Walking the Body Home

resources for caring for our own beloved dead

and other visions

(aunt Becky)

Walking the Body Home

A LOCAL RESOURCE FOR AFTER DEATH CARE IN JEFFERSON COUNTY, WASHINGTON
Created by Sarafina Landis & Mo Walrath

A practical guide for those planning to care for their own beloved dead or for their own death at home, from the time of death to the disposition, providing access to an informed and empowered course of action.

Washington Funeral

Resources & Education

Washington Funeral Resources & Education is dedicated to providing Washingtonians with information about their legal rights and available resources when death occurs. Whether you’re anticipating a death through illness or age, or wanting to be prepared with the facts knowing death can come at any time, this resource is designed to enable you and your community to be better equipped to provide meaningful, hands-on care for the dead—what is commonly called a "home funeral".

Washington Death Care Packet

Prepared by the PDX Queer Death Collective, the Washington Death Care Packet is a comprehensive overview of the following resources —

BEFORE DEATH //

  • End of Life Washington Advance Directive

  • Physician Orders for Life Sustaining Treatment (POLST)

  • Providing for your Pets in the Event of your Death or Hospitalization

  • What Else Shoudl I add to my Death Plan?

AFTER DEATH //

  • What to do when Someone Dies

  • How to Care for the Dead

  • Washington Death Certificate Worksheet

  • Families Acting as Funeral Directors

Body As A Future Offering

A Thesis by Sarafina Landis

+ at the intersection of death, ancestral healing, queerness, and cultural death midwifery

This work, along with a ritualized art installation, brings participants to be in touch with their own mortality. There they are guided to become aware of the active relationship to the ancestors of place with the unseen entanglement of embodied ancestors, begin to mend displacement wounds with the earth, and be in more accountable belonging. The exploration centers queerness and eroticism as emergent medicine of liminality - the necessary passage through a dying paradigm into the new, as well as guidance from death for interrupting colonial-settler futurity. It challenges the borders we create in and between our bodies, identities of self, and the living and dead.

Download the Thesis