Archive: October 2013

Corpse roads – then and now

20 October 2013
Charles
1 Comment
Categories: Attitudes to dead bodies, burial, coffins, funeral customs, Ghosts

Back in the middle ages, established churches hung on to their right to bury the dead when new churches were built nearby to serve a growing population. Burial rights brought in revenue.

This meant that parishioners of churches without a right to bury their dead were compelled to take them to a church which did using designated corpse roads. Some were just a few miles in length, others much longer. 

These medieval corpse roads, so called, were pre-dated by long, straight tracks found all over the world along which the dead were carried and which were reckoned to channel the spirits of the dead.

All manner of superstitions attach to corpse roads, and if you want to find out lots more, quickly, you can’t do better than turn to Wikipedia, which has an excellent entry on the phenomenon. The tradition of toting a corpse feet first derives from these superstitions. It was supposed the prevent the spirit of the dead person from legging it back home. It would be interesting to conduct a poll of undertakers to discover how many actually know this. 

A quick google reveals just some of the corpse roads — also called coffin roads, lych ways, etc — which remain walkable: 

The Lych Way in Devon

Hindon to Enford (Wilts)

Teffont to Dinton (Wilts)

Bohenie to Achluachrach

Pass of Glencoe to Dalness

Ulverston to Coniston

Wasdale Head to Eskdale via Burnmoor

Mardale (Haweswater) to Shap via the Goggleby Stone

Rydal to Grasmere via Rydal Water and Dove Cottage

Arnside to Beetham via the Fairy Steps

Johnby to Greystoke

Garrigill to Kirkland

Borrowdale to Brigham

Bellever to Lydford (Devon)

Zennor St Ives (Cornwall)

Aston to Blockley and Stretton to Blockley (Warks, Gloucs)

We still have working corpse roads, of course; we just don’t call them that. We call them the ring road or the bypass. 

One of you dyed-in-the-wool deathies out there ought to compile a gazetteer of corpse roads so that fellow-deathies everywhere can catch some fresh air and keep the memory alive. 

A C of E funeral

19 October 2013
Charles
3 Comments
Categories: funeral, Religious funerals

To Salisbury and the funeral of the mother of two friends.

The venue is the cathedral, no less. We get there in good time, but not good enough: the place is almost full and we forage for a seat at the back.

Who’s the celeb who died, you ask. No one you’ve heard of. Andrea was the wife of a Wiltshire vicar who touched the hearts of everyone she met. Her achievement was that she was a first-rate human being. All these people testify to that, having got themselves here at, doubtless, some inconvenience.

The service is billed as one of gratitude and thanksgiving. It’s the full and formal Anglican rite. As we wait for it to begin we contemplate the poem by RS Thomas in the service booklet, The Other. It begins:

There are nights that are so still
that I can hear the small owl
calling

And concludes:

And the
thought comes
of that other being who is
awake, too,
letting our prayers break on him,
not like this for a few hours,
but for days, years, for eternity.

There’s a procession comprising all manner of appropriately attired officiants, and the Bishop of Ramsbury bringing up the rear. It’s a proper procession. The nave of the cathedral is 134 metres long and the land-speed record for getting from start to finish is nowhere near lowered on this occasion.

The ritual wraps itself lovingly around Andrea. There’s a bidding prayer which commemorates Andrea’s “love of being a parish priest’s wife who welcomed all who came to the vicarage door” at the same time as proclaiming the faith that “all who believe in [Christ] will rise with him”. I guess there’s a good sprinkling of unbelievers and agnostics present, but it’s by no means alienating. The tone is humane and gentle.

There are good hymns – ‘Angel-voices ever singing’; ‘Brother, sister, let me serve you’; and ‘Tell out my soul’. There are prayers and communion.

A family friend delivers a tribute which deftly balances biography, naming of attributes and affectionate anecdotes. A woman from the Mother’s Union pays tribute to Andrea’s dedication to that organisation. The bishop speaks with admirable concision. His text is George Herbert’s Bitter-Sweet:

Ah, my dear angry Lord,
Since thou dost love, yet strike;
Cast down, yet help afford;
Sure I will do the like.

I will complain, yet praise;
I will bewail, approve;
And all my sour-sweet days
I will lament and love.

There is singing from the choir – Gelineau’s setting of Psalm 23 and Byrd’s Agnus Dei from the Mass for Four Voices – which conjures all the usual adjectives: timeless, ethereal, etc. In a building like this, with the gloaming settling, all the usual adjectives fall short by a distance.

An hour and forty minutes later, it is over: “Andrea, go forth upon your journey … May your portion this day be in peace.”

And the procession makes its way back down the nave which Andrea walked up, years ago, as a young bride.

Should women be allowed to go to funerals?

17 October 2013
Charles
10 Comments
Categories: Attitudes to death, funerals in other cultures

I don’t suppose there can be many ‘indigenous’ funerals held these days which prohibit the presence of women. There may be one or two redoubts in Presbyterian Scotland. Bucking the trend in the wider community, though, many Muslims prohibit their presence. 

