Handmade Death

Intimate Rendezvous with Mortality

By delegating the intimate aspects death and dying, we relinquish an essential part of what makes us human. What transformational wisdom is accessed when we dare to engage tangibly with mortality again?

Through most of human history, death has been a hands-on affair. As the living navigate the distance between here and no longer here, our most powerful rituals have centered around caring for the dead. Death was once an intimate, shared experience, almost always at home. But then about a 150-years-ago something changed. End-of-life become medicalized, the hospital ward replaced the bedroom, the funeral home replaced the front parlor, and we lost touch with what it means to take care of our dead, leaving the living financially vulnerable and emotionally marooned.

But recently a few end-of-life iconoclasts are wrestling death back from the experts. If you don’t want to suffer needlessly through the last six months of your terminal disease, in 11 state and 7 countries you can now partake in Medical Aid in Dying and end your life at 2pm on Tuesday. If that’s not legal where you live, you can voluntarily stop eating and drinking – VSED - until you die at home, cared for by the people you love. And if embalming, and then lying in a state of suspended decay in a concrete-lined casket makes you recoil, family members can build your coffin, green funeral homes will bury you under a tree, or your body can be composted, so in six-weeks-time, you’ve been welcomed back into the cycle of life.

These are some of the death mavericks I’ve filmed. What unites these voices is a willingness to step into the circle and become intimately engaged with the death and dying process. By using our hands in the mundane tasks of caring for the dead and dying – holding a cup, changing a pad, washing the body, weaving a wicker casket, digging the grave, turning a clay urn to hold the ashes – the mundane and practical allows grief to transform. And maybe, in that process, we glean a little wisdom how to face our own death.

A film by Jan Stürmann

Born in South Africa, studied photography at Pretoria Technicon. His publishing credits include The New York Times, The Washington Post, Smithsonian, The Boston Globe, Time, Newsweek and Marie Claire. He was primary videographer for the documentaries Ai Weiwei Yours Truly and There Is A Place On Earth.

Learn more: www.handmadedeath.com