieve the

person from the refrigerated room where the corpses are kept. The bodies are kept in boxes in the

cooler where Doughty says it is a surprise every day to see who is in the box when you open it.

The body is then put on the hydraulic gurney to be brought to the retort. If the person has a

pacemaker it is removed because pacemakers contain lithium ion batteries that are rumored to

explode if left in the retort for too long. The body is loaded onto a conveyor belt to be moved

into the machine. The metal door is closed and the process of burning the body begins. The first

thing to burn is the cardboard box which is labelled as an alternative container on the funeral bill.

Then organic materials and water evaporate rapidly. Soft tissues like the skin then turn charred

and crispy making the person unidentifiable from this point forward. Of the flames that come

from the retort, the main central flame is the one that does most of the work. The central flame

burns the chest which takes the longest amount of time. Then a metal rake hooks the ribs to push

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the body so that the central flame can burn the legs. Once the entire body is burned the rake is

used to compile the larger chunks of bone into a long tray and then a broom is used to scoop the

smaller bones and ashes into the tray. The tray is then examined for metal that is removed. Then

the chunks of bone are put into a blender called a cremulator to blend the bones into a fine

powder.

i. Cremation and Death Denial

I have previously mentioned Doughty’s distaste for direct cremation services that were

heavily promoted in Mitford’s writings as Doughty believes that they hide the death process as

fast as possible. It is the law that the family receives their dead loved one’s ashes in a white

powder because, as Doughty states, if there were chunks of bone left in the cremated remains

then the family would be reminded that there are bones in the urn rather than an abstract concept

of a human being. Doughty quotes Geoffrey Gorer’s The Pornogrpahy of Death by stating, “In

many cases it would appear that cremation is chosen to get rid of the dead more completely and

finally than does burial” (Doughty 2016). This avoidance of death through cremation is a critique

that Doughty offers against Mitford’s heavy push for direct cremation. Cremation can be done in

a way that promotes denying our own mortality, but it can also be done in a way that involves the

family and doesn’t hide death.

As with embalming, home funeral wakes are something that the death positive

community believes can enhance the experience of the survivors by creating a ritual that the

family believes in. One way that a family can partake in a home funeral alongside cremation is

by holding the funeral with the body present before the cremation occurs. This way the family

can wash and prepare the body which allows them to be present with their loved one’s death.

Then, after the funeral, the body can be cremated and disposed of in a manner that the deceased

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person asked for. Some examples include being buried in the urn, being kept in the house, or

being scattered somewhere they loved. Doughty mentions that now as we are less likely to just

blindly follow in our parents’ footsteps for how to handle death, we are open to a wide variety of

rituals to include in funerals, giving us ritual freedom. Home funerals can provide this ritual

freedom as well as death positivity, whether one chooses burial or cremation.

ii. Environmental Concerns of Cremation

Although cremation that is not direct cremation can be done in a way that does not deny

death, there are still environmental concerns about how cremation machines run that should be

addressed. Cremation is better for the environment than embalming because it does not require

injecting the body with harmful chemicals and takes up little to no space in the earth depending

on what the family chooses to do with the ashes. However, the cremation machine itself poses a

threat to the environment in different ways. Most of the concerns with cremation are the energy

inefficiency of the machine and the heat that is produced and released into the atmosphere.

A lot of the problems with cremation machines are beginning to lessen as people become

more aware of the issues and request more environmentally friendly options but they are still in a

transition state. Older cremation machines use a lot more energy than newer models which

shows that the industry is moving in the right direction to create a more sustainable, energy

efficient cremation machine. Retorts also run off fossil fuels, mostly in the form of natural gas, to

keep the chamber at a high temperature all day long. On average the amount of natural gas used

to do one cremation is the same amount used in a 500-mile car trip (Doughty 2017). Natural gas

releases greenhouse gases, especially carbon dioxide, into the atmosphere which contributes to

the ongoing damage of the ozone layer.

