Just over three-quarters of public health funerals conducted in 2010/11 were for men.
Stat generated by the Chartered Institute of Environmental Health. More here.
Spare a thought this morning for Lynda Hannah, owner of Living Legacies, a green funeral company in New Zealand with an alternative, less than rigidly formal approach to funerals. Ms Hannah likes to empower families to play their part, do what they can, take ownership. There are funeral directors of her ilk in the UK.
Perhaps, after reading about what happened to Ms Hannah, you will feel impelled to join the chorus of condemnation. Even New Zealand’s environment minister has lent his voice. Here are some facts.
Russ Travis, 21, was out speeding with his friend David Alan Te Maari when the car crashed and Mr Travis was killed. David Alan Te Maari, the driver, is now doing 6 years and 2 months for manslaughter.
Travis’s mother, Dee Stansbury, engaged Living Legacies to be her funeral director. Lynda Hannah brought Travis’s body home in her station wagon where it was placed on a table until the coffin arrived. Ms Hannah dissuaded the family from having the body embalmed. A lot of people wanted to see the body. The room temperature rose too high. There was leakage, which Ms Hannah had warned the family might happen. When the time came to take the body to the funeral, the station wagon’s cam belt was screechy. Mr Travis’s family were furious and refused to pay.
In the aftermath, Ms Hannah observed: “It is common for grieving people to express misguided anger towards a third party because placing it where it rightfully belongs is just too painful.” She may have a point. She also observed that the family would have been better off with a mainstream funeral director.
Here at the GFG we have enough contacts in New Zealand to have been able to establish that Lynda Hannah has ten years’ worth of satisfied customers to her name and is reckoned to be a good person if, perhaps, a tad scatty. We are also aware of good ‘alternative’ funeral directors in the UK who have attracted a similar response from families who ought to have engaged a more conservative, if more expensive, undertaker.
We sent Lynda Hannah an email of support. She tells us that, though her ordeal has been hugely stressful, she has been very consoled by the upsurge of support support she is receiving from those who know her.
Read the newspaper story here. Check out Lynda Hannah’s website here.
In parts of Africa it is said that people experience two deaths: one when their body dies, and the other when the last person who knew them dies. Cemeteries are living testimony to that.
Source — a nice piece about cemeteries
“Thank you so much for coming. Unlike the rest of you, I don’t have to get up in the morning.”
Rob Buckman, doctor author, actor, comedian and broadcaster, who died last October after a career which was devoted to improving the way medics counsel the terminally ill. He left instructions for this message to be played at his funeral.
A fancy gaff? No, a tomb. The tomb of Maharajah Ranjit Singh, aka The Lion of the Punjab.
His ashes repose in the middle, on the spot where he was cremated, in a marble urn shaped like a lotus.
There are eleven other urns, those of his four wives and seven other women who threw themselves on his funeral pyre.
In Lucknow, India, Rajan Yadav is standing for Assembly elections on a manifesto of rooting out corruption.
He wants to consign corruption to the funeral pyre, he says, and he is underlining this by conducting his campaign from a cremation ground. To make the symbolism complete, he has nicknamed himself Arthi Baba, the name given to the bamboo stretcher used to carry a corpse to the pyre.
He says:
“I am a misfit in the present system as I am a honest person. In today’s world, an honest person cannot survive … Corruption, adulteration, dishonesty, bribe are common these days…if you want to cleanse the system, they must be killed….democracy cannot survive in such a situation… I tell the people that ultimately they have to come to the cremation ground….so vote for me for salvation and cleanse the system…that is why I have opened my election office at Rajghat on the banks of the Rapti river, where bodies are burnt.”
Full story here.
We can speculate why it is that, in so-called advanced societies, the conventional funeral as an event is something dead people are increasingly bypassing. The point is that it’s happening, and demand for direct cremation (deathbed to incinerator) is growing. It is growing especially among educated liberal thinkers, precisely the constituency which was the first to adopt cremation.
