Archive: 2011

Please help!

4 November 2011
Charles
No comments
Categories: Attitudes to dead bodies, Dress codes

Judith Simpson is a PhD student in the School of Design at the University of Leeds. 

She is researching the way in which the dead body is dressed, ‘styled’ and presented and how (or even if) this relates to what people believe about life and death. 

Here is Judith’s appeal to YOU: 

I am asking a number of funerary professionals for their observations on how customers ask their loved ones to be presented and for any opinions on why these requests are made. I would be extremely grateful if you could respond to the survey on the link below. If you are able to share the survey with colleagues in the industry that would be wonderful. I would also be delighted to capture the opinions of retired funerary professionals who may have witnessed significant change over their careers. 

There is a statement attached which explains the project and how its findings will be used; this has been approved by the University’s Ethics Committee and I trust it will allay any of your concerns. 

Before you take the survey, please read the statement below, which has been approved by the University’s Ethics Committee.  

The link to the survey is here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/FHSP23F 

 

 

Informed Consent Form 

An Investigation Into Current Trends in Presenting and Viewing the Dead Body 

Purpose of the Study:

This is a study of contemporary social practices that is being conducted by Judith Simpson, a research student at the University of Leeds.  The purpose of this study is to examine what people of the early twenty first century believe to be the most appropriate way of dealing with the body between death and the point of burial or cremation.  My particular interest is in the way that the body is dressed and presented for viewing by family and friends.  I am interested in both the memories of people who have been involved in these processes and the opinions of the community in the widest sense.

What will be done:

You will complete one of a series of surveys, which will take 15-20 minutes to complete. The survey may include questions about

  • your own experience of arrangements made following a death
  • your opinions on historical practices or those of different cultures
  • your thoughts on ‘ideal’ funerary practices
  • your ideas about what specific customs might mean
  • your ideas about what happens when we die

I may also ask for some demographic information (e.g. age, gender, religious belief) so that I can consider whether, for example, the insights of women are different from those of men, or whether age has an influence on ideas about death).

Benefits of this Study:

You will be contributing to knowledge about how death is currently understood in Britain, and about the arrangements that ordinary families make in times of bereavement. 

Risks or discomforts:

No risks or discomforts are anticipated from taking part in this study. If you feel uncomfortable with a question, you can skip that question. Your participation is greatly valued but is completely voluntary.

Confidentiality:

Your responses will be kept completely confidential. I will not know your IP address when you respond to an online survey.  I will only have access to your email address or other contact details should you choose to enter them in response to an invitation to participate in a follow up interview.  If you do provide contact details these will only be used by the researcher and will not be disclosed to any third party.

The survey does not ask you to provide your name, and should any comments that you make be published in research papers you will be identified by a participant number only.

How the findings will be used:

The results of the study will be used for scholarly purposes only. The results from the study will be presented in educational settings and at professional conferences, and the results might be published in a professional journal.

Contact information:

If you have concerns or questions about this study, please contact Judith Simpson at sdjms@leeds.ac.uk or one of the project supervisors, Professor Efrat Tsëelon (e.tseelon@leeds.ac.uk) or Dr Judith Tucker (j.a.tucker@leeds.ac.uk).

By beginning the survey, you acknowledge that you have read this information and agree to participate in this research, with the knowledge that you are free to withdraw your participation at any time

Eric Idle’s eulogy to George Harrison

4 November 2011
Charles
5 Comments
Categories: eulogy, Humour, Memorial service, tributes

Eric Idle’s eulogy to George Harrison at the memorial event at the Hollywood Bowl:

When they told me they were going to induct my friend George Harrison into the Hollywood Bowl Hall of Fame posthumously: my first thought was – I bet he won’t show up.

Because, unlike some others one might mention – but won’t – he really wasn’t in to honors.

He was one of those odd people who believe that life is somehow more important than show business.

Which I know is a heresy here in Hollywood, and I’m sorry to bring it up here in the very Bowel of Hollywood but I can hear his voice saying “oh very nice, very useful, a posthumous award – where am I supposed to put it? What’s next for me then? A posthumous Grammy? An ex-Knighthood? An After-Lifetime Achievement Award?

He’s going to need a whole new shelf up there.

So: posthumously inducted – sounds rather unpleasant: sounds like some kind of after-life enema.

But Induct – in case you are wondering – comes from the word induce – meaning to bring on labor by the use of drugs.

And Posthumous is actually from the Latin post meaning after and hummus meaning Greek food.

So I like to think that George is still out there somewhere – pregnant and breaking plates at a Greek restaurant.

I think he would prefer to be inducted posthumorously because he loved comedians – poor sick sad deranged lovable puppies that we are – because they – like him – had the ability to say the wrong thing at the right time – which is what we call humor.