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 Some of the other harmful substances that are released are carbon monoxide,

hydrochloric acid, sulfur dioxide, dioxin, polychlorinated dibenzodioxins, and polychlorinated

dibenzofurans. These substances are released as smoke into the air where they can eventually

travel down into water systems (Doughty 2018). If a person who is being cremated has amalgam

dental fillings, then the burning process will release mercury into the air. Amalgam fillings are

becoming less common, however, so this problem will soon diminish (A Greener Funeral 2016).

If the person did not do a direct cremation, they were likely embalming first for an open casket

viewing before being cremated. This means that the carcinogen formaldehyde will now vaporize

and be suspended in the atmosphere until it eventually rains down onto the earth. Also, if the

person is being burned in a wooden casket that uses the sealants that a contemporary burial

casket would, these harmful chemicals will be burned and released into the air. Newer cremation

machines are being built with better filtration systems and is something retort companies are

working on improving with each model. The pollution reduction mechanisms diminish the

amount of harmful pollutants being released but do not entirely erase them. Some crematoriums

participate in carbon offsetting programs that help reduce their carbon footprint and invest in

newer cremation machines that have higher fuel efficiency. Although there are improvements

occurring in crematoriums the death positive community would like to push further with other

fragmentation techniques considered in the eco-death movement that I will discuss further.

C. History of the Eco-Death Sphere

The eco-burial or eco-death movement, a term that also includes fragmentation

techniques, is not necessarily a brand-new movement, and Doughty is not the founder of it.

Doughty promotes and shows support for this movement as it is considered an extremely death

positive way to handle the dead in America. Doughty states that the modern funeral industry

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promotes human exceptionalism that no matter what it takes, no matter how expensive or bad for

the environment it is, it’s worth it because we are humans. The eco-burial movement promotes

acceptance of our death and decay just as any other animal does rather than human

exceptionalism. People should be able to practice important death rituals without causing

extreme harm to the environment so new eco-friendly options are needed. In James Green’s

Beyond the Good Death: The Anthropology of Modern Dying, he describes the history of the

modern day eco-burial movement that the death positive community promotes. The modern eco-

burial movement was an English invention, with the first eco-cemetery occurring in the Carlisle

Cemetery. During the 1980s Ken West created a section at this cemetery for people who

preferred a more natural option that also costs less money.

Many of West’s standards remained the standards of most eco-cemeteries, which include

no embalming, and no nonbiodegradable items. This means that metal jewelries or synthetic

clothes that contain plastics are not allowed to be worn by the decedent and the body must be

placed in a cotton shroud or biodegradable coffin. There are a few options that most eco-

cemeteries will also allow, including cardboard, bamboo, unfinished wood, and chipboard

coffins. Some refer to this cemetery as a woodlands burial area because the lawn is not

manicured, fertilizers are forbidden, wildflowers and native trees are planted, and the soil is

allowed to settle naturally, allowing the area to return to the woodlands it once was. People

aren’t allowed to leave flowers or any other remembrance items on the grounds. There are also

no markers for whom is buried where; therefore, you are not allowed to walk on the cemetery.

However, a bench and a brick structure that has all the names of those who are buried there are

near the grounds for people who want to commemorate their loved ones. This standard of eco-

burial that was started in the UK is the most common standard of how to have a natural burial

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and natural burial grounds. Another UK based early eco-burial advocate was the Natural Death

Centre of London, founded in 1991, which helped work with farmers to create permanent

cemeteries on their land that would be preserved for years to come as natural areas as well as a

burial ground.

