Last Tasks

‘m delighted that you could come to talk,” says Jane Hartley, 63, her own voice a spirited croak. Dying of uterine cancer that, despite a hysterectomy and radiation, has metastasized to her lungs, she has been staying for the last several months in a guest house adjacent to her son’s home in Sebastopol. She does not have money for a funeral, but in any case does not want one.

Propped in an adjustable hospital bed, she explains how several experiences in her life had dovetailed, leading her to choose a home death: Reading Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’ “On Death and Dying” and quickening to the idea that the terminally ill should not be shut away but surrounded by loved ones. Lying silently alongside her comatose mother for five days, until she passed. And, as a longtime spiritual director of Harbin Hot Springs, an alternative community north of San Francisco, inviting Jerri Lyons of Final Passages to give a home funeral seminar.

Having seen firsthand that “there is something so special about being with someone as they cross over,” Hartley knew what to do when she received her “bad X-rays.”

“I knew I wanted Jerri involved, that was the key thing,” she says.

In addition to helping Hartley write a grant proposal to the June Ebensteiner Hospice Foundation to cover the costs of a home funeral and cremation, Lyons showed her Elizabeth Westrate’s 2004 documentary

“A Family Undertaking,” in which a morticians’ convention where titanium urns are marketed to “wealthy clients that want something that reflects their lifestyle” is contrasted with a 90-year-old rancher from South Dakota branding his own coffin.

When asked how receptive her son, John Mitchell, has been to the idea of carrying out her final preparations, Hartley pauses. “We’re still working on it. He doesn’t want to go there yet,” she says. Which presents one of the “ifs” of home funerals: Although the person dying may want it, she’s not the one who must see it through.

And then Hartley starts to laugh,

not the laugh one expects from the terminally ill, but one of giant amusement. What she finds funny,

she says, is that she’s going to be in the room this weekend when Mitchell and her other son and some friends finalize what they’ll do with and for her after she has gone. “I think it’s going to be a hoot,” she says. “I look forward to giving you grand plans from the back fence.”

For several days afterward, she is too sleepy to say more than hello on the phone, and five days later, at 1:40 in the afternoon, Jane Hartley passes away, her friends beside her.

Mitchell, an event planner, says three of his mother’s friends “did the bathing.” He chose the clothes she would be cremated in, and set up an altar around the body in his living room, which everyone helped to decorate. “We all agreed,” he says,

“it was definitely what she wanted.”

As to whether he found the experience helpful, or healing, Mitchell is not as sure.

“It’s funny,” he says. “At the service, I was in producer mode, making sure everything was taken care of. I was trying to make it as beautiful as possible so other people could be there to witness her passing.”

He said his own goodbye just before Christmas.

“It was her birthday,” he says. “I took her ashes to the ocean, and buried her above the cliffs, and that was sort

of my memorial, because it was

just me.”--NANCY ROMMELMANN