Tommy Randal Odom is buried on a hill where the warm sunshine
filters down through the trees and the laughter of children fills
the air. To the right is Mt. Pam. To Tommy’s left the entrance to
Golden Gate park, and at the foot of the hill is an elementary
school, the source of the mirth in the air.
Tommy Randal Odom is buried on a hill where the warm sunshine filters down through the trees and the laughter of children fills the air. To the right is Mt. Pam. To Tommy’s left the entrance to Golden Gate park, and at the foot of the hill is an elementary school, the source of the mirth in the air.
In his living days, Odom would have loved this spot – the first burial plot to be used in a new ecologically friendly cemetery called Fernwood in Mill Valley, California. He was a man who enjoyed the simple life, helping friends, caring for the homeless, and entertaining children at his painting garden in the Northern California Renaissance Faire. But on September 5, Odom and his girlfriend were in a terrible car accident.
While driving too fast on a road near his Sebastopol home, Odom missed a sharp curve and was headed toward a ravine as the car went out of control. It came to a teetering stop just long enough for his girlfriend to escape, but Tommy was not so lucky. As the car lurched he was caught between its metal frame and a tree, killed instantly.
“It was terrible, but it was also merciful,” said friend Rebecca Love, a Sebastapol sculptor. “His family lives in Texas and they didn’t really know what to do, so they gave me permission to take care of him.”
In most cases, “taking care” of a loved one after death would have meant calling the mortuary or crematorium and arranging for disposal of the body, but Love wanted to do more for her friend. When her mother passed away, Love had bathed and dressed her body and done her hair and make-up rather than letting a stranger do so. For Odom, a whose death had been so sudden and violent, she wanted to go further.
“I was granted permission to get his body,” said Love. “I rinsed it in beautiful rosemary water and I anointed him with the herbs and oils that they used in the Bible. I wrapped him in white muslin and I laid a cross in this really deep blood red cloth over him because he always said that when he died he wanted to be bathed in the blood of the lamb.”
The process wasn’t easy for Odom’s friend of nine years.
“Of course a body that’s been in a car accident isn’t pretty,” said Love. “I just had to keep saying, this isn’t Tommy. Because of my faith, I just kept thinking, Jesus was in a worse condition than this, but his loved ones still cared for him.”
After Odom’s body was placed in a wooden coffin, it was taken to Love’s studio, where friends and relatives gathered to decorate the casket, painting remembrances and rainbows. In the garden outside, attendees could choose to paint small wooden ships, the kind that Odom made for children at the Renaissance Faire. They, too were placed in his coffin.
And when they were ready, his brother, two sisters and a close-knit family of friends drove Odom’s body the hour’s distance to his Mill Valley resting place. They buried him themselves.
A family member choosing to clean and dress their relative before a morticians arrival is not that rare according to Jim Habing, funeral director and owner of Habing Family Funeral Home. Taking such a personal role in the preparation and disposition of a loved one’s body is another step that may seem odd in today’s society, where death is an $11 billion per year industry according to the National Funeral Directors Association. But for about 10 percent of Americans (and growing) it’s a conscious choice to eschew the mortuary industry in favor of a more intimate, more economical end to life.
The choice cuts across lines of class and religion, from New-Age former hippies who want to return to the earth to Muslims who wish to follow the Quran’s mandate for a simple burial to born-again Christians who feel their family would be better served by keeping the $6,500 an average family spends on funeral costs before the burial plot or concrete vault prices are added.
“Initially, it was a financial consideration,” said Georgia Tripp, 65, whose husband Gerry passed away three years ago. “But when I saw how comforting it could be… The mortuary is so quick, so sterile – it feels kind of like McDonalds.”
Tripp displayed her husband’s body in an empty room of their home, surrounded by flowers as his favorite music played.
“He wasn’t a big suit wearer at that time in his life, and that would have been odd,” said Tripp, a practitioner of alternative and eastern medicine and religion. She dressed him in a casual outfit. A blanket his daughter had crocheted was draped over him.
“On the day of the service I knew that not everyone would be comfortable seeing him,” said Tripp. “I just left the door cracked and left a note on it saying people were welcome to go in and say good-bye to him. But if they just went by the room to go to the bathroom all they could really see was his feet.”
