Every few months, a Facebook announcement invites strangers to a special tea party. These gatherings around Knoxville have only a few rules: There's no official speaker and no agenda. Cake is required.
And everyone talks about death.
Some are facing death. Some are grieving. Some are planning ahead for a distant funeral. Others are pondering the afterlife. Conversation can go in any direction.
Jenny Arthur, a community minister at Borderland Tees in south Knoxville, helped organize Knoxville's first Death Cafe in 2015.
“Death Cafe is an international movement where people come together, usually total strangers, who just want to be able to break the taboo of talking about death and dying,” she said. “And it really ends up being a lot of fun.”
Death cafes have been held at churches and coffeehouses. Anybody can organize one and publicize it on the Death Cafe Knoxville Facebook page. The largest in Knoxville drew 50 people from age 20 to 90, Arthur says. The atmosphere is bright, not morbid.
“In fact, we like to end the Death Cafes with a singalong of 'Happy Trails,'” Arthur said. “And everyone loves that.”
These social events are one aspect of a larger “death positive” movement that views death as a natural part of the life cycle and encourages people to make the rituals of death more personally meaningful. That can mean end-of-life and funeral planning. Many in the death positive movement are choosing home burials or “green burials.” Instead of paying thousands of dollars to a funeral home for embalming and a casket, loved ones prepare the body at home and bury it simply, so it quickly merges with the landscape.
Arthur helped bury a destitute friend this way a few years ago. After she picked up his body from the nursing home and kept it at home overnight, she took it to Narrow Ridge Burial Preserve in Washburn. There, wrapped in a shroud, he was buried with a ceremony that included readings of his funny stories.
“It felt good to take care of our friend ourselves,” Arthur said. “It felt very natural.”
In many parts of the country, this might sound new-age and unusual. But in Appalachia, it might sound familiar.
“It’s really just a way of returning to the traditional way of burial,” Arthur said. “People might want to see it as something new, but it’s really not. It’s something very, very old that people used to know how to do. And over the years, we’ve lost that knowledge. And it’s not even knowledge, it’s confidence. We’ve lost the confidence that we can do this.”
For East Tennessee, the concept is coming full circle. In fact, the tradition of home funerals persevered longer in Appalachia than in other regions, says Aaron Astor, an associate history professor at Maryville College.
“I think it’s longer because a lot of these communities remained intact for much longer, especially communities that existed around networks of kinship,” he said. “In so much of the rest of the country, people up and moved and interacted with strangers and developed a more urban community and so they developed more bureaucratized processes for handling death and burial.”
Lois Shuler Caughron was the last person to live in Cades Cove, a popular loop of historic farms and churches in Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Now age 94, Caughron spent all but the last 20 years of her life in the Cove, where her ancestors were the first settlers.
She remembers how everyone helped out when someone died.
“They would ring a bell when somebody died in the cove, and if there’s anybody sick they’d count the toll on the bell and they’d know who died,” she said. “And so they’d put down their hoes and things and go help dig the grave.”
A local man would make a simple wooden coffin, often for free. Neighbors would bring stack cakes, the dough sweetened with molasses and layers topped with applesauce. Women in the family would wash and dress the body, which would be laid out at the home for everyone to visit.
“They’d sit up that night before the burial, and the ladies would make paper flowers to go on the grave,” Caughron said. These homemade flowers would stand in for the real thing during winter, but it was important to decorate the grave.
Even after moving out of the cove, her daughter Ruth Caughron Davis remembers staying up for her grandfather's wake on Pea Ridge near Maryville. Davis was a teenager when her grandfather died the same week as John F. Kennedy. The family kept the body at the house several days, until all the children could fly in from the West Coast. At night the adults took turns sleeping, but a few people always remained awake with the body.
Arthur says seeing the body of the person in his home environment often leaves better memories and can help with the grieving process. When her partner died in the hospital years ago, the body was whisked away before she could recover from the shock. As a chaplain, she wants people to know they can ask for more time.
“A home funeral takes that even further,” she said. “You’re in control. You decide when you’re ready. There’s no rush.”
In the past, death seemed more natural because people had experience of being close to a body at a wake, Astor says. That physical familiarity is reflected in Appalachian music, like the song “Rosewood Casket” most famously recorded by Dolly Parton.
After the wake, a funeral service would be held at a church, then the body would be buried in the church graveyard or a family cemetery. (In isolated mountain hollers that relied on a circuit-riding preacher, the funeral might occur after the burial, Astor says.) In Cades Cove, a family member would often make the gravestone, too, with slate pulled from Tater Branch, Davis recalls.
Caughron and Davis still return to Cades Cove every year on Decoration Day to put flowers on family graves in the Primitive Baptist Church cemetery.
In fact, Memorial Day has its roots in Decoration Day. Before it was a holiday to honor dead soldiers, it was a holiday to remember dead family. In the mountains, descendants would mound up soil on the graves, clean weathered headstones and plant flowers, Astor said. The dead became part of the mountain landscape, making their descendants feel closer to both.
“The point is that you go back to, including the burial places, where people were born, worked, loved and died,” Astor said. Their names were repeated in the names of creeks, coves, hollers, mountains and graveyards. “It’s an organic connection to the land that’s missing almost anywhere else in America, even in a lot of other parts of rural America.”
Although relying on a funeral professional is fine, Arthur says more traditional death practices can offer another kind of comfort. Death can be a moment to strengthen our connection to that land and the past.
This deliberate choice of traditions to revive makes the old new again, Astor said.
“We are selectively trying to find elements of the past that would resonate – that would seem more organic, whether it’s handling the body in a certain way, refusing certain chemicals, whether it’s a process of sitting up – a wake – or just the general attitude of approaching death as part of the cycles of life,” he said. “There’s a lot to draw from in the Appalachian tradition.”