Archive: 2011

Gilded poo

25 January 2011
Charles
10 Comments
Categories: Co-operative Funeralcare

It’s been a dispiriting couple of days. Once again the damned Co-op Funeralcare has re-announced the obvious in yet another self-serving survey and, incredibly, reaped a rich harvest of column inches in the UK’s newspapers. You’ve almost certainly encountered some of it.

I wasn’t going to rise to it. At this time of the year I’d rather turn my sights to sunnier things. But I suppose I ought to write about it because I know that a number of you come here for second-hand news. Second-hand news is me.

If you want to find out what the Co-op sent out to all those flat-bottomed hacks too idle to go out and find news stories of their own, click here. It may be a good idea to have a sick bag to hand.

The survey is endorsed by venerable academic and ‘funerary historian’, Julian Litten. What on earth he thinks he’s doing lending his name to this garbage I can’t think. This ‘ere celebration of life trend, it’s all down to Princess Diana and Jade Goody, apparently — some sort of copycat effect, I suppose. FFS.

As Paul Hensby accurately points out, the damned Funeralcare has established itself as the thought leader in contemporary funerals. Ha! All the while, SAIF only whispers the findings of its Ipsos MORI price comparison survey. And where are the celebrants’ trade bodies?

Enough. Is Co-operative Funeralcare systemically incapable of delivering what people want? That’s a rhetorical question; they read this, they have lawyers.

Upper class tweets

22 January 2011
Charles
No comments
Categories: Tweets

GoodFunerals Charles Cowling

Satan’s skull found in New Mexico! http://bit.ly/fcDVTO

GoodFunerals Charles Cowling

Why do the clergy prefer funerals to weddings? Good account here from a C of E priest: http://bit.ly/ieIhzc

GoodFunerals Charles Cowling

What is a bhusa yong? Lovely photographic account here of a Thai funeral and open air cremation http://bit.ly/fcbNLH

GoodFunerals Charles Cowling

Good looking books here for graveyard rabbits and burialists generally: http://bit.ly/hfYbDH

GoodFunerals Charles Cowling

Beautifully written thoughts about death – and deaths – here. Must-read: http://bit.ly/dQYP3t

GoodFunerals Charles Cowling

More and more protestors holding funerals for things. Danger that funerals will soon look like protests? http://bit.ly/h6GlVq

GoodFunerals Charles Cowling

‘No one is to “stay up with me” at the funeral home. I won’t be around to entertain you.’ Great last wishes here: http://bit.ly/eQE7Nn

GoodFunerals Charles Cowling

Texting at funerals is okay. http://on.msnbc.com/hWKUyg

GoodFunerals Charles Cowling

“The interior of her coffin will be embroidered with a firefighter in full gear, walking hand in hand with an angel.” http://nyti.ms/gSB38o

GoodFunerals Charles Cowling

Council sells bier to natural burialists http://bit.ly/ihKKLG

GoodFunerals Charles Cowling

No advance directive? You’ll cost more and die more distressingly. Good piece here: http://nyti.ms/h5Eh0v

GoodFunerals Charles Cowling

Why bother with a funeral at all? http://bit.ly/dE3Cnx

GoodFunerals Charles Cowling

Murdered journalist’s ashes scattered in Times Squarehttp://bit.ly/h4uIoh

GoodFunerals Charles Cowling

Vampire Verse Challenge 2010 – winning poem here:http://bit.ly/ijtlaz Well, what would you rhyme with ‘spectre’?

In the midst of death let there be life

22 January 2011
Charles
No comments
Categories: crematoria

There’s been a lot of interest in the US this week in what their media reckons to be a startling new trend. Owners of funeral homes, which over there are much roomier than ours, are reacting to shrinking profits – the impact of the rise in cremation and the slump in the economy – by hiring out their facilities to wedding parties and anyone else wanting to have a bit of a do.

The responses of the media are predictable enough – ‘creepy’ ‘bizarre’ etc – but it seems as if there’s been some uptake. I guess there has been some corresponding redecoration, too.

A good move, I’d say, likely to bring death back to life where it belongs.

