Archive: 2011

Angelina Jolie a funeral director?

28 November 2011
Charles
No comments
Categories: funeral directors

 

Sometimes you have a tantalising glimpse of what might have been. If things had turned out differently, the path less travelled chosen, Angelina Jolie could have been a Funeral Director.

In an interview recently, the actor said that:

It sounds like this very strange, eccentric, dark thing to do but in fact I lost my grandfather and was very upset with his funeral. How somebody passes and how family deals with this passing and what death is should be addressed in a different way. If this whole acting thing didn’t work out that was going to be my path.”

Would Brad have been a bearer? We can only wonder.

The full article is here.

Burning news

27 November 2011
Charles
No comments
Categories: cremation, crematoria, resomation

Two interesting crematorium stories for you.

The Sydney Morning Herald, in a story colourfully titled Crematoriums add corpse power to electricity grid, reports that Durham (Eng) crematorium is planning to “use the heat generated during cremation to provide enough electricity to power 1500 televisions. A third burner is to be used to heat the site’s chapel and offices.” How the Grid sorts exclusive use for tellies is not described. But it’s an eminently pragmatic re-use of energy and we can only hope the commonsensical, channel-hopping folk of Durham go with it. Intriguing, isn’t it, how cremation is closing the gap on its greener competitors, Resomation and Promession?

Meanwhile, in the Midlands, there’s a naming tussle going on concerning the new crem being built midway between Stourport and Kidderminster. Wyre Forest District Council wants to call it Wyre Forest crematorium but, in a heartwringing plea, the burghers of Stourport have begged for it to be named after their town. Civic pride is involved, and the izzat of Stourport. Councillor Gary Talbot has issued this (rather foot-stamping?) entreaty: “It is in Stourport so I think it should be named after Stourport. The town deserves more recognition and respect. We get hit time and time again. If it was in Kidderminster, I don’t think it would be named after Wyre Forest.”

We had no idea that civic pride involves having a facility for incinerating the dead named after you. 

Source 1  Source 2

Taha Muhammed Ali

26 November 2011
Charles
No comments
Categories: Poetry, something for the weekend

In October a great Palestininian poet died. Taha Muhammed Ali was self taught and, all his life, earned his living as a shopkeeper in Nazareth. He was witness all of the agonies and upheavals of the time – but but when he thought of his own death dreamt only of sleep and tea. Here’s the poem he wrote:

Tea and Sleep

If, over this world, there’s a ruler
who holds in his hand bestowal and seizure,
at whose command seeds are sewn,
as with his will the harvest ripens,
I turn in prayer, asking him
to decree for the hour of my demise,
when my days draw to an end,
that I’ll be sitting and taking a sip
of weak tea with a little sugar
from my favorite glass
in the gentlest shade of the late afternoon
during the summer.
And if not tea and afternoon,
then let it be the hour
of my sweet sleep just after dawn.

*

And may my compensation be —
if in fact I see compensation —
I who during my time in this world
didn’t split open an ant’s belly,
and never deprived an orphan of money,
didn’t cheat on measures of oil
or violate a swallow’s veil;
who always lit a lamp
at the shrine of our lord, Shihab a-Din,
on Friday evenings,
and never sought to beat my friends
or neighbors at games,
or even those I simply knew;
I who stole neither wheat nor grain
and did not pilfer tools
would ask —
that now, for me, it be ordained
that once a month,
or every other,
I be allowed to see
the one my vision has been denied —
since that day I parted
from her when we were young.

*

But as for the pleasures of the world to come,
all I’ll ask
of them will be —
the bliss of sleep, and tea.

If you’re minded you can hear him read it here. The arabic version is first (worth it just for the sounds and rhythms) and then the translation.

US Funerals Online Seeing a Huge Increase in the Number of People Looking to Compare Funeral Prices

25 November 2011
Charles
12 Comments
Categories: funeral cost, funeral directors

Posted by Charles

Are there, we wonder, any lessons British undertakers can learn from this article on PRWeb:

Many funeral homes today have their own websites, but most of these seem to have forgotten to include information about the one thing that is on most people’s mind. How much does a funeral cost? There is no other industry that hides their prices in the way the funeral industry does. Research conducted by US Funerals Online revealed that over 80% of funeral home web sites do not disclose actual costs.

