Archive: 2011

Movie synopsis: The Funeral Director (2009) So far as I can find out, it never got distributed.

“A broken-hearted man, Kevin, finds company in a pet cricket. After ditching a lucrative advertising job, he signs on as an apprentice in a funeral home and finds himself not only working for a sexually starved pre-menopausal funeral director, but also rooming with her free spirited nymphomaniac niece. In a strange way, Kevin becomes like one of the old Renaissance masters by taking the dead corpses to study and advance his art by photographing them. While the nymphomaniac becomes addicted to the idea of helping him win back his ex-girlfriend they find themselves exploring loss, death, and resurrection. In a dark romanticism, Kevin attempts to artistically reincarnate the dead people by dressing them up in elaborate costumes and makeup, trying to recapture the memory of their best human quality and to defy the tragedy of their death.”

If only I could find you a clip or a trailer!

I recently had a row with Eulogy magazine. They were slow to pay me for an article I wrote for them. It’s never a good idea to smash up a contact. I had no beef with the editor, Alfred Tong, who seemed nice, bright and funny. It was the accounts dept where my rancour lay. I considered all that and went ahead anyway. I was cross.

It looks as though I might have caught them at a very bad time. Alfred Tong has issued a extraordinary press release announcing nothing less than a relaunch of Eulogy after what appears to have been period of teeth-gnashing, uproarious lunacy and the departure of some of the original partners. It must have put years on him. Here’s what he says:

“Thankfully, the people we started off with are no longer involved. Their departure has given the remaining members of the editorial and publishing team some time to reflect on where we went wrong and the changes we needed to make.”

He is aware of terrible mistakes: “just before the July 2010 launch came the declaration in the advertising trade’s weekly newspaper, Campaign, that Eulogy would be, ‘the world’s first grief brand.’  Since when did an emotion become a brand?”

Read his remarkable, wither-wringing account of what went on here: The Life and Near Death of a Magazine

Alfred’s vision for the relaunched magazine could make it a formidable player. I hope that will happen and I wish him and his team every good fortune. The vision for the magazine is this:

1. Eulogymagazine.co.uk will be a forum for charities, support networks, and organisations that do the valuable work of helping people cope with bereavement and those facing death through terminal illness.  Eulogymagazine.co.uk will assist these organisations in their fundraising and promotional drives.

2. Eulogymagazine.co.uk will be a place where the extraordinary nature of ordinary people’s lives can be celebrated. To that end there will be a significant amount of space for reader-submitted eulogies, stories, podcasts and videos.

3. Eulogymagazine.co.uk will offer advice for readers, as well as a range of other blog, comment and multimedia content designed to be thought-provoking, comforting, and helpful. It will also host content, which promises a much-needed laugh, when you need it most.

Presently, more than 50 per cent of people who die in an NHS hospital do not receive last offices.

How did it come to pass that hospitals stopped performing last offices for dead patients? How was it that a ritual as old as time was so coldly abandoned? How did it come to be acceptable that funeral directors should collect corpses bagged with lines attached swimming in their own urine?

Good medics and nurses care like crazy for their patients. Good funeral directors care far, far more than people know for their dead. And in between, this hiatus where the body occupies the status of, I don’t know, so much disappointing carcase.

I’m not writing surefootedly here because I have never collected a body from a mortuary. FDs who read this blog will, I hope, feel inspired to give us informed information.

Having said which, the future is bright. At the instruction of the National End of Life Care Programme, all people who die in NHS hospitals will in the future have to be given last offices, and nurses will have to be trained to do it. Except it won’t be called last offices, it will now be called care after death because apparently last offices sounds too military.

People with ‘religious or cultural or requirements’ will be invited to participate. I really can see no reason at all why all people should not be invited to participate. They can always say no thanks.

I can see FDs nodding in approval of the pillow. Read more in the Nursing Times here. Read a nurse’s experience of last offices here.