Tripp says that the process isn’t for everyone, but said that most of the people who came to the funeral were suprised by how comfortable they felt. And preparing for the service gave her solace.
“It gives you something to do, some order when it seems like there’s none,” she said. “The experience of his death I would not want to repeat, but for the things it taught me I will be grateful until I die. He gave me gifts in his death I could have never imagined. I was able to make peace with him dying.”
Tripp scattered her husband’s ashes outside of Mt. Shasta last year, at a place where the two had camped many times.
Dwight Caswell, 60, who lost his wife Anne to breast cancer two years ago, also found a sort of solace in caring for her at home. “In a standard situation there’s all this padding – the distance, the coffin, the embalming and make-up,” said the Sonoma resident, a former Presbyterian minister. “It’s all to put death at an arm’s length. We pretend we’re immortal, that death is a mistake that other people make.”
There was an inescapable reality to Anne’s death, said Caswell. In fact, anyone in the country can view it, since the Caswell’s invited PBS’s POV into their home for the documentary “A Family Undertaking.”
“It was the only funeral I think anyone had been to where they had to sign a waiver,” said Caswell.
“Anne wanted to teach people not to fear death because she didn’t.”
Anne had been trained as a philosopher at Sarah Lawrence and Harvard, and she wasn’t about to die without thinking through her options. She contacted Jerri Lyons, a death midwife (one who shepherds a family through the home funeral process), and decided on a $30 cardboard box for her coffin. “I think the only thing she regretted was that the box wouldn’t be recycled,” said Caswell.
He covered her casket in cards and drawings sent by the Sunday school students at their church, where Anne had often gone in to classrooms to teach children about handicaps, as she had been born missing a hand and part of an arm. The service was in the small meditation room that he’d added on to the house for her.
“It was smaller and much closer,” said Caswell. “My wife was just sitting there in her cardboard box in this very nice dress.”
Friends and relatives, some of whom had just heard and come straight from work, filled the home, spilling out into the living room and kitchen, even looking in through the windows from the yard.
“You couldn’t escape the fact that she was dead,” said Caswell. “People have all these notions about what a body looks like because of what they see on TV or in the movies. It’s not like someone’s going to start rotting in a day or two. She was actually beautiful.”
Caswell held a memorial service for his wife several weeks after her funeral so that friends who hadn’t been able to attend the burial could remember her. Odom’s friends plan a similar private celebration this weekend after-hours at the Renaissance fair. For now, the sun is setting on a hill in Mill Valley, and somewhere children are laughing.
But on a hill in Mill Valley, the sun is setting and the children are laughing.
If you’re considering a green or home burial
In most states it is completely legal to care for a body yourself as long as the proper paperwork is filled out, but watchdog groups like the Pre-Posthumous Society claim that funeral directors are lobbying to make the practice illegal. If you’re considering an alternative burial, here are some things you should know:
• You must obtain certificates for death as well as for disposition (what you plan to do with the body). Most of the time, the funeral home handles this, but if you are considering a home funeral, you’ll need to complete this process. Contact the Funeral Consumers Alliance by calling (800) 765-0107 or visiting www.funerals.org for more information.
• Most funerals, unless they’re open casket, don’t require embalming. However, if the body is going to be buried in a traditional graveyard, you’ll have to check with the cemetery to make sure that burying loved ones wrapped in shrouds or in caskets of plain pine or cardboard is acceptable.
• The Catholic church is okay with cremation these days, but requires that its members (or their ashes) be buried whole. If you’ve been considering burial of your ashes at sea, the Neptune Society (www.neptunesociety.com) can offer more information on how you can achieve this. If you’re inclined to spend more money for an interesting tribute, your ashes can be mixed with concrete and sunk off the Georgia coast to make an artificial reef through Eternal Reefs (www.eternalreefs.com).
• For information on obtaining a pine burial box in the Bay Area, contact Kate Broderson of A Plain Pine Box, P.O. Box 1307, Forestville, CA 95436 or call them at (707) 578-7709.
• If you’re looking for someone to shepherd you through the home burial process, contact Jerri Lyons of Final Passages by visiting www.finalpassages.org or calling (707) 824-0268.
