September 2012 – Page 7 – The Good Funeral Guide

Don’t miss Gail’s 30 Day Challenge

4 September 2012

Charles

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Categories: funeral customs, music, Poetry

I can’t keep up these days, dammit. To my great grief I missed the start of one of the great events of the year, Gail Rubin’s annual 30 Day Challenge. She attends 30 funerals in 30 days, and each day writes each one up in great detail in a values-neutral narrative. Goodness knows where she’s got to.

Apart from being feats in their own right, Gail’s marathons offer very interesting insights into funeral customs, readings, music, etc in the US. In years to come sociologists will pore. But there’s no need to wait til then.

Gail posts daily. Play catch-up now.

Whither consecrated woodland burial sites?

4 September 2012

Charles

11 Comments

Categories: natural burial, Natural Death Centre

Posted by Richard Rawlinson

Back in 2001, The Telegraph ran a story about the Church of England opening its first woodland burial site, Arbory Trust, a consecrated 40-acre plot in Cambridgeshire with trees and flowers replacing gravestones.

‘Other sites cater for pagans and ‘New Age’ followers and do not offer a Christian burial,’ claimed the newspaper in its indomitable way, adding. ‘Unlike other woodland sites, the trust does not plant trees on top of coffins because of the implication, which is contrary to Christian teaching, that people are reincarnated in the tree.’

Two years later, The Telegraph revisited the subject, this time stating ‘Churches across Britain are to set up woodland burial sites because many of their existing graveyards and cemeteries are full’.

It quoted the Rt Rev Anthony Russell, then the Bishop of Ely, saying he believed that such burials would prove popular. ‘The woodland burial sites not only provide extra consecrated space, they also meet the wishes of people who want to be buried in an environmentally friendly setting which is close to nature,’ he said.

Almost a decade later, I searched the list of UK natural burial grounds on the website of the Natural Death Centre, and found just two consecrated sites: the aforementioned Arbory Trust and Bedfordshire’s St Albans Woodland Burial Ground, consecrated by the Diocese of St Albans.

Does anyone here know if there are more consecrated sites not registered with the NDC or if the CofE’s bid to unburden graveyards has not yet taken off—beyond people choosing cremation?

Meanwhile, traditional cemeteries from Clitheroe Cemetery in Lancashire to London’s New Southgate Cemetery have established wooded areas for people who wish to have more natural surroundings. Here.

Joy of Death Convention – 7-9 September

4 September 2012

Charles

5 Comments

Categories: Joy of Death

It’s a fantastic lineup of brilliant speakers and a great clan gathering — and it’s not too late to buy a ticket!

Saturday 8 September

All the talks will be in the Lower Gardens Suite of the Whitehall Hotel, unless otherwise stated.

9.30am – 10.00 – Reception at the Whitehall Hotel (teas and coffees)

10.00 Barbara Chalmers

Barbara Chalmers trained as an independent celebrant with Dead Good Guides. She launched the website Final Fling in 2012. It offers advice on everything from planning a funeral to writing a will and even allows users to upload videos for loved ones and leave them in virtual safe deposit boxes.

She says: “All of my adult life, I’ve been disappointed by the drab, dreary, impersonal funerals that we put with up with as an end of life ritual. I believe we need new rituals and expressions to mark key milestones in life.”

10.45 Jane Morrell and Simon Smith

Jane Morrell and Simon Smith of green fuse contemporary funerals, are funeral directors and celebrants, trainers of funeral celebrant and funeral directors, and authors of We Need To Talk About The Funeral. Their talk is titled: Is This The Future Of British Funerals?

The average age of the person who died for whom green fuse arranges funerals is just 64. This gives Jane and Simon a unique view of the way the next generation want funerals to be. They discuss the way funerals are changing, the choices people are making and the new challenges facing funeral directors and celebrants.

11.30 Break

11.30 Death Café with Jon Underwood (The Waiting Room, Arlington Hotel

Jon Underwood started offering Death Cafés in the UK in September 2011, after hearing of Bernard Crettaz’ Cafe Mortels in Switzerland. To date over 180 people have attended these convivial conversations about death over tea and cake. Jon has written a guide to running your own Death Café which has resulted in them being taken up in a range of places including the US.

A death café is a chance to share your thoughts about mortality over tea and cakes. You can talk about your fears and experiences in a supportive environment, (since numbers are limited, please pre-book a place by emailing Jon Underwood – underwoodjon@gmail.com).

11.45 Rupert and Claire Callender

Rupert and Claire Callender have been at the forefront of the alternative funeral movement since their decision to set up as undertakers and celebrants 12 years ago.