Why ban women from funerals? To spare their feelings, mostly. Or put it another way, because they can’t be relied on to hold themselves in check. Women, as is well known, are easily subverted by the slightest emotion. They are prone to making a scene and creating disorder. 

This, at least, is the consideration which informs a thumbs-up for female funeral attendance at Muslim funerals in America, where Shaykh Luqman Ahmad has delivered this ruling: 

based upon the fact that Muslims in America, as a rule do not engage in the practices of wailing, tearing clothing, beating the cheeks, and hollering out bad statements at funerals, and the evidence from the sunna of the Prophet (SAWS) and the view of the scholars we have mentioned, it is not haram for Muslim women to accompany the funeral procession to the grave sites as long as they are able to control themselves … If there is a probability that attendance at the burial will stir emotions to a degree where unlawful behavior will likely occur … then it is prohibitively disliked.

Women: know your limits. 

Fifty years since JFK’s assassination

17 October 2013
Charles
No comments
Categories: funeral

Posted by Richard Rawlinson

We’re approaching the 50th anniversary of John F Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas, Texas, at 12.30pm on Friday, 22 November 1963. In the wake of a media deluge, here’s a video of the state funeral on Monday, 25 November.

Preparations were speedy. The president’s body was brought back to Washington and, after 24 hours in the White House, the coffin was taken to lie in state at the Capitol, viewed thoughout Sunday by thousands of mourners. Meanwhile, representatives of countries from all over the world flew in to DC for the Monday requiem mass at St Matthew’s Cathedral, after which the president was laid to rest at Arlington National Cemetery.

From Abide with Me to the Last Post, from John-John’s salute as his father’s coffin went by to Jackie Kennedy’s mourning veil, the funeral seems remarkably timeless and universal.

Death in the community

16 October 2013
Charles
7 Comments
Categories: Marketing

East Midlands funeral director, A. W. Lymn The Family Funeral Service, has become the first funeral directors in England to advertise on a billboard. The poster is the first of a series of 9 which will appear over the course of the next year

The billboard is situated at the bottom of Greenhill Rise in Carlton, Nottingham. 

Nigel Lymn Rose, managing director, said: “Our office in Carlton is situated on a side road called Church Street. As it is not on the main road a number of clients had been unaware of its existence and I was wondering how to improve its profile. On looking through my great-grandfather’s photograph collection I came across a picture from the 1920s of a hoarding advertising his funeral business and I immediately thought that would be an appropriate way to once again advertise our business in a prominent position in Carlton”

Be smart – follow the money

16 October 2013
Charles
4 Comments
Categories: cremation, crematoria, funeral cost

In all so-called advanced cultures, funeral practices are becoming less elaborate. All this talk of baby boomers reinventing funerals as bespoke, themed, accessorised, more or less lavish performance events can seem to make good sense — but baby boomers, who by now have buried and cremated many thousands of parents, ain’t, experience now tells us, buying in to all that. Recession or no recession, the dying express the wish to keep it cheap and simple; and those left behind seem content to fall in with that. When people fall into conversations about funerals, the proudest boasts are made by those who spent least. 

Where a funeral dwindles to its essentials — the body of a dead person and the body of people who cared about him/her —  there’s not much margin for an undertaker. But where the expanding market is the one for cheap funerals, that’s where an undertaker needs to hang out. You need to do more funerals for less to make your business pay, of course – if you can get em in the first place. 

So the earnings ceiling for an undertaker is getting lower and lower. This is especially evident in the US, where once comfortably-off morticians have been banjaxed by the rush to cremation. Growing impoverishment ought to act as a disincentive to new entrants. But the market in Britain remains saturated with undertakers because they are motivated by vocation rather than acquisitiveness. Altruistic people thrive on adversity; it strengthens their humanitarian resolve and enhances their sense sainthood.

Which is why the smart money is now increasingly going into crematoria and natural burial grounds of 20 acres+. Here profits remain fattening. Dignity and the Co-op are moving in bigtime. Bibby, the corp behind GreenAcres, is showing no interest in buying out undertakers. 

There’s a race on to buy out council-owned crematoria and build new ones – they’re going up everywhere. Here’s a bubble that’s going to end in rubble. Where low cost scores highest with consumers, and at a time when funeral poverty is stalking the land, it won’t be long before people wise up to the fact that the cheapest cremation provider is the one who cremates most economically by blazing round the clock 365 days a year (not 250 as at present) in a standalone plant with a viewing gallery set in a very few nicely appointed acres. There’s nothing to stop anyone from building one of these now. In the US they’re called crematories. That’s what we need: crematories, not more crematoria. 

By how much would efficient cremation bring down funeral costs? The US gives us some idea. You can arrange a direct cremation in New York for £860 including all undertaker’s fees. The cremation part of that comes to just £265. In Florida you can buy the complete direct cremation package for £525. In Maryland, using a particularly nice-looking crematory, you can buy the complete package for £618. And in San Diego you can do the whole thing for just £416 all in. 

