Do you appreciate a healthy lifestyle?  A “green” sort of living.  Do you live respectful?  Have you created a life with good things around you?  A home, family, career that is all tied together with love, vision, commitment.

I’ve never been sure of where my comfort level in the process of death has come from. As kids, we were always present in funerals.  We spent the happy times with aging family, the journey through dis-ease and ultimately the passing.  Encouraged to approach a casket. Talk, pray to the resting one. Even in touching the hand or kissing the forehead was a natural act.

At times as I’ve journeyed with others through their process I have thought of myself as being callus or insensitive. “How can there be such resistance and fear to such a natural process” I would wonder. A life well lived is a death well celebrated.

As I prepare for my daughters weekend birthday, she reminds me to “remember the white table cloth”. Our tradition is that all the kids write, color, doodle their greetings, wishes, memories to her on this. I had to smile when I read the part and observed the children in the photo preparing the casket. We celebrate life and birth. The natural process, for us, is to continue the celebration.

“A generation ago the baby boomers brought back home births. Recently there has been a resurgence in home-based end-of-life care.  As a natural extension of home hospice care, families are choosing to care for the body of their deceased loved one themselves, at home”…………http://funeralalternatives.wordpress.com/  (https://www.facebook.com/funeralalternatives.ca)

To me, this is the ultimate journey of care and compassion and love. And………something I will ask of my family.
                                                                                           

A life well lived is a death well celebrated.