In 2018 I started DeathCare BC as a website and social media presence, at the time on Facebook and Instagram. I wanted to share practical information about “what to do when someone dies”. Over the intervening years the way we relate to one another online has changed and the way that work appears online has as well.

On a personal note I have evolved as a death care worker, educator, and community advocate. Over the last 18 months I have largely disappeared in the online world, but I have been nearly at my most active in the offline world. I have hosted workshops, talks, and am working with a dozen individuals a week doing funeral planning. My phone continues to ring and I continue to answer and learn from my clients and from the changing landscape.

The chasm between my online presence and my lived reality has widened. In this gap I have developed a curiosity and insecurity about the future of who that online person is.

Headshots are from two years ago, pre-motherhood (late 2025) and pre-move to the Interior. Website copy is factually accurate but stale. Social media posts are months or years old.

The effort to bring all of this up to the moment and aligned with current trends honestly is not juice that feels worth the squeeze for me. Increasingly being online has felt like screaming into a void that then regurgitates my own work back to me in an AI summary. It is tiring.

So! I have decided to deactivate my social media! Instagram and Facebook specifically. I have also cancelled my subscription for Squarespace and Wordpress which means that my DeathCareBC and EmilyBootle.ca websites will be offline soon.

These pages represent enormous effort and investment to create and maintain. I have mixed feelings about taking them down, but it feels like the right thing to do in this moment of rapidly changing ecosystems. I also believe that the information I have shared will continue to appear in search results for people who need it, due to the nature of how SEO functions these days. Though deactivated I do not believe I would be capable of scrubbing my information from the internet if I truly wanted to.

Substack is free and low barrier, so I will use this platform when I feel compelled to share one thing or another. I have big feelings, ideas, and visions for the future of deathcare, and will continue to show up in my community for those who need me.

In the meantime, connect with me by email at emily.bootle@gmail.com and I will get back to you when the timing is right.

And in the meantime always remember,

In those years I have answered the call many hundreds (thousands?!) of times, coming from people in the midst of the worst times of their lives. I have had the immense responsibility of doing my best to help these folks make decisions, plans, and compromises. Within the fog of their bereavement and my professional obligations, we have come together to do the best we can given the circumstances.

In 2019 I created DeathCare BC as a way to start getting information about the deathcare industry into the general public. Since then I have had the privilege of speaking at conferences, workplace lunch and learns, webinars, PROBUS meetings, book clubs, and niche events.

The goal has always been, and continues to be, to do absolutely everything in my power with the information I have to:

prepare my community for the inevitable

To quote myself:

“Look, none of us can know the circumstances of our death truly. We don’t get to know whether we will be caught in an avalanche, in our beds, surrounded by friends and family, unexpectedly in any manner of places. But you know what we can know? Exactly what will happen two hours, two days, and two weeks later, logistically speaking… The bureaucracy and logistics are knowable.”

- Myself, today (and for a long while now)

Humans are prediction machines. We have our big beautiful brains that spend a lot of their energy anticipating, calculating, and measuring for outcomes. Because of this we can also be fearful-ball-of-anxiety machines. Our fear of the unknown keeps us up at night and it can quickly become overwhelming.

I believe this fear of the unknown is what makes us so reluctant to have these conversations with death. It opens up all manner of questions that we are just not equipped or even able to answer. I have a tremendous amount of compassion for the reasons people avoid it.

That being said, what about all these know-able things?

What if we could say, “well I don’t know how I might die, but I sure do know that I have a neat little green burial and a bouquet of seasonal flowers bought and paid for, so that’s where this body of mine will end up”.

If that seems specific it is because it is, as those are the services I pre-paid for when I did my funeral planning in 2020. And you know what? I feel really good about it.

A lot of what we worry about is how the people we love will manage after we are gone. We are worried about whether they will be swallowed up in their grief, or if there are conversations we haven’t had the chance to have yet, or if we are going to miss out on some really incredible things. One of the hard parts is knowing that we won’t be there to comfort or guide them in their grief.

The next best thing for the first two hours, two days, and two weeks, is to have an excellent plan in place.

This year I am evolving the focus of my day-to-day services to working with individuals and couples to put thoughtful after-death plans together. Part of that is also being able to pay for these plans in the form of an insurance policy (with TruStage Life of Canada), which I spent a big chunk of 2024 getting licensed to do.

emily's cool new site for pre-planning

When I answer the call from a bereaved family one of the first handful of questions I will ask is if they have a pre-plan. The reason? Because it is the next-best-thing to having someone in the room telling you exactly what their wishes are, and it is paid for to boot.

My hope is that by making this offer and working with as many people as possible we can shift the way we approach the services of a funeral home.

Reducing the confusion of early grief allows the clouds to clear more quickly to allow all of the other emotions in. Going into a funeral home with notes written in your loved ones handwriting provides a comfort I cannot begin to describe here, one I have witnessed over and over again in real time.

As my friend Christa Ovenell says, don’t wait until it is raining to fix the roof.

My new home at www.emilybootle.ca is for the planning work I am talking about in this post.