Eventually, eco-burial became popular in North America as well. In the United States,

two companies have founded a different way of going about conserving land for green burial. In

1996, Memorial Ecosystems Inc. in South Carolina and in 1998, Forever Enterprises in

California began offering interment rights. They describe interment rights as “The concept is to

sell interment rights on 5 percent of the land and use the endowment from that 5 percent to

preserve the rest as open space” (Green 2008). They use existing cemeteries to create

conservation land areas as well as talk to cemetery caretakers who would like to add their own

green burial section to their grounds. As of 2016, there are now 93 registered green burial

cemeteries in the United States, and I am sure that the number has continued to grow as of 2020

(Marsden 2016). For example, Larkspur Conservation is the first nature preserve that has been

turned into natural burial grounds in the state of Tennessee and they were not included in the

comprehensive list Marsden provided in 2016 on the US Funerals Online website.

As it is seen with the comparison of the style of burial grounds that jump started the eco-

burial movement in the UK versus the US, there are different styles of eco-cemeteries. I will

discuss the three different styles of eco-cemeteries then I will discuss further the types of

environmentally friendly burial and fragmentation techniques that the death positive community

promotes and works to legalize. All three styles of eco-cemeteries are now utilized in North

America. The New Hampshire Funeral Resources, Education, and Advocacy organization has

labelled the green burial cemeteries on their list under three categories: Green Burial Council

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certified hybrid, Green Burial Council certified natural and Green Burial Council certified

conservation. The Green Burial Council helps educate the public and funeral professionals on

how to have a green burial and how to find or create your own green burial cemetery. These

three certification requirements are for Canadian and U.S. burial grounds that want to be certified

by the green burial council standards. They list these certifications and how to qualify on their

website (https://www.greenburialcouncil.org/our_standards.html):

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Figure 1. Green Burial Council certification standards

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According to these certifications, Ken West’s woodland burial grounds would be considered a

hybrid eco-burial cemetery. Ken West’s cemetery's burial grounds were within a conventional

cemetery but followed the guidelines of a natural burial within their own section. The cemeteries

that started in America, Memorial Ecosystems Inc. and Forever Enterprises, would be considered

natural burial grounds as they exist to restore the natural environment but do not work with a

nonprofit or government organization to guarantee their conservation efforts. The more recent

burial ground I mentioned, Larkspur Conservation in Tennessee qualifies as a conservation

burial ground as it is on a nature preserve that is designed to restore native flora and fauna and is

run by a nonprofit organization. There is also a fourth type of green burial ground that does not

fall directly into the Green Burial Councils standards. These cemeteries are called green friendly

cemeteries because they are not separate from traditional burials, but they offer environmentally

friendly options that one can choose.

D. Eco Death Options: Burial

i. Exposure Burial

I covered the different types of eco-cemeteries that exist and will now discuss the options

that are currently available for eco-burial that the death positive community discusses. It is to be

noted that when I mention traditional burial, I am referring to the modern-day tradition of

embalming the body, using a metal casket and a concrete vault during burial. Doughty discusses

that she feels as if her body and her atoms are on a loan program from the earth and when she

dies it is up to her to give the earth these atoms back. For herself, she enjoys the idea of not even

burying the body, just placing the corpse in the woods on the ground for animals, bugs, and

bacteria to eat away at the corpse until it is fully decomposed. This is currently not legal but

something that the death positivity community believes should be allowed. This open-faced style

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of natural death care is called exposure burial and is the way that many humans have buried their

dead for years and continue to do so to this day. In a TedTalk Doughty gave called, “A burial

practice that nourishes the planet,” she mentions the Tibetan culture that practices sky burials in

which the body is placed at the top of a mountain for the birds to eat and consume the body, a

form of exposure burial.

Exposure burial is not very common in the Western world, however. Doughty relates this

want to be eaten by animals in death to her recent vegetarianism. She had been consuming

animals her whole life so what is the difference if these animals then consume her when she has

passed? Accepting that we are animals that are going to die and decay is something that Ernest

Becker promotes. One of the ways that exposure burial is allowed in the United States is for the

person to donate their body to a human decomposition research facility more commonly known

as a body farm. Body farms around the country allow forensic scientists and anthropologists to

better understand the decomposition process so they can better solve forensic cases in the future.

