Jean Heva
Adapted extract from a letter sent to The Natural Death Centre by Jean Heva of the Palmerston North Women's Homedeath Group in New Zealand.
We are wanting information about the purchasing and design of electrified cold slabs (cool plates) that can be used at home to keep a dead person's body cool before burial/cremation.
My interest in death was prompted by my fathers death in 1987. I didn't like what happened, ie the usual whisking of the body away to a funeral directors, visit by appointment and brief church service with a closed coffin. A year or two after Dad's death, I started writing essays about death ... and I'm still researching and writing. For me birth and death have been the biggest teachers about life. I seem to have had to learn the hard way, by experiencing birth and death in a way that felt very wrong and disempowering before finding the homebirth movement and helping to create a homedeath movement in our area.
PN Women's Homedeath Support Group, PO Box 4253, Palmerston North, New Zealand (tel 06 358 7139).
The Natural Death Centre also wishes to obtain an electrified refrigerated plate that families can put under the dead body at home. These are still used in French villages. Anyone who can give a lead about obtaining one, please make contact with the Centre (tel London 020 8208 2853).
John Bradfield, author of Green Burial, has suggested that in the absence of such plates it might be sufficient to have the body by a fridge with an open door, with a tent-tunnel of some kind taped around the fridge door and enclosing the body.
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