In our own straitened times, as cuts begin to bite, the message for our crems couldn’t be clearer. Throw open your doors. Become a proper community resource. Pay your damn way.

Only good for goth weddings, of course, encircled as all crems are by tombstones and angels with one arm broken off at the elbow. But great gathering places for events of all sorts. Pity they can’t do food.

But they can start recycling their heat. Up here in Redditch they’re planning to pipe it down to the nearby sports centre. One local undertaker has already put the mockers on it. There’s a public briefing on Thursday. I shall join the citizenry, take the temperature and report back.

 

Aghori

22 January 2011
Charles
8 Comments
Categories: Attitudes to dead bodies, Attitudes to death, funeral customs

The ascetic’s refusal to accept worldly comforts is venerated by Hindus, but the awesome, horrifying renunciation of the AGHORI sadhu seems to defy the norms of civilized life. He will live only in the cremation ground, cook his food on the fires of the funeral pyre, eat and drink from a hollow skull that he uses as the sadhu’s bowl. No food or drink is taboo to him and aghori is known to eat faeces and human corpses and drink urine. He will wear a necklace of bones or one of human skulls, use shrouds and shawls removed from the dead at the cremation ghat for his bedding, smear himself with the ash of the pyre and generally stay naked or use the bark of a tree as a garment. The aghori will make his medicant’s bowl by cutting a man’s skull just above the line of the eyes and use the hollow scalp both in rituals and for his daily needs; the aghori code specifying that only the skull of a dead male may be used. Sadhus normally keep a bowl to collect alms in and to eat from and will use a kamandalu for water. The aghori uses the skull-bowl for all purposes, including the shamanistic tantric rites, with which he aspires to achieve the powers of the secret mantras.

[Source]

Bad gets worse

20 January 2011
Charles
2 Comments
Categories: Dignity, funeral cost

Once in a while you read something which doesn’t just confirm your instinct, it informs it. That happened to me bigtime today. Blogger Viridis Lumen has a post on this very sad story. The undertaker at the heart of this heartless event was our old friend Dignity plc, the company spawned by the vile, scandal-ridden Service Corporation International.  And this is what Viridis Lumen has to tell us about plc’s:

Under corporate governance law, including after New Labour’s botched reforms in the middle of the last decade, PLC’s have one sole objective – to maximise the financial return for their shareholders. Any deviation from this by their Officers potentially breaks the law.

In his book and film, “The Corporation”, Joel  Bakan explores the legal fiction, common to most of the western world, that allows PLC’s to claim the same legal status as human beings – a PLC is an artificial or legal personality. This ludicrous state of affairs provides all manner of protection for the entity, including being able to claim the right to privacy in its dealings. It also shelters the actual real humans who own shares and benefit from its profits and dividends from any adverse legal and financial consequences from its actions. If it does not pay its suppliers, they are personally buy cialis taiwan immune from its liabilities. If it commits ecocide or manslaughter as a result of bad practices and is sued, they are not financially accountable if it cannot pay its damages. If its officers, driven relentlessly to maximise financial returns for their shareholders, break the law in doing so, it is they who face prosecution, not the often faceless shareholders whom they serve.

Here’s the big insight (my bold):

Consequently, Bakan characterises the Corporate Personality as essentially psychopathic in its essence – it operates in a totally egocentric, self-interested fashion without conscience or regard for the impact of its actions on individuals, communities, other species or the environment. Beyond those it needs to satisfy its insatiable demand for profits, it has no care for its staff and discards them as soon as they are surplus to requirements.

Though a plc may have working for it people who are altruistic, the same values can never be embodied by a plc: “as corporate entities, such benevolent behaviours would be quite inimical to their purpose.”

There’s a good story confirming just this over at the MyLastSong blog.

I’m sure there’s a case to be put in favour of plc’s. I hope someone will supply it.

Find the excellent Viridis Lumen here.

Death ed

19 January 2011
Charles
4 Comments
Categories: Attitudes to death

There’s a brilliant piece over at funeralwise.com that I think you will want to read.

