Show Summary:
Learn about the beautiful, sacred (and legal) option of having a funeral in your own home. Olivia Bareham’s experience as an auxiliary nurse, hospice volunteer and as her mother’s end-of-life caregiver, inspired her to investigate more meaningful and personal alternatives to traditional funeral practices.
New from Brant Huddleston
Show Overview
This episode was recorded at the 6th Annual Afterlife and Awareness Conference where I had the pleasure of meeting Rev. Olivia Bareham of Sacred Crossings, and where we sat under the sun in the hotel courtyard talking about home death and funerals. You can hear the birds and cool breezes in the background on this beautiful spring day in St. Louis, Missouri.
Olivia is a certified Death Midwife, Home Funeral Guide and Celebrant. She holds bachelors degrees in Education and Natural Theology and Sacred Healing and is an ordained Inter-faith Minister. Olivia’s experience as an auxiliary nurse, hospice volunteer and her mother’s end-of-life caregiver, inspired her to investigate more meaningful and personal alternatives to traditional funeral practices. Rev. Olivia, and other death midwives like her, empower and guide families to reclaim the lost art and healing ritual of a home death and funeral. Plus, she is a closet rock-star.
What you will learn from Olivia Bareham:
- If and where home funerals are legal (Spoiler: Yes, and almost everywhere)
- A cheap but beautiful and deeply personal alternative to an expensive casket
- How our deaths are affecting the environment
- What she learned about death from giving birth
You will also want to check out Rev. Olivia’s Death Care Directive ($10), which allows you to appoint a family member or close friend to be your death care advocate or agent. He or she will be a person you trust to honor your final wishes and to guide family members and friends through the process of your funeral and final disposition. This written plan allows you to list all of your personal, legal, financial and medical information. Your completed document outlines your wishes concerning religious or cultural traditions for after-death care; your choice of funeral home or family-directed home funeral services; your funeral/memorial service and your choice for the final disposition of your body. I bought one!
Other resources Olivia recommends include:
Enjoy this interview with Reverend Olivia Bareham of Sacred Crossings.
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I Am a Racist
Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.
Mark Twain
I often hear nowadays, people being accused.
“He’s a racist.”
“She’s a racist.”
“Trump’s a racist.”
“So and so’s a racist.”
What I have yet to hear is: “I am a racist.”
So let me be the first.
I am a racist.
Yes.
I see the ugly thing, creeping around my soul like a roach in the kitchen. I squash it, but sometime later, there it is again.
I know there is a nest somewhere, eggs hatching, a source deep within me, hidden away where it’s easy to deny. There is where I'll find the library of my false beliefs, the lies I tell myself over and over, so often they become grooves cut into my gray matter, like fissures in rock where the water runs down, cutting deeper and deeper, until fissures become swales, and swales become canyons.
When did the first racist raindrop fall? I don’t know. As a child, for sure. How many drops of poison does it take to pollute the vessel of pure water of which we are born? When, exactly, does a person become a racist, and who gets to decide?
I don’t know, but then, neither does anyone else.
I don’t believe in permanence. That’s one thing the Buddhists have taught me.
Everything changes.
We can become aware of that library of false beliefs, that nest of nasties that colors our perception of things, often for the worse. Awareness alone brings change. We can cut new grooves. My challenge as a human being is not to deny that I am a racist, for that would be as foolish as denying I have cancer when I really do. My challenge is, rather, to stop the cancer from metastasizing and poisoning the whole man.
I doubt I will ever fully eradicate my racism. Unfortunately, I suspect some vestige of it will always be with me. But what I can do, and what I do do, is expose myself to experiences that lessen my racism, those being travel, kind and honest conversation, and breaking bread with “the others” whenever I can. These experiences, like wind and rain, smooth rock and, over time, lay low even the highest mountains.
So when I hear the angry crowd shouting, "He’s a racist,” I want to ask:
“Who among you is not a racist? Stand up then and take a bow...for you are surely a god.”
I moved to Substack!
Hi there. If you've read this far, then you enjoy, or are at least intrigued by, my ideas. If you want to learn more, jump over to my new website on Substack, where I continue to write about travel, the second half of life, and other mad musings.
