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Dienna Genther runs her hands over a cedar urn that she just finished making for her mother's ashes. Genther has a business making wooden coffins. She and her sister also made all arrangements for their mother's funeral, rather than employing a funeral home. "As far as I'm concerned, it's a privilege to care for our own dead," Genther said.

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Theresa Doyle was an independent woman, an unconventional woman, a free-thinker who taught her children to question society and not to settle for its norms.

She was also a quiet, rural woman whose life followed a simple philosophy: cherish your privacy and take care of your own business.

So it only made sense that when Doyle died in November, her children would handle the funeral arrangements themselves rather than going through a funeral home.

"She wouldn't want some stranger taking care of her, even in death," said Dienna Genther, Doyle's youngest child.

Within hours of Doyle's unexpected death from heart disease at the age of 68, Genther and her sister, Corinne Marie, found themselves braving the funeral industry - a failing bureaucracy, Genther says, that does not inform grieving families of their rights and responsibilities.

"As far as I'm concerned, it's a privilege to care for our own dead," Genther said. "And it's a privilege that most of us are being denied, and I don't think it's right."

No state law prevents families from caring for their dead. Family members can take the body to a cemetery or crematory themselves, or bury the body on their own land. They can also acquire the legal documents, such as death certificates, themselves.

This sort of practice, often called a family-directed funeral, might seem progressive, but it is deeply ingrained in American culture. Up until the mid-1800s, families were the ones who washed and dressed the deceased and prepared the body for burial. They would have home funerals, holding vigil over the corpse for days and often placing the body in a living room where family and friends would linger and say prayers and tell stories of the good ol' days.

But with the Civil War came a new necessity for grieving families. Soldiers who died on the battle field had to be transported hundreds of miles to get back home, and embalming became a common practice in order to keep their bodies intact on the long journey. Even President Lincoln's body was embalmed after he died and was displayed across the country as it traveled by train on its way to burial.

And so began the funeral industry - a modest business at first that grew in popularity at the turn of the 20th century and gained economic power by the middle of the century.

Today, the funeral-home business is a multimillion-dollar industry. According to the National Funeral Directors Association, the average conventional funeral costs about $6,000, which includes mortuary services, embalming and the casket. That price does not include the cost of the cemetery plot, which can cost up to $2,000.

For Dienna Genther and her siblings, the total bill for preparing a funeral themselves was less than $400. That included the cost of cremation ($150), the permit to cremate ($100), and the cemetery's administrative fees ($100). Because Genther makes pine box caskets for a living, she did not have to pay for the casket to transport her mother's body to the crematory. She and her siblings plan to spread their mom's ashes around their East Mountains land, which cuts out any burial costs.

"I wouldn't recommend you doing this if your sole motivation is financial," Genther said. "It's a lot of work."

A lot of work indeed. In order to bypass the funeral industry entirely, Genther had to go back and forth between the Office of the Medical Investigator, which gives out the cremation permit, and the Bureau of Vital Statistics, which provides the death certificate. The death certificate had to be signed by the medical investigator, and a burial-transit permit was required from the county registrar in order for Genther to transport her mother's body to the crematory.

Everywhere Genther went during those two days following her mother's death, she said, she was informed by state employees that what she was trying to do was illegal.

"Only after quoting to them the state statutes that allow it did their minds change," she said.

"The funeral industry works really hard to misinform people and make them feel like they don't have any options other than them handling it all for you," she added.

Paul D'Agostino, funeral director and general manager of Fitzgerald and Son in Albuquerque, says he has always encouraged and assisted families in doing what they want to do.

"But we always need to be realistic of what you can and can't do," he said. "We don't talk families out of it, but there's more involved than what's on the surface."

One important thing to consider, D'Agostino said, is the state law that requires a body to be embalmed or refrigerated to a temperature below 40 degrees, if the body is not going to be buried or cremated within 24 hours of death.

"The average individual doesn't have the facilities to refrigerate or the ability to embalm," he said. "From that aspect, you need a funeral home."

Although it is a sticky issue, there are some funeral homes that will work around that statute as a way to meet the needs of the family.

Tim Rivera, director of Santa Fe Funeral Options and Memorial Gardens, works closely with American Indians and Buddhists as well as natives of northern New Mexico - all populations that have always practiced the ritual of caring for one's own dead. He says the law about embalming is meant to be a standard. If a Buddhist family wants to keep vigil over a body for two days, he is not going to get in the way of their religious beliefs.

"As long as you're being practical," Rivera said.

The majority of Rivera's clients, while they might like the idea of a more alternative funeral option, are not comfortable with planning a funeral by themselves.

"I can tell you, 95 percent of people don't want to deal with it," he said. "They want assistance with it."

Joe Sehee, director of the Green Burial Council in Santa Fe, says that might be true, but that most of those people might not know they have any other options.

"All we're trying to do is give people options and let them know they have a lot of them," said Sehee, who, along with his wife Juliette Armstrong-Sehee, helps walk people through the process of family-directed funerals. "People just want a little bit of hand-holding."

Sehee believes there are untold emotional costs from not being able to be part of the funeral-planning process. By seeing a loved one through the transition into death, he says, by seeing the body and caring for it and preparing it for its final disposition, the bereaved can come to terms with the loss and can accept death as natural.

"End of life rituals," he said, "are there to heal the living."