He put Monty Python on here at The Hollywood Bowl, and he paid for the movie The Life of Brian, because he wanted to see it.

Still the most anybody has ever paid for a Cinema ticket.

His life was filled with laughter and even his death was filled with laughter… In the hospital he asked the nurses to put fish and chips in his IV.

The doctor – thinking he was delusional – said to his son “don’t worry, we have a medical name for this condition.”

Yes said Dahni “humor.”

And I’m particularly sorry Dahni isn’t here tonight – because I wanted to introduce him by saying “Here comes the son” – but sadly that opportunity for a truly bad joke has gone, as has Dahni’s Christmas present from me.

George once said to me “if we’d known we were going to be The Beatles we’d have tried harder.”

What made George special – apart from his being the best guitarist in the Beatles – was what he did with his life after they achieved everything.

He realized that this fame business was – and I’ll use the technical philosophical term here – complete bullshit.

And he turned to find beauty and truth and meaning in life – and more extraordinarily – found it.

This is from his book I Me Mine:

“The things that most people are struggling for is fame or fortune or wealth or position – and really none of that is important because in the end death will take it all away. So you spend your life struggling for something, which is in effect a waste of time… I mean I don’t want to be lying there as I’m dying thinking ‘oh shit I forgot to put the cat out.'”

And he wasn’t. He passed away – here in LA – with beauty and dignity surrounded by people he loved.

Because he had an extraordinary capacity for friendship.

People loved him all over the planet.

George was in fact a moral philosopher: his life was all about a search for truth, and preparing himself for death.

Which is a bit weird for someone in rock and roll. They’re not supposed to be that smart. They’re supposed to be out there looking for Sharon. Not the meaning of life.

Michael Palin said George’s passing was really sad but it does make the afterlife seem much more attractive.

He was a gardener – he grew beauty in everything he did – in his life, in his music, in his marriage and as a father.

I was on an island somewhere when a man came up to him and said “George Harrison, oh my god, what are you doing here?” – and he said “Well everyone’s got to be somewhere.”

Well alas he isn’t here. But we are. And that’s the point. This isn’t for him. This is for us, because we want to honor him. We want to remember him, we want to say Thanks George for being. And we really miss you. So lets take a look at some of the places he got to in his life.

Video montage is shown of George Harrison’s life, from youthful Beatle to mature solo artist.

Well he’s still not here. But we do have someone very special who was very dear to him – who is here. The first man to perform with the Beatles. The one and only Billy Preston.

Billy Preston and a chorus of vocalists sing Harrison’s “My Sweet Lord.”

Thank you Billy Preston.

So this is the big drag about posthumous awards: there’s no one to give ’em to.

So I’m gonna keep this and put it next to the one I got last year. No, I’m going to give it to the love of his life, his dark sweet lady, dear wonderful Olivia Harrison, who is with us here tonight. Liv, you truly know what it is to be without him.

Thank you Hollywood Bowl you do good to honor him. Goodnight.

Online amnesia

3 November 2011
Charles
2 Comments
Categories: memorialisation, onlime memorial sites

ObituariesToday.com is national obituary service, with funeral home listings, pre-planning information, a resource section for funeral information, as well as obituaries and memorial announcements. In other words it’s one of those online memorial websites. There are lots and lots of them. 

If you want to find the page on ObituariesToday which commemorates, shall we say, David Victor Regier, you go straight to it by clicking this link — here. 

Yes, whoops.

We can’t find out what’s happened to Obituariestoday.com. It looks as if it might have gone down with all decedents and everybody’s memories of them. It wouldn’t be the first online memorial site to have suffered this fate.

Caveat online memorialiser bigtime.

Here at the GFG we only endorse (and hugely admire) MuchLoved.com

Fiction tempers the funeral facts

2 November 2011
Charles
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Categories: Uncategorised

By our religious correspondent, Richard Rawlinson

TV mini-series The Borgias stars Jeremy Irons as Renaissance Pope Alexander VI, nee Roderigo Borgia. Created by Neil Jordan of The Tudors fame, is a lavish period piece (winning this year’s Emmy for Best Costume) and is packed with racy plotlines involving power struggles, sex, assassinations and sibling rivalries.

As the portraits above and below reveal, the casting of Irons involved a degree of artistic license. The Venetian ambassador reported that Rodrigo Borgia’s corpse was “the ugliest, most monstrous and horrible dead body that was ever seen, without any form or likeness of humanity.”

After a week of intestinal bleeding and convulsive fevers, he died in 1503 at the age of 72. The swollen body began to release sulfurous gasses from every orifice, according to reports, and someone had to jump on the body to jam it into the undersized coffin.