Their talk is about their support for the campaign to legalise outdoor funeral pyres, something they have dubbed natural cremation. Funeral pyres actually play a large part in European cultural history. Is it time for them to return?

12.30 Lunch

1.30 Wendii Miller

Wendii Miller, a Cambridge graduate, who carried out her own DIY burial for her 98-year-old mother Doris, even digging the grave after collecting her corpse from Grimsby Hospital mortuary and driving her mother’s remains back to a burial site outside Harrogate. She will be showing the video she made of the experience.

2.10 Kristie West

Kristie West is a grief specialist. She helps adults who have had a bereavement in their lives, specialising in parent loss. Kristie positively changes their experience of losing someone they love, in a matter of hours, so they can talk about, remember, and love them without it hurting anymore.

2.45 Dominic Druce

Dominic Druce grew up in Oxfordshire in an Anglo-French family where being babysat invariably involved a tour of the family graves. From this grew his passion for gravehunting and hearing great stories. Otherwise he is a freelance researcher and translator, who sometimes sells his paintings. Recently moved from France, he now lives in Hove.

3.00 Walk around St Peter’s Cemetery, Bournemouth, BH1 2EE with John Walker (assemble outside main entrance). Cost £2 if you have not booked onto the conference.

3.30 Pam Trott

Pam is an independent celebrant and is passionate about helping people to make their own choices in life and death. Using her experiences of past life regression taking the soul from birth to death and beyond, ultimately teaching people how to die without fear.

3.30 Ghost Tour of Bournemouth Town Hall, Bourne Avenue with Michael Stead (assemble outside main entrance, unfortunately we will not get inside access)

4.00 Death Café (The Waiting Room, Arlington Hotel) if possible, please pre-book a place by emailing Jon Underwood – underwoodjon@gmail.com)

4.30 Language! Timothy perform in the Arlington Arts Café.

The Chairman & Mrs P will entertain you with their catchy but morbid tracks.

Sunday 9 September

Obituary Lunch

12.30 for 1.00pm – Sunday lunch with David Twiston Davies, former Chief Obituary writer for the Daily Telegraph at Days Hotel (formerly the Marsham Court Hotel), 3 Russel-Cotes Road, Eastcliff, Bournemouth, BH1 3AB.

(Ticket price £15 includes tea or coffee and a light buffet)

“Let us deprive death of its strangeness; let us frequent it; let us get used to it. “

Montaigne

It’s all hotting up for the funeral Oscars

4 September 2012

Charles

13 Comments

Categories: Uncategorised

Apologies from the editorial team here at the GFG-Batesville Tower for the recent blog dribble if you’re one of those who enjoy the customary daily torrent. We have been traversing the country with the TV crew who are making a half-hour documentary about the upcoming funeral Oscars ceremony in Bournemouth this Friday. It’s not too late to book tickets and accommodation for this star-studded event. Go to the Joy of Death website.

We’re still not allowed to say the name of the TV channel concerned, I think. But we can tell you that it’s a biggie, and the documentary will go out in a prime time slot. It’s going to be a lovely thing. The crew have been knocked out by the brilliance and loveliness of everyone order cialis generic they have met.

Already, we know that this is going to be a great event, nothing less — huge fun in its own right, a great gathering of the brightest and best, a vast amount of happy nattering and, underlying it all, our mission: to sing the praises of the unsung heroes of Funeralworld.

There’s been some media interest. Most notably, on Friday BBC R4 are intending to record a ‘package’ for the Saturday morning Today programme. Oh, and the Sun is keen to come and talk to you.

Yes, but what-do-I-wear-what-do-I-wear, I hear you wail. We have now received guidance from the TV people. The dress code is Dress to Impress. Anything goes so long as it’s eyecatching.

See you there!

So silly to take sides

4 September 2012

Charles

8 Comments

Categories: DIY funeral, funeral customs, funeral directors, green funeral, home funerals, Rights of the bereaved

A few weeks ago I bumped into a funeral director I like and admire. He was bursting with something he had just learned and needed to share: Ken West is not bonkers, official. He’d met Ken at some do or other and had revelled in a feast of reason and a flow of soul with the great man.

The news did not come as a bombshell. Ken’s thinking runs with all the clarity of Pennine springwater, as all who know him will attest. No ranter he. Very nice man, to boot.