DeathCare BC will continue to be the place where I focus my education efforts, especially empowering community deathcare on the local level. Bridging the gap between our healthcare system and the death system is a vital piece of this big puzzle.

As with so much in life, there is overlap and connection to be had everywhere.

Thank you for listening and reading along on this evolving journey.

Emily

(PS, if there is something you want to see/hear me write about please let me know!)

There is also the fact that I believe all ideas originate from a well which we all have access to, and so there are no thoughts which are not shared with our collective in some form.

Anyhow, to ramble and begin, this is one metaphor I share when speaking about my own death and that of others. I may have written about it before but here I will share it again because I would like to.

We begin our lives as huge boulders.

For many of us, if we are lucky, from the moment someone becomes conscious of our conception we have an influence that exceeds our physical presence by magnitudes. Even the idea of us is powerful, heavy, has a gravity that pulls in our parents, siblings, and communities.

Taking myself as an example.

I am a 33-year-old woman with no children of my own yet. I do have two parents, two sisters (and a brother-in-law), a niece and a nephew, a partner, and more friends than I can count on my fingers and toes (what luck!). To boot I also have many aunts, uncles, cousins, and chosen family. In short, I am a pretty big boulder.

I think of the moment of death as our boulder landing into a deep pond and settling to the bottom with each one that came before.

If I were to die tomorrow, by some twist of fate, my boulder would create a ruckus. It is so big and moving with so much inertia - it would *crash* and *splash* into the water. Everyone who knows me would get soaked. The quiet surface of the water would ripple and bubble long after my boulder exited from view. It would take many minutes for the waters to settle, and it might take hours for the surfaces to become fully dry again.

What a lot of fuss that sounds like.

Now, let us imagine that I am permitted to live a long life with many more chapters as yet unseen. My boulder continues down this rocky path to the inevitable splash and settle. Over the years it bounces, rocks, and is gradually chipped away by this journey.

Bang, boom, chip, crack.

Until one day, let’s say I’m one-hundred-and-two years old, my small pebble that was once a boulder launches off its final cliff and into the water. I fall asleep cozy in my bed one night and do not rise with the sun the next morn.

*plop*

There are still ripples, those of my great-grandchildren, of my now-grown-and-also-elderly children who recognize that they will be the next to take this natural leap.

There is however, a different quality to this ending. There is a gentleness, a calm, and a quicker restoration of peace.

In the past I have shared this metaphor when I am sitting with a family following the loss of an elder. Often it comes up when someone had pre-planned for a somewhat elaborate funeral with catering and flowers, only to discover that there aren’t many folks left to attend.

I might say something along the lines of “some of us are lucky to live long enough that there’s no one left to come to our funeral”. Then I might deploy the boulder metaphor.

It is my hope that the planning I have done will help to restore calm after my death. That the plans I have in place and the work I have done to communicate my wishes are kind of like giving my family a towel or a bit of sunshine to dry off in.

At the end of the day we do not get to choose our endings, they come to us when it is time whether we are a mountain-sized boulder or a pea-sized pebble.

I suppose that it came to me to share this today because it is the beginning of a new year. A year where we will all be tumbling and rolling and hitting unanticipated bumps along the way. It feels good to remind myself that I am on a journey determined by fate and gravity.

This is also the first post I am sharing as an audio file as well. My style of writing may not feel overly readable for some, I am admittedly quite wordy and often reverse the format of my sentences from what is supposedly correct. This is feedback I received often in university anyhow. I hope that it conveys well via audio, at least.

That is it for now.

Happy new year to my fellow boulders, pebbles, and jagged rocks. May your path be rocky and your landing calm and resolute.

Emily

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In the cavernous space of my mind provided by the privilege of safety, I hold their body.

I see their family, their friends, their community tending to them in a bright light.

In this private space they are sung to and prayed over, tears falling acknowledging the profoundness of the loss.

In this mind’s eye they are laid to rest according to their wishes or custom. They find their pyre, soil, or sky, in the way their Ancestors did and Descendants will.

When I see images of the dead my heart catches and the grief pulls at my edges.

And in the temple of my mind, we get to work.

It was in the news since residents are ~140km away from the nearest funeral home, and a family recently had an awful experience of finding this out in the midst of sudden loss. Quotes from this interview were included in an article published a few days ago providing an overview of the situation.

According to this article the business closed in 2021 or 2022 which leaves one to wonder what folks were up to in the meantime. It does look like this issue goes back even farther with this 2019 article detailing how ambulatory services briefly filled the gap but that there was no forward moving plan. The authour recommends individuals prepare accordingly with the knowledge that there is no funeral home.

Now, the tone in all of the reporting is as somber as the topic demands. We have a situation of diminishing infrastructure for rural areas of the province and few solutions coming forward from government and businesses. In the meantime family, friends, and neighbours are going to continue to finish out their mortal time leaving physical remains to be laid to rest.

Who do we call when the closest funeral home is 200km away by road or by boat?

Our community deathcare crew, that’s who. I don’t want to make this seem easy… it is hard work and can be full-on scary for those who are uninitiated. But trust me when I say that it can be done, especially so with the help of many individuals who are identifying and working with their strengths.

