Lucinda Herring - Reimagining death: stories and practical wisdom for home funerals and green burials

We cannot heal our relationships with the natural world, others, and ourselves until we heal our relationship with death and grief. With Reimagining Death, Lucinda Herring charts a course for this essential healinga course that is both practical and spiritual, personal and universal.

Brian Flowers, funeral director, founder of the Meadow Natural Burial Ground, and past president of the Green Burial Council

This is the book we have all been waiting for! As a sacred partner in this complex journey of living and dying, Herrings wisdom and poetic renderings resonate completely with what is in my heart. Her stories remind us that nature is our constant companion, offering solace, mystery, possibility, and at times absolute proof that there is much more to life and death than what most people believe. This book can help us transcend our fears of death and find the authenticity and beauty in life that is always there.

Jerrigrace Lyons, founder and director of the nonprofit Final Passages, the Institute of Conscious Dying, Home Funeral, and Green Burial Education

Lucinda Herring embodies the emerging ethic of natural, meaningful, and conscious threshold and after-death care. Her book empowers us all to trust our intuition and find ways to say goodbye that are both practical and transformative. She has captured the generous spirits of the home funeral and natural burial movements perfectly.

Lee Webster, former president of the National Home Funeral Alliance, education chair of the Green Burial Council, and founding member of the Conservation Burial Alliance

With her innate wisdom, depth of understanding, and compassionate approach, Lucinda Herring embodies the sacred and offers us the possibility of an honoring, transformative, and loving experience of death. This book offers peace of the green and is a profound gift to us all.

Claire Turnham, UK-based founder of Only with Love and chair of the Home Funeral Network

As an active, long-time member of the National Home Funeral Alliance and the founding director of Heart Land Prairie Cemetery, a prairie restoration burial ground in central Kansas, I have longed for a book that I could give to people interested in what lies at the very heart of this work. Reimagining Death is that book. I am so grateful for Lucinda Herring for sharing her stories and practical instruction and for reminding us all of a deep abiding wisdom we share as human beings. Caring for our own dead in tender, environmentally friendly ways has the power to help heal our souls, our relationships to each other, and to reinstate our place in the cycle of life.

Sarah Crews, president of the National Home Funeral Alliance and director of Heart Land Prairie Cemetery

Copyright 2019 by Lucinda Herring. All rights reserved. No portion of this book, except for brief review, may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any meanselectronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwisewithout the written permission of the publisher. For information contact North Atlantic Books.

Published by

North Atlantic Books

Berkeley, California

Cover design by Jasmine Hromjak

Cover photo courtesy of Lindsay Soyer

Book design by Happenstance Type-O-Rama

Hospital to Home Funeral Blueprint appears in this book courtesy of Lee Webster; The Long Conversation courtesy of Laurie Riepe; Undertaking courtesy of Donna James; And Well Adorn His Body courtesy of Judith Adams; and Bringing Eric Home courtesy of Shelley Sherriff

Printed in the United States of America

Reimagining Death: Stories and Practical Wisdom for Home Funerals and Green Burials is sponsored and published by the Society for the Study of Native Arts and Sciences (dba North Atlantic Books), an educational nonprofit based in Berkeley, California, that collaborates with partners to develop cross-cultural perspectives, nurture holistic views of art, science, the humanities, and healing, and seed personal and global transformation by publishing work on the relationship of body, spirit, and nature.

North Atlantic Books publications are available through most bookstores. For further information, visit our website at www.northatlanticbooks.com or call 800-733-3000.

DISCLAIMER: The following information is intended for general information purposes only. We encourage individuals to consult natural after-death care providers, as well as their health care providers or faith communities before administering any suggestions made in this book. Any application of the material set forth in the following pages is at the readers discretion and is his or her sole responsibility.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Herring, Lucinda, author.

Title: Reimagining death : stories and practical wisdom for home funerals and

green burials / Lucinda Herring ; foreword by David Spangler.

Description: Berkeley : North Atlantic Books, 2019.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018031617 (print) | LCCN 2018040542 (ebook) | ISBN

9781623172930 (E-book) | ISBN 9781623172923 (paperback)

Subjects: LCSH: BurialEnvironmental aspectsUnited States. | Funeral rites

and ceremoniesEnvironmental aspectsUnited States. | Environmental

responsibilityUnited States. | BISAC: SELF-HELP / Death, Grief,

Bereavement. | FAMILY & RELATIONSHIPS / Death, Grief, Bereavement.

Classification: LCC GT3203 (ebook) | LCC GT3203 .H47 2019 (print) | DDC

393/.9dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018031617

North Atlantic Books is committed to the protection of our environment.
We partner with FSC-certified printers using soy-based inks
and print on recycled paper whenever possible.

This book is dedicated

to my mother

Irobel Foshee Herring (19272001)

and to my father

Harold Francis Herring (19242010).

May the legacy

of their love

and stewardship of family, land, and place

bless this book and bless its readers.

With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time

And all shall be well

And all manner of thing shall be well

These illustrations are in the color photo section.

Jake Lying in State at Home

Courtesy of Tristan Seniuk and family

Undertaking

Courtesy of Tristan Seniuk and Donna James

Jake and His Mushroom Shroud

Courtesy of Tristan Seniuk and family

Sons and Friends Lowering Jake into Green Grave, The Meadow, Ferndale, Washington

Courtesy of Tristan Seniuk and family

Painting the Casket at Home

Courtesy of Olivia Bareham/Sacred Crossings, www.sacredcrossings.com

Boys Decorating Vahes Casket

Courtesy of Olivia Bareham/Sacred Crossings, www.sacredcrossings.com

Eric Home from the Hospital Hours after His Death

Courtesy of Eric Fields family

A Friend Built the Pine Casket and Then Word Went Out to the Community for Anyone to Come and Decorate It.

Courtesy of Eric Fields family