Interview with Joseph Orso, author of “On the Threshold of Worlds”

Joseph Orso is a former journalist who lives in a log house in Wisconsin with his family, farms, and does some other work. He’s an interesting person (learn more) and he’s also a good writer. His new book is On the Threshold of Worlds: Tending My Father Before and After His Last Breath (Front Porch Republic Books, 2026). It’s about caring for his father who had Alzheimer’s and about giving his father a natural burial, and all the reasons why. He was kind enough to chat about the new book and its ideas with us.

How would you describe this book to someone who hasn’t heard about it or read it?

The book is about the end of my father's long journey with early-Alzheimer's, and how family and friends tended him after his death without help from the funeral industry -- washing his body, sitting round-the-clock vigil with his body, and burying him in a hand-dug grave on our rural land.

That's the above-ground narrative. Below the ground, the book explores our mythical and practical responsibilities to each other in a culture that undermines those responsibilities at every turn. Does it matter what we do with our beloveds in death? Are their bodies bags of genes to be discarded? If not, then what are they, and how are we to tend the body after breath?

Finally, it’s worth saying that the book is indirectly about the intimacy of place. My family lives in a very unique land, where the ancient contours remain because the glaciers miraculously never came here, never flattened us out like the rest of the Midwest. This land — it’s ancient beauty, its rolling hills and valleys — has a strong presence, a strong memory, in our lives and in the book.

What are you hoping readers will get from this book?

I hope there is at least one reader out there who, after reading this book, realizes how simple it is to take care of their beloved in death, how healing it is, and that when they are confronted with the death of their own beloved, that their journey is different because they read my father's story.

I don't expect everyone will do it the way we did. For instance, we are deeply fortunate to live on rural land where we could hand-dig a grave. But if one reader decides that she will wash her mother's body after the breath is gone, or if one reader organizes a round-the-clock vigil with his brother's body before the funeral, that would be heartening to me. One experience like that inevitably changes how family and friends will encounter death for generations to come, and we all just need a catalyst to begin this work in our own circles. There are many such catalysts, and I hope this book is one.

Separately, I hope those caring for someone with Alzheimer’s or dementia might find some solace in this book. It can be a lonely and shocking journey without obvious support, and I hope my father’s journey and our journey with him might offer some sense of companionship, some sense that healing — not recovery, but healing — is possible in the end.

Do you have an ideal reader?

I wasn't thinking about a particular reader when I wrote this. But now considering it, I suppose an ideal reader is someone longing for two things: meaning and practical pathways for embodying meaning — not merely thinking about it.

That said, I also suppose some people might be more immediately drawn to the book: the small-farming and homesteading community already making boundaries with industrial care and working hard to bring birth, education, building, food and everything else back home; the religious and the spiritual for whom death is understood as a sacred journey; folks interested in natural burial and green burial; and people destabilized by the meaning-collapsing experience of caring for someone with dementia.

This is a very personal book, drawing on your experiences and engaging emotions and thoughts. What did you get out of writing it? I know it began with posts online. What prompted you to start writing and what kept you writing?

Writing is an intuitive process for me. I don’t begin with an outline, just a notion of what journey I am about to take. Getting up early and writing nourishes the rest of my day. Enchanted isn’t quite the right word, but there is something like that in writing. Stories crack open worlds. Having just come through the very altering end of my father’s life, that was the journey that beckoned me during the morning hours.

What I personally got out of telling this particular story is very simple: Memory. We think of memory as being in the head, but it’s not. It’s in our mouths, our words, in places we revisit, in the patterns of our days. Memory is incarnate and also generative. It changes us. I hope that incarnating Dad’s memory like this can help my family pray for him, and him for us.

What role do you think reading plays in helping us lead a good life?

The question is more complicated than it seems. Reading can deform as much as transform us, so discerning what you will read — and what you will not — is essential in whether it leads us toward the good or elsewhere. Also, there are people who don’t read much and have other pathways for leading good lives.

In my own life, reading does many things. Before I was Eastern Orthodox Christian, I lacked an intimate community of traditions and elders, but recovered some of this by reading writers with kinds of wisdom I would not otherwise have encountered. Vine Deloria Jr., for instance, changed my life. Reading cultural critics has helped unveil the particular meanness of our civilization, and how its patterns relate to ancient patterns at war with the holy. These influence choices my wife and I make, like homeschooling. Reading fairy tales and stories with my family helps us encounter life as the quest that it is, not the drudgery-escapism dichotomy our culture inflicts on us. Reading the saints and Scripture is the highest form of reading for me, in that they help me in my perception and relationship with God.

It’s common to have an aging parent who has significant needs or even something like Alzheimer's or dementia. I know many people dealing with that and trying to care for parents, but I don’t know that we often learn how to be in that role until we’re in that role. I was talking with a co-worker the other day about what kind of life preparation would be good for young people. What would you say to people, maybe aged 16-25, about caring for parents?

Like all worthwhile human journeys, caring for our elders is spiritually and practically very difficult, not culturally honored, and filled with treasures.

The attention of people that age — my own attention when I was that age — is seduced toward strange social customs and careerism. Of course, going off into the world and cultivating your vocation are important tasks. But more important is who you care for, which is different than what you care about.

I think our focus of concern is too much on political issues curated by the media, on faraway suffering that leaves us angry and powerless and yelling at our neighbors. “Who do you care for?” means “Who, with flesh that you can touch, are you tending in some way?” How you answer this depends on your own heart and context. My children care for sheep and chickens and a garden. They also helped care for my dad during his life and death. We also ought to care for people with acute suffering, like poverty and isolation.

