there was a virgin. thank you so i thank you very much we haven't had a sunday like this bill in the longest time. caring for what's on that is common in much of the world but rare in the west in british columbia there is a small but growing home funeral movement but it's reconnecting people to the process of tending to the dead like yes ok this is robert smith jones he has been our debt person multiple times including for our youtube videos one of those videos and i actually now had over seven hundred thousand hits. so she knew me before i was famous. ok. so the first thing we're going to be doing is carrie and ok everyone at least three people on each side my name is pashtun area where i met death matter where i am the executive director

of india which is an acronym for the canadian integrated network for death education alternatives which strongly supports families having meaningful choices whether thoughts are around i'm also a wiccan priestess and and i actually are dangerous one close off and wicca has a much stronger focus on the balance between light and dark. and there is that respect for the cycle of the year in the death house to happen in order for there to be new growth what we're going to work on right now is washing the top part of him there's something that happens between the mind and the body when you're hands on with the body that is what we used to call it in the seventy's at the stock. it's like a whole bunch of things come together much deeper than just sitting by the body or

praying or singing or writing a memorial or something like that but it's also easier to process through to this is now a corpse and our beloved is still with us in our hearts maybe in spirit but this is just carbs now ok so let's proceed to washing the body itself most people feel that doing this is their last act of love and it allows the person who's been doing the major caretaking to have that one last time but it also allows people who haven't been involved in the caregiving to actually participate in that sort of feel like they gave a little bit if i could have someone's help like you help me if you can read them down. it gets real or every time i do it. this is my favorite color and this one is being kept for when it's time for me to

sleep in the forever and. whatever happens to you after death. i know one mother eighteen year old son died and accident right in front of their house and doing the body care was allowing her to step one step over the threshold with her son and i. mean yes she would mourn him. but that actual process of caring for him was one that was black eyed it isn't just an hour ceremony it's. in the middle of the night. that we. are all the things that never got resolved to now. all of those moments.

i think that we've become increasingly detached from death i think people don't grieve properly when they try to avoid seeing death. and so i think anything that brings us closer to our dad and to confront our own mortality is positive and helping. this is stunning it's. it's completely quiet and still. burstein and beautiful. yeah i mean it might not be a traditional cemetery with headstones and. rows and flowers and everything but i don't think anybody would object to spending for the rest of eternity here i think i have a very traditional view of carols and of cemeteries just because the way things are done where i grew up but yeah i don't understand why this is such a rare phenomenon that is

a controversial this is an alternative or french it's just. just beautiful and peaceful and that's what most people want when they're choosing a cemetery. i think my father would be really moved by the scene and most directors to be honest. my name server make day my family and i did a home funeral for our mother though this was her bedroom the night that she passed we were all around her and this is where she stayed for five days so she has an ice pack on her abdomen and she's an ice pack on her head and ice pack under the core organs are just like a painting with so many beautiful colors and everything versus just your regular funeral is like dead body general home service ground.

we had so much fun and play with it. and we carried her out the door and we carried her like this and as we were carrying her the ladies are singing in the kitchen. and we just carry her down the stairs and around the corner and then there's a driveway underneath and that's her and i o's ford flex was waiting for her and it was raining and i said she's having her p.c. baptism it's beautiful. she put her in and off we went. from what i've read and what i've talked about with people is that your body is just your vehicle right it's just what you're here with it was her shell that we were disposing of which we had to write and then her spirit was around with us.

davis is a funeral director who helped deborah with her mother's home funeral her experience working out a corporate on the funeral home led her to embrace alternative practices alongside traditional ones when you first get into funeral service you come in with all these . deals and thoughts about what you're going to do and how it's going to go and the more experience i had within that corporate environment it just seemed like those ideals weren't able to be realized we were told that we needed to have unlicensed sales people with us when we were meeting with people who were just telling us you know someone close to them has just died what was their background would come from sales of other. industries there were people who came from car sales for sure photocopiers just whatever their background was if we were in the selection room

looking at ernst and caskets. i felt that their their suggestions were biased you know based on what kind of commission they would get out of that once people have suffered a loss how fair is it to put an employee in a situation where if they don't they can't eat there should be no commission sales and into life welcome to our snow capital today tom green is a funeral director and a leading opponent of corporate ownership of funeral homes when you serve people who are bereaved you're serving people who are to me uniquely vulnerable so when a organization the size of wall street comes into that very delicate situation and there is an opportunity for people who are more ethically. challenged. to make enormous amounts of money in the city of vancouver in the burnaby there are

nine real funeral homes left and the largest chain owns eight of them you think there's an awareness in the public that really the good old is our corporate oh you know what the difference is between know we've had a law passed where it was required for all of the publicly own funeral companies to put their real name in all their contracts all their signage and all their advertise. the two thousand and nine yellow paint just had their name in about a font of i think point five. the next year but it was there so this is a process called stealth ownership right where you are that's where the corporations wealth ownership where a corporation will buy a family funeral home and then keep that family name so the public thinks that they're still working with an independent family funeral home when in reality it's just a part of a of a much larger corporation exactly right yeah the mass takeover of independent funeral homes by corporations is what worries me the most when i think about the future of my family's business you know it's such

a critical time it's so important that environment is a caring and supportive environment. a funeral homes a scary place that's were i was born on but dad said. i got the. funeral service you have a choice you can develop a keen sense of humor or become an alcoholic it can be. so he called back a few minutes later and he says jackie your mother's body isn't at the morgue my sister's of what do you mean it's not at the morgue and he says well it's not here it's sounds like possibly sci has the body john dental oh-h. and jim halliburton stories share a common thread they say their mothers bodies were both mishandled by funeral homes owned by service corporation international

a funeral conglomerate based in texas that has come to dominate the funeral industry in north america we had planned to have an intimate family service we had planned to do a celebration of life later but we never had anything we never had anything she said i literally don't know how to tell you this but mom has been cremated. she was on her way to the funeral home story with her mother's clothing. armament always taking very good care of herself she always wanted to look great she was a little bit of a fashionista and you know even even in a walker she would want to make sure she had high heels on so the fact that our mother was taken and cremated in the pajamas that she died in and without her teeth

