by Janet Hurley / photos by Naomi Jonson

The “green reapers” are (in front) Kim Zorn of the Green Casket Company, Carol Motley of Bury Me Naturally and Caroline Yongue, a Buddhist minister who runs the Center for End of Life Transitions.Organic. Sustainable. Local. Biodegradable. Nope, we’re not talking about the produce at your local food co-op. We’re talking about death. A "green death." A green burial and perhaps a home funeral, one that’s unlike anything you’re likely to see in most traditional funeral homes.

Unless you’re morbid, you probably don’t spend a lot of time thinking about the end of life—yours or anyone else’s. You’ve probably been too busy concentrating on living to consider how your corpse might pollute the earth, for example (or the air, if you’re cremated). That wouldn’t surprise Carol Motley of Bury Me Naturally, Kim Zorn of the Green Casket Company or Caroline Yongue of The Center for End of Life Transitions. The three Asheville entrepreneurs, dubbed the "green reapers" by their supporters, say most people generally don’t want to face the great equalizer. And if they must confront death, they certainly haven’t thought about how to make the process earth-friendly. But these women are out to change all that. They consider themselves part of a national movement that had its first groundswell in California, calling for earth-friendly coffins, caskets, shrouds and other products, and a return to traditional ways of tending our dead.

They’re used to people giving them strange looks. "I can tell they’re thinking, oh no, she’s going to talk about death again," Yongue says. Zorn agrees. "I forget that not everyone is as comfortable talking about death as I am," she says. Motley says flatly: "I’ve been called a kook." Despite some differences in mission and work, they collaborate often to unearth the realities of standard funeral practices, which they say are inordinately expensive, unnecessary and literally toxic. They want to bury the myths about home funerals and tending the dead, and lay to rest the notion that death is something other than a natural part of life.

Motley, 39, has long been fascinated with funerals. She lives in West Asheville with her husband Rob and two small children and says her interest was first piqued by a funeral director who spoke at her Birmingham, Alabama, high school. Sometime after the speech, like a scene from the ‘70s movie Harold and Maude, Motley took to visiting funeral homes. "They are all the same," she says. "Full of grandma furniture and air freshener." Once, she was allowed to watch an embalming process and decided it was unnatural and unnecessary (in fact, it is rarely required by law, and, according to the Centers for Disease Control, offers no public health benefit). Later, on summer break from her teaching career, she delivered huge, costly flower arrangements to cemeteries and churches—which just withered over graves containing expensive coffins made from imported woods and metals. "It was just so wasteful," Motley says.

She figured cremation must be a better choice. But she was astonished to find that most bodies that are cremated have been embalmed first. Motley says she called the EPA’s Toxic Control Assistance line in Raleigh and was told that if she buried or burned the amount of formaldehyde, phenol and menthol commonly used in embalming, she’d be arrested and fined for illegal disposition of toxic chemicals. Indeed, the Occupational Safety and Health Agency’s formaldehyde standard requires embalmers to wear respirators and full-body coverings. "Green burials need to be done," Motley says. "We are poisoning the earth and air where we live and work."

Motley launched Bury Me Naturally in December 2008, offering non-toxic, biodegradable burial products including locally-crafted pine and cardboard caskets and cremation urns. That’s right. Cardboard. "Some people are shocked, but then they say—‘Why not? It’s just going right in the ground anyhoo’," she says. "Oddly, the ones I have sold have been to well-off folks who really just want simplicity." She can arrange for caskets, cardboard or otherwise, to be decorated by local artists. Want a mariachi band to play by the river at your funeral? She can orchestrate it. "Cool people die," she says. "We need to be treated like individuals." As for burials, she refers to Green Hills, a cemetery off New Leicester Highway in Asheville that has been run by Jennifer and Ron Gortney’s family since 1901 and encourages green burials without the use of cement grave liners.

Getting into the death business has been daunting. The American funeral industry is entrenched not just in tradition but in buying caskets and other products from long-established, enormous companies. Motley’s competition includes Aurora Caskets of Indiana, a privately-held company that makes more than 150,000 caskets each year and has more than 900 employees. Then there’s Batesville Casket Company, owned by publicly-traded Hillenbrand, Inc. which claims 3,400 employees in North America and posted revenues of $678 million in 2008.

So far, Motley sells to individuals and plans to open a retail store, the Natural Casket Gallery, in West Asheville in late October. She’ll sell Kim Zorn’s pine caskets, biodegradable urns and fresh flowers. She hopes to find a local manufacturer to make biodegradable, organic shrouds for those that simply want to be laid in the ground sans casket, and local fashion designer R. Brooke Priddy of Ship to Shore is already creating an artful mock-up. This fall, Motley will also start courses to obtain a North Carolina Funeral Director license.

Like Motley, Kim Zorn, 53, claims she’s never had any fear of death. Zorn, who lives in Candler with her husband and business partner Ron Prior, says it wasn’t even a scary topic growing up near Lake Michigan, where drowning was common. A former graphic designer, Zorn switched careers in her early 40s to follow her heart into hospice nursing. After six years with Care Partners of Asheville, Zorn has witnessed far too many situations where families are unwilling to talk about death, no matter how imminent. Worse, families at hospices, Mission Hospital or other care facilities are usually just given a list of options—which don’t include green burials—to make their funeral arrangements. In the midst of grief, they make what she calls bad choices, spending more than they should and never considering the environmental impact. In 2008, Zorn decided people needed something affordable, simple and environmentally sound. She discussed the idea of making metal-free pine caskets with her husband, a carpenter. He was skeptical at first but now loves building each casket in their house, using pine grown sustainably outside Hickory. The caskets are lined with organic muslin and stuffed with pine shavings.

