Author: Charles

Way to go?

28 March 2012
Charles
19 Comments
Categories: Community funerals

All things pass. In twenty years from now we shan’t be doing funerals as we do them today. Another good reason for not buying a funeral plan.

Incremental change, say a great many reformers, will bring this about. Eventually.

It’s worth keeping a weather eye for radical change, too.

A few of us have been working on the concept of a not-for-profit community funeral co-op. We call our model a Community Funeral Society – a CFS. We’ve been talking to the Plunkett Foundation here about it, and they like what they hear. We’ll be publishing our manifesto shortly – as soon as we’ve got it more or less right.

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Would you book doves for your funeral?

27 March 2012
Charles
18 Comments
Categories: funeral customs

Posted by Richard Rawlinson

I’ve always associated the ritual of releasing white doves with Hello!-funded weddings between footballers and the singers in girl bands. They make a cute photo-op as they flutter from their gilded cage, perfectly colour-co-ordinating with the bride’s gown. They may symbolise love, peace and faith but, at a funeral, might they may be more distracting than moving?

The White Dove Company, which operates across Greater London and the Home Counties, charges £80 for a single dove, £100 for a pair, and then £10 each for additional birds.

It assures concerned customers that its homing doves are fed like prize athletes and undergo training to help them to navigate back to their loft, which can be up to 150 miles away. It also puts minds at rest that the doves will not crap on guests as they ‘like to perch before they mess’.

However, the company warns against releasing doves in fog, rain and sub-zero temperatures. It also berates some rivals for using untrained birds which cannot find their way home.

When is a grave not a lifestyle accessory?

27 March 2012
Charles
3 Comments
Categories: scandals

A dead priest, buried in the grounds of the school he founded, is in danger of being dug up and moved so as not to be in the way of the school’s new owner.

Father Jarzebowski, a Pole, bought the school in 1953 for fifty quid. There, he educated the children of Polish émigrées until his death. He wanted to be buried in the grounds, right by the playing fields. So that was where they buried him. Later, a member of the Polish royal family, Prince Stanislaw Radziwill, had a church built nearby. He is buried in the crypt. 

It’s a nice old house, this school — the model for Toad Hall in Wind in the Willows. 

Spool on some fifty years and the school is now worth £16.5 million. It has been bought by an Iranian heiress who wants Father Jarzebowski and Prince Stanislaw out. Ken Clark grants an exhumation licence. The Polish community is up in arms — and that’s not all. So are John Bradfield of the Alice Barker Trust and Teresa Evans of EvansAboveOnline. Together they are a formidable force. They believe that the dead should be left to rest in peace. Teresa adds, “whether or not we agree with what the law says, the law is the law and must be respected.” 

Things come to a head in the Appeal Court this Wednesday. John and Teresa want everyone to know about it. Here’s their press release:

DANGER – COURT TO UNWITTINGLY ENCOURAGE ILLEGAL DESTRUCTION OF GRAVES? 

Because of incompetence on the part of civil servants since 1857, governments have long been colluding with the illegal destruction of graves, which have been created within living memory. 

The court hearing on Wednesday is the first opportunity in more than 150 years, to put a final stop to those illegal actions. 

Unless the judges are made aware of the true legal position, those illegal actions will in all probability be encouraged. 

The Ministry of Justice is the Defendant but it has not submitted evidence on case law. 

It is too late for the Alice Barker Trust to apply to become an intervening party. The best it can do at such a late stage, is secure publicity, to alert the judges to the case law mentioned on the website below. 

Please help protect the public interest with publicity on this crucial issue. 

URGENT PRESS RELEASE 

PUBLICITY NEEDED ON OR BEFORE WEDNESDAY 

Government in Court over a Priest & Wind in The Willows 

A charity is calling on the government not to mislead the Court of Appeal on the 28 March 2012, when it considers long established law, on the protection of graves. 

The Alice Barker Trust has warned that the courts have not been told the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth by the government. The charity alleges that despite its objections over the last 20 years, the government has persisted in issuing unlawful and invalid exhumation licences, resulting in the illegal destruction of graves created within living memory. 