They study the different circumstances that a body can decompose under so that they can

determine for how long a body has been decomposing when found. In the process, animals like

vultures come and eat the body. This is considered a donation to science and does not have a

ritualistic aspect to it so it is not a very accessible option to exposure burial, therefore the

legalization of exposure burial would be useful in the movement towards having multiple options

for eco-friendly burial methods.

ii. Recomposition

Recomposition, also known as human composting, is another method that people

consider eco-friendly. It is a way to repurpose the human body into something useful for future

generations. One of the body farms in the United States, at Western Carolina University,

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researches how to compost human bodies and turn them into nutrient dense soil that the family

can use and let replenish the ground. Doughty mentions that human composting is a great option

because of the increasing popularity in people who want to be turned into trees. Currently people

who want to become trees are cremated then placed in the soil where the tree is planted but

unless these ashes are placed perfectly, they create a thick paste that does not allow trees to grow

properly. Ashes are high in salt and deficient in nutrients so sprinkling ashes on plants will likely

kill them. Therefore, if humans were allowed to compost into a nutrient dense soil and then be

utilized in the soil that trees are planted in, the trees would be able to flourish from the corpses

that supply them. Companies like BiosUrn, The Living Urn, EterniTrees, and Capsula Mundi

placed cremated remains and soil into biodegradable containers and pods along with tree

saplings in hopes to grow a tree from the corpse. However, this method does not have a high

success rate because of the trees’ inability to grow well with cremation ashes in the soil.

Composting is already a popular method to reduce food waste in the sustainability

movement and could be a useful option for those wanting a natural body disposition process.

Human composting is commonly referred to as recomposition because it turns the body into

something useful again. It is illegal in most of the United States but has recently been legalized

in state of Washington in 2019. Doughty tweeted out about her support for getting recomposition

legalized in California where she resides, linking to the Recompose website, an end-of-life

planning organization working to get recomposition practices allowed in the entire country. They

promote the ideal of “soil to soil,” a play on words of “from dust to dust,” a common Christian

saying. Recompose is currently based in Seattle since Washington state allows recomposition.

The entire composting process costs 5,500 dollars and includes the following: transportation to

the facility, empathetic handling of the body, transformation of the body into soil, opportunity

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for a virtual ceremony facilitated by the staff (virtual only because of the current COVID-19

requirements), filing of the death certificate, sheltering of the body including cooling if needed,

and respectful handling of the soil. The family is given 64 ounces of the soil in a specially

designed container and then the rest of the soil is brought to the Bells Mountain conservation

forest. The process typically takes around 30 days and the compost is turned several times to

ensure thorough decomposition. The bones are still left over once the body is composted and can

be blended and crushed in a way similar to the process used when someone is cremated. They

will begin accepting their first bodies to compost in November of 2020. Doughty states that this

way of recomposition makes you become the “post-mortem contributor you’ve always wanted to

be.”

iii. Conservation Burial

One of the most important aspects of green burials is that once people are buried in the

ground that land can no longer be used to build on top of, thereby creating a conservation or

preservation area. This is done by putting the conservation burial ground on a land trust where

the property owner legally agrees that there will be no development on this land because of the

dead bodies on it. Money that is given to the cemetery goes into protecting and managing the

land their loved one is buried on. Also, since green burial grounds typically allow the native

vegetation to regrow it creates large spaces that will benefit the earth for future generations.

Traditional cemeteries have grass lawns that must be manicured, limited trees, and non-

biodegradable metals and concrete in the ground. The concrete vaults in traditional cemeteries

are simply used because it makes it easier to cut the grass. This wastes resources and land that

could be restored to its natural habitat. A green burial will set aside land to be preserved for all of

eternity. Doughty puts the concept of conservation into perspective when she compares

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traditional cemeteries to conservation burial by stating, “There are a lot of people who think that

we shouldn't even have cemeteries anymore because we are running out of land. But what if we

reframed it? And the corpse wasn’t the land’s enemy but its potential savior” (Doughty 2017).

