Author: Charles

The Travelers – Elizabeth Heyert

27 January 2012
Charles
2 Comments
Categories: Art and death

See the full photo essay (16 photographs) here. 

Over the course of one year (2003-2004) Elizabeth Heyert photographed the deceased members of a Baptist community in Harlem. Heyert took her photos at the funeral parlour of Isaiah Owens, one of the few places where the old tradition of festively dressing up the dead lives on.

All of The Travelers photographs are accompanied by the name of the person in the portrait, as well as their date and place of birth and death. Significantly, the individual stories of each photographed person are absent from the work, in spite of their value to Elizabeth. I asked Elizabeth why she didn’t make them part of the project. Elizabeth explains that it was mainly an issue of privacy. Although the stories were important for her to be able to establish intimacy with the subjects, they were not really meant for public consumption. They form the narrative of a community that Elizabeth is not a member of. She wanted to be careful not to be presumptuous and act like she belongs to this community. Therefore she did not claim the stories as part of her project.

Moreover, she found that including the date and place of birth and death was already very effective in triggering the imagination. These simple facts indicate that the majority of the 31 portrait-sitters grew up in the south of the United States and moved north. This information alone calls upon a whole history. Elizabeth identifies it as the story of the 20th century, when black people took the journey from the south of the US to Harlem, in search of a better life. It was the only way for them to escape from poverty, even though the situation in Harlem wasn’t perfect either. It was a way they could take control of their lives.

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Can you identify me?

27 January 2012
Charles
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Categories: Attitudes to dead bodies, bereavement, Death masks, Memorialising, onlime memorial sites

Posted by Vale

A young girl went missing. A body was found. A young man went to the police and said that she might be his sister. They said that was not possible; her age is wrong. That was how it happened back in 1994.

Today, police are looking for this man. The man who said that the young unidentified girl found in Pogonip Park was his sister. She still might not be his sister, but they need to find him to make sure.

The young girl was murdered in an area of the park where homeless people stayed. Now new tests have shown that she might have been younger than the police first thought…

I was an African American Male, about 50 years old, I stood about 5’8 and I wore a gold loop earring in my left ear. Now you know what they know. What they don’t know and maybe you do is my name.

Let me back up for a minute.

On July 23, 2006, a man and his son were crossing Mosquito Lake (Cortland, Ohio – Trumbull County) in the swampy area. While they were crossing they saw what they believed to be human remains. The authorities were contacted. Tests were run, they figured out my general description, the one I gave you above; but they couldn’t match me to any of their records on file, missing persons, etc. In time, the phone stopped ringing and all leads simply dried up.

The unknown victim is one of many whose stories are told on an American blog called Can You Identify Me? In its own words:

The site was started in 2007 as a blog dedicated to America’s Unidentified. It brings these individuals back to life if only for a brief moment to share some invaluable information along with their forensic reconstructions. Can You Identify Me gives the victim a first-person narrative and temporary Doe name until someone out there recognizes them. Once they are identified, they can be reunited with their families and the victims can rest in peace with a tombstone shining with their given name.

As one of their readers says ‘Not many blogs make me stop and read almost all their current posts. Topics like these bring be extreme sadness. Its a great thing you are doing. It saddens me to see how many lives go off without any closure.’

You can find the site here.

Singing them out

26 January 2012
Charles
5 Comments
Categories: Uncategorised

Here’s a lovely story from the Isle of Anglesey, reported by the BBC.

A local funeral celebrant, Tim Clark, has founded a choir to sing at funerals. He has named it Threnody. Tim says: “Many [secular] funerals are at crematoria, where there is not a tradition of choral singing. We aim to change that, and to help people to join us in song. Increasingly, I’m finding that people would like some singing along with some recorded music.”

Threnody’s repertoire, comprising both sacred and secular music, includes many Welsh favourites whose names we shall not give you because you’d never be able to pronounce them. 

What a difference the fresh immediacy of live singing will make. Here at the GFG Batesville Tower we applaud this initiative to the echo.

It’s such a good idea we hope it goes viral. 

Full story here. 

Coffin and splutterin’

26 January 2012
Charles
27 Comments
Categories: coffins
In the correspondence columns of the Feb Funeral Service Journal we find this touching plaint. Dig the velveteen undertakerly verbals, especially in the first sentence: 

Dear Sirs Re: The missing link 

One of the fundamental items provided by a Funeral Director is the coffin used to contain the mortal remains of our clients’ loved ones. 

When we attend a restaurant we expect food and, in my case, a bottle of wine too. I recently arranged a funeral with a very creative family who had taken the opportunity to purchase a Bamboo Coffin directly from an associate member of a professional trade association. I was disappointed to learn of the ease they experienced in obtaining what would normally be a consumable product only supplied to the trade. 

Funeral Directors strive to deliver a complete comprehensive service meeting the needs of bereaved clients. We are here to support, offer choice and deliver a sympathetic service charging fairly for our service. When you take a bottle of wine with you to the Restaurant you expect to pay ‘Corkage’. As a Funeral Director I struggle to ask a grieving family to pay the ‘Coffinage’ on an item purchased privately from a trade supplier. The family I had the pleasure of helping challenged every element of the funeral costs and there was no way that we could sustain the regular average revenue with this particular funeral. 

The Funeral Directors’ add-on to the trade cost of the coffin covers the unplanned mortuary fridge breakdown and all the other little things that we, like any other business, wish didn’t crop up. By providing the families the opportunity to purchase items independently, thereby furnishing the funeral themselves, are we witnessing the beginning of the demise of the Funeral Directing business? 