The charity claims that one of the country’s top judges, the Master of the Rolls, clarified the law in 1880 and that the first opportunity to have that clarification endorsed, will now be squandered. 

At Fawley Court, the house which inspired Toad Hall in the book The Wind in the Willows, the government has issued a licence, to remove the body of a priest from his grave and may later issue another licence to move the body of a prince. 

The charity insists that the licence is unlawful and is displaying the evidence on http://www.exhumationlaw.moonfruit.com/

More details available from

Alice Barker Trust, John Bradfield, Full Time Hon. Researcher 1990-2012 Tel. 01423 530 900

Note: John Bradfield is the author of Green Burial, the DIY Guide, a book which clarified many legal matters concerning natural burial in the early days of the movement. Teresa Evans is currently campaigning to stop all interference with the Cross Bones graveyard in London. 

A community funeral society

27 March 2012
Charles
5 Comments
Categories: home funerals

Posted by Charles

I’ve always liked the idea of Viroqua, Wisconsin. It seems to be the hometown of a lot of very nice people, all four and a bit thousand of them. Viroqua was dubbed ‘The Town That Beat Walmart’ in 1992 because its small businesses are able to compete with the monster and hold it at bay. It has a flourishing food co-op and farmers’ market. 

Viroqua is also the home of an active and influential group of home funeralists, the Threshold Care Circle. They work with anyone who wants to care for their dead at home. They are skilled in body care and other aspects of waking a dead person. They provide a complete alternative to professionalised funeral directors.

They don’t charge for what they do. If they did it would mean that they were trading as unlicensed funeral directors. Thank goodness we are free of this unnecessary regulatory nonsense in the UK.

Here’s a piece about them by a Viroqua blogger: 

The women did their work – researching, educating and supporting – quietly and diligently for years until, in May of 2010, our community was engulfed in tragedy and grief when two 18-year-old boys were killed in a car accident in the early-morning hours of Mother’s Day. Living in a town as small as ours, no family was left untouched by the heartache of this tragedy, and once again, the community rallied together. This time, however, there were more resources in place for grieving family members who might wish for an alternative to the traditional choices of funeral and burial. With the care and guidance of the Threshold Care Circle, the family of one of the boys chose to bring his body home, bathe him, and hold a 3-day vigil on their front porch. The home-vigil was new to almost everyone who experienced it, and the family’s choice to do this undulated outward, reaching an unexpectedly large group of people. But in the midst of unimaginable despair, those who were sharing the experience were finding extraordinary moments of truth and beauty. All were profoundly moved and forever changed through exposure to such tender caring and collective grief. A wide segment of our community had been initiated into an alternative view of death and dying, and it deeply touched a place of longing and need. [Source]

I have a feeling that our funeral industry hasn’t the vision to coax us out of the dismal rut that we dignify with the name of tradition. In any case, it would be hard for it to survive commercially if it did. 

It’s inspiring to consider a way of doing things which offers an alternative to the present lo-cost craze which is sweeping our country. The irony is that, as alternatives go, a home funeral is actually a lot cheaper, despite being several hundred times more valuable. 

On Wednesday we shall look at a community enterprise in the UK which, perhaps, points the way ahead. 

In the meantime, spend some time on the Threshold Care Circle website here. 

Cherry blossoms

26 March 2012
Charles
4 Comments
Categories: Art and death, Attitudes to death

Posted by Vale

Blossom bursting from bare wood,
old hearts crack open
spring sunshine.

There is something unlooked for in the pleasures of spring: light, warmth and the flush of blossom; a sudden generosity beyond expectation.

Japan marks this annual marvel by holding blossom viewing parties. It’s part of a culture which reverences nature by going out and actively celebrating it – moon gazing, listening to mountain streams and viewing flowers.

Springtime brings the most intense experience. A wave of cherry blossom festivals sweeps the islands of Japan starting in the south and following the sun northwards over two or three months. Picnics under the trees can be raucous and lively (older people often prefer more sedate plum blossom viewings), but winter is over and the sap is rising.