Nicholas Ille, owner and founder of US Funerals Online, said, “Gone are the days when families would just order the services from a funeral home, without even inquiring about the costs.”

Baby boomers are becoming increasingly interested in doing things their own way, which can also be driven financially. Why have expensive funerals when the money would be better being left to our children? As people live longer their senior years can now be one expense after the next, care homes, nursing homes and hospices all come at a hefty price, and then comes a final bill that needs to be paid.

Over the past 18 months, US Funerals Online has been working closely with local family-owned and operated funeral homes across the U.S offering a low cost funeral option. “We believe that every family in America should be able to locate a low cost funeral provider, if that is what they choose” says Nicholas. The US Funerals Online web site lists all funeral homes by city/state and clearly identifies the low cost providers, including their price. By including all funeral homes in our directory, this makes comparing costs between different funeral homes, only a phone call away.

Could something like this happen in the UK? Why not?

Here at the GFG we don’t obsess about price, we obsess about service. And transparency. British undertakers’ websites are, many of them, as dire as it gets when describing their service offer, far far worse than any other commercial sector. They are amateurish and subliterate. They rarely talk to you, the reader, they talk about us and about ancestor Albert, founder of our barnacle-encrusted undertaking dynasty — here he is conducting a funeral in 1921 (cue hazy b&w photo of bow-legged man leading a bloated Austin down a high street). Dammit, WHAT CAN YOU DO FOR ME NOW??

When these undertakers do talk about their clients they talk about them as if they had nothing in common with the punter reading the website: “We recognise that our customers are individuals and each will have their own ways of coping with bereavement.” Tcha! Where’s the human being behind that? Oh, there he is in a Gilbert and Sullivan top hat with his big black cars fanned out behind him. HOW MUCH DO YOU CHARGE?!??

All undertakers know that more and more people are shopping around.

Those undertakers who are upfront about their prices are doing very well.  

As are those who come across as human beings like us. Hint: people do business with people. 

Undertakers: go figure.

Funerals-Online here.

Where do you stand on funeral pyres?

24 November 2011
Charles
11 Comments
Categories: funeral pyres, open-air cremation

The Natural Death Centre, veteran pioneer of the better, greener funerals movement, passionately and vocally campaigns for open-air cremation on sustainably sourced wood pyres. If you want to find out why, be patient, I’ll give you the link in a minute.

Where do you stand on funeral pyres? Do you embrace them or would you stamp them out? 

The NDC would like to know. You can tell them with one easy click of your mouse by doing the online poll on their website. Hang on!

The GFG, of course, expresses no view on this matter. We like to represent all of the people all of the time.

If you want to register a no, close your eyes now.

If you want to register a yes, go to the foot of this page here.

Police arrest dead man at his own funeral

23 November 2011
Charles
6 Comments
Categories: Uncategorised

There’s a lovely story in today’s Mail about the funeral of a runaway solicitor, Andrew Paterson, who died from a heart attack on the beach at (nice way to) Goa.

Paterson was on the run from the old bill. Had been since 1987 when the long arm almost caught up with him in the matter of a bit of dodgy dealing.

Once abroad, Paterson changed his name to Mark Attwood and made a flagrant fortune building holiday resorts in exotic places. He married three times, fathered six children and was loved by all who knew him.

His last wish was to be buried in the churchyard of his tiny home village of Begelly in Wales. So his wife (#3) brought him home and all went to plan until… the coppers rocked up. Finally they had their man! They let the funeral go ahead, but intervened before he could be buried. They took Mr Paterson away for fingerprinting, for, in their own words, ‘Andrew Paterson failed to attend Guildford Crown Court on October 13 in 1987 to answer conspiracy to defraud charges and a warrant is still outstanding.’ Having made sure they’d got their man, albeit posthumously, they let the burial go ahead.

He must have been a hell of a good guy. His funeral was attended by every one of his six children and each of his three wives.

Full story here.

For no good reason I recall this Tommy Copper joke: The police arrested two kids yesterday. One was drinking battery acid, the other was eating fireworks. They charged one and let the other off. 

Cremains of the day

23 November 2011
Charles
5 Comments
Categories: ashes

We’ve always liked Daisy coffins. They’re a quality product and use a range of lovely looking, renewable materials: water hyacinth, banana leaf, wicker — imported, of course. The people at Daisy are nice, too. 