Go figure, Bibby. You read it here first. Send us a bung when it all comes good. 

Up and coming

16 October 2013
Charles
No comments
Categories: Uncategorised

In Glasgow, Barbara Chalmers of Final Fling is organising a Day of the Dead festival which Barbara describes as ‘A small but perfectly formed celebration of life and death with art, chat and a bit of pop-up drumming.’ Dates are Sat 26 Oct and Sat 2 Nov. Sounds good to us; we are big fans of Barbara. 

At Leela Osho in Dorset, Archa Robinson and team are holding one of their regular Living and Dying Consciously weekends on 8, 9, 10 November. 

Leela Osho2

An essay in melancholy

14 October 2013
Charles
3 Comments
Categories: funeral, funeral customs, funeral trends

Last week I passed an empty hearse going the other way. It set me musing.

Freed from its solemn duties, no longer slowed by a weighty coffin and all the gravitas attendant upon such a thing, emptied of flowers and no longer the misty-eyed focus of profoundly sad people, it had about it none of the majesty and decorum,  the grandeur and grace, that properly wreath a hearse.  It looked inessential, superfluous, dispensable. Gawky. Going too fast. 

You think I’m banging on a bit. You’re right. 

I then fell to musing on the way people in cars treat hearses these days. They buzz and harry them, cut in and chop up processions. It’s like watching a kestrel mobbed by crows. People these days have no manners, no solicitude. They’re in a hurry, they’ve got places to go. 

But it’s not just a manners thing, is it? Or a hurry thing? There’s more to it than that. 

Once upon a time (not so long ago) the death of someone touched everyone. It evoked the mystery of existence. In everyone’s mind a funeral procession awoke questions: how long have I got? What does it feel like? What comes after? It spoke of the universal human drama of those born to die. It inspired awe and the doffing of hats. 

It’s not a manners thing. No, it’s a universality thing. In place of a general drama of life and death and the mystery of existence played out in our midst, for us, disconnected from matters elemental, there are one-off sketches in which unknown unfortunates die — bad luck. Seek not to know for whom the bell tolls, it ain’t tolling for me, mate. 

And so a funeral procession, instead of speaking to and for the human condition, is seen as descriptive of no more than a little local difficulty afflicting someone else. 

And the funerals of these incogniti address the particular and the personal, the private hurt, the here and the now, in crematoria which divert those who cared for them briefly from life’s mainstream (where death belongs) before setting them on their way again. 

Moral: it’s much easier to write prettily about mortality and funerals wearing a reactionary hat. 

Cash for crash

14 October 2013
Charles
8 Comments
Categories: funeral directors

Suffolk police have come under fire for their practice of awarding cash payments to officers who have to deal with exceptionally difficult or distressing incidents — a particularly horrible road crash, for example or, in the words of the Police and Crime Commissioner, “picking up charred remains of bodies from house fires and picking up decomposed bodies out of rivers with their own hands.” Traumatic circumstances like these may qualify a policeman for a cash payment of £50-£500. “These are over-and-above, additional tasks that no amount of training can prepare officers for.”

The Taxpayers’ Alliance describes the payments as “macabre” and says: “it is vital that the right support is in place, but throwing bonuses at the problem is not the solution.”

The Ipswich Star records that ambulance staff and firefighters are not eligible for such payments. 

The bonuses are, of course, a charge on the taxpayer. The process whereby trauma is mitigated by a wodge of cash is not explained.

How would it be if funeral directors were to start charging extra for ‘distressing’ removals, and adding the charges to their clients’ bills? 

Story in the Ipswich Star here. Hat-tip to GMT

The beauty of the vigil

14 October 2013
Charles
4 Comments
Categories: Vigil, visiting

Posted by Richard Rawlinson

When Charles Darwin died in 1882, he was brought to Westminster Abbey the evening before his huge funeral. His coffin was borne through the cloisters, his five sons following, into a small, bare vaulted side chapel (St Faith), which had until recently been used as a storeroom.

Architect Sir George Gilbert Scott, involved in the restoration of the Abbey, described this overnight resting place as a picturesque and beautiful room. Seen by the dim light from lanterns, it seemed tomb-like in contrast with the lofty interior of the Abbey. It was an intimate, contemplative place, different in mood to the public ceremony the next day, when the building was peopled with the living, when Darwin’s friends served as pallbearers in the procession to the Abbey’s communion rails.

A friend’s husband died suddenly a couple of years ago. The night before the requiem mass, he was removed to the Lady Chapel of Westminster Cathedral, the Catholic one just down Victoria Street from the Abbey. This Lady Chapel had been the scene of the couple’s wedding several years before. My friend recalls how special (painful and soothing) it was for her to sit there with him through the evening in silent, solitary vigil before funeral the next day.

I’m told the removal to the church the night before is becoming less common, even in Ireland. How common are such removals and vigils in hospital chapels or at home?