Whence could such a misconception have sprung? From his long association with the Natural Death Centre? Did – does – the NDC still evoke antipathy in undertakerly circles? In spite of their diplomatic efforts to heal rifts and work collaboratively with the ‘mainstream’? In spite of the success of the natural burial movement, one of Britain’s most successful cultural exports in the last fifty years? Are they still reckoned chattering class undertaker-bashers?

I don’t know. You tell us.

What we do know for sure is that the deathcare industry tends to be chary of scrutiny, as the recent exposé of Co-operative Funeralcare reminds us. In the face of seeming adversity, the trade/profession circles the wagons, hunkers down and gets snarly.

It’s not an easy mindset to analyse. You’ll be able to give us some pointers. Many undertakers have, in addition to justifiable pride in their work, an acute sense of amour propre. They can be prey to feelings of self-importance and we-know-best. They can be reflexively conservative. They are often happier dealing with things rather than ideas. In a word, prickly. Many, not all.

It’s a shame. It’s a shame when perfectly decent people write off as a hostile force other perfectly decent people who feel they have important or interesting things to say. On a personal level, it is unjust, and that’s the point of this piece.

Over in the US, where undertakers tend to suffer from the same abiding vices as so many of our own, a man called Todd Van Beck writes about his native funeral industry. He calls himself a ‘funeral educator, consultant and historian’. He’s very much an insider.

In appraising the home funeral movement, so buoyant over there, he concludes that the mainstream industry ought to consider commodifying this nonaligned and insubordinate practice by offering an “old fashioned home funerals package”. In doing so, the industry can outflank and marginalise those idealistic pioneers who developed home funerals and, at the same time, make some money out of a custom which is founded in self-help and altruism.

In arguing his case, Mr Van Beck makes no attempt to hide his disdain for the home funeral movement. He also derides one of its pioneers, Holly Stevens:

I just finished reading a horribly boring article regarding home funerals published by Ms. Holly Stevens (a self-proclaimed funeral consumer advocate).

The article rehashed the negative feelings concerning funeral undertakers, like Lisa Carlson has done for years (and has seemingly made a living doing so).

One new twist Ms. Steven’s took was referring to us funeral undertakers as “commercial morticians.”

I haven’t heard that one before. Snappy title though…“Commercial Mortician.”

The piece goes on in similar snarky vein.

Lisa Carlson is a doughty battler. She can look after herself. And she has the added advantage of being alive.

Holly Stevens is dead. She died just over a year ago of cancer. She was was a highly intelligent and humane Quaker beloved of all who knew her. Perhaps her most notable attribute was her gentleness. I never knew her, but I was/am a Facebook friend. You can probably find her memorial page there. Holly was one of the authors of Undertaken With Love: A Home Funeral Guide for Congregations and Communities, which you can download free.

Let’s try to agree about two things.

First, there is no such thing as an alternative funeral and no such person as an alternative funeral director. Our dead belong to us, and so do their funerals. Everyone has the right to their own opinion and their own practice.

Second, debate is not merely useful, it’s vital. So is mutual respect. Digging trenches is silly.

In the words of Thomas Lynch, the eminent US undertaker: “Some want to be empowered, others to be served, others not to be bothered at all. Our job is to meet them where they are on this continuum and help where we can when we’re asked.”

I wish

3 September 2012

Charles

No comments

Categories: Poetry

I wish
I wish we’d had more time,
To talk about the life you lead, the things you saw, your thoughts left unsaid.
I wish we’d looked to our futures, yours and mine,
Shared paths, different lengths of time,
I should have followed where you led.
I wish I knew what really made you laugh,
From that place in your heart,
When the tears would start and track down your face,
Your shoulders would shake,
And you lost all semblance of grace.
I wish I didn’t know https://laparkan.com/buy-prednisone/ what made you cry,
The hurt in your eyes, in your voice,
Head forced down whilst you try,
Try and hold it together.
I wish you’d have let me help you more,
And I’d asked you for less,
Both of us like children,
The pain of asking as great as any from the mess,
We got ourselves into.
I wish I’d said “I love you” more than I did
But most of all,
I wish you were still here to listen to these words.

Lol Owen

What price eternity?

3 September 2012

Charles

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Categories: Attitudes to death, Death education

Following Michael Jarvis’s piece earlier today, I’m beginning to wonder whether death-denial isn’t more prevalent among the elderly than the young.

In the September Oldie magazine (strapline: ‘ticking the right boxes’) agony aunt Mavis Nicholson prints a couple of letters from readers:

Dear Mavis

Re your piece in the Summer issue on dying, I’m so glad I’m not the only one who thinks she is not destined for death! For no reason I can think of I’ve always had the feeling that I’m not going to die. I shouldn’t wonder if there isn’t a whole pack of us out there, suffering from this delusion. I wonder if it has a name? Perhaps we should coin one. I’ll be interested to know if you get more responses from people with this ‘complaint’.

