Sara Williams was a high school student in Hickory more than five decades ago when she received a sardonic jab from a classmate that has stayed with her ever since.
“It was during Honors English, and we were reading Dante’s Inferno,” the now-retired Baby Boomer recalled in a conversation outside a coffee shop in her current hometown of Graham. “I was so full of questions, and everyone else was like ‘ugh.’ Tom Dicks was sitting behind me, and he said ‘Sara…you’re literally obsessed with death.’”
A few moments with this lively, enthusiastic septuagenarian are enough to dispel any notion that she’s somehow preoccupied with the macabre. All the same, Williams has come to embrace the words of her one-time high school nemesis as a tribute to one of her most enduring life interests.
These days, Williams is a recognized expert on death and its sequel – the funerary practices that modern society has elevated into the one truly recession proof industry. For more than a decade, she has hosted a casual discussion group about issues that surround life’s final curtain call. She also been involved with two nonprofit organizations – the Home Funeral Alliance and the Funeral Consumers Alliance – and presently serves as the national president of the latter nonprofit.
Suffice it to say, Williams is not the least bit reluctant to talk about death, and she insists is one persistent taboo that more people should try to surmount.
“It’s part of a natural cycle,” she observes. “We live and we die. But people don’t want to talk about it. And if they don’t talk about it, they’re going to get slammed by a $10,000 to $20,000 bill from [a funeral home].”
Still, the funeral business wasn’t always the veritable life’s mission that it has become for Williams.
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Raised as a Presbyterian, the Hickory native initially saw the ministry as her natural calling, and she pursued this objective all the way to Duke Divinity School – with a pitstop at UNC-Chapel Hill for her undergraduate degree. Williams eventually left divinity school and wound up working as a medical administrator at her undergrad alma mater. Along the way, she reconnected with, and ultimately married, Hank Williams – an old high school flame who had embarked on a career in the Army after he graduated.
About three years into her marriage, Sara Williams underwent another life-changing transition when a visit to her doctor led to a diagnosis of breast cancer. Williams acknowledged that this news took her completely aback.
“I didn’t know anything about this disease,” she recalled. “It was something that other people got.”
Williams addressed her unfamiliarity with breast cancer by absorbing herself in the latest developments, and she ultimately worked on two major research studies about the condition. It was also during this phase of her life that Williams became reacquainted with the “passing” fancy of her high school days.
“People need to understand their rights as a consumer,” she said. “Funeral services are the third largest expense for many people. . . and I want to end the assumption that you have to spend $9,000 for a funeral.” – Sara Williams
In 2013, Williams became acquainted with the concept of death cafés – a sort of kaffeeklatsch, or tea-and-cake-fueled discussion circle, about post-mortem matters. Within a year, she was hosting a death café of her own – with the next installment slated to take place on August 7 at Endswell Funeral Home in Hillsborough.
At about the same time Williams began to facilitate death cafés, she joined the board of directors for the National Home Funeral Alliance – a nonprofit group that strives to teach people how to curate funerals themselves without having to rely on the services of a funeral director. Williams also became involved in the North Carolina chapter of Funeral Consumers Alliance, which promotes affordable funerals, advocates for legislative reform, and tries to root out exploitative business practices among funeral homes.
Williams, who now serves as the president of the group’s national organization, insists that one of the chief reasons why some funeral homes are able to take advantage of their clients is the willful ignorance of so many people about the funeral trade.
“People need to understand their rights as a consumer,” she said. “Funeral services are the third largest expense for many people. . . and I want to end the assumption that you have to spend $9,000 for a funeral.
“You don’t need to bury yourself in better furniture than you live with.” – Sara Williams
“You don’t need to bury yourself in better furniture than you live with,” she added. “You can get a container at Walmart, and the funeral home has to accept it.”
In addition to her organizational work, Williams has established a website that delves into some of her other funerary interests. Dubbed shroudingsisters.com, this online domain characterizes its creator as a “home funeral guide,” a hospice volunteer, and a certified “funeral celebrant.” It also promotes Williams as consultant in “green burials” – an umbrella term for various forms of interment that meet certain ecological criteria.
Williams points out that a biodegradable casket or shroud is all the paraphernalia that’s needed for an authentic green burial. She notes that this approach dispenses with costly concrete vaults and embalming, but still meets basic public health standards if it’s correctly performed.
Although her website lists just nine cemeteries in North Carolina that specialize in the pure form of green burial, Williams acknowledges that property owners can theoretically use their own land for green burials as long as they have the site authorized by the local health department.
Another issue that’s near and dear to Williams is funeral poverty – and particularly the plight of “the unclaimeds,” or people with no family or friends to attend to their final arrangements. Williams insists that charitable strangers can step in to make sure these abandoned individuals aren’t entirely forlorn and forgotten.
“Everybody needs to be remembered, and we can make sure they are,” she insists. “There are high schools that have student pallbearers who volunteer to carry the casket for someone they don’t even know.”
Solutions to the problem of the unclaimeds were among the highlights of a national conference that Williams organized last month on behalf of the Funeral Consumers Alliance. This four-day event ultimately brought many of the group’s members to Research Triangle Park for a series of workshops and talks that its organizer hopes will breathe new life into the alliance’s work.
Among those who were invigorated by this conference was Williams’ own husband, who is himself a board member for the North Carolina chapter of the Funeral Consumers Alliance.
Hank Williams concedes that as the loyal co-pilot to his dynamic wife, he has been spirited off in directions where he’d never head on his own.
“It’s been one wild ride,” he said. “But I’m proud of the work that she’s doing.”