The last week has been a lot of serious conversation for me. About the future of the funeral industry in my province and whether there is anyone really steering this ship. As a private industry responsible for essential infrastructure it can be discouraging to see relative silence when it comes to the challenges faced by harder to reach areas where the business case is harder to make.

This crew is my way of starting to break down deathcare in a way that feels approachable.

I hope that you see yourself in some or many of these characters. Helpers come in all shapes and sizes - some of the tasks are paid work done by professional folks, and others are the domain of family and friends. Take a look and let me know who is missing! There is so much to be done and there really is no timeline for when the work of death caring is finished.

The support of a compassionate and experience licensed funeral home or director can be so helpful when taking the community deathcare approach. Call around and see what you find, and after you do please let me know as I work to articulate the breadth of this issue for future advocacy.

We are in the midst of crafting a new philosophy of care of our dead. One that is responsive to the increasing demand and decreasing availability of relevant businesses to provide that care.

Have some fun with it.

xxEmily

“My son went to Surrey and all he got was this box”

The same dad told me repeatedly during the arrangement that it felt like a Monty Python skit, it was so absurd.

His son had died of toxic drug poisoning after a period of being clean and returning to a poisoned supply. This scrawl was alongside poetry, art, lyrics, in a stunning collage that covered every brown inch of the cardboard top. A work of art that would be burned several hours later in a helpful metaphor for the liminal nature of even a long life on this earth.

But we are not getting long lives. Our artists, poets, musicians, philosophers. Our children who draw outside the lines in their work and also in the function of their lives within a system that doesn’t know what to do with them.

Do we understand that art is created in the minds of those who see what the rest of us cannot?

Do we understand that in order to evolve as a species we must create, and that to create we must be permitted to live evocatively. We must be permitted an element of suffering that accompanies the life of someone who does not see themselves reflected in what already exists.

I cremated a philosopher. He couldn’t work as an adult because he had to walk - he walked the streets of the city for four seasons and wrote about it in his journals. His family had contact with him when they could, when he wasn’t walking. He walked, he observed, he had pain from an injury in his foot and when he used what was available to manage it he was killed. This man didn’t see the age of 40, and the world will not see the insights that he had.

Do we understand what we have lost?

Past generations of artists and thinkers who were able to survive their years of creation because the drugs weren’t lethal. We celebrate them now, the ones who made it. We laud their insights, their music, their contribution to culture and the world.

How is it that we can patronizingly appreciate what altered states created in the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, and not see what we have lost. What we are losing.

Grieve, grieve, grieve.

And rage.

And do something.

Activists selling street drugs from Vancouver ‘compassion club’ charged with trafficking

[From DULF.ca]
Donate: Any amount you can give will bring us closer to our goal. Contributions can be made to:

• DULF via Open Collective at: https://opencollective.com/dulf

• DULF via E-Transfer or PayPal at: druguserliberationfront@gmail.com

A page like this exists from the BC government as well as on many funeral home websites. Typically they’ll outline legal considerations, who has the right to make decisions, and how soon death certificates will be available. On the first set of checklists we are already talking about cancelling subscriptions and paid bereavement leave.

What a lot of these pages do not include is advice like: brew a pot of tea, go for a walk around the block, keep talking to your person. Or suggesting leaving the room for a few minutes and coming back in… Talking about how much time you might have. If a death is unexpected there is little to no detail regarding the process of body release and how physical conditions might affect our options. In fact, I have yet to see an official resource that talks about the body at all.

Even my own When Someone Dies page only glances over the options. A few years ago I created a Choose Your Own Adventure of after death care options and am working out how best to make it available. To give you an idea of the overlapping layers of options, this is what the current decision web looks like:

Since you are subscribed to this newsletter I am going to guess that you might be initiated to this topic. However a lot of us, including those in the know, still struggle to put together a full picture of what happens when someone dies. And the reality is that if death comes to our door, the reality of it will make it hard for us to remember what we know and even trust the information we have.

Not every death occurs along a predictable timeline. Heck, even well planned for deaths often surprise us with twists and turns that leave us tired and overwhelmed. The comforting thing for me is that regardless of what that final part of the journey looks like, once we are dead there is a reliable and predictable set of decisions.

This does not mean that the choices are easy to make, it just means that we can know with 100% certainty that they will need to be made.

Tomorrow (December 14th) I’m hosting a Webinar at 7PM PST that will do an overview of what I believe are the missing details in our after-death resources. It will go most deeply into the pieces that the funeral home or community death group will be looking after.

Link to register for Webinar via Eventbrite ($20)

So far we are a very small group which has me excited to cultivate a rich discussion of what brings everyone into the room. It also means that we will be able to spend much more time on individual questions, pursuits, and interests.

In the meantime, if you or anyone you know would like to connect and learn more about the processes and options of death I am always here. There will be a future post that gets way into the weeds, and hopefully a choose your own adventure in the new year, but in the meantime I hope to be able to meet a reader or two at the webinar tomorrow.

Until then be safe and kind, and look out for one another in what can be very trying times.