The point is to make caring for the nearby world a primary concern, to elevate it, and also just to notice the ways you are already caring for others. Then caring for your parents will simply be a natural phase of your life. It will offer you meaning, heart-break, and grow you up.

Why was a natural burial important to you and your family? In the book, I think you do a very good job avoiding being overly prescriptive, but what kinds of convictions led you to this choice?

The short answer: We buried my dad in this way because we love him. We did not want strangers managing his body after death — not embalming him, not burying him in concrete, not cremating him. We loved him, and we wanted to tend his body ourselves, as he tended ours, to lay him in the holy ground with our own hands.

The long answer: We never thought too much about wanting a natural burial or green burial. Those words are important, and the movements behind those words are important because the cultural norm has become such a degradation of the traditional norm. Our culture has chemicalized and commodified death, like most aspects of life. In order to relearn how to do very basic things — to know they they are even options — we need such labels like green burial, organic food, natural birth, holistic health, natural building, etc. But beneath those labels are stories and more personal convictions, as you note in your question.

A central conviction in my family life is that we ought to tend to God, the land, and people the best we can, and also rely on God, the land and people to care for us the best we can. This generally involves making boundaries with industry, which has inserted itself into all aspects of experience, separating us from the sacred, the land, and each other. This is impossible to fully do — it’s like a Baba Yaga task — and the emphasis is less on extracting industry from our lives, and more on trying to become real human beings.

To become a real human being is not inevitable, but lifelong work, and burying my dad in this way was part of that work. Every small step we take in learning to do something on our own, without the intrusion of industry, matures us a little bit.

I have talked about this book with many of my friends and at first some of them can’t imagine why I’d be recommending a book about natural burial to them. Obviously, the book is about much more than that, but it is also about natural burial. What do you think people might get out of reading about that, even if they aren’t particularly interested in having one? Why should people think about dying and being buried?

As you say, the book is about a natural burial, but I don’t think of that as primary. For me, the book is about tending our beloveds ourselves — in death as in life. Why do this? Because it is healing, humanizing and orients us toward the holy.

Not everyone can or wants to do what we did. But maybe some aspects would speak to you: gently washing the body of your beloved after death, sitting with your beloved around-the-clock during their dying days, holding a round-the-clock vigil after the last breath. If you are a true materialist, and understand the body as a bag of genes, then none of this makes sense. But I don’t think most people are true materialists. We care about the bodies of this world. How we tend them in death is not a functional question, but a mythical one.

I would also encourage people to look into cremation, embalming and conventional burial practices. It’s hard to talk about these things plainly, as death is such a tender time and people do the best they know how. But looking into the actual process of embalming or the environmental effects of cremation leads many to natural burial.

I think one of the themes in the book is human dignity. How do you understand human dignity and what are some ways you think it shapes life before burial? I know that’s a broad question, so you can go wherever you’d like with that.

If a holy person came into your house, what would happen? Without trying, you would be humbled, reverent, quiet. If he was wounded, you would do your best to heal him, to help him. If she was hungry, you would offer her food. If you spoke, you would speak kindly.

I believe this is who we dwell among, that the human being is an image of God, that our world is made by God. This means we have responsibilities in this world — to love, to relieve suffering, to reverence the other in whatever broken form they come to us. What causes us — or at least me — to be blind to what is holy, to fail to encounter my neighbors as divine images, to even degrade them at times, to increase their suffering? That’s a more difficult question.

It seems like a natural burial is also consistent with your way of life. Can you share a bit about how you live, your relationship with technology and things like that?

The way I would describe our life is that we strive to orient ourselves toward the holy, family, land and community by making home the center of culture. This means that, like many of our friends, my wife birthed our children at home, we homeschool, we built our own home, we farm on a homescale — raising sheep, chickens and a garden — and we live down the driveway from my mother’s home. As you say, burying my Dad at home by our own hands was part of this way of life, as it was part of the way of life of the vast majority of our ancestors.

Regarding technology: My family makes boundaries with technology and compromises with technology, like most people. Our home is not wired for electricity; after many years, we bought a battery we charge up the driveway at my Mom’s house, and so now we plug in lamps, a blender stick, and rechargeable headlamps. We have carried in and out our water for more than a decade, but might get running water someday. We do not have Internet in our home and I think we never will, but we use it in our office in my Mom’s house. I did not have a cell phone until I got a job a couple years ago and my boss handed me one, which I find valuable for the work. I also think of Smartphones as pocket demons.

When we look into a screen, we go into another world and are absent from the bodies around us. A child looking at a parent who is gazing into a screen encounters a vacancy, or the opposite of a presence. The more we look at screens, the more we interact with that vacancy, so we try to severely limit this in our family. Relatedly, we try to limit our interaction with surveillance culture, not out of fear but principle.

If I could press a button to make all screens go away, would I? Definitely! But I’m not a purist, and I enjoy listening to The Brothers Karamazov on an app as I drive around way too much for my job. As much as I prefer to hear my daughter chanting with the choir at church, or my friend singing John Prine around the fire, that infinite music app is pretty great. So it goes.

I look up to the Amish regarding these things. They are not anti-technology, as many misperceive. They’re just intentional about it as a community in a way we are not. They are always, in an organized process, assessing whether a new technology might serve their community and align with their beliefs or whether it undermines those things. Then they make boundaries or accommodations based on that discernment.

Do you have another writing project that you’ve started now or that you’re pondering?

 Yes, but I don’t think it’s quite ready to say out loud. It’s still fermenting.