Zorn, who still works at Care Partners, says the Green Casket Company is committed to a 24-hour turnaround on caskets, with free delivery in North Carolina. This makes them more competitive with coffin-making giants such as Aurora or Batesville—though "more" is a relative term. In a year, Zorn says she’s learned a lot—much of it from local funeral home director Dale Groce, to whom she sold her first casket. Groce and his family have been in the funeral business in Western North Carolina since 1929. Groce credits her with providing the impetus to offer a green funeral option at his firm and says she prompted him to become accredited with the Green Burial Council, a national nonprofit based in Santa Fe. "We have been each other’s sounding board," Groce says.

For Caroline Yongue, choosing a home funeral isn’t just a return to traditional practices. It’s a way to honor the dead without wresting them from their families and caregivers. In North Carolina, families can legally act as their own funeral directors, transport a dead body and keep it in their home for viewing and services—without embalming. Tending the body can provide closure and help with the grieving. "We don’t just become this toxic waste when we die," Yongue says. "We don’t all of sudden need to use gloves to touch our loved ones." Yongue says there are a few procedures that come in handy at a home funeral: placing the body in an air-conditioned room, bathing it with a soap solution, dusting it with powder for dryness and swabbing the mouth to prevent bacterial growth. In the past 13 years, she’s assisted with 11 home funerals free of charge as part of an all-faiths project of her Asheville-based Buddhist sangha, Anattasati Magga.

Recently, Yongue assisted the Burke family of North Asheville with a home funeral for their nine-year-old daughter Edie, who died from a rare degenerative disease. Edie’s mother Laura says that, like most families, hers had never really discussed what to do when Edie died. Keeping Edie at home, getting the chance to bathe her and visit with her at any time just made sense for the whole family. She insists that, while home funerals may not be right for everyone, it’s not a "way out there" option. Only a few of the 150 people who came to her house declined to sit with Edie. Yongue says this is an important aspect of home funerals. "Grief doesn’t know visiting hours," she says. Yongue tries to follow a family’s lead. "I’m not there with an agenda. Most people don’t even know I’m Buddhist. I just give them the information they ask for."

Just as most people don’t realize they can act as their own funeral directors, they also aren’t aware that they can act as their own attorneys. The Center for End of Life Transitions offers fee-based workshops on completing end-of-life documents, which are readily available and legally binding, no lawyer necessary. Yongue stresses that the center doesn’t offer advice, only information. Most people, she says, don’t even know what the term "life support" means or that some methods can cause discomfort. "By preparing our end-of-life documents, thinking about our own death, we lessen fear," Yongue says. "It’s a gift to our loved ones, who don’t have to guess at what we want." The center is developing a training program for volunteers called Doulas for the Dying. Just as doulas help women through the birthing process, these volunteers will assist the dying through the final transition.

Like Motley and Zorn, Yongue took a Mountain BizWorks training course but considers herself something of a "social entrepreneur." In the BizWorks class, Yongue realized how hard it would be to consider taking money for her services. So far, she’s done home funerals for free and accepts a small fee for facilitating workshops. She also occasionally works as a hairdresser and assists with her husband’s architectural business, but the growth of the Center for End of Life Transitions requires full-time shepherding, which she could only do as an employee. She’s currently working with a group of volunteers to develop a funding plan. Motley also struggles with the financial side of her business. "Balancing what people want and still making money is really hard," she says. When she sold a dying prisoner a pine casket at cost, her lawyer was aghast. "She said, what are you, a social worker? What is your mission? To help everybody and not make money?" Zorn says she needs to sell six caskets a month to be profitable and right now is selling about two a month (at $850 retail). Still, she and her husband are reinvesting everything into the business and hope to open a manufacturing plant.

Asheville, so seemingly progressive and full of retirees, would seem like a natural place for these women to achieve their mission. Then there’s the fact that, in a down economy, an alternative funeral is simply cheaper. According to the National Funeral Director’s Association, the funeral industry generates $11 billion a year in the U.S. In a 2006 survey by the association, the average cost of an adult funeral was $7,323, which included a metal casket at $2,255 but not the cemetery, monument or marker costs, flowers or obituaries. Locally, one can spend upwards of $6,000 on a casket alone, according to an informal survey of Asheville-area funeral home websites and brochures. The full-service "green burial" option at Groce costs nearly $5,000, but it does include the pine casket. Burke and Yongue estimate that Edie’s home funeral and cremation cost approximately $600.

All three women say consumer education is key—for the success of their enterprises, and for the green burial movement. Joe Sehee, executive director of the Green Burial Council, notes that in a 2007 AARP Funeral and Burial survey, one in five respondents said they would be interested in going green once they knew about the option. Sehee is optimistic about the growing green burial market and says it makes financial sense for traditional funeral homes to get involved. "Not everyone wants an alternative funeral arrangement, but funeral homes are missing out on those who do," he says. The Green Burial Council has accredited approximately 300 providers in three years. Zorn, Motley and Yongue try to book educational presentations as often as possible in venues like churches, hospices, hospitals and assisted-living facilities. They often carry Zorn’s petite, model-sized pine casket with them in a back seat. So far, they’ve found the most receptive audiences to be in faith communities—such as Jewish or Muslim—where natural burial is a religious tenet.