Bringing Death Home with Heidi Boucher

Heidi Boucher is a home funeral guide and writer and director of the documentary ‘In the Parlor’ where she follows the intimate journey of three families as they navigate caring for their dead at home. Heidi’s work with death is tender and truly beautiful. In this episode we unpack how funerals moved from the parlors of our homes to funeral parlors in just 150 years including the rise of the funeral industrial complex. We explore the very human emotion of conflating our fear of grief, loss, and ‘abandonment’ with the fear of death and the dead. This is as much an exploration of how to have a funeral in your home and navigating the legalities and practicalities of it as it is a conversation around grief. We talk about forming relationships with our dead loved ones, whether they’ve died recently or in the distant past and forming a relationship with grief, who we walk hand in hand with in this life. This is an unfurling conversation and while it may seem heavy at first blush - I left it with an incredible sense of lightness. 

We also talk about:

• Navigating death with children and teens
• Scaling home funerals
• & so much more

Find Heidi: 

Film: In the Parlor (intheparlordoc.com)

Get in touch with Heidi: [email protected]

Timestamps:

00:03:20: the Funeral Industry by the Numbers

00:08:29: Introducing Heidi and setting intentions

00:11:44: How death and funeral care has shifted in 150 years

00:21:27: How our views of death have shifted 

00:26:57: Fear of death vs fear of grief 

00:37:30: Modeling death as parents//for children

00:46:03: How media has shifted death 

00:52:39: The ‘how tos’ of home funeral care 

01:04:52: Nurturing our relationships with the dead 

01:15:14: The first 72 hours after death - making room for grief

01:30:18: Funeral care is scalable - you can pick and choose what you want to do

01:39:20: Bringing death home 

A List of Books Mentioned:

Find the full list HERE

More Resources:

Home Funeral Alliance 

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