Direct cremation also makes very good sense to those who reckon cremation to be a very good way of preparing a body for a funeral. It may be extraordinary that we assign the identity of the person who’s died to a pile of pounded bone fragments, but we do. And having been so rendered, those bone fragments assume three very favourable properties that a dead body lacks: they are portable, durable and divisible. A family can hold their own funeral for ashes pretty much anywhere they like, whenever they like. No need for specialist help, no fancy cars, no hoopla. Once you’ve got your head around the notion, it can look very attractive.
For both these direct cremation groups, the no-funeralists and those espouse the ‘rite of secondary treatment,’ together with a third group, those who wish to hold their funeral in an alternative venue, cremation as we do it in the UK offers very poor value for money. Because, whether you like it or not, you pay both for the burning and also for rental of a ceremony space you’ve no need of. Even people using the slightly less expensive early-morning slots normally get 15 mins of ceremony space whether they want them or not.
Poor value for money may be irksome to the rich but it is disastrous for a fourth group: those who urgently need to work to a budget. Recent steep rises in the cremation fee, necessitated by the installation of new emissions abatement equipment, have made an already bad situation worse.
It doesn’t have to be like this. In the US you can ring a nice, proper man like Michael T Brown at Simplicity Memorial and he’ll arrange a direct cremation for you for $995 all in — around £660. Have a look at his website, he’s everything a funeral director ought to be – here. In the UK £660 probably wouldn’t cover the cremation, never mind the funeral director’s collection-packaging-delivery service.
Our British crems are, both, expensive ceremony spaces and inefficient incinerators of the dead. The case for uncoupling incineration equipment from crematoria is growing. An efficient, environmentally sensible incinerating plant is a standalone structure that services several crematoria and puts in a long shift.
It’s not going to happen overnight, is it? A ‘castrated’ crematorium becomes just another funeral venue. Our crems will fight to the death to retain their raison d’etre. We say that with respect to those who run our crematoria, many of whom are far more dedicated to the best interests of the bereaved than they are credited for.
There is a concession that crematoria might make now. A drop-off service and a cremation-only price. In terms of process there’s no need for bodies to be directly cremated, and those who have been funeral-ed elsewhere, to be carried into the chapel and placed on the catafalque. Take ’em round the back. To a seemly reception area — it doesn’t have to be very big, just decently appointed. Isn’t that a much better way of catering for those who have no need of, or cannot afford, the ceremony space?
In the east end of London, Quaker Social Action are working hard, with the help of some excellent volunteers and sympathetic funeral directors (let’s hear it for T Cribb and Sons), to enable people on low incomes to have affordable funerals. An affordable cremation fee would make a huge difference.
A drop-off service and a cremation-only fee. Simple, logical, obvious, fair. But for our crematoria the thin edge of the wedge, too — yes, there’s the rub.
There are so, so many vested interests standing in the way.
Quaker Social Action’s Down to Earth project here.
It was interesting to follow the unfolding debate amongst funeral directors and celebrants in response the blog post ‘C of E raises funeral fee to £160’ here.
If you are one or the other, have you paused to wonder what on Earth any consumer would have made of it?
Yes, look at it from that point of view.
What is the impact of this description of a celebrant’s fee: “Just a quick slab of cash into the back pocket”?
What is the impact of: “Sadly I do not believe anyone I see taking funeral services is providing a good or fair service to the bereaved families I serve“?
What about the woman celebrant doing up to ten funerals a week when other celebrants say they wouldn’t dream of doing more than two? Is she a greedy guts just in it for the money? How many funerals is too many? How can those doing just two a week, and spending all that time, possibly make it financially worth their while? Why can’t they be paid what they’re worth?
The debate revealed that, far from adopting a collaborative, joined-up approach to the creation of what is, for the consumer, the most important part of the process, the funeral itself, funeral directors and celebrants (religious and secular) seem to come from different worlds, a proportion of each from Hell.
What does this say about the value of the funeral as an event?
Why do funeral directors not embed celebrants and pay them properly? This was one of the best, most constructive contributions to the debate.
What emerged from the exchanges was a deeply depressing spectacle of dysfunction and unpleasantness.
Go figure.
From time to time the cry goes up, sometimes from the public, sometimes from funeral directors themselves, that it’s time to regulate the funeral industry.
