How A Death Midwife Can Help You Work With a Funeral Director After a Loved One's Passing

A death midwife, much like a hospice worker, helps a dying person deal with end-of-life feelings and care, but these professionals can also help the family through the death and its aftermath. If you opt to work with a death midwife, they can help you with many aspects of the process including choosing and working with a funeral director at a place like Fry Bros Funerals.

Here's how a death midwife can help as you work with a funeral director:

1. Contacts and Referrals

As death midwives work closely with the dying everyday, they have contacts in the industry. They can help you find a funeral director, and once you find one, they can help you advocate for what you want or what your loved one has requested.

2. Preparing the Body and Addressing Its Disposal

Many death midwives take an alternative or holistic approach to death, and because of that, they often work with families who want to wash and anoint their dead loved ones' bodies. These individuals may opt to skip embalming and have the body buried or cremated just a few days after the death.

In other cases, families may prefer to take a more conventional approach and have the body embalmed and then cremated or buried. Regardless of what you decide, you will need a funeral director to help you arrange embalming, cremation or burial. A death midwife can work with the funeral director to make sure that everything happens on schedule as you want it to happen.

3. Planning the Funeral

Planning the funeral is a personal decision -- you may want your religious leader to do the ritual in your place of worship, you may want to have the funeral at the funeral home or you may prefer to have a funeral at home.

Regardless of what you want, you can convey that to the death midwife, and they can rely your wishes to the funeral director as needed. The death midwife can even talk with the dying person about what kind of ceremony they want, and these professional can make sure those plans are respected after his or her passing.

4. Writing Obituaries

When you work with a funeral director, they are often willing to handle a range of the administrative tasks associated with death, and that includes submitting obituaries to newspapers. Writing the obituary can be an emotional process, and if no one in your family is up to the task, the death midwife can help you create the obituary and give it to the funeral director.

For more ways your death midwife can help you work with a funeral director, contact a death midwife or a funeral director.