Home is where the funeral is

WHEN MARK HOBBINS was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in the fall of 2007, word spread rapidly through his long-time communities of Gays Mills, Soldiers Grove, and Viroqua. At 53, no one was planning on him dying soon. But pancreatic cancer is still considered basically incurable and survival rates beyond a year are pretty rare.

Living with dying, Hobbins did his best to keep his eyes smiling. He got about nine more months. It was a time of goodbyes, of songs on his guitar, of peace-making, of settling up. It was a time of great pain and great reconciliation, and it wasn’t easy. In the end, the intensely private Hobbins died as he chose to: home and alone in the house he built in the woods.

Even with the time, the one thing that Hobbins didn’t do is plan his funeral or what happened to him after he died. So when his then 19-year-old son, Lumen, found his body, Lumen did what made sense: he called his mom.

Mary Root, Lumen’s mother, had been Hobbins’ partner and she came over right away. But not before she called her friend, Kathy Doerfer, who she knew could help with what came next.

And what came next was one of the most profound experiences in Root’s life. That evening, people came in and helped prepare Hobbins’s body. They washed the body, Lumen picked out clothes for his father, they sat with the body and they talked, they cried, they listened to each other and they listened to the rain, steadily marking the passing of time, the passing of Hobbins’s spirit out of his body. They stayed in the home overnight; they stayed with the body, until it was time to take him to the crematorium.

“It was a very beautiful time,” Root says. “The spirit of the person is still there…the stuff that may have gone on in the day-to-day life just falls away and you have a chance to have that just open-hearted love. It’s just a critical time; it’s a beautiful opportunity.”

Root discovered that caring for a loved one at home after death was just exactly what she wanted and needed from the death of her former partner and father of her son. She felt like she was able to spend the time with Hobbins that she wanted to, and was also able to use a funeral director to transport the body to the crematorium.

Her call to Doerfer was key in helping Root and her family have such a fantastic experience at home. Doerfer is part of a Viroqua-based group called the Threshold Care Circle, which is dedicated to helping families take care of their dead in a way that suits their needs. For many, that means doing at least some parts of the grieving at home.

When someone dies, loved ones have to make thousands of decisions, from the handling of the body and the rituals of viewing and goodbyes, to the burial and the paperwork. For many in the Kickapoo region, keeping these decisions close to home has helped them feel like they’ve had a satisfying, if difficult, process in saying their final goodbyes. Home funerals are changing the way that people make choices, and the Threshold Care Circle is poised to assist families in exploring all the options for dying well and honoring the dead.

Nancy Rhodes spends a moment at home with the body of her mother, Charlotte Rhodes Armstrong

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