Death in the United States is a multi billion dollar industry. Cremations, embalming, caskets, urns, memorial services, overhead, and fees for funeral home staffers, each of which alone prove costly to the average person, can run many families into the red trying to satisfy the need to provide the best for their departed loved one (Lyons 4). Resultant ceremonies produced from these efforts may even fall short of the grieving and honorary atmosphere intended only to replace it with overbearing silence and impersonality (Ramshaw 2, 3). What flies below the awareness of much of American society is the fact alternatives to the expensive, distant funerals of today have been available all along. Home funerals eclipse the standard modern ceremony …show more content…
A perception of corpses being dangerous, disease bearing, and unhygienic exists in the United States. To the point that an ignorant observer could believably come to the conclusion that death is catching. Ariscain’s 2010 article for the Pan American Health Organization on body management after natural disasters states in a less than impressed response to this belief that “ . . . no scientific evidence to date has suggested bodies of victims of disaster increase the risk of epidemic breakouts. In fact, the cadavers pose less risk of contagion than an infected living person” (1). The simple truth is being dead does not make someone any more dangerous than they were in life, if not less so. Decomposition is the natural process of the body breaking down from agents of decay, biochemical processes, weathering, and predation. However, this process takes a while to happen and for the time it would take to have a home funeral the body is unlikely to even need any type of preservation aside from cool temperatures and ice (Weidman 6). In fact, some cultures keep bodies of the dead in the homes for years, both without detriment to health or the ‘protection’ of