Questions You've Wanted to Ask a Funeral Director But Didn't Know Whom to Ask

Just a note about something new coming to the Undertaken With Love site. We're in conversation with several licensed funeral directors in various parts of the nation who have a track record of being supportive of family-directed funerals or who serve primarily as home funeral guides but also are licensed as funeral directors. We're inviting them to serve as consultants to our site who can address questions related to home funerals that families would like to pose to a professional mortician.

Here are a few questions that come to my mind:

• How can a family go about finding a flexible funeral home to assist on a very limited scale in a home funeral?
• In terms of a home funeral, what are the realistic options following an autopsy?
• What are the appropriate precautions for a death involving "X" condition (e.g., MRSA infection)?

In the meantime, let's gather some questions to pose. If you have a question you've longed to ask a mortician, please email them to us!

Michael Jackson to be Buried in Gold Plated Coffin

From "Connecting Directors," a social networking Internet forum for funeral professionals:

Michael Jackson to be Buried in Gold Plated Coffin: "Michael Jackson's final flamboyance will be the vehicle in which he's delivered to his final resting place: This 14 karat goldplated custom casket that will be the center of attention at Tuesday's memorial service at the Staples Center in Los Angeles. The $25,000 container from Batesville Casket Company ('because every family deserves a Batesville') is made of solid bronze, plated with 14-karat gold, and polished to a mirror finish. It's the same model in which James Brown was buried. No question about it, it'll be the fanciest coffin in the graveyard."

The Jackson family has every right to choose the casket of their choice. But I have to say I have much more respect for the choice Billy and Ruth Graham made when they selected their own caskets -- identical birch plywood ones built by prisoners of Louisiana State Penitentiary and sold for only $215 a piece. The Grahams' son, Franklin, had seen the caskets while visiting the prison on a mission and was struck by their simple dignity.

I have some sympathy for morticians whose profession requires them to be flexible in meeting the expectations of customers with wildly variant tastes in final things. Not all of them attempt to push conspicuously consumptive casket models onto their bewildered clients. At some point, we the consumers have to accept some responsibility, too, for the choices we make. As a person of faith, I would like to see more religious leaders take the higher ground in encouraging a funeral etiquette that is simpler, more affordable, more gentle on the earth, and ultimately more sacred than what we too often see practiced in America.

Cemetery in an arid land continued

Same cemetery and neighborhood down the street from each other as yesterdays' post.