Emily

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The first was to a spouse who came in and immediately asked for water. I got out the Brita jug and a clean glass and he downed a full one then took it to refill himself. He remarked that he didn’t realize how thirsty he was until he walked in the front door.

We spent about 45 minutes together and he talked about what the dying experience had been like. About the blessedly blunt nurse and the remarkably un-blunt doctor. About how the last words he spoke to his spouse were “I love you” and hearing them in return. About sitting at the end of the bed, washing their feet and legs, and then leaving to take an afternoon language class. Their spouse insisting that they go.

About sitting in a Zoom meeting for the company they’re working for and getting the call from the hospital. About ducking out early and letting their supervisor know about a “family emergency”.

I wonder if he’s just forgotten to drink water for a couple of days or maybe just hadn’t adjusted his intake to account for all the tears. It’s incredible how that particular well doesn’t seem to run dry for those who are grieving. There is always another tear tucked away somewhere.

When the blunt nurse was trying to get him to see that his beloved was dying she very simply said “you have to use your eyes”. He said that he did, that he still wanted more opinions and more information, but that his eyes could see what his heart wasn’t ready to. His spouse had protected him the severity of the illness until the very end.

He told me he’d had to adjust to the news very quickly. In a matter of Wednesday to Thursday. I told him that quickly is one thing, hours is light-speed.

After three full glasses of water and some conversation about their life, what death looks like in a hospital room, and the weight of ashes, he took his leave.

An interesting skill that I’ve really honed over the years is that my eyes can fill with tears, all the way, and yet they won’t fall. I am a big fan of crying, so it’s not that I am ashamed, but I do feel that for me to let those tears fall is borrowing energy of a grief that’s not mine. This might not be exactly right, but it’s something along those lines. The tears exist, but this water doesn’t flow into the ocean that these grievers are creating.

I can count on one hand the times when my tears have fallen with a family, and I think it’s OK. They find their way out during the rest of my day, and in a kind of beautiful and synchronistic way it is usually when I’m laughing.”

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I was told that in the 80s casket companies made a pitch. That funeral businesses could lower prices on professional fees, and increase prices on merchandise. Why would they do that? Because it makes them look like the good guys with the low prices, and “aw, gee” the casket companies with the high prices.

According to this source, funeral homes took them up on this. So gradually the margins on professional services got smaller and the margins on funeral products went up up up.

The issue is that over time as a business you don’t control the prices on your merchandise, so as the costs for these products go up you have to increase proportionally. In most businesses (not just funeral service) this cost/price tension exists, and the cost of doing business is going up. Not ideal for small businesses or for the consumer.

Which brings me to:

BYOC! (Bring Your Own Casket)

In BC we are endowed with the legal right to bring our own caskets to any funeral business.

Groovy, right? This means that anyone could decide to acquire a burial or cremation container from Costco or their local carpenter. They may even decide to make it themselves.

For the curious I’m going to outline here a few things to consider when making the decision to purchase or build a casket to bring to the funeral home. It may help for someone making the decision at need, or perhaps even ahead of time.

Buying a Casket

This option is pretty straightforward. When you are purchasing a casket on your own, it may be as simple as placing the order and requesting delivery to your funeral home of choice.

Some things to consider:

- Confirm the delivery date and time with the funeral home in advance, this way they can ensure that someone is available to receive it. They are busy places, and if the casket arrives when no one is available to receive it that could result in a delay to your services.

- Check that the costs are actually better. Consider any shipping and handling, and compare with similar options available from the funeral home. If they are comparable, you may just want to order from the funeral home, they will be able to ensure quality of the product as well.

- Consider the timing. If you are trying to expedite services, this probably isn’t a great option. However, if you are OK with providing a few extra days for the processing and delivery then no sweat.

Building a Casket

This can be a great project for a hands-on community, especially with a bit of advance notice. It may also be an interesting project to bring to a local artisan or woodworker. Some families have even been able to make this type of project come together following an unexpected death.

Practical things to consider:

- Talk to the funeral home and crematorium. Giving them notice that you are planning to build your own casket will help them prepare on their end. It may or may not be something they are excited about, but as long as it is functional and reasonable it will all work out fine.

- Make sure the casket is functional and reasonable. Get accurate dimensions from the crematorium or cemetery before you start anything. Often home-made containers are much deeper than they need to be, which can be awkward for placing the body. Think about the weight and density of the materials being used. Priority should be placed on light and combustible woods with cremation, for example. One reason being that crematoriums are often staffed with a single person, and it is important to consider their safety and well-being. Make handles if you can.

- Keep in mind the legal requirements for cremation containers. For transport purposes that means they are looking for “rigid and leak-proof”. For cremation I have included the points from the legislation below:

The Humble Cardboard

Going to give it to you straight. You may have already noticed that I am using the terms casket and container interchangeably here. The reason is that, for a significant percentage of folks in BC it is the humble cardboard that is selected. The cardboard cremation container.

To write a post lauding the attributes of the cardboard would take me the rest of the day, so I’ll suffice with a list:

- Inexpensive

- Environmentally sustainable, comparatively

- Great for decorating

- Easy to store

All that being said, it is not without it’s drawbacks. A couple off the top of my head:

- If the person inside it is over ~125lbs, it will fold if picked up from either end. Therefore it is not an ideal container for transporting on your own, unless the base is reinforced with particle board for example. It really wouldn’t be recommended for anyone over 200lbs or 6’4”.