Daisy don’t just make nice coffins, they also thoroughly understand design. They present themselves beautifully. They use an excellent graphic designer; their ads would look great in any glossy lifestyle magazine. And it’s all a bit wasted on their target audience, funeral directors, who are, of course, much more interested in things like price and whether they leak and creak. Funeral directors have a thing about creaky coffins. 

Daisy don’t sell direct to the public. A great pity; they’d shift a few. 

But they have just started selling urns direct to folk like us. We liked the look of them and asked us to send us one. They did — with a return postage sticker. We took it out to lunch to test reactions. Nobody reckoned it was an ashes container; one person thought it was a box of chocolates — encouraging for anyone wanting to transport ashes in a container which doesn’t shout Dead Man’s Dust at innocent bystanders. 

The urn pictured above is from their leaf range. They do them in a variety of shapes and colours. They are made of cardboard decorated with dried leaves. They’re biodegradable, of course, if you want to bury — and reusable as a memory box, or whatever, if you want to scatter. At £35 they are nicely priced. 

Check out the Daisy Memories website. They do other urns in all sorts of materials. Click here. 

Note to cynics: no, they’re not paying us a penny to say this. We say what we like.  

Stoned

22 November 2011
Charles
4 Comments
Categories: Co-operative Funeralcare

The dolts at The Co-operative Funeralcare have quarried another groundbreaking wheeze. Undistracted by the implosion of Thomas Cook, with which Co-op Travel ill-advisedly merged earlier this year, the blue-skies thinkers at Effcare have cooked up a… wait for it… headstone plan (which they inflatedly call a memorial masonry plan). 

Yes, now you can buy tomorrow’s gravestone at today’s prices. More than that, you can compose your own epitaph and choose the style in which the lettering will be gritblasted by an indifferent machine. 

This is a  thoughtful thing to do. When we die the cognitive powers of our nearest and dearest will, as you know, be paralysed by grief or summick and they’ll find it impossible to express a preference for any hideous shade of imported Chinese or Indian granite let alone be able to come up with something to say on it. In the words of The Co-operative,  “The plan ensures family members are not left with the emotional and financial burden of making these decisions at a very difficult time.”

Asked why the service thought people would want to write their own epitaphs rather than leave it to their loved ones, a spokeswoman said people were increasingly wanting to make personal additions to their own funerals.

She said: “The feedback we are getting is that people want more specific things and they want it to be a celebration of their life. We are getting people to take that one step further … making it more personal and more about you.”

So there you have it. Left to our descendants, our epitaphs will lack both a personal and a celebratory touch.

The thinking is obviously flawed and illogical. Taken with pre-need  plans, this gravestone plan is just another way of shutting out the bereaved from creating fitting memorial events for their dead.

A word to the dying. Say what you’d like, write them a cheque, then butt out; you’ll be dead. This does not apply if there will be nobody close to you looking after things when you’re gone. 

Will anyone, we wonder, explain to those who take out one of these prescriptive plans that the wishes of the living are not legally enforceable after they’re dead? What will the Co-op be saying to people who say ‘We don’t like it; we want something else’? 

Dismal press release here. 

Marvellous!

22 November 2011
Charles
4 Comments
Categories: funeral directors

Muriel Grimmett, Coventry’s first female funeral director, is still going strong at the grand old age of 80. She reckons to keep going for as long as her faculties will allow.

She headed up Grimmett and Timms until 1996, when the firm was sold. She now works with the independent firm AJ Lloyd (recommended by the GFG), where proprietor Darren Lloyd has told us that it’s Muriel’s formidable principles, standards and example which most inform ethos and practice. 

An Instinct for Kindness

21 November 2011
Charles
1 Comment
Categories: Assisted suicide, self-deliverance

From the review in the Guardian:

Last year Chris Larner took his ex-wife Allyson – with whom he had remained good friends – to the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland where she ended her life. It was a life that had become unbearable because of the constant pain, indignities and limits imposed upon her by multiple sclerosis, a condition she had lived with for more than 25 years. Allyson decided that enough was enough.

It is its total lack of sentimentality that makes it so moving, and half the audience is in pieces long before the end. That, and because the redoubtable Allyson is so fully present in the show. Planning her own funeral, she declares: “I don’t want any stiff upper lip. I want weeping and wailing and inconsolable.” This was not a woman to go gently into that good night, and this is a show that reminds us that how we die is as important as how we live.