. is the part that gets me every time we never knew anything about a cia or any other of their of their brands we thought it was pleasant valley community local vernon funeral home that's been there for i don't know how many years but i remember seeing it as a kid there's basically three entities in the town and the public doesn't know that they were all three of us so so that so families are going from one to another to another getting prices and wondering why the prices are so denecke and he started to push an envelope towards towards me on the table and i started to stand up and i said are you offering us money and he said well you know all this and maybe you could pick pick and earn on the wall and blah blah blah and i turned to my sister and i said carrie we're leaving now my sister opened the envelope and it was three hundred dollars. can you imagine how insulted you would feel if a check was pushed across the room for you basically telling you that your mother's

death and your mother was worth three hundred dollars i have not after three and a half years been able to grieve over my mother i've been trapped trying to get the word out about what is going on here these are not numbers or statistics these are people sci declined to be interviewed and said they don't comment on pending litigation we had found out a song that my mom used to sing to the troops that's called i'll be seeing you. oh do you do you know play with her for your you played your mum. or you really really yeah wow. and you know i think the thing. is that a lot of this gets lost in the narrative of death because the fact is is that it is a sacred right for all of us that if there were more private providers that would

be concerned about how they were providing that service they would be more tuned to the needs of of the community. you know that boy that william carlos williams wrote about the red wheelbarrow it's only forty words so much depends upon a red wheel barrow plays with rainwater beside the white chickens. what are you talking about says i i mean i really tried to get that one it was a december because we had two kids in our town that they live by the river in the they had ice over they'd got out and they fell through the ice and drowned one was six one of those four i think we put them both in one casket. and i remember the minute walking those parents into see these two little boys they were in there we

got blue jeans one had his arm on the other one they looked like two boils i remember looking out the window at my garage across the street and well they're all there something to take your your gaze away on which you could concentrate all your attention so as to avert your eyes from this horrible notion that this could happen to be a good funeral director you have to notice right away that there are things that won't be fixed but you can be present for them. obviously the tragic situations that you deal with the car accidents the suicides i've had to deal with homicides i've had you know many deaths of children those are probably the hardest like my father doug gilchrist ran his own funeral home for many years he and my father studied together to become funeral directors death is always there it's always in your face it's always part of your every day. or.

your i suffered a very bad mental breakdown and time i was hospitalized for a couple days and of course as most people doctors a couple days later i'm back at the you know over the period of the next four years i had another three nervous breakdowns and one point of which i was told that i had p.t.s.d. we grieve for those not only in our own family. we grieve for those families that we serve every day because we probably knew them we probably buried their answer their own call years before we know that there are funeral director than ontario who have been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder directly linked to their work there appears to be a higher than average rate of alcoholism and certainly a higher than average rate of divorce michelle clark works in funeral education she and her husband paul are both former funeral directors we have lived in constant

fear that these things were going to happen to our children or to us most funeral directors just suppress everything we've we've we're taught how to do it the most recent one was the lady that stopped her son son to death from postpartum and like ross was the exact same age as her son i just think it was so real. i was so how would that metaphors that self you would you know you'd be withdrawn and just withdraw it all yeah like i would just come home and just sort of just quiet not saying really the little boy at the memorial gardens that the tree fell on i thought it was horrible you know or you can remember it oh mike this is the thing there's been so many people stories for him there on a school field trip the wind picked up and blew the tree branch on the kid i mean he was eight you know it all. for us we're lucky because we're both funeral

directors so we get it. people to say that. you're born to be a film director. and most people in our industry would say the same thing why i went to this profession. and we know film directors that have born into that world and have continued a legacy on and it's not what they wanted to do and in part because of the guilt but you feel you don't want to let the community down and so they've given up their lives to do something they don't want to do. ok. it's been great for us we would never have met their fallen in love if we weren't both funeral directors but as parents i i wouldn't want to children.

that's pretty good a. member. i said you know i'm just going to stay. down. there was just something i want to do. i need to come. you know you never get over it it's but you you are to cope and you know. i don't know what will eventually happen with my family. and i don't think i will ever fully get over the guilt that i feel for not continuing their legacy i understand now that i made the only choice i could it's a sacred and solemn duty but you'll never last.

hello it's already quite an down the caspian sea coast but the showers go through for twenty four hours ago the whole system is gone eastwards it's very obvious still turkmenistan and beyond but if you tell it back to iran it's all gone quiet tehran's city in the sunshine again twenty degrees it's down to about thirty just a bit above in baghdad so the whole the iraqi plane is cooling down as you might expect so today twenty eight in beirut remarkably warm you might think with the winds coming out from the south that swine flu there's a fairly persistent breeze written down through the gulf now of the next two days which has dropped humidity certain amount in bahrain and qatar carry on doing that of course and then turns around the arabs are obvious from the end to go to the western side of saudi and that has to warm things up again so we holding on to forty mecca and not much to the drina so that

a variation there little cloud left not still to build yemen arliss as it's dry sunny fill in stay with dropping humidity now we saw some passing showers last essay running through the western cape and the potential of seeing one or two shows here but actually if you look at all of southern africa india congress would be hard pressed to see anything other than big open blue skies. and when they're on line we were in hurricane. thirty six hours these are the things that need.