- Not very leak-proof. If there are fluids involved additional lining or bags will need to be used, likely plastic.

- If kept in the cooler the cardboard can soften, just a combination of moisture from remains and cold air. When it warms up condensation will challenge the structural integrity.

This post is about helping people make informed decisions when it comes to their caskets and containers of choice. At the end of the day, sometimes the easiest thing to do is order from the funeral home, and in the early days often easiest is best. Ideally easiest also means that we can feel good about the decision we’ve made, and to make that happen I recommend clear and open communication with your funeral provider.

They are here to help. Whether that means ordering your family a sharp-looking cardboard or receiving your Costco casket and storing it safely at their facility. And hey, if you’ve got room in your garage or basement and you’re wanting to go the DIY route, no time like the present to get started.

For inspiration, here are links to some cool artisanal casket makers around the world:

Fiddlehead Caskets in New Brunswick

Woven Farewell Coffins in the UK

Pāhiki Eco-Caskets in Hawaii - it looks like they are currently crafting urns to donate to families of victims of the fires in Maui, please be sure to take a look at their site.

Evergreen Coffins in British Columbia

Brownsville Caskets in British Columbia

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I have spent many many hours with the dead at the funeral home(s), in all kinds of condition and colours. From still warm to six months gone, died peacefully at home to victims of various acts of humanity, infancy to centenarian. Only once have I worked with someone I knew in life (my nearly 100-year-old great aunt Iris).

At 32 years old I’m still in the fledgling years with (hopefully) much more to come. So far I haven’t discovered a deceased person “in the wild” and unexpected. I have always had the luxury of being able to prepare in advance, take a deep breath, and unzip the bag or un-shroud the sheet. It may be the case that if I were to work in removals, or for the coroner service, my philosophy would shift (maybe). I know that it takes incredible courage and grit, and that our communities owe a debt of gratitude to those folks.

Onto the thought I wanted to explore with this post: Being Organic.

I have news for everyone. We are made of the same stuff as all other things. Before we move onto the next part of this thought let’s go over that again.

We are made of the same stuff as all other things.

Try to really feel that reality, maybe look at something around you and try to really feel the fact that you are the same. I’ve got a smoothie, coffee, and a boiled egg here, and without getting too metaphysical, they’re going to be consumed by me and then become me (it’s 8AM and I am sober thank you very much). We are the same.

If I were to up and walk away and leave my breakfast on the coffee table a few things would happen. My smoothie would melt, the coffee would go cold, the egg would dry out and maybe begin to grow some hair. In fact all of it would grow hair: mycelia. On a long enough timeline if I left everything in this apartment all of the organic bits would go through some sort of liquifying, decay, and growth. Eventually becoming unrecognizable from their original forms.

And here is where the content warning comes in. If I were to sit down in this La-Z-Girl chair and never get up, the same thing would happen to me.

Pause: my intentions with this post are not dark. I want to refrain from spooky images from horror movies or the grotesque dramatic of fiction. I want to think of the forest.

I am going to borrow a quote from a website called “Fungi Ally” which might be biased, but the article is well sourced:

The combination of death and time will transform us in form and function. Form is the obvious part, it is the reason that it is so hard to explain to a family why they may choose not to view a loved one after some time has passed. They won’t look like themselves, because the processes of nature have begun, and this is an appearance we aren’t familiar with. Compared with the fleshiness of the living, the aesthetic of decay can look stark.

In function however, we have been transformed. And this is the part that brings me comfort when the harshness of the change seems too much. We no longer look the same because our job is no longer to be a living functioning human being going about our day. Our new function, as organic components, is to reduce down and become nutrients for the next living thing.

We have this in common with everything. Without even trying we are building up, breaking down, to build up once again in a new and unrecognizable way. Our energy that keeps us animated and in conversation and relationship with other humans is changed, and becomes a part of the energy of the world that doesn’t belong to any one being.

What does it mean to be left to the forest, the desert, the ocean, and permitted to re-enter the cycle of birth, growth, death, decay?

Does it sound something like being in community with all living things?

Is there anything morbid here?

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Ranging from love ballads to detailed instructions, factoids to personal anecdotes about how my life has been changed. Each time I would get about a paragraph in before the wind would vanish from my sails. And so this morning I have decided to simply permit these vignettes to form a post of their own.

In time I hope to find the words to elaborate on these ideas each in turn, for there is so much to say, but for now here they are.

One poem, one to-do list, and one thought:

A To-Do List for People with Bodies:

1. Sit down and have a real tête-à-tête with your body: think about what it means that this precious flesh has transported you through every fabulous and fearful experience of life. Examine the freckles, wrinkles, sunspots and scars. Consider this quote (from a Quaker in 1892),
   “You don’t have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body.”
   And what a vehicle it is! So many of us struggle to love our bodies, and here I do not ask for that. Simply consider the body.

