Herndon, USA — Deidre "Nusaybah" Ritchie knelt down and gently braided the brown hair of the woman's body lying in a cocoon of white sheets.
After demonstrating to the women gathered around her how to wash the body with soap and sweet-smelling camphor, Ritchie finished wrapping the woman in several layers of seamless white cloth, which five minutes earlier were a set of store-bought queen-sized bed sheets.
"Performing this service for others is a reminder that death is a certainty for all of us," said Ritchie, 39, as her audience of more than 20 Muslim women took notes and asked questions on how to prepare a body for burial in accordance with Islamic law.
The woman in the sheets was actually a volunteer. The women gathered in the cold conference room peppered Ritchie with questions, such as whether or not hair extensions should be removed before burial (answer: yes, if possible).
Like a midwife who makes house calls, Ritchie always keeps an emergency kit on hand in her car, which includes sheets, scissors, wash cloths, soap, camphor and a small bucket. She is one of many volunteers responding to calls nearly every week to wash and shroud Muslim bodies for burial.
While most Americans turn the bodies of loved ones over to funeral homes for embalming or cremation, volunteers including Ritchie work with Muslim families to administer the final preparations, in accordance with Islamic teachings.
According to Tahir Anwar, imam of the South Bay Islamic Association in San Jose, Calif., little is known about how funerals were conducted in the time of the Prophet Muhammad, Islam's founder. "The bodies were washed, people did the (funeral) prayers, and they were buried. Those remain the three things we do today," he said.
"We don't have services where people are paid to wash bodies," said Anwar. "We do it ourselves, as family members or volunteers, as a reminder of our own mortality."
This hands-on involvement is uncommon today in the United States, according to Gary Laderman, author of the 2003 book, Rest in Peace: A Cultural History of Death and the Funeral Home in Twentieth-Century America. As embalming became popular after the Civil War, funeral homes gradually filled a role formerly held by church communities and families.
"The real authorities about dead bodies now are funeral directors," said Laderman, a professor of religion at Emory University in Atlanta, Ga.
Kneeling over the volunteer "corpse," Ritchie, who converted to Islam more than 10 years ago, described how to remove clothing, jewelry and hospital tags, and drape a towel or sheet over the naked body. Even though women are washed by women, and men by men, a sense of modesty should be maintained, said Ritchie, who is usually assisted by two or more family members or friends of the deceased.
"Treat the person as you would want to be treated," she told her audience.
Usually, Ritchie can find everything she needs for the procedure at a nearby funeral home, which stocks these supplies for its Muslim clients, and where Ritchie performs most of her washings. The ritual usually takes about two hours to complete.
"We've been working with Muslims for almost 20 years," said Bill McDonough, director of the family-owned Loudoun Funeral Chapels in Leesburg, Va. "Muslims do most of the things on their own, so we really only provide transportation, the facility for washing and the legal licenses."
That translates to lower rates for Muslim customers, said McDonough, estimating that they now comprise 20% of his business.
Although Ritchie said she prefers not to charge for her services, she sometimes requests a nominal fee to compensate for the hours of work she misses as fundraising coordinator for FAITH, a local Muslim social service organization that sponsored the training session and coordinates washing services in the area.
Caring for bodies is a "communal" religious obligation, she explained. If other volunteers are not available, and family members of the deceased are unable to perform the washing themselves, Ritchie said she is personally obligated to carry out the task.
"It would be unacceptable if there were even one time" when a body was not washed, she said, noting that FAITH sponsors its yearly trainings to increase the pool of knowledgeable volunteers.
Muhammad Fraser-Abdur Rahim, a 27-year-old Washington D.C. resident, first helped wash a body when he was 8 years old, alongside his father, an imam in Charleston, S.C.
"It was a bit scary, going into this dark, morbid funeral home as young boy," Fraser-Abdur Rahim recalled. The deceased was an elderly Muslim man from New York who wished to be buried in his native South Carolina, he said.
"As we washed this older gentleman, putting musk and camphor on him, I saw him in a babylike state, needing our assistance, and the feeling of being afraid just left," he said. After that early experience, Fraser-Abdur Rahim frequently assisted his father with washing bodies and, as he grew older, began to train others.
"You are part of this idealistic brotherhood," he said, "caring for people when they need your assistance."
When family members are involved for the first time in washing and shrouding a body, they are often surprised at the beauty of the process, Fraser-Abdur Rahim said.
"In horror films, you see the body as grotesque. But giving someone their last rite on this physical earth, you realize the body is a human being, and someone will do the same thing for you."
According to Ritchie, caring for the body can also provide solace for a grieving family. She recalled preparing the body of a woman who had had died violently.
"At the beginning," she said, "the family members were distraught and tense. But by the end, they were literally hugging me, talking about how they would give charity on her behalf and how they finally felt at peace.
"Doing this last, loving act for one's friend or family member in and of itself can be very soothing," she said.
This seven-century-old Islamic tradition dovetails with a modern, American movement toward more personalized death care, according to journalist Mark Harris. In his 2007 book, Grave Matters: A Journey Through the Modern Funeral Industry to a Natural Way of Burial, he relates the story of Beth Knox of Takoma Park, Md., whose 7-year-old daughter died in a 1995 car accident. Knox insisted on caring for her daughter's body before burial at home, rather than turn it over to a funeral home.
Today Knox runs a non-profit agency, Crossings, which has helped several hundred families arrange home funerals. According to Harris, she is just one part of a larger, baby boomer-driven movement toward simpler, "greener" death care and funerals.
"(Knox's) argument is it's the engagement with the corpse that allows you to come to terms with death."