A Port Kembla organisation is importing "cooling boards" to allow grieving families to keep their deceased ones at home while they say their goodbyes.
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Community Undertakings, a Port Kembla Community Project, has ordered the special boards from the Netherlands. The boards are placed under bodies to keep them cool enough to meet health regulations.
Community Undertakings' Jenny Briscoe-Hough said this allowed families to spend time with the body to process grief and say goodbye in their own way.
The organisation aims to educate the community on death, funeral choices and the grieving process. The project is awaiting funding to provide environmentally friendly and affordable funerals to disadvantaged and indigenous communities.
Ms Briscoe-Hough believes people process death better when they are allowed to grieve outside the time constraints placed on them by funeral homes and crematorium.
"Even in cases of long-term illness, death is still a shock. It's heartbreaking and we have to allow time for our hearts to break," she said.
"Spending time with the body lets us process that a love one has died rather than feeling like they just disappeared which can happen when a body is taken away suddenly."
Founder of the North Coast-based Natural Death Centre, Zenith Virago, will speak in Wollongong next week as part of a NSW tour.
Ms Virago, who is an expert in the fields of holistic death and dying, said cooling boards had been used at Byron Bay for the past 15 years.
She said the experience was "always healing for families and no family who decided to keep their loved one's body at home regretted the decision".
"There's great comfort in being able to bring someone home," Ms Virago said.
"Being with the person for a small vigil is a private intimate experience before the bigness of a funeral," she said.
Ms Virago gave an example of a young Byron Bay family who lost their father and husband to a terminal illness.
"They kept the body at home and his children and the community gathered to sit quietly with the body. They comforted and grieved together as they came to terms with his death," she said.
"They had an outdoor ceremony and his children were able to kiss him goodbye and decorate his coffin. The family drove him to the crematorium and went swimming on the way home. They said it helped they were involved in every step of his journey."
Ms Virago and Ms Briscoe-Hough are touring NSW this month, hosting Death and Dying workshops.
Ms Briscoe-Hough said the workshops highlighted the importance of knowing the wishes of a loved one before they died, to avoid family conflict over funeral arrangements.
"These conversations need to happen around the dinner table not around the sick bed or by a coffin when you should be saying goodbye," she said.
There is an information session next Monday, July 22, from 6.30-8pm at Wollongong Golf Club.