Conservation burials are another way for corpses to be returned to the earth and nourish the trees

and other native plant life around their decomposing body. Natural burials also help with

conserving forests as 4 million acres of trees are used to produce wooden caskets every single

year. With the use of shrouds and other biodegradable materials that are less resource intensive,

such as bamboo, there is conservation of two different landscapes at the same time. In British

Columbia, Canada, the Evergreen Coffin Company sells their green burial coffins at local

farmers markets to make them accessible and well known to the public. The coffin costs $1000

and is shipped as a kit that can be assembled easily at home so it can be stored for future use

(CBC News 2020). Shrouds used by the Jewish, Muslim, and some Orthodox Christian cultures

promote a quick and natural decomposition process. Shrouds are a piece of fabric that is wrapped

around the dead body. It is made of either unbleached cotton, muslin, linen, silk, felted wool,

bamboo or hemp, all biodegradable materials.

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 Figure 2. A body in a cotton shroud. Photo from Elizabeth Fournier @elizabethgreenreaper on Instagram .

On the social media app TikTok, an account run by a human bone sculptor who discusses death

called @deathscience posted a video advocating natural conservation burial and exposure burial

to generation Z people, a large margin of the demographic on TikTok. He started the hashtag

“#GenZForest” and asked the viewers if they had ever wanted to be buried to help fertilize a tree

or be eaten by scavengers when they are no longer alive. The video received an overwhelmingly

positive response with comments like “... I’ve always said I want to be left for nature to take care

of” and “Where do I sign up?” It also has received 29.7 thousand likes and 82.1 thousand views

of September 22, 2020. Many people in the comments have also said that they are older than

generation Z (those born between 1997 and 2012) and find natural burial to be the only way to

go. For all generations alike, death positive activists have shown natural burial to be a

compelling option. Conservation burial is a useful way to keep land from being developed and

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use ground space without worrying about damaging the ecosystems for future generations or

running out of space.

E. Eco Death Options: Fragmentation

With a rise in popularity of cremation over traditional burial, it is important that eco-

friendly fragmentation techniques are discussed and developed alongside natural burial options.

Fragmentation means that the body is being broken down into smaller pieces without being

buried into the ground, cremation being the most common example of fragmentation. The

increase in popularity of cremation is largely due to how cost effective it is compared to

traditional burial. Traditional burial funerals on average cost anywhere from 9 thousand to 11

thousand dollars. Mitford’s glorified direct cremation has an average cost of 2,400 dollars in

comparison. Today 53.1 percent of people would choose to be cremated, according to the

National Cremation Association of North America. In 2015, cremation beat traditional burial as

the number one choice for Americans when they die and in 20 years Americans are projected to

have 80 percent of the population opt for cremation (LaMotte 2020). The death positive

community wants to be able to change American death culture and promote being eco-conscious

in death, therefore appealing to eco-friendly fragmentation techniques is important to their

message, including alkaline hydrolysis and green cremation.

i. Alkaline Hydrolysis

Alkaline hydrolysis is also known as bio-cremation, aquamation or water cremation and

is an environmentally friendly version of flame cremation. It uses less fuel, fewer emissions and

is more energy efficient than flame cremation, saving up to 90 percent more energy. The corpse

is placed in a pressurized chamber filled with water and potassium hydroxide, also known as lye,

a common ingredient used to create things like soap and detergents. The water is heated up to

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300 degrees, heating the body, which allows the water and lye to eat away the blood, skin,

muscle, and fat. This process takes 4 hours to go from a full corpse to bones. Then, as with flame

cremation, any metal material is taken out of the remains and the bones are blended into a fine

ash for the dead person’s loved ones to take with them. Aquamation provides 20 percent more

ashes than flame cremation does (Talk Death 2020). Aquamation is the most similar process to

natural decomposition that one can get without simply decomposing in the ground.

