Home Funerals/Caskets for Sale

A few days ago I joked about buying a casket and storing it in your home.  It looks like this actually happens, since caskets are available on eBay -- Jeff Jarvis provides the link. 

Mr. Jarvis also links to an interesting Washington Post article about home funerals. Some quotes from the article:

One benefit of a home funeral, advocates say, is price: A home funeral can cost only a fraction of a mortuary funeral, which typically runs about $5,000, according to the Funeral Consumers Alliance. The prices can go much higher.

But the most important benefits, advocates agree, are psychological. "There's a tremendous increase in healing and acceptance of death for the family to touch and see and be with the departed," Knox said. "It's very empowering at a time when you feel like everything's out of control."

Despite the violent deaths that crowd movie and TV screens and newspapers, in our culture "we never see actual death," said Joshua Slocum, the director of the Funeral Consumers Alliance, a national group that advocates for consumer protection in funeral affairs. "The institutionalization of illness and death has made us inordinately terrified."