“Death midwife” Olivia Bareham wants to remind Angelenos that “home funerals are completely legal.”
Photographer: Josie Keys
“Death midwife” Olivia Bareham wants to remind Angelenos that “home funerals are completely legal.”
Photographer: Josie Keys
Olivia Bareham sits in a small Westside café on a weekday morning, ordering toast and discussing the particulars of death.
“Oh, you have rosemary bread?” she says, thoughtfully. The server nods. “I’ll take that, please.”
Bareham, along with partner Rebecca Le Vine, is the co-founder of Sacred Crossings/Continuum Home Funerals, an organization that offers an unusual alternative to the sterile, expensive and dehumanizing morass that is the modern-day “death care” industry. As Bareham explains, after a person dies, his or her body is usually released from hospital or home care to a funeral director, inserted in a black plastic bag, and refrigerated. The embalming process — during which blood is replaced by preservatives, organs are removed and unnatural cosmetics applied — is horrifying, undignified and invasive.
It’s a lot to stomach before breakfast. And it’s also entirely unnecessary.
“Home funerals are completely legal,” says Bareham, whose genteel manner and kind eyes make her seem uniquely suited to the sensitive role of “death midwife.” “I think over the years people have lost touch with the reality of death completely, on all levels: mental, physical, emotional. They don’t know what’s happening; they don’t want to know what’s happening.”
While corporate-owned mortuaries flourish, driving prices for funerals sky-high, families remain largely unaware of their legal right to handle the process themselves to take a loved one’s body into custody, transport it, and keep it in the home for the three days that the process generally takes. According to the Federal Trade Commission, a traditional funeral can run well over $10,000. Home funerals generally cost less than $2,000, and remain an extraordinarily intimate and personal process. Estranged families reunite; final goodbyes are said. Those who must go on without their loved one are able to come to terms with his or her passing in a gentler, more humanistic way. Still, many hospitals and health care workers are ignorant of a family’s right to claim a body. Even the Massachusetts Dept. of Health had to be informed by the FCU — the Funeral Consumers Union, a national advocacy group — that home funerals were indeed within the law.
Over her rosemary bread and poached eggs, Bareham explains, “We go to the home and we talk not only to the person doing the passing, but also to the people who will be with them. Most people know exactly what music they will play, what poems they want read.”
She relates the story of Mireille, a flamenco dancer in her heyday. After planning arrangements with Mireille and her sister, Diana Kalfayan, “for the last few days of her life we hung her beautiful flamenco scarves on the wall, the table, so she could remember the feelings she’d had when she was dancing.”
“It was incredible,” said Diana. “To be able to be with Mirielle for a couple days [after she had passed] and allow the mourning, with relatives and friends and brothers, was an amazing experience. On top of it was Olivia: you could feel her coming with her heart. ‘This woman,’ my sister said, ‘I want her to be there when you are washing me and dressing me.’ The way [Olivia] talked to my sister was so gentle, so sensitive.”
Olivia and Rebecca work with the family to wash the body, anoint it with oils, and dress the person in the clothes he or she had wanted to be buried in. The body is kept cool using dry ice and air conditioning; no other preservation is needed. “We set up an altar in the room, and candles. People visit and sit by the person, maybe touch them, say what they have to say. And then by the second day, life starts to return to the house; you see [the family] in the kitchen cooking.”
On the third day, the body is placed in a simple casket that has been decorated by family and friends. “We bring art supplies and glue, and the whole family decorates it; they come up with the most amazing things. They put photographs on it, whatever they want.”
When her mother, Rosemary, passed away in 2002, Olivia was inspired by the kindness of the hospice nurse, who encouraged her to bathe and dress the body. “We laid her on the bed, and found a rose and we put it on her chest, and she looked so beautiful,” says Bareham contemplatively. The experience encouraged Bareham to begin her education in death midwifery.
“We don’t let ourselves think about our mortality,” muses Bareham. “If we did, how would our lives change? We might think more carefully about war and pursue peace.”
For more information on Sacred Crossings/Continuum Home Funerals, visit SacredCrossings.com.