As an independent, we strive towards offering excellent service with an underlying desire to thrive rather than just survive. It is unfortunately about money. Money pays for the sandwich I had for lunch today and hopefully the £10 meal for two tonight from M&S. It is what keeps the world spinning.  

I would be interested to learn of other Funeral Directors who have experienced associate trade members jumping the gap from ‘Trade Supplier’ to ‘Retailer’. Like every other Funeral Director I like to be included in every aspect of the funeral . Is it a case that our ‘Trade suppliers’ no longer supply direct to the customer, or more a case of me stepping sideways and swallowing my pride? 

I look forward to hearing your comments. We are all working hard to maintain our market share following a year when the death rate in most areas has been unexpectedly low. I hope in the true Christmas spirit we can come together and make sure we are not the missing link. 

Yours faithfully

Jason Maiden

Chelsea Funeral Directors

GFG comment: 

Beyond observing that Mr Maiden is probably wrong to stick with his fridge, sorry, we just can’t be bothered to rise to this. Don’t let that stop you. Does the analogy with a full-service meal apply? Where does this leave takeaways? What are we to take of Mr Maiden’s DIY approach to eating — that M & S meal?

Any food for comfort for him, anyone? 

Nice obit

26 January 2012
Charles
1 Comment
Categories: obituary; epitaph

Really nice recent obit here from The Times: 

Hilary Ruth ALLEN 

Hilary Ruth (nee Castle). The family are sad to announce, after a long and brave 3 year battle with cancer the death of Hilary in Salisbury on the 5th January 2012, aged 67 years. She was a wonderful mother, wife and friend, whose presence and energy is already being missed by many. She now rides on the back of her elephant, as they dance across the universe. She has left a piece of her in all of us and her memory will live on as will her energy, bringing strength and comfort to all. A woman who made her own destiny, and lived to bring happiness to her family, friends and to her, no one was ever a stranger. A bastion to all creatures and nature. A lover of crop circles and hugging trees; she was totally unique. 
Hat tip to Andrew Hickson for this. 

Is this the industry’s High Noon moment?

26 January 2012
Charles
13 Comments
Categories: funeral directors, Marketing, scandals

The funeral industry is in a bad place. Public reaction to last week’s Which? report revealed few friends. It also showed it to be no good at defending itself.

Things are going to get worse. Time is running out. 

At the GFG we’ve lost count of the number of calls we’ve taken in the last year from TV production companies, in particular, wanting, with one honourable exception, to dig dirt and put the boot in. The bully boys are circling. 

Crisis? Yes, crisis.

Consumers are baffled and angry because there’s no way of knowing who’s good (if any) and who’s not. Poor marketing is a contributory cause. But the most brutal truth of the matter is that the codes of conduct of the industry trade bodies, NAFD and SAIF, simply do not, by themselves, offer consumers quality assurance.

So what’s a good undertaker to do? From time to time, here at the GFG, we like to offer suggestions.

First, the good guys need to hang together and keep the bad eggs out. They can do that in one of two ways. They can form yet another trade body, a selective one. Or they can adopt a different business model.

In the past we’ve looked at the viability of rolling out a really good, proud brand – ‘John Lewis’ funerals. That’s the way for the consolidators to go. Presently, the consolidators are adding zero value to consumers’ experience of a funeral, and short-term value only for their shareholders. Their present way of operating is astoundingly dim.

We’ve also looked at the joint venture model used by Specsavers – here. 

Another model that funeral directors might like to consider is the Best Western model.

It’s a clever and an attractive way of doing things – a collaborative way of doing things. Best Western is an organisation which provides back office roles, marketing, reservations and operational support, to over 4,000 hotels in 80 countries worldwide. Best Western doesn’t own any of these hotels; each one is independent. It’s a chain, but it’s not a chain. You get the best of both worlds: all the warmth and individuality of an independent hotel, and all the assurance of quality standards which all hotels have to meet.

It’s not an orthodox franchise operation where both franchisor and franchisee operate for profit. Best Western is a non-profit membership operation which works, democratically, as near as dammit as a co-op, one member, one vote. Membership is renewed annually.

Re-read the last two paragraphs substituting ‘funeral director’ for ‘hotel’ and you begin see how easily this model could adapt to the funeral industry.

Here at the GFG we do not feel a sense of responsibility to save the funeral industry. Our focus is the best interests of consumers. Good funeral directors collaborating effectively to keep each other up to the mark and get the message out would help a lot. 

It is high time they got their act together. 

Open-air cremation

25 January 2012
Charles
3 Comments
Categories: funeral pyres, funerals in other cultures

Buddhist monks and devotees stand around a pyre during a high priest’s cremation ceremony at the Heain-sa temple in Hapcheon, South Korea, on Jan. 6, 2012. The ceremony, called Dabisik, was held for Ji-Kwan, a former head of the Jogye Order of Korean Buddhism.

The Dabisik ceremony signifies the return of the human body to nature. The casket is placed on a pyre constructed from wood, charcoal and thatched bags. After the body has burned, the bones are gathered from the ashes, crushed and ground up.

Source

Quote of the day

25 January 2012
Charles
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Categories: Quotes

“I get up, drink my usual four coffees, have a look at the obituaries in The Times, and if I’m not in them, I’ll get on with the day’s work.”

Patrick Moore at 88