"These Two Millennials Want To Change The Way We Die"

"She is the first to admit the word "mortician" conjures some undesirable stereotypes: creepy men who prefer the company of dead bodies; or maybe greedy ones, who prey on the families of the deceased with high prices during a fragile time. And perhaps the worst: it’s most certainly  not a job for a woman. But Carvaly is  a mortician  and  a woman —  and  half of a new company that could likely change those clichés for good, although that’s not their goal. They have bigger fish to fry than stereotypes...

Undertaking L.A. is an oxymoron; it's a brand-new type of funeral home that seeks to bring us back a few hundred years, before the commercialization of death. And it’s almost eerily simple. Doughty and Carvaly will come to the home of the deceased and walk the loved ones through how things were done in the past and still done all over the world: washing and dressing of the body, and an at-home wake and/or funeral. The survivors can be involved as much or as little as they’d like...  There's no embalming, no calling 911, and no last visions of a loved one wearing too much makeup in a casket...

“[At the beginning of] the 20th century, you had big hospitals come in and take the dying out of the home, you had funeral homes come in and take the dead bodies, and you had slaughterhouses and food plants take away the killing of animals. So every type of death and dying is now removed from society,” she says. Of course, with change comes both negative and positive effects. The positive includes the care hospitals can administer. The negative? According to the women, the fact that death is a specialized industry makes it all the more scary, mysterious, and abrupt — which they say deeply disrupts the grieving process."

http://www.refinery29.com/2015/08/92557/undertaker-funeral-director-jobs?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=post&unique_id=entry_92557#.vmtodc:1CJ4

This feels really true, and really important. And this is totally my theory about millennialism, and how it's sort of about being a fish who can see the water and be productively dissatisfied. There is so much stigma about being opposed to the status quo, about pointing out problems with systems that most people engage with, so I find this really impressive and inspiring. I can only imagine how much pointless, knee jerk negativity they have to deal with.

Related: a really fantastic, well written profile of a mortician that made me think differently about death.