2. Let your mind consider your body after [you (your you-ness)] is gone: so bizarre! After we die our bodies are here, a symbol of how we presented ourselves to the world and very real. They are also very organic, which means they need to be either refrigerated or preserved if want to have any kind of extended time with them. Since you aren’t there it is going to be up to everyone else to decide what to do about that. Off to the funeral home, the parlour, the cemetery, the crematorium?

3. OK return to the tête-à-tête: what does your body think about the plans you have made for it after you vacate? Does your body feel good about its destination? Ambiguous? Confused? Is it dawning on you that you haven’t made plans, and is your body looking at you with one eyebrow raised wondering about being left in the lurch?

4. Reconcile the above: if you’ve done 1-3 and you feel like you and your body are in alignment regarding its destination after your departure, congratulations! Proceed and be well and may this issue not bother you for many moons. If you have done 1-3 and feel uneasy, that’s OK! Uneasiness is a tremendously mortal trait and one that unites us all in our curious moseying through life.

A Thought

Working in a funeral home is a unique role in deathcare because, as the situation stands, it is the only place that is almost guaranteed a call after death.

We have a blossoming community deathcare movement, alongside a growth in acceptance of things like grief counselling and support groups. There is comfort in the knowledge that more people are accessing improved care. However, opt-in and additional expense are required for these resources.

Cue the funeral home.

What do they do, in that first call? I can tell you in a few short sentences, in a vague order, they:

1. Answer the phone

2. Normalize overwhelm, empathize, console

3. Provide information (ie. prices, timelines, options)

4. Take information (ie. who, what, where, Will)

5. Book a meeting

Some variation of the above conversation is happening in every funeral home at all times.

No matter how prepared someone is for a death, their reaction will be influenced by the neurochemical responses to stress.

Absolutely no one thinks that this is a good state of mind for making permanent decisions. Expensive, profound, and mystifying decisions. And yet, that is exactly the situation that we have set up for our grievers.

While poking around looking for a decent reference regarding the neurobiology of stress, I found this table from the 1984 publication Bereavement: Reactions, Consequences, and Care:

The reason that this section is titled Thought is because this phenomenon of

our grievers being positioned to self-advocate in their most vulnerable moments

is why I created DeathCare BC, and why I have taken off my funeral director hat for now.

Over the last couple of weeks I have been trying to reconcile my love and admiration for funeral workers with the fact that I have consciously stepped away from the business. I feel guilt, worry, a sense of imposter syndrome. There is a significant value placed on doing the work and by placing myself outside it I fear losing touch.

However.

In my career as a funeral director I have struggled to balance the business side with the inadequacies of the system in which it operates.

During a first call I am always compelled to tell families that there are dozens of options, to try and guide them to an informed decision. Funeral homes often send clients elsewhere, doing their best to help people find a cost and service fit.

It is a challenging dance, to operate an ethical business while knowing that consumers know so little about what you do.

Funeral directors want informed families. They want to feel good about the services they provide, to be a part of improved outcomes for the bereaved. Healthcare providers want the same, to be a part of healthy outcomes for their patients and communities.

DeathCare BC is creating a collaborative approach to dying by supporting healthcare providers with the transition of care following a death.

Always whittling away at the core of the mission, stay tuned for versions II, III, X, XV.

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PS: once a month I host a death meditation on Zoom, information and link to sign up here.

I received a call from a grandmother whose child was delivering her stillborn grandchild at BC Children’s Hospital. As with many of these calls, this family was from out of town.

Folks in need come to BCCH for specialized care, and there are inevitably some who end up needing deathcare support as well. This is the nature and the heartbreak of these fragile and risky early days of being human.

The distance families travel can truly compound the complication, expense, and isolation for many of them. It is not anyone’s fault, but a challenging factor in the system.

In our conversation, the grandmother kept returning to timing.

How long does cremation take to happen? How soon can we have the ashes in order to go home? How much does this cost?

She was doing the difficult legwork of asking these questions on behalf of her child, a crucial task.

Eventually it felt right for me to inquire about if they had considered transporting her grandchild home on their own. Here I will pause and put my informative deathcare hat on:

When I made this suggestion she immediately responded to it. She had no idea that it was possible, that they could do the four hour drive home with her grandchild in their care.

The reality of this request is that it is not overly common (currently) so the hospital support staff may not know how to respond. They are trained and informed on how to release to an authorized funeral home, not a private family or individual.

All this means is that there may be additional advocacy required to help get everyone on the same page.

My conversation with the grandmother ended and I sent her an email outlining how the permit application works, the questions she may need to ask the hospital staff, and some ideas about the transport itself.

A few hours later the grandmother called me back and said she’d spoken with their local funeral home who were ready to receive them and carry out care. Good.

At this stage, the social worker was encouraging the family to consider other options fully before proceeding.

Let me say this, the social workers at BCCH are amazing. The family said this as well.

They provide impeccable support to people going through a terrible time in their lives. This was simply one of those situations where a family was making a request which opened up some unknowns that needed to be dutifully considered.

I encouraged the grandmother again to simply continue to make the request, and to assure the social worker that they knew what they were taking on. Any concerns they had were most certainly coming from a place of wanting what was best for the family.