Vivienne Rendall

Dear Mavis,

As usual, I looked at my Summer Oldie back to front, so started with you, a mere 81, not believing you’d ever die. I’m 86 and also quite unable to consider not being here any more. Like your Rob Woods, I believe part of us goes on.

But — let’s be realistic — the more likely answer is that our brains are just not programmed to comprehend nothingness, so we invent endless theories about what might happen in the afterlife: heaven, hell, reincarnation, whatever. I have now reduced my expectations from eternal life to aiming for 100, now no longer as rare as it used to be.

Helga Harman.

Immortality therapy might do the trick. A dose of Gulliver’s Travels for starters.

When he first lands in Luggnagg and beholds the Struldbrugs, Gulliver “cried out as in a rapture; happy nation where every child hath at least a chance for being immortal!”

Gulliver revises his opinion when he realises that “the question therefore was not whether a man would choose to be always in the prime of youth, attended with prosperity and health, but how he would pass an eternal life under all the usual disadvantages which old age brings along with it … The diseases they were subject to still continue without increasing or diminishing. In talking, they forget the common appellation of things and the names of persons, even those who are their nearest friends and relations.”

It gets worse.

Taboo or not taboo?

3 September 2012

Charles

6 Comments

Categories: Attitudes to death, Death education, Dress codes, funeral customs, medical interventions in dying, Natural Death Centre

Posted by Michael Jarvis, onetime Manager of the Natural Death Centre

For very many people in the UK ‘death’ is a subject left unmentioned. If you are reading this then you are part of a minority. A minority, furthermore, who would generally like to see more public openness regarding dying, death and funerals. We know the benefits: peace of mind from discussing one’s individual wishes, removing an unnecessary burden of decision-making from the bereaved, possible financial advantages from advance planning, and so on.

Death seems to be a taboo subject for many, but does the general reticence to mention death, let alone discuss it, make it so? We need to understand how it this has come to prominence. It wasn’t around in the time of our Victorian forebears despite their sensibilities in many areas (skirts on piano legs, for example). Rather, it was paraded with openness in art and literature and surrounded by a great deal of etiquette and ritual. Type ‘Jay’s of Regent St’ into a search engine to see details of a whole store devoted to mourning dress and accessories. So what happened in the last century to bring about such a seismic change?

First, war and a pandemic. The First World War brought death on such a massive scale that repatriation was not feasible and Victorian and Edwardian notions of mourning were unsustainable. The scale of loss of life was immediately surpassed as a result of a global ‘flu pandemic and in the aftermath ‘death’ as a subject began to be swept under the carpet.

Second, and there’s a degree of irony here, better living. In the 20’s and 30’s homes fit for heroes might have been a bit thin on the ground, but improvements in medicine and sanitation brought about a significant rise in life expectancy which had been less than 50 years for both men and women in 1900. Conversations http://www.mindanews.com/buy-cialis/ which began “We should talk about what happens when I die” would increasingly be answered by “Don’t be silly, you’ve got years ahead of you!”

Third, and perhaps most relevant, is the simple fact that death is now largely institutionalised. Death happened in Victorian homes; now the event is most likely to occur in a hospital, outside the home and away from friends and family. It is most likely too that they will not see the body which will be removed by undertakers. Undertakers themselves would prefer the use of the term ‘funeral directors’, another example of the dead being at a distance from the family.

Taboo? Perhaps on reflection it’s not so much that death is a forbidden topic as that for many people death happens to others, elsewhere, and is dealt with by someone else. And here’s the rub, denying the existence of death is unhealthy. Unless we can change that mindset we run the risk of creating psychological problems and we lose control: control of that which we wish for ourselves, that which will ease the pain of bereavement and even lessen the likelihood of family disputes and squabbles.

Put bluntly it is my view that we would all be the better if more people felt able to have conversations about death and its various implications. Projects such as the Good Funeral Guide and the Natural Death Centre have done and are doing sterling work but there’s a lot that individuals could do. Think of all the clubs and societies in your area – from the W.I. to Rotary via Probus, Lions, Mothers’ Union and countless others, the one thing they have in common is that from time to time they struggle to find speakers. Offer your services. Challenge them to put death on the agenda.

J’accuse!

