Top 4 green burial myths, click here. Before we go any further, let’s make sure we’re legal 🙂
To plan a green burial or home funeral, use the annotated list below as a starting place. We at Piedmont Pine Coffins vouch for these resources. These are books we’ve read, people we’ve met, and links we’ve clicked.
For example, we highly recommend home funeral guide Jenny Bingham. She has visited our workshop. She’s also a movie star. (She was the “death doula” in the green burial documentary A Will for the Woods, also listed below.) Jenny could tell you all by herself how to plan.
Resource list for green burial
- Shrouding Sisters is a North Carolina consulting service that helps with home funerals and green burials.
- Carolina Memorial Sanctuary is a beautiful conservation burial ground near Asheville, NC.
- Grave Matters by Mark Harris (Scribner, 2007). This book presents a series of natural alternatives to standard practice in the contemporary funeral industry. It includes green burial, home burial, and burial at sea.
- The Green Burial Council certifies cemeteries, funeral homes, and coffins according to strict guidelines.
- Funeral Consumers Alliance – This national advocacy group has affiliates across the country.
- Jenny Bingham, sacredpassages.org, home funeral educator, Hillsborough, NC. 919-241-4304
- A Will For the Woods – This 2013 documentary about a Durham, NC man’s last wishes for a green burial won top prize at the Full Frame Film Festival.
- The National Home Funeral Alliance offers education and support for those interested in reclaiming the power to care for our own dead.
- Pine Forest Memorial Garden is a cemetery in Wake Forest, NC, that has a section set aside for green burial. It is the cemetery featured in the documentary A Will for the Woods.
- The Inspired Funeral is a blog by New York funeral director Amy Cunningham. Check here for a host of links for hours of research on how to plan a natural funerals and fitting tributes.
Reclaiming our rights
Any one of the links above will show you how to start planning. More essentially, any link will welcome you to a realm of new (and at the same time, old and traditional) possibility in our end-of-life practices. Green burial, after all, is about recouping our familial death rights of old. There is a hallowed power imbued in death care. Let’s bring this power back into our parlors.
At Piedmont Pine Coffins, we make simple pine box coffins and we help families reclaim the power of caring for our own dead. We are advocates of the green burial ethos.