This was where we left it, and after leaving a voicemail with the social worker and sending a message to the family it went quiet on my end.

The following day in the late afternoon, an email arrived from the grandmother. It was quite brief, but in essence said:

Thank you, we are on our way home with my grandchild.

It was about two paragraphs, there were kind words regarding my role, she described showing the permit application to the social worker and getting them on board in the end. But this is the line which matters here:

We are on our way home.

A we that encompasses their entire family for this car ride back to their community.

This Mother’s Day I will be thinking about this family, and the many hundreds of individuals that I have walked with through this particular experience of parenthood.

I am thinking about the grandmothers, who are making the calls and continuing to carry their babies and grandbabies when the need arises.

I am thinking about those who do not have this kind of support, and who experience this type of loss in isolation.

I am thinking about what a gift it is to be held, and to be carried home.

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Inevitably every mortal will be shuffling off this coil, from the perspective of the life-lover and full-liver this can feel tragic, for others who are ready it is a relief. Regardless of your lean, at some point there will be a responsible individual making decisions for your end-of-life and after-death care.

Planning Ahead could mean some or all of the following:

• Designating a healthcare decision-maker

• Deciding on which interventions you want in the case of a life-altering illness or accident

• Who will speak for you when you cannot speak for yourself, and what do you want them to say?

• Writing a Will, designating an Executor, and putting enough detail into that document so as to eliminate doubt for your survivors

• Having the conversations that need to be had, from a social perspective to a legal one

• Making your funeral (deathcare) wishes known, picking a funeral home, perhaps even paying for them in advance

• Crafting three separate Spotify playlists: Intro, Conclusion, Outro (OK maybe this one is just me, but I absolutely have music I’d like my kin to jam to in their grief)

This list is an off-the-top-of-my-head start to what is actually a significant project.

There are very well qualified end-of-life doulas and professionals who support with Advance Care Planning and beyond who would be able to sum it up more succinctly. The point is, that there is a lot of documenting to be done beyond simply the writing of a Will.

Now, I am very much in the camp that we need to do this work as a gift to our loved ones. Having clear instructions is providing them a raft in their grief. When all around them is confusion, high waves, and the overwhelm of an unknown future, at the very least they have our words to guide them.

I believe that this is the easiest way to convince most people that it’s important. However, there are a lot of folks who fall into the category of:

And it is for these folks that I am going to make a second argument for why you should be planning ahead.

Why you should plan ahead even if you don’t care what happens to your body or how hard it is for your survivors to deal with your stuff:

Over the next decades we are going to be experiencing an unprecedented aging of our population. The healthcare system is bracing for this influx, and in some ways the deathcare system is in the midst of a preparation as well.

By 2031 the youngest of the baby boomers are going to be 65 years old. This is a cohort of free-thinkers, movers, shakers, and individuals who understand what it means to have to share resources with so many others. Since grade-school they’ve been experiencing the pressure of their demographic on the systems we rely on.

If you do not make your wishes known, it will not be a best-case scenario for you. It may not even be a medium-case scenario. My pragmatic reason for anyone to plan ahead, if the loved ones argument doesn’t land for you, is very simply for your future self.

At this moment you may not care what happens, you are happy to defer this issue to the next person in line. Will that still be the case when you are waiting for services at the hospital, with dozens of others in line for the same?

The squeaky wheel gets the grease. If you have no one designated to speak for you, what do you think the chances are that your care will come close to that of someone who does?

This is not a gentle truth, but it is true. Advocacy doesn’t happen all by itself, and relying on an over-burdened system to make decisions in your best interest is naïve at best.

I’m dead anyway, I don’t care what happens.

It’s true, after death the inconvenience for the dead person is lessened, but is it entirely zero?

While someone is waiting for urgent care that may or may not come, experiencing pain from a disease that may or may not be treated, perhaps their mind may begin to wander to the beyond. As our bodies begin to fail is often when we become the most aware of them.

Without a plan in place, there can be significant delays in cremation or burial. When someone has no next of kin and no Will, there is a public fiduciary designated to assess their estate and make plans on their behalf.

Do we think this happens overnight?

It is not unusual for publicly represented deceased bodies to rest in the morgue for weeks while these determinations are made. And that is what it is like today. Not in ten or fifteen years when we experience a doubling of the death rate.

It currently can take weeks or months for a publicly designated representative to make decisions regarding cremation or burial of a non-represented person.

How long do we think these delays will be in the future?

I understand that many folks still will not care, that it is neither here nor there to them if their earthly remains are in a bureaucratic waiting room. This issue may simply be another piece to add to the “not my problem” pile. These folks are entitled to their perspective.

My suggestion is simply this: when our bodies are failing, and our systems are not in a position to support them, there may be cold comfort (but comfort nonetheless) in having a plan.

If you will not plan ahead for the sake of anyone else, do it for yourself.

I will be making this point over and over again. Not only for the sake of the deathcare workers whose morgues are occupied by long-term guests, or for the healthcare staff who are at a loss for how to intervene.

I make this argument for the future-selves of the people who are adamant that they do not care.