Master of Ceremonies Johann Burchard elaborated: ‘The face was very dark, the color of a dirty rag or a mulberry, and was covered all over with bruise-colored marks. The nose was swollen; the tongue had bent over in the mouth, completely double, and was pushing out the lips which were, themselves, swollen. The mouth was open and so ghastly that people who saw it said they had never seen anything like it before.’

There’s nowt so gold as green

31 October 2011
Charles
2 Comments
Categories: natural burial

Posted by Charles

An irony of the natural burial movement is that it was begat by idealists and freethinkers and  environmentalists… and then spied and pounced on by venture vultures scenting carrion. When you do the math you can easily see why — and begin to fear that there are going to be tears before bedtime.

Here’s an example.

Take 15.7 acres of land in Haslemere, buy cialis levitra and viagra Surrey. Get planning permission to turn them into a natural burial ground. Put them up for sale for around £3 million. 

This is actually happening.

The buyer sells each plot at what you’d pay for a plot in local authority cemetery in leafy Haslemere, namely £2,000. That parcel of land is set to earn…

£28 million. 

More here. 

Buried this day

31 October 2011
Charles
1 Comment
Categories: Attitudes to dead bodies

 

Joan Wytte was born in 1775 in Bodmin, Cornwall. She was sometimes called the “Fighting Fairy Woman” or the “Wytte (White) Witch”.

Joan was famed as a clairvoyant, and people would seek her services as a seer, diviner and healer. Her healing practices included the use of “clooties” (or “clouties”), strips of cloth taken from a sick person and tied to a tree or a holy well as a form of sympathetic magic, such that when the cloth rots, the disease was believed to dissipate.

Later in life, she became very ill-tempered as a result of a tooth abscess, and would shout and rail at people. She often became involved in fights where she exhibited remarkable strength and people came to believe she was possessed by the devil. She was eventually incarcerated in Bodmin Jail, not for witchcraft but for public brawling, and due to poor https://laparkan.com/buy-accutane/ conditions in the jail, Joan died of bronchial pneumonia at the age of 38.

Her bones were disinterred and used for séances and various pranks, then later displayed at the Witchcraft Museum in Boscastle, Cornwall. It is said that, while her skeleton was on display in the museum, they started to experience disruptive poltergeists, and a witch was bought in to advise them, who said that Wytte’s spirit wished to be laid in a proper burial. She was finally laid to rest in a peaceful wooded area in Boscastle, and her gravestone reads: “Joan Wytte. Born 1775. Died 1813 in Bodmin Jail. Buried 1998. No longer abused”. [Source]

Joan was buried on 31 October. 

Thanks to Belinda Forbes for this story. Joan is the subject of a lecture this evening at Arnos Grove, details here. 

This ae nighte

31 October 2011
Charles
1 Comment
Categories: Art and death, dying

Halloween has deep roots. Through All Hallows Eve to the old pagan night of Samhain, each marks the time of year when the veil between this world and the next are at their thinnest and the dead and the living can most easily meet and mingle.

 As this blog’s contribution to the celebrations, here is the Lyke Wake Dirge in probably the most famous of recent versions performed by Pentangle.

It’s a very old Yorkshire dialect song for the time spent sitting with the corpse (Lyke is an old word for corpse – think Lych Gate). It describes the journey the soul makes and the challenges it meets on the way. In a way it’s a set of instructions but, if there’s a lesson, it is that charity in life is the best way to ensure safe passage in death.

 Here are the original lyrics, with a translation:

This ae nighte, this ae nighte,
Every nighte and alle,Fire and fleet and candle-lighte,
And Christe receive thy saule.
When thou from hence away art past,
Every nighte and alle,
To Whinny-muir thou com’st at last;
And Christe receive thy saule.

If ever thou gavest hosen and shoon,
Every nighte and alle,
Sit thee down and put them on;
And Christe receive thy saule.

If hosen and shoon thou ne’er gav’st nane
Every nighte and alle,
The whinnes sall prick thee to the bare bane;
And Christe receive thy saule.

From Whinny-muir whence thou may’st pass,
Every nighte and alle,
To Brig o’ Dread thou com’st at last;
And Christe receive thy saule.

If ever thou gav’st silver and gold,
Every nighte and alle,
At t’ Brig o’ Dread thou’lt find foothold,
And Christe receive thy saule.

But if silver and gold thou never gav’st nane,
Every nighte and alle,
Down thou tumblest to Hell flame,
And Christe receive thy saule.

From Brig o’ Dread whence thou may’st pass,
Every nighte and alle,
To Purgatory fire thou com’st at last;
And Christe receive thy saule.

