Cariboo Community Deathcaring Network is all about reaching out and making connections so that when we or someone we love is dying, we have an informed and compassionate community holding us.
In today’s changing landscape of death and dying, everyone has an important role to play; individuals, families, death doulas, home funeral guides, hospice palliative care workers and traditional funeral directors.
On October 26th we brought these elements together for the Swan Song Festival. We offered information on Natural Burial, home funerals and a host of other non-traditional approaches to Deathcare. We invited our local Williams Lake Hospice and Cariboo-Chilcotin Funeral Services to join us in offering information and resources to festival visitors.
It was a groundbreaking event.
I believe we are building bridges and fostering a death caring community that works together for the benefit of us all.
Meg Kennedy-Gunn and one of the staff from Cariboo-Chilcotin Funeral Services joined us at the festival, as did Daphne Johnson Executive Director of Williams Lake Hospice. Some very good conversations resulted.
Meg dropped us a note yesterday asking that we share the attached article citing it as a good read in respect to funeral directing. And it is.
I sense from the article that traditional funeral directors are feeling unjustly maligned. Change is hard, and there is a push on in our society for more transparency in services and pricing, more personal control of our dead and dying loved ones and a return to caring for our own.
As individuals and as a community it’s time to reclaim deathcare as an honoured part of life. Time to ensure that we have those important conversations about end of life and after death wishes to lighten the load on our families and on funeral directors.
We are fortunate in Williams Lake and 100 Mile. Our local funeral homes have not sold out to the huge multinational conglomerates where services are standardized and prices are dictated. The owners and staff of our local funeral homes are respected members of our community and have been here for generations. They are genuinely caring people.
Education, advocacy, and offering information and services on non traditional Deathcaring is where we come in.
“Funeral directors in our society play an important role and there must be room for both traditional approaches to death and dying and the more creative and non-traditional home funeral.” Sarah Kerr
We believe it is important for home funeral guides, death doulas, hospice palliative care workers and traditional funeral directors ‘to find ways to collaborate.’
For the benefit of us all.