2 September 2012

Charles

35 Comments

Categories: funeral directors

It was always going to be risky, this business of recommending funeral directors. We set out purposefully, hoping for the best with the best possible intentions, knowing that if you’re going to make anything in this world, you’re going to make mistakes. We’re optimists. It seemed, and still seems, to be a good thing to do, to show funeral shoppers the way to the people who’ll look after them best. Win-win.

Yes, it’s an important service. Because of their reluctance to say to their funeral director, “Now take me to your mortuary, I want to see that everything is in order,” funeral shoppers must, instead, blindly trust him/her to discharge what is, to them, a funeral director’s most important role: to be nice to their dead person. As we know, there can be many a slip twixt back and front. As independent consumer advocates, we are in the best possible position to offer the reassurance that consumers most desire.

But Funeralworld is another country; they do things differently there. Who (the hell) are we to sit behind our keyboards and opinionate? What do we know, dammit?! Well, by sheer hard work we have learned. When we’ve boobed — and we have — we have put our hands up quick as a flash. We’ve done it the hard way. It’s been a slog at our own expense. And, yes, we’ve won precious credibility.

So it came as a blow last week to undergo a credibility-threatening event which, coincidentally, came at a time when, having suspended our listing in order to radically remodel it in sustainable form, we are about to relaunch it. We know that our listing is 98% good. We need to aim for 100% minimum and roll it out nationwide. We can do it. Stand by for an announcement.

The credibility-threatening event was the arrival of a letter here at GFG HQ. Here’s what it said:

Dear Mr Cowling

I see you recommend __________ of __________! (Name and place deleted.)

Have you visited his premises? I have, and was appalled. Only one room divided by a curtain to make a reception and a chapel … I also asked where he kept his bodies and was told in his mortuary. I could not see where his mortuary was so have asked around and been told he does not have one. Also he has no cold storage and in hot weather advises people that a relative is not suitable for visiting when really he has not collected the body from the hospital because he has nowhere to keep it! After leaving I also noticed he has only one door into the premises and no parking. I did not like the idea of my dad being hurried across the road on a stretcher and left in the front room so I went somewhere else. I may have paid more but at least I know my dad was cared for in proper surroundings.

I follow your blog and you seem to be a very nice man, perhaps you are too nice and have had the wool pulled over your eyes by someone who talks the talk but doesn’t walk the walk.

I wonder how you follow up your recommendations, do you make spot checks, do you phone around pretending to be a customer.

The letter is signed, but there is no address, postcode or any other contact details.

The subject of the letter is a funeral director in whom we placed an absolute trust. He was trained to the highest standards by the doyenne of tutors and seemed to us to be born to be an undertaker. He recently moved to new premises which are, by his own admission, small. We trusted that they were big enough. Above all, we trusted that he would have made adequate provision for the care of his dead and, of course, installed a fridge. We hadn’t yet got around to re-visiting him.

What could have happened? He’d gone mad? He was never anything but a charming blagger? He had money problems? We all know well enough how the most unlikely people can go off the rails.

It was time for a spot check.

Having no address for my correspondent and, therefore, no assurance that she is who she says she is, but knowing that she follows the blog, I publish my reply here.

Dear _______

Thank you for your letter (undated) drawing our attention to what you allege are grave shortcomings in the premises and mortuary equipment of the funeral director you named.

I paid him a visit on Friday and asked to be shown his mortuary/embalming suite. There I found a perfectly adequate fridge. Every tray had on it a duvet which is used to cover each occupant. Every tray had its own pillow, and on each pillow lay an artificial rose (of rather good quality). The mortuary was entirely clean and odour-free.

The premises are, as you say, small. While I was there I spoke to a person who had come to visit her dead relative — not for the first time. She was perfectly happy with both the premises and the service she was receiving. Indeed, she could not have expressed higher satisfaction with both.

I am pleased to be able to tell you that your principal misgiving is unfounded. I cannot verify your allegation concerning the coffin. As to the premises having no rear entrance, we must bear in mind that many funeral directors do not have rear access, yet manage to transfer their dead in a perfectly respectful manner. We must bear in mind also that it is the tradition in this country ostentatiously to display a coffin in a hearse on the public highway.

The funeral director has been offered the lease on the much bigger premises next door and intends to move as soon as he can.

We remain happy to recommend him. Our opinion of him rides as high as ever.

Please feel free to post a response to this in a comment box, but please do not publish the name of the funeral director concerned because this may involve us in litigation. This is a censor-free blog except in cases of libellous comments. Please be aware that any comment you post will reveal your IP address.

With all best wishes,

Charles