FAQ
Q: What exactly is a home funeral?
A home funeral happens when a loved one is cared for at home or in prepared space after death. This gives family and friends time to gather and participate in various aspects of care. Family members can keep the body cool with noninvasive techniques, such as ice and air conditioning. Loved ones can file the death certificate and obtain transport and burial permits. It is legal in Arizona for families to transport the deceased to the place of burial or cremation. Families or next of kin can facilitate the final disposition by digging the grave in a natural burial, or preparing the body for cremation. The body can be bathed, dressed and laid out for visitation. Hiring professionals for specific products or services, planning and carrying out after-death rituals or ceremonies is also an option.
Q: Are home funerals legal?
Yes. In every state and province, it is legal for families to bring or keep their loved one home until time of disposition. In ten states, a funeral director may need to be involved in some capacity, but this is not the case in Arizona.
Q: Are home funerals safe?
Yes. Dead bodies do not pose an increased health risk any more than when they were alive. With appropriate hygiene and cooling techniques, it is perfectly safe to keep a loved one home for several days. Embalming itself poses more than an eight times greater risk to embalmers of contracting myeloid leukemia than the general population. Bodies with infectious diseases are not usually candidates for embalming and are simply kept cool in a professional setting if not at home. View our Health & Safety page for more information.
Q: What does a home funeral cost?
The average professionally-directed funeral now costs $8,343 (NFDA), without casket, vault, cremation or burial costs included. A home funeral costs the price of ice, if used, copies of the death certificate as desired, gas to transport the body, and a rigid container, such as a cardboard box or pine casket, usually totaling under $200. Burial and cremation costs would be added at whatever the going rate is in your cemetery or facility.
Q: What are the benefits of home funerals?
The many significant benefits are environmental, financial, therapeutic, and spiritual. Families who choose to care for their own report a sense of completion, a feeling of having done their best for those they love, and a stronger connection to their friends and family and community. Having something meaningful to do to help others through a crisis or sorrowful time is usually empowering for all involved.
Q: What are the top reasons families choose home funeral care?
A. Top reasons for electing to conduct care of the deceased include, in no particular order:
to take the time to be truly present
to avoid outsourcing the responsibilities they choose to assume themselves
to avoid professionalizing a family rite of passage
to make meaning of the death
to begin healing the family and community
to take environmental responsibility by foregoing invasive and toxic procedures
to make the funeral affordable
to find spiritual connection
to participate more fully in their own lives and in their family life
Q: Who owns the dead?
A. In the language of the law, the family member who has the most direct link in the next-of-kin chain has legal custody and control of the body. If unwilling or unable to assume that responsibility, members along the chain as spelled out by Arizona Statue are imbued with the authority until someone is able to act. View Arizona Statue here.
The fact that most families choose to relinquish that partial responsibility by signing a contract with a professional that transfers physical custody does not negate the family’s right to decide what ultimately happens to that body. The only service they are licensed to perform that a family member cannot is embalming.
Arizona requires that refrigeration occurs within 24 hours, which arguably applies only when the body is being handled by a funeral firm. Bodies can be refrigerated (kept cool) using dry ice or gel packs. Home funeral families choose how the body is handled, preserved, transported, and disposed of on their own timetable. Even in cases of autopsy (where the ME’s right supersedes the family’s temporarily) and organ donation, the decision remains with the next-of-kin after the process is complete, including having the body brought home.
Q: If a body is not embalmed, what must a family do to care for it? When should the body be buried?
This is a more complex question than it sounds. Care of the deceased changes depending on whether it was an anticipated death or unanticipated, under what conditions the person died, under what regional weather conditions the period will be subject to, and whether there will be travel involved.
Unembalmed bodies (according to the CDC, CID, WHO and PANO) are not dangerous nor are they more infectious than they were in life. Simple methods of cooling the body such as using dry ice, Techni-ice, an a/c unit, or opening a window in cool weather are more than sufficient. Even without these methods, most bodies can be kept for up to 3 days in a 65 degree room. Bathing the body with simple soap and water to remove the usual surface bacteria will dispense with concerns about smell. The body is then dressed if desired or wrapped in a shroud or blanket, sheet, or quilt.
Removal for final disposition — either burial or cremation — is at the discretion of the family, either themselves or by hiring that service. In Arizona Law, a funeral director is not needed to file the death certificate or witness a burial, the family can file any necessary paperwork and make any other additional arrangements themselves, such as calling Social Security or filing obituaries. There is no time limit in Arizona for burial or cremation unless cause of death requires it. View more information on Cooling Techniques here.
Q: What, other than legal requirements, impede families from exercising their right to care for their own dead?
Because the funeral industry is a tight-knit community, often crematories, cemeteries, and newspapers refuse to accept bodies or information directly from the family by policy or business practice. Even when families have the right to this according to law, they are still being obstructed from handling the entire process without being forced to hire an intermediary.
Some hospitals and hospices also require removal by a professional without regard for policy compliance with the law. Care facilities and hospitals often have limits on how long a body can be sheltered, forcing the family to hire a funeral director to file the death certificate quickly.
The process is becoming more, not less, cumbersome for families with the implementation of state Electronic Death Registration Systems, or EDRS. Funeral directors have a direct link to Vital Statistics software.
Q: How many home funerals occur in the US every year?
Families choosing to do all or part of after death care in the US is on the rise if we measure by interest, but definite figures are unavailable as vital statistics offices do not distinguish between funeral directors and families "acting as their own funeral director" who may sign the death certificate themselves. Some home funeral families hire someone to file death certificates for them and do everything else themselves, so who signs does not provide definitive proof. Best we can do is acknowledge the cultural shift from one of fear to one of increasing openness around all things death related.
We do know that more people are interested in supporting families choosing home funerals for their increased intimacy and privacy. Because of that, they are unlikely to report their activity even if there were a medium for doing so.
There has always been an uninterrupted faith tradition for Jewish Muslim and Quaker communities, but as more people begin to understand that caring for our own is a fundamental human right regardless of religion, the more they are expressing a longing to go back to simpler ways, though with some new twists. Gone are the days of cookie-cutter funerals — home funeral families take from traditions what has meaning for them and they make up the rest as they go along, sometimes coming up with new traditions in the making.
Contributing to the uncertainty of counting numbers is the fact the definition of a home funeral varies widely. Keeping a loved one home for an hour or for a week might be considered a home funeral. Hiring a professional to file paperwork or handle transportation only after a three-day vigil is still a home funeral. It comes down to how many families self-identify as home funeral families, and they aren’t required to report it to anyone.
Hospices and hospitals may be aware of the choice to bring or keep a loved one home, but neither is equipped or interested in documenting what happens after the patient is no longer on their service.