Why Hutterites Keep Their Dead at Home for Two Nights

When somebody on this colony is dying, people start arriving to sing. Not at the end. From the time it is understood, in shifts, through the night, some of them driving two hours from other colonies. They are not there to say goodbye. Most of them are not close family. In this one I take you through the three days between a death here and a burial. The hospital, and why somebody who is dying is brought home as fast as it can be arranged. The singing, and what it is actually for, which took an outsider writing a paper about us for me to understand. The two nights the body spends in the house, who sits with it, and what the children do. Then my own part in it, which nobody has ever described and which is mostly arithmetic — five hundred people arrive and they have to be fed. The casket, who makes it. The grave, and why there is a machine on this place that could dig it in four minutes and does not. The stones, which all say the same four things. What happens to her belongings, which is nothing like what happens to yours. And at the end, the thing that changed how I think about all of it: what is considered a good death here, and why it is the opposite of what you want. My husband keeps the books on this colony and has his own channel, and he has already told you about the funeral itself. This is the part before it. SOURCES Peter H. Stephenson, "He Died Too Quick! The Process of Dying in a Hutterian Colony," Omega: Journal of Death and Dying, 14(2), 1984 — the slow dying ideal, and the title, which is a Hutterite's own complaint. Joanne Cacciatore and Rebecca Ong, Omega 64(3) — the wake, the casket, the attendance figures, and the threshold at age five. A Guide for Teachers New to Hutterian Colony Schools, Alberta Teachers' Association, 2018 — the three days and the two-night wake. John A. Hostetler, "Hutterites," Encyclopedia of World Cultures — burial on the third day. Tim Smith Photography, Decker and Deerboine Colonies, Manitoba — the hymns sung around a casket in the home, and the grave dug by hand. NOTE ON HONESTY Almost nothing about how Hutterites bury their dead has ever been written down, and what exists is not from here. The published record is one paper out of South Dakota, one out of Saskatchewan from the nineteen seventies, ten lines in a handbook for schoolteachers, and a photographer's captions from Manitoba. My own branch, in this province, has essentially never been described. So a good deal of what I tell you in this video I am telling you because I was in the room. That is not the same as evidence and I would rather say so. The line about Hutterites envying children who die young is in the literature more than once, and I give it to you, and I also tell you what I have seen in a kitchen four days after a woman buried a baby. Both are in this video. This channel is narrated by a composite character. The voice and image are AI-generated. Everything factual about Hutterite life in it is sourced above or flagged as my own observation.