The water from the water cremation process is sterile and contains no human DNA. It is a

mixture of 96 percent water and 4 percent acids and peptides (Talk Death 2020). This water is

repurposed for agricultural purposes or can be taken by the family to use in their own personal

gardens. The water is completely safe for agricultural use. In Oregon, the water is donated to

help water sod farms. Elizabeth Fournier, known as the Green Reaper on Instagram and her blog

site, has a picture, seen below, of the leftover water from a water cremation with the caption:

“Did you know... If you choose to have a water-based, eco-friendly cremation, you are
welcome to have as much of the water you would like returned to you for your garden or
other watering needs? The liquid is a byproduct of the body’s breakdown into its most
basic components of sugar, salt, peptides, and amino acids. There’s no RNA, there’s no
DNA. Amino acids are fabulous for plant nutrition.”

Figure 3. Image provided by Elizabeth Fournier @elizabethgreenreaper on Instagram.

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Water cremation uses fewer resources like fossil fuels, casket materials, and energy and reuses

the resources that it does use by allowing the water to be repurposed.

Melissa Unfred, also known as the Modern Mortician on social media, is an eco-death

advocate and mortician at Green Cremation Texas where they offer water cremation for the price

of 1,985 dollars. Water cremation is legal for pets in all 50 states but is only legal for human

beings in 20 states. These states include Alabama, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida,

Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Kansas, Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, Missouri, Nevada, North

Carolina, Oregon, Utah, Vermont, Washington, and Wyoming (Talk Death 2020). There is no

list, however, of operational aquamation machines in the United States. Unfred mentions that

they often travel to other neighboring aquamation facilities depending on where the dead body is

picked up, as people who offer aquamation can be few and far between in most parts of the

United States or the practice is illegal in that person’s state.

ii. Green Cremation: Improvements to Flame-Based Cremation

As previously stated, there are many improvements in flame-based cremation machines

as new models come out. The main improvement is the filtration systems that are being used are

becoming more common and are filtering out more pollutants. At Green Cremation Texas they

also take further measures to ensure the least amount of pollutants being released into the

atmosphere when the body is incinerated. They call their flame-based cremation a green

cremation because of the precautions they take and advertise it to those who want to be

fragmented but are not ready to come to terms with water cremation yet still want to be as eco-

friendly as possible. They send the body to the nearest energy efficient crematorium, so the fossil

fuels used in transportation are minimized. Then they ensure that any medical or end of life

plastics are removed from the body so that they do not burn and release toxins. The body is then

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wrapped in a cloth sheet and placed in a cardboard box rather than in a plastic sheet and wooden

casket. On Unfred’s Instagram, @mod_mortician, she shows a video of the cremated remains

being placed into a compostable bag rather than a plastic bag once the ashes are blended.

Some people also choose to use biodegradable urns as well if they want to bury the ashes.

These urns are made from untreated wood, bamboo, cardboard, or cotton. There are also

biodegradable urns that are specifically made for water burial of the ashes. “AmazingGraceUrns”

on e-commerce website Etsy sells a biodegradable urn that can be used for water burial or

planted in the ground. The urn is a large white rose made of cotton and sugar cane with a bag

attached where the ashes are placed. If water burial is chosen, then the urn is able to float for two

minutes and then will sink to the bottom of the body of water to dissolve.

Another approach to the energy efficiency issues that cremation machines have is to

reuse the excess heat that comes from cremation machines. Some crematoriums have taken the

excess heat and chosen to recycle it to heat things like homes or swimming pools. This is an

environmentally friendly way to create heat using heat that was already going to be produced

anyway and with this method will no longer be wasted. Current flame-based cremation has made

many strides towards becoming more eco-friendly despite it not being the most eco-friendly

option. In the next chapter I will analyze home funerals and their relationship with the eco-death

and death positive movement.