It’s an interview with a teacher, George Campbell, who used to teach a death education class to his high school students.Yes, a death ed class. Could any teacher in Britain propose such a thing without getting death threats?

Here’s a taste:

5. How did teaching the course change your own views on death?

I don’t necessarily go out have a few beers and start talking about death education, but I am very comfortable talking about death. When I was teaching the class many people would ask me questions about it. As one student said, it was a course on how to live, not how to die. Once you spend time thinking about death, you realize that certain things you think are important are not, and other things you think are not important are.

The interview is a gripping read. And there’s a link to Campbell’s text book, which he has posted online. Great ideas here for anyone considering talking about death in the community.

The good look

19 January 2011
Charles
No comments
Categories: Embalming

1920s advertisement by a Boston (USA) embalmer:

For composing the features, $1

For giving the features a look of quiet resignation, $2

For giving the features the appearance of Christian hope and contentment, $5

What is the look that present day Brit embalmers are coached to create?

Whatever happened to consumer choice?!!

Source:  Lisa Carlson

DADBA

18 January 2011
Charles
9 Comments
Categories: bereavement, Books, funeral, Grief

There’s a nicely written piece over at Obit magazine, a review of a new book, The Truth About Grief: The Myth of Its Five Stages and the New Science of Loss (Simon & Schuster), by Ruth Davis Konigsberg. It’s probably worth reading.

It’s a demolition job on certain schools of bereavement counselling — those informed by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’s On Death and Dying. I don’t know how prevalent it is in the UK now, the orthodoxy that bereaved people must, under the supervision of a well-meaning person who’s been on a course, be taken on a journey through the Famous Five Stages — possibly stage by stage to a strict timetable. Denial. Anger. Depression. Bargaining. Acceptance.

With acceptance, of course, comes closure, as the bereaved person finally ejects the dead person, wiggles her tail and swims happily away to join all the other carefree fishes. Something like that. (How I wish we could put WTF in tiny caps after a word, as we put TM after a brand name. Closure WTF)

If it misses the point bigtime, why should we be surprised? Kubler Ross was writing about the emotions a dying person might go through, not a bereaved one. And I don’t remember her prescribing the full five in the right order.

“When 233 people were interviewed [by Yale University researchers] between one to 24 months after the death of a spouse, most respondents accepted the death of a loved one from the very beginning.” I seem to recall that studies of those bereaved by the 911 attacks revealed that counselling had prolonged the grief of many of those unlucky enough to receive it; those who had none did best.

While I was researching my book I spoke to someone at Cruse who fielded this question: Have you done any research to discover whether a good funeral can be transformative of grief? (Ans: We’ve never thought of that.)

I am sure there are good things going on in the bereavement sector and I hope someone will tell us what they are. Counsellors take a bit of a bashing from sceptics (until they themselves need counselling).

Poem

18 January 2011
Charles
2 Comments
Categories: Art and death

Memoir


It has been

absolutely


fascinating

being me.


A unique

privilege.


Now my

whole life


lies ahead

of you.


No thanks

at all are


called for,

I assure you.


The pleasure

is all mine.


Dennis O’Driscoll

Memorialisation option

17 January 2011
Charles
6 Comments
Categories: memorialisation, open-air cremation

Edward John Trelawny’s Records of Shelley, Byron, and the Author is, according to blogger Pykk:

a gossipy, wayward, autobiographical book by a moustach’d Romantic who tracked down both poets in 1822 and stayed with them for a while by the Mediterranean. He was still there when Shelley died, and alert enough to rescue the poet’s unburnt heart from his funeral pyre. The cremation, though romantic on paper, was not a romantic gesture; the body had to be carried from the shoreline where it was found to Rome for burial, and the authorities, fearing infectious disease, weren’t going to let them travel through the countryside with an intact corpse.


“In snatching this relic from the fiery furnace,” Trelawny writes, “my hand was severely burnt; and had anyone seen me do the act I should have been put into quarantine.” The heart was passed on to Mary Shelley, who wrapped it in a copy of her husband’s Adonaïs and deposited it in a box on her desk.

[Source]