A Path Home

Today Sarah is joined by Deborah Thornton and Angela Franklin. Deborah's daughter, Scout, died in a car accident in the summer of 2019. With the help of Angela and her husband, Michael, both death midwives and home funeral guides in the rural Oregon town where Scout was living with her partner, Travis, and their dog, Mowgli, Scout was given a natural burial on the farm she called home.

watch Scout's performance at the 2019 Kate Wolf Festival here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYpIV7By9BE
contact Angela here:
https://www.facebook.com/crossroadsdeathcare/
Scout's mother, Deborah Thornton, is a transformational life coach based in Maryland. The story of her emotional journey following Scout's death will appear in a forthcoming collaborative book on cultivating emotional resiliency.
Learn more about Deborah's work here:
https://prismatic-coaching.com/

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Today Sarah reposts an episode from our first season in 2019 called Grief and the Holidays with a couple of changes. Several people have asked about the song at the beginning and end of A Path Home. The title of the song is The Next Step.  At the end of this episode you will hear a rough recording, made outdoors on a cellphone,  of the whole song. Here are the links for the resources used in the original episode.
https://www.refugeingrief.com/
https://johnpavlovitz.com/2015/12/18/blue-christmas-what-to-do-when-the-holidays-hurt/
https://www.centerforloss.com/
https://www.griefhealingblog.com/

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On this episode we hear from Jonel Kiesau, who shares the tender, sorrowful, yet somehow joyful experience of caring for her beloved husband, Andy, at home along with their two young daughters, family and community. Andy was buried in a hand-crafted wooden box on their farm in Wisconsin. You can find Jonel's essay, Fifty Acres, in the book Contours: A Literary Landscape here: https://www.driftlesswritingcenter.org/product-page/contours-a-literary-landscape
And read more about their story along with photographs on her blogspot: https://possuminthecompost.blogspot.com/2018/07/the-beauty-of-loss.html

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Today Susan Mackey shares her creative solution for providing after-death care when a home funeral wasn't possible, home funeral care just not in a home. To learn more about Sue and her work see her website here: https://www.outoftheboxfuneralplanning.com/
Susan serves on the board of the Funeral Consumers Society of Colorado, an affiliate of the national Funeral Consumers Alliance. Here are those links:
https://www.funeralconsumercolorado.org/
https://funerals.org/

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On today's episode I speak with three members of the Pomerantz family, sisters Jennifer and Katie and their father, Sanford. It was almost exactly one year ago, November 13th, 2020,  that I met the family at Heart Land Prairie Cemetery where they buried Francine, the girls' mother and Sanford's wife of 51 years.
 
To find out more about HLPC, check out the website:
http://www.heartlandprairiecemetery.org/

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Bonni Goldberg shares the story of reckoning a complicated relationship with her mother by caring for her at the end of her life and after her death. The women in Bonni's family performed the taharah, a final act of great kindness in Jewish tradition, for Bonni's mother when she died. What followed was an Aquamation, also known as "water-cremation."
Bonni is an author of several books for young people and adults. To see her titles and read about her work visit her webpage at: https://bonnigoldberg.com/
She has written several essays on death under the pen name Batya, that you can read at the following links: https://medium.com/take-too/the-real-reason-i-wash-the-dead-63b0269edee8
https://psiloveyou.xyz/searching-through-my-fathers-ashes-70d5dad2f453
https://medium.com/take-too/meet-me-at-the-death-cafe-90280eb5b4c3
More on Aquamation here: https://aquamationinfo.com/

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Writer Maggie Jones shares with Sarah the after death care her family provided for both of her parents some 18 years apart. The experience of remaining with her father's body for a full night after his death, stayed with her and ultimately inspired her to write a story for the New York Times Magazine called The Movement to Bring Death Closer.
To learn more about Maggie's work visit her website, here: https://bymaggiejones.com/
You can find the NYT story here: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/19/magazine/home-funeral.html
And listen to the piece on The Daily, Sunday Read edition here: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/20/podcasts/the-daily/home-funeral-guides.html

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Diana Lindsay and her friend, home funeral guide Lucinda Herring, share the story of Kelly Lindsay's dying process and the family who gathered to accompany him on his final journey with brain cancer. Here are the links to Healing Circles, the support organization founded by Diana and Kelly: https://healingcircleslangley.org/ and https://healingcirclesglobal.org/#top
I mention in the introduction just a few of the things Healing Circles offers, but there is SO much more. It is really worth taking a look!
If you're interested in reading Diana and Kelly's book on caregiving and grappling with cancer or any other life-limiting illness you can find it on Amazon. Amazon Smiles will donate to the National Home Funeral Alliance if you select it when ordering.
https://smile.amazon.com/Something-More-Than-Hope-Everything/dp/099124270X/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=something+more+than+hope+diana&qid=1623966311&s=books&sr=1-1

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Lauren Carroll is a funeral director based in Colorado Springs. After finding out about home-based, family-centered after death care, Lauren devoted her practice to helping families create home funerals. On this episode we discuss everything from filing a death certificate to rigor mortis and body care. She is a co-founder of Deathwives, a non-profit death education and advocacy collective. Find out about the courses they offer here: https://deathwives.org/

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Aubrey Brinneman and her friend, home funeral guide Lauren Richwine recall the dying, death, home funeral and natural burial of Aubrey's husband, Tyler. Ty faced his diagnosis with a rare, aggressive cancer by being actively involved in preparing his young family for what was to come. If you are in Indiana and would like some support or have questions regarding holding a home funeral or natural burial, you can contact Lauren through her website: http://deathdonedifferently.com/
The shroud the couple ordered for Ty's natural burial came from Kinkaraco, Green Funeral Products.  https://kinkaraco.com/

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