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 CHAPTER 5: DIY/HOME FUNERALS

People choose cremation over traditional burial because of how cost effective it is, and

Doughty and her community frequently discuss ways that eco-friendly manners of death easily

coincide with home funerals, which keeps the cost of the funeral extremely low. Mitford’s first

mythology was that funeral directors have convinced the American public that the embalming,

expensive caskets, concrete vaults, big show rooms and expensive add-ons are traditional

funerals. Before embalming became the general norm in the United States, natural burial was

what was truly considered the traditional style of burial because it was the only way to do burial.

Also, before undertakers became funeral professionals, people conducted funerals in their own

homes with the body on ice to keep it from decomposing too fast. The family of the deceased

person was in charge of basically everything and would occasionally hire someone to make them

a coffin if they didn’t make one themselves.

A traditional or conventional funeral that is done in coordination with a funeral director

costs on average 9 thousand to 11 thousand dollars. The caskets alone cost 2 to 10 thousand

dollars. Funerals can be such a financial burden on families that those who lose family members

often try to get money donated through crowd funding to help with the cost of the funeral using

websites like GoFundMe. The National Funeral Directors Association conducted a survey of

prices across the country of each service provided in a traditional burial and found the average

for each service. Embalming on average costs $725, preparing the body (makeup, hairstyling,

etc.) $250, staff to facilitate a viewing $425, staff to facilitate a funeral ceremony $500, hearse

$325, service car $150, metal casket $2,400, basic memorial printed package $160, transporting

remains $325, and vault $1,395. There is even a section for a non-declinable funeral home basic

service fee that costs on average $2,100. It is very easy for these fees to quickly add up and for

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some it could be hard to determine what is truly necessary for the funeral they want to have.

Doughty describes this as the American public paying such extreme amounts of money just to

impress others and ensure the dead's preservation, but it just leads to debt and even bankruptcy

for far too many. There is even a company called Funeralocity that compares funeral and body

disposition prices based on zip code so that people can find the most affordable option for their

loved one. Doughty states that we are conditioned to spend these exorbitant amounts by our

culture and the funeral industry so that we can avoid the reality of death, but with home funerals

and green burial, a family can have a meaningful death ritual that doesn’t cause extreme financial

burden.

Green burials avoid many of these expensive services and having a home funeral,

sometimes referred to as a DIY (do it yourself) funeral, can significantly cut the costs of the rest

of them. A green burial reduces cost by eliminating the need for embalming, vaults and

restorative art like hair styling and makeup and opting for more sustainable and cost-effective

burial containers such as shrouds or bamboo coffins. All of the extra fees included on the list like

a hearse, staff to facilitate a viewing or ceremony, service cars or the non-declinable fee of

funeral home service are completely eliminated when the family is in charge of the funeral at

home. This is why Doughty states that she hopes to put herself out of business one day because

that means she will have encouraged enough people to take funerals of their loved ones into their

own hands, accepting death, saving money, and helping the environment along the way.

Green provides an example of how a home funeral can be done for under $1,000. The

example given is for someone who is going to be cremated after the funeral, but this can be

rearranged to have the person buried in a natural burial cemetery as well. The body is kept at

home and can be kept for several days easily with ice, no embalming required. The family then

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washes, dresses and places their loved one into a personalized homemade casket made of

cardboard or plywood. Many families paint and decorate the casket as part of the ritual. Then

people visit the deceased person and do things like feast, share stories, or pray for their loved

one. If a family member has a durable power of attorney of health care they can substitute for a

funeral director. Home funerals require more planning than a conventional funeral, but they cost

much less and allow the family to fully care for their loved one while they transition into life

without them. This is also only one way to do a home funeral and the options are endless,

depending on what the family believes and places importance on, in death. Home funerals are

completely legal in the United States although many view it as taboo, scary and something you

aren’t allowed to do. Doughty’s channel educates people on their option to have a home funeral

that will be cost effective, not require commercial body handlers, and will be done by someone

they trust - themselves. Green home funerals are able to revive the funeral ritual that existed pre-

Civil War in America that involved family involvement and minimal intervention of the

decomposition process.

