Unexpected Benefits Of At-Home Burial
Posted on: 9 December 2016
As you age, it's wise to start considering arrangements for your own burial. Reasons to pre-plan include reducing stress for your family at the time of the funeral, reducing funeral costs, educating your family about what to expect, and more. Some families choose an at-home burial, which is a natural way to become one with the earth once more while employing a minimum of pomp and ceremony. This type of burial can actually have several unexpected benefits, though. Here are some of them.
Making your family more familiar with a difficult topic
Although discussing the funeral arrangements and having your family go through some training to be able to better handle your remains during preparation for the funeral may not actually make your family comfortable with death, it may help them become more familiar with the topic and more comfortable with discussing it. This can lead to less suppressed emotion and less ignorance due to miscommunication.
Reducing burial costs
If you choose a traditional in-ground burial, you pay for not only space at the funeral home and for the funeral director's time and the embalming process and so on, but also for a casket and transportation to the cemetery and grave-digging services and a grave liner and other conveniences. These are important parts of a traditional funeral, but not all of them are necessary for an at-home burial and some, like the grave-digging, can even be done by family members. You'll still have to pay for flowers, a casket, a headstone if you want one, and the services of a death midwife or other officiant, but altogether it can be much more budget-friendly than a cemetery burial.
Eco-friendliness
The fact that an at-home burial doesn't involve embalming and having strangers handle your remains may have been one of the things that attracted you to the process, but did you know that the lack of embalming and other characteristics actually make an at-home burial much more eco-friendly than a traditional burial? In addition to fewer chemicals, fewer non-renewable resources (such as concrete used for grave liners) are necessary and graves are usually dug by hand.
These are just some of the benefits to an at-home burial that you may not have known about before. Of course, like any other type of burial, it has pros and cons, but if you want an eco-friendly burial handled mainly by friends and family with low cost, this may be just the thing for you. Contact a company like Morris Nilsen Funeral Chapel to learn more about your options.
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