If ever thou gav’st meat or drink,
Every nighte and alle,
The fire sall never make thee shrink;
And Christe receive thy saule.

If meat or drink thou ne’er gav’st nane,
Every nighte and alle,
The fire will burn thee to the bare bane;And Christe receive thy saule.

This ae nighte, this ae nighte,
Every nighte and alle,
Fire and fleet and candle-lighte,
And Christe receive thy saule.

 On this night, on this night,
Every night and all,Hearth and house and candle-light,
And Christ receive your soul.
When from here away you pass
Every night and all,
To Thorny Moor you come at last;
And Christ receive your soul. 

If ever you gave hose and shoes,
Every night and all,
Sit then down and put them on;
And Christ receive your soul.

But if hose and shoes you gave none
Every night and all,
The thorns shall prick you to the bare bone;
And Christ receive your soul.

From Thorny Moor then you may pass,
Every night and all,
To Bridge of Dread you come at last;
And Christ receive your soul.

If ever you gave silver and gold,
Every night and all,
At Bridge of Dread you’ll find foothold,
And Christ receive your soul.

But if silver and gold you gave none
Every night and all:
You’ll tumble down into Hell’s flames
And Christ receive your soul.

From Bridge of Dread then you may pass,
Every night and all,
To Purgatory fire you’ll come at last;
And Christ receive your soul.

If ever you gave meat or drink,
Every night and all,
The fire will never make you shrink;
And Christ receive your soul.

But if meat or drink you gave none,
Every night and all,
The fire will burn you to the bare bone;
And Christ receive your soul

On this night, on this night,
Every night and all,
Hearth and house and candle-light,
And Christ receive your soul.

 With thanks to Jeff Duntemann for his translation of the Dirge. If you are interested in reading more, his page is here.

Funnybones

28 October 2011
Charles
No comments
Categories: Art and death, Attitudes to dead bodies, Books, Ossuary

Posted by Vale

What is it with this fascination with bones and skeletons?

Faced with a pile of them and one man plasters into the walls and cornices, another creates chandeliers and shields while elsewhere anonymous skulls are given names, cleaned, polished and even appealed to for information.

Bones seem to be the acceptable face of death. Tangible reminders of course; a frisson of the macabre certainly, but once the Yorick lesson has been learned –  you might think there would be little more to add.

Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow
of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy: he hath
borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how
abhorred in my imagination it is! my gorge rims at
it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know
not how oft. Where be your gibes now? your
gambols? your songs? your flashes of merriment,
that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one
now, to mock your own grinning? quite chap-fallen?
Now get you to my lady’s chamber, and tell her, let
her paint an inch thick, to this favour she must
come; make her laugh at that.

Except that there always is. Faye Dowling has published a wonderful Book of Skulls that, through images, explores our continuing fascination:

And, for the ossuary lovers, Thames and Hudson are publishing Empire of Death.

It brings together the world’s most important charnel sites, ranging from the crypts of the Capuchin monasteries in Italy and the skull-encrusted columns of the ossuary in Évora in Portugal, to the strange tomb of a 1960s wealthy Peruvian nobleman decorated with the exhumed skeletons of his Spanish ancestors.

And our old friend St Pancras is on the cover too.

The sisterhood of the skulls

27 October 2011
Charles
No comments
Categories: Attitudes to death, cemeteries, Ossuary

Posted by Vale

If Kutna Hora and Capela dos Ossos show anything it is that we cannot let bones lie.

Buried and disinterred, stacked and stored these vast collections become places where the living can meet and marvel at the dead.

In Naples, at the charnel house in the middle of its Fontanelle Cemetary, this urge has flowered into a full blown relationship. In the 1870s a cult arose around the anonymous dead. People adopted skulls, cleaned and polished them, gave them names, brought them offerings and asked them for favours.

The cult lasted until the late 1960s when the church closed it down.

You can read about Fontanelle here and here.

Be-spoke for one like this

27 October 2011
Charles
11 Comments
Categories: Hearses

From This is Surrey Today:

SCORES of cyclists formed a guard of honour for the funeral procession of a popular cyclist.

More than 120 people from local clubs turned out to honour Pete Mitchell at Randalls Park Crematorium in Leatherhead last Thursday.

Mr Mitchell covered a staggering 570,000 miles during 62 years of cycling.

He died on September 16 at the age of 76 and according to his daughter Jake Dodd, 41, of Epsom, he went out the way he would have wanted to.

She said: “He rode 37 miles back home from Maidenhead, had his tea, went to bed and then didn’t wake up, which was a really lovely way to go.”

What a great turnout for Mr Mitchell. If only, we can’t help thinking, his family had known about the Rev Paul Sinclair’s bicycle hearse.