Underneath the joy there is, of course, a poignancy. It’s not as simple as reminding us that – like our lives – the blossoms’ beauty is brief and all too quickly ended, it’s also the sense that there could be no better time to leave than when the world around you is at its most lovely. Back in the 12th Century Saigyo famously wrote:

I wish to die in spring
beneath the cherry blossoms
while the springtime moon is full

Of course the connection between the cherry blossom and time’s passing can be found much closer to home too. This from AE Housman’s A Shropshire Lad:

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.

How nice to imagine the time when you thought you had fifty blossom seasons more.

What price value?

26 March 2012
Charles
9 Comments
Categories: ceremony, direct cremation, funeral directors

Over at the Connnecting Directors website here there’s a rant by a funeral home consultant, Alan Creedy. In it, we see amusing similarities between the US funeral industry and our own:

Why do funeral professionals spend so much time fighting among themselves and never fighting for themselves? … Why is so much emotional energy spent on not-losing-a-call and none spent on getting 5 more calls?

Mr Creedy berates US undertakers for their passivity in hard times:

We are so addicted to our “Mr. Nice Guy” image and so afraid of offending just one person that we allow people like Jessica Mitford and Lisa Carlson and a plethora of ill informed journalists to tell our story for us. In fact, I have come to believe we no longer know what our story is.

Worse, it seems US funeral home profits have halved in the last 30 years. Mr Creedy wants undertakers to stand up for themselves:

WAKE UP! If you think people will like you because you are their doormat (which they don’t) they will like you a whole lot less when you are a public failure. Your livelihood is in jeopardy. Your wife and your family’s livelihood is in jeopardy…

…and so on. You can read it for yourself here.

Over here in the UK, times are also hard for undertakers. There are too many of them competing in a market where the death rate has never been so low.

Worse, there’s a recession on.

And to top it all, demand has never been higher for cut-price funerals. The undertakers who are doing best are the £995, bargain basement, pile em high and burn em cheap brigade. The number of people looking for direct cremation is becoming astonishing.

It is not all economic necessity which is driving this. Arguably, the significant factor is the failure of our undertakers, collectively, to make a case for the emotional and spiritual value of a funeral ceremony.

A funeral is, for many, no more than an invidious social ordeal.

And the trend is that it is becoming increasingly okay to opt out.

Thoughts of a funeral-goer

23 March 2012
Charles
3 Comments
Categories: Thoughts of a funeralgoer

Posted by Lyra Mollington

I’ve been rumbled. 

My grandson let it slip that I’m writing for the Good Funeral Guide.  My sister Myra has just phoned me – and she seems to have forgotten that sarcasm is the lowest form of wit.  

M:       Congratulations on your new hobby.  What on earth possessed you to write about funerals? 

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Green cremation

22 March 2012
Charles
2 Comments
Categories: resomation

It’s interesting to see how Resomation is taking off in the US — green cremation, they call it. Great name.

In addition to the eco credentials and the energy efficiency of these Resomators, we wonder how just how attractive to US undertakers, sorry, funeral directors, is the lovely whiteness of the ‘ash’ you get from Resomation. It’s the sort of thing that’s likely to make all the difference to our cosmetising cousins. 

Full marks to Sandy Sullivan in Glasgow, who makes Resomators for the US market. Nice guy, and doing okay. Well deserved. 

Find Resomation Ltd here. 

A folklorist’s funeral

22 March 2012
Charles
6 Comments
Categories: alternative funerals, shroud

There’s a very charming and touching account here of what would conventionally be reckoned the very alternative funeral of Thomas Hine, pictured above. His beautiful Leafshroud, below, was made by Yuli Somme here.

London’s finest independent funeral directors

22 March 2012
Charles
11 Comments
Categories: funeral directors

Posted by Richard Rawlinson

I’m posed with a dilemma here, a choice between topicality or taste.

Oh, publish and be damned. Forgive the timing in this, the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee year, to raise the subject of Her Majesty’s official undertakers, Leverton & Sons, a 200-year-old family firm of funeral directors that has served London for eight generations.

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