Solace – Family Led Funerals

When it comes to keeping your loved one at home, you can wash, dress or wrap, encoffin a person and keep them in your home for several days. In Tasmania there is no prescribed length of time. General consensus in the Home Funeral Movement suggests that depending on the manner of death, 3 days is a reasonable time to keep a body at home without any outward signs of decomposition being present. Indeed, there have been various examples of people keeping their loved ones at home for longer periods without incident.

There is a requirement under Tasmanian Burial and Cremation Regulations 2015 to maintain the temperature of the body at 5 degrees Celsius or lower. This is possible and there are various options available to families to do so. The use of a cooling bed or blanket, a cuddle cot for a child, ice packs, dry ice, damp towels and/or Techniice (an Australian re-usable product) in conjunction with portable air conditioners to assist in keeping room temperature cool are all options available to Tasmanians. If this cool temperature is maintained, then you are not required to place the care of your loved one in the hands of a mortuary or into refrigeration.

Interestingly, in the international community, the body temperature considered to be acceptable to maintain an outwardly suitable presentation is actually much higher, at around 18 degrees Celsius (65 degrees Fahrenheit)¹. In some US States it is stipulated to be lower at 8 degrees Celsius (47-48 degrees Fahrenheit).²

In the UK, where it is not uncommon to have waits of several weeks for Cremations to take place, there have been Home Funerals that have seen the body kept at home (not without the challenge of considerable maintenance, but certainly without incident) for up to two weeks simply using ice packs.³

The World Health Organisation has made it quite clear that there is little risk associated with coming into contact with or looking after a deceased person. “… Furthermore, although some of these diseases are highly contagious, their causative agents are unable to survive long in the human body following death… It is therefore unlikely that such epidemics will result from contact with a cadaver. Indeed, survivors present a much more important reservoir for disease…” – World Health Organisation.4 Dr. Michael Osterholm (Centre for Infectious Disease Policy and Research (CID) goes on to state – “… the mere presence of a dead body without regard to its embalmed status and one that is not leaking blood from an open wound or perforation, does not pose an increased [health] risk of infectious disease transmission for the person who might handle that body or review it in a private setting. Once a human dies, infectious agents that would be of any concern, including those on the individual’s skin or internal organs, is greatly diminished… there simply is no measurable risk of that body transmitting an infectious agent…”⁵ This is an important point because often we have been lead to believe as a consuming public that dead bodies are dangerous and should therefore be handed over to the professionals for their expert care. This is not in fact the case and that is reflected in the lack of Legislative requirement upon the public to engage the services of a Commercial Funeral Home.