Here at the GFG we’re against it. We defend the principle that the dead belong to their own, not to a bunch of professionalised specialists. We’re open minded about most things, but on this one our minds are made up.
The perils of professionalisation are best exemplified in the United States, where ‘morticians’ must attend college and learn the mysteries of embalming by practising on indigents. In addition to acquiring a sense of themselves quite out of proportion to the work they do, they also work hard together to stifle consumer rights and keep prices high. Every state has its own funeral board. The example of Oklahoma is typically instructive:
The mission of the Oklahoma Funeral Board is to act in the public interest, for the public protection and advancement of the profession within the police powers vested in the Board by the Legislature of the State of Oklahoma, entirely without appropriated funds. The Board shall serve an informational resource on funeral service to the general public and members of the funeral profession.
Lovely, you think, til you read the next sentence:
The Board consists of seven members appointed by the Governor. Five of the members must be actively engaged in funeral directing and embalming in this state for not less than seven consecutive years immediately prior to appointment. Two members of the Board are chosen from the general public, one of which shall be a person licensed and actively engaged in the health care field.
Yup, five out of the seven people guarding the flock are wolves.
Here in the UK the only similar example of disproportionate industry representation is the All Party Parliamentary Group for funerals and bereavement. This is essentially a group funded by the NAFD which lobbies parliament on behalf of the industry. We have made two requests to Lorely Burt MP, the chair, for consumer representation on the APPG. On the last occasion (30.11.2011) she replied: That is very remiss of me: will chase and come back asap. Thank you for reminding me. We’re still waiting. We note that, in tackling the Social Fund Funeral Payment mess, the APPG’s work is likely to benefit consumers.
In Minnesota an enterprising funeral director, Verlin Stoll, wants to roll out funerals costing around one third of what most Minnesotans pay an old school funeral home. Cut-price funerals is also a live issue just now in the UK, of course, where recessionary pressures, an oversupply of undertakers, a falling death rate and a growing disillusionment with the emotional and spiritual value of a funeral have sparked a ‘race to the bottom’ — not an open and raging price war, but a price war all the same. Trad funeral directors deplore this. They even write to some funeral homes who publish price comparisons warning them darkly in a form of legalese not to do so. Consumers and fair-priced funeral homes are the beneficiaries.
Back to the good Mr Stoll. He wants to open a second funeral home but, to do so, he must meet the state’s legal requirement to fit it out with an embalming facility at a cost of around $30,000. He has no intention of using it — he’s already got one. So the Institute for Justice is going to fight his case and seek to get the regulation overturned. The exec director of the Minnesota Funeral Directors Association thinks that this “tears away the regulatory structure we’ve put in place to protect consumers.”
Did he say that with a straight face?
On its website, the MFDA commits itself to:
♦ Advancing the value of funeral service consistent with the changing needs of society
♦ Advocacy on behalf of consumers and members
♦ Visionary leadership – trust and confidence in staff and volunteer leadership
♦ Promotion of integrity; honest and ethical behavior within the funeral industry
♦ Collaboration with others in the interest of consumers and members
♦ Recognize the importance of education as a vehicle to enhance both public service and public image
To those who campaign for regulation in the UK we say: better the mess we’re in.
Last year the Institute for Justice defended the right of Benedictine monks in Louisiana to sell caskets direct to the public. The YouTube clip below may amuse and infuriate you.
More on the Minnesota nonsense here. More of the Oklahoma Funeral Board here. More about the APPG here.
There will be exactly two schools of thought about this poem:
The Funeral Director
by Jerry J. Brown
Listens, hears and understands…
Communicates softly, a tear, a touch, a smile…
Senses the shock and knows the numbness of disbelief and denial…
Understands the intimacy of death, and quietly
responds to each mood and moment…
Knows the many faces of grief and helps
family members understand them…
Walks with families through the corridors of
confusion and despair onto the pathway of
acceptance and serenity…
And through education, experience and
personal compassion, is the most
dedicated to helping people during
this time of pain and sorrow.
Thus, with gentle strength and deep sensitivity
the Funeral Director serves our society.