At the end of our days we experience a vulnerability that takes us back decades. We experience fear, loss of control, and ultimately the releasing of this world which has held us whether we like it or not.

The very least we can do for that future self is to write down one or two things that matter, whether it is pain management, the care of a beloved pet, or absolutely no lime jello.

To acknowledge, that in the end, some things will matter. Regardless if we are prepared to consider them.

It is true that eventually we are all dead anyway. But this fact should not prevent anyone, whether for themselves or others, from trying to make that transition as comfortable as possible.

Planning ahead is the only way.

As a funeral director it is not uncommon for me to receive Facebook friend requests from families I serve, or to see familiar names liking my Instagram posts. DeathCare BC clients, folks attending my speaking engagements, and anyone who searches “DeathCare BC” is going to come across “Emily Bootle”.

It is for this reason that I am starting with this post. In the years to come this organization will grow and evolve to include more diverse voices than simply my own, however at this stage, on this date, these words are coming to you from Emily Bootle. Here is where you can learn a bit about where I’m coming from and what you can expect by subscribing to this newsletter.

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This is not my life story, simply the part of it that embodies how I came to this work.

During the last year of my undergraduate degree, a BA in Psychology, I was living in Kamloops (go Wolfpack) and trying to decide what to do with my life. At that time I did not yet understand the nuances of personal growth and that “what to do” is not a single choice, but a cumulative set of actions and thousands of decisions we make every single day.

A BA is essentially the high school diploma of the 2000s so I knew that additional training was in my future. A dear friend’s mom was volunteering with RCMP Victim Services and suggested I apply, and so I did, and so I became a volunteer.

This is where the DeathCare BC story starts, even more so than my later career in funeral services. Victim Services is where I first became aware of what I call the “gap” between public systems where dying occurs (healthcare/coroner) and the private deathcare system (funeral homes).

It takes courage to acknowledge what we don’t know, and curiosity to find out exactly how big our blind spots might be.

Not too long ago, within the last century, the deathcare system looked very different than it does now. When communities were smaller and more religious, there was a greater role for families to play both in the care of the dying as well as the preparation of the deceased.

Before there was industrial refrigeration, early disease detection, and the 9-1-1 responses that we enjoy today, the dead were much more present. Over time and with the industrialization of care we have gradually lost our familiarity with the sights, sounds, and experiences of death and dying.

I consider it one of the greatest privileges of my life that I have been able to come into this work and be a part of laying our dead to rest, as they say. An even greater privilege has been to walk alongside families (chosen and otherwise) as they become empowered to tend to their own precious dead.

The tasks of deathcare come in all forms, whether it is a spouse who washes a face and hands, or a parent who decides to dress their child and drive them to the cemetery. Sometimes it means telling someone’s story in the form of an online page or at a gathering with their community.

It is my fundamental belief that by taking an active role in deathcare, individuals can relate to their bereavement in a new way.

Death, especially when unexpected or untimely, blindsides and overwhelms us. It throws us back into states of mind where we are vulnerable, defensive, unable to think straight, and ultimately needing comfort. Sometimes the comfort we seek is from the very person who is now no longer available to us, which compounds our isolation.

Rhetorically:

Does anyone believe that individuals in this early stage of bereavement are in a position to make informed consumer decisions?

Funeral homes are in the position of operating as private businesses providing essential services for highly vulnerable clients. It is how the system is set up, and our communities have been held and supported by these businesses for decades.

The only way for the funeral or deathcare consumer to become empowered is for all people, whether healthy or actively dying, to prepare for the inevitability of their death.

When someone plans ahead, that could mean anything from writing a Will to completing full advanced care directives including a funeral plan. The difference in the experience for the survivors in these cases is night and day. While no one loves to think about the fact that they will die one day, it is simply the best thing that we can do to show care for our people beyond our deaths.

The role of DeathCare BC, is to help those within the systems of living to support the transition to the systems of death.

This means demystifying the process at every stage and providing guidance to those who are guides. Whether you work in a community health setting, palliative care, not-for-profit organizations, hospitals, or are simply a member of the mortal public. We all bear the responsibility of our own learning.

Understanding what happens after a death has occurred can fundamentally shift the our conversations with the dying and those around them.

There are opportunities presented at end-of-life that may be missed if we do not have the language to articulate them.

This post will end here, because there is the very real risk that I may continue to write for the rest of today and into tomorrow. There is so much to say, and so many stories to tell, that I hope will be a part of building a narrative of community care.

Funeral homes are an essential piece of the deathcare system puzzle. 

Community death workers are an essential piece of the deathcare system puzzle. 

Nurses, Care-Aides, Social Workers, Doctors, LPNs, Educators are an essential piece of the deathcare system puzzle. 

Loved ones are an essential piece of the deathcare system puzzle. 

Deathcare is involved at every stage of life from birth to death, and provides a lens through which we can provide a different type of care.

My hope is that you will join me as our culture, this business, and my perspectives evolve and shift.

This post will remain always as an archive and a time-capsule for this moment.

We are at the dawning of a new age of elder care, and with that will come conversations and experiences of dying that we cannot yet imagine.

Thank you for being here, for reading, and for coming along with me.

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