The National Home Funeral Alliance is an organization mentioned on the Order of the

Good Death blog that helps people understand how to do funerals in their home. The idea of

doing a funeral at home can be confusing to many people as American culture tells them that

dead bodies are dangerous and should be handled by the professionals. The NHFA exists to

educate on how to care for their dead in their home properly and provide answers to practical and

legal questions about home funerals. Many families are concerned about the amount of work it

takes to have a proper and dignified funeral at home. The NFHA mentions on their website that

not all families believe in caring for their dead entirely without assistance at home and

acknowledge that funeral directors can be important assistants in the home funeral process.

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However, the NFHA emphasizes that choice is what drives home funerals and funeral directors

might only need to be used for certain aspects, not every single aspect of the funeral. Some of the

things that a funeral director could help the family out with while still allowing the family to care

for their dead include but are not limited to completing a death certificate, transportation of the

body to the home, use of a prep room for body care, or locating a cemetery. Of course, this will

increase the price of the home funeral depending on the amount of services the funeral director

provides. The price is likely to still be greatly reduced, however, and can be adjusted depending

on the financial needs of the survivors. NFHA states “Hire only what you cannot do or are

uncomfortable doing” when discussing the use of funeral directors. Home funerals provide the

option to not go into significant debt as one of their benefits. NFHA also provides support for

home funeral guides, people who teach and support those who need help during the home funeral

process and emphasize the family-centered aspect of this type of funeral.

NFHA provides educational content in the form of PowerPoints that home funeral guides

as well as interested family members can utilize. One PowerPoint called “Healing Presence: The

Re-Emergence of Home Funerals in America” is particularly helpful in explaining the emotional,

environmental and financial benefits that a home funeral provides, keeping in mind home

funerals and green funerals accompany each other. The emotional benefits they list are that home

funerals create a natural flow of events, normalize the process of death, teach children, promote

healthy grief, feel useful, find meaning, and inform the community. Along with these benefits,

they also educate families on how it is totally safe for both the caregivers and the deceased to

take care of the body at home - a topic Doughty frequently visits in her book and YouTube

educational videos. The NHFA states that the CDC, WHO, CID and PAHO agree that dead

bodies are not a health risk. Home funerals are able to provide families ritual freedom to

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participate in rituals that they create and believe in within their home, separate from the uniform

rituals that America has upheld since the Civil War. Doughty believes in the importance of ritual

and family involvement, two things she believes go hand in hand.

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 CONCLUSION

The death positive movement has provided a section of the American public with the

education to know they have other funeral ritual options available for them to choose from.

Doughty promotes the necessity and benefit that ritual can provide for people. She shows that

ritual freedom in knowing your options of eco-burial alternatives and home funeral wakes is

essential to create ritual change. Ritual freedom to choose a different funeral rite than the general

public or what your family has previously done is important to accepting your own mortality and

the natural death process. Doughty and the death positive community have been able to provide

more funeral ritual options to Americans through their activism for the eco-burial

movement. They believe that it is better for the well-being of the individual to understand their

death rite options and have the opportunity to choose eco-friendly options rather than be fed

certain false narratives from the funeral industry that dead bodies are dangerous, family

involvement is morbid, and that a funeral professional knows better than the decedent's family

does.

The death positive movement works hard to educate the American public through social

media on the benefits of changing how Americans do their death rituals. They promote ritual

change, from embalming, conventional burial, and direct cremation towards eco-friendly body

disposal and home funeral wakes. Their educational, cultural, and philosophical movement’s

goal is to create a ritual change by providing ritualistic choice to an otherwise homogenous

ritual.

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