Author: Charles

Are you in or out?

13 October 2011
Charles
14 Comments
Categories: funeral cost, funeral directors, funeral plans

It’s not often that you see a funeral entrepreneur on Dragon’s Den, but last night’s show shone a brief spotlight on an enterprise which, in an industry unaccustomed to innovation, is likely to elicit responses ranging from ‘It’ll never work’ to ‘Tcha.’ Theo Paphitis ruled himself straight out, no messing. But it turns out that death spooks him.

It’s one of those online planning sites (you know, the ones that never make it) with a twist. It’s more than a just passive repository of funeral wishes. It’s also a service comparison website which enables consumers to find the funeral director who’ll give them what they want.

The idea is that you plan a funeral online (with plenty of help), and your plan is then sent anonymously to all funeral directors in a geographical radius set by you. The funeral directors respond with a quote and a pitch. They name a price and they also say why they think they are best for the job. They can link to their website and anything else that makes them look good – third-party endorsement, a video clip on YouTube, whatever. You then choose the funeral director who seems both nicest and best value, and from there on it’s face-to-face and personal. If it doesn’t work out, you go back to the website and choose someone else.

How does it pay for itself? This is the bit that funeral directors are going to hate. You buy a coffin from the website at a cheaper price than you are likely to be able to buy it from a funeral director. The website pockets the margin.

Want to know more? Go to the website and try it out for yourself. It’s called CompareTheCoffin.com. Yeah, yeah, what’s in a name?

Is it likely to catch on? Don’t ask me; I don’t have a business brain. But I’d hazard a guess it stands a good chance of establishing a niche. More and more people are shopping around for a funeral. CompareTheCoffin does all the legwork for them and still almost certainly enables them to make a saving. It seems to have something of the win-win about it, for best funeral directors, too – but, as I say, don’t ask me.

I must declare an interest, though. When the originator of CompareTheCoffin, Steven Mitchell, approached me at the conception stage and asked me to write some text for his website, I did some drilling down, not in a Paphitis way, but into the ethics of it. I satisfied myself that, yes, this is an ethical business idea, Steven is a good guy, as is his web developer Akmal (this is a rare partnership between a Jew and a Moslem), and I set about earning a few meagre pence as a day labourer.

Whether or not CompareTheCoffin is a runner is something you are in a far better position to judge.

After last night’s show the CompareTheCoffin website came under what looked like sustained cyber-attack, which may perhaps be rated flattery. If it’s back up after its drubbing you can find it here. Catch the Dragon’s Den show here. 

Britain’s second favourite undertaker

12 October 2011
Charles
2 Comments
Categories: Dignity

Here are some up-to-date headline stats on Dignity plc, the brand that dares not speak its name.

Valued at £460m

Average earnings growth of around 15% over the past five years. Growth is forecast to be at a similar level in the current year and 11% in 2012.

Debt stands at £319 million, up from £238.5 million in June 2010.

In the first half of 2011, revenues rose by 7% to £108 million and profits rose slightly to £24.5 million. 

During the first half of 2011, the company spent £11 million on seven acquisitions, in addition to opening 11 new satellite locations at a cost of £500,000.

Handles 12% of total deaths in UK.

UK’s largest single operator of crematoria. Underlying profits grew by 12.6% during the period to £11.6 million. 

Affinity partners include Legal & General, Asda and Age UK.

You may now applaud. 

Source: Motley Fool

The Good Funeral Guide congratulates Dignity on the great value it offers shareholders, and welcomes all good news it may wish to communicate via us to consumers. Get in touch, chaps!

What Makes Funeral Celebrants Do It?

12 October 2011
Charles
10 Comments
Categories: celebrants

From a practising funeral celebrant, more opinionated stuff that possibly needs a health warning: it’s only what I think.

I’m not really sure why we do it – I’m sure we have many very different conscious reasons and less self-aware motivations. As Freud, Jung, Adler and Frankl all said, or if they didn’t, they should have: our motives are opaque unto ourselves. If you think you’ve understood your own motives in something as complex as this, then your motives have probably just skipped a step or two further back into the mists. Anyway, here’s a few pointers through the murk:

  • We do it because for some strange reason we can do it, this odd thing. It’s difficult, demanding, fascinating, and – dare we say it – addictive.
  • No, we don’t do it just for the money. We’re not that stupid.    
  • It needs doing, if people are to have more freedom and choice about an important event. That’s the ideological motivation. Not everyone’s spiritual needs (or atheistical requirements) can be well served by ordained ministers of religion.
  • It’s intensely interesting, the patterns of all these lives and their endings. Many “ordinary” lives are not in the least ordinary. It is a privilege to help mark their ending.
  • The job flatters or completes our egos; it feels good to be wanted, at a time of crisis in people’s lives. People are mostly very appreciative; the bond between us and a family is brief but it can suddenly feel very warm, very strong. If we’re doing the job well, we have to share a little of their grief, and feel some love for them. So it’s a bit deeper than flattery, but the mists are swirling, so I’ll move on…
  • No, hang on, let’s look into that: maybe we get a charge out of being close to some strangers for a short and intense period, and then we can – have to – move on; we’re compassion tarts, sentiment junkies, it makes our own lives more intense. And that sense of heightened meaning, contact with an absolute, is very addictive.
  • It helps us to explore our own mortality and to come to terms can you buy cialis online in canada better with the prospect of our own deaths. So we’re trying to work through fears of our own about death, by a kind of familiarisation therapy.
  • Following on from that: we are close to death at funerals, but afterwards we are still here; after a successful funeral, we feel a sense of achievement, even a small victory. We’ve helped some people find meaning when death has taken away someone who meant a lot to them. Not a victory over death itself, of course, but over the desolation and emptiness it creates.
  • We like the attention – it’s a small-scale public event, and they sure as hell pay attention to you, even if many of them won’t remember a word.
  • We are chronic melancholics and we like hanging around graves and crematoria, wearing black and looking profound – sort of doing a Hamlet: “Alas, poor Yorick! I never knew him Horatio, but he sounds to me like a fellow of infinite jest, why, his family were telling me just the other day they well remember the time he…”
  • We’re disgusted by what we see as the emotionally stifling conventions of the funeral business and our culture’s mortality aversion. We want to open it right out, because we can see a way it can be done better, a way that can enrich people’s lives, honour their deaths, and be use to their grieving.
  • Oh, and (let’s be fair to ourselves): It’s good to feel you’ve helped some people, and done a good job for them for a fee that is not extortionate. If, of course, you have done a good job…

It’s interesting how many celebrants I know moved into the role after some profound and distressing experience – a near-death illness, the death of someone or some people close to them. I very much respect that. Which raises the question: can you be a successful celebrant if you haven’t been bereaved? Don’t know – guess so, but I do think our own losses can make a bridge for our empathy and compassion.

Cash for corpses 2

11 October 2011
Charles
4 Comments
Categories: Attitudes to dead bodies, funeral cost

You heard it on the news? You read it in your newspaper? The Nuffield Council on Bioethics has published a report calling on the government to find out of people like the idea of getting a free funeral in exchange for donating their organs.

Professor Dame Marilyn Strathern, of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics, says: “The possibility of sparing relatives the financial burden of a funeral might encourage more people to register as donors.”

The report rules out offering people an up-front cash inducement in exchange for agreeing to donate an organ or two sometime down the line.

The whole scheme is so fraught with contradictions you wonder how it ever saw the light of day. The point being that those who agree to donate organs cannot be sure where or how they are going to die; unless a person dies in hospital in pretty good health, their organs are no use.  No use = no funeral payment.

So no potential donor is going to be able to bank on a free funeral.

Which means that donors would be mad not to make provision for their funeral anyway. They may even do the dumb and trusting thing and buy a funeral plan or other financial product.

So when the cheque for three grand arrives, what does it go towards? Furnishings? White goods? A plasma TV?

It’s a turkey, Professor Dame Marilyn. And don’t give us this talk about rewards for altruism. Altruism is by definition its own reward.

An interesting thing about this report is that no one has picked up that it is not the first time the Nuffield Council has flown this kite. It first flew it in April 2010.

Guardian report here. Telegraph report here. Daily Mail report here. 

Bereavement Counselling in the NHS (Taking the sting out of death)

10 October 2011
Charles
2 Comments
Categories: Attitudes to death, bereavement, Death; Good death, End-of-life issues

Posted by Vale

Pat is a Bereavement Counsellor working in an NHS Trust hospital. Her job is to help people affected by a death in a hospital, supporting them through their grieving. Pat is the subject of a long article inSaturday’s Guardian. It can be found here.

It’s a heartening read. Death in a hospital can be a very fraught business. Treatment, perhaps in intensive care, is hard to comprehend, and the workings of the institution are often alienating and frustrating to people who want to support someone they love at the end of their lives. And death comes in so many forms that it’s sometimes difficult simply to come to terms with what has happened.
Pat’s role – carried out, it is clear, with great love and understanding –  is to help people come to terms with what has happened. Sometimes it is a matter of looking at notes, talking to doctors and taking time to explain why someone died. Sometimes it is just about making space for grief. Pat:

“has a mantra that “nothing is wrong in grief”. She almost always honours requests from bereaved relatives, however unusual. A common wish is to touch the body of a loved one: hold their hands, or kiss their foreheads or even wash their face. One woman asked Pat if she could help her retrace the journey her 15-year-old daughter’s body made from the hospital to the mortuary, after she died from a very protracted illness. She then wanted to see where she had been blessed in the mortuary. “And there’s nothing wrong with that,” she says.”

It’s good to know that hospitals are recognising that the death of a patient is both an ending and, for bereaved family and friends, the beginning of another vital process – the need to grieve, mourn and say farewell. Important too that they recognise that their role in this next stage is crucial. Reading about the work that Pat does, however, did make me want to ask more questions about the way that the NHS treats people at the point of death.

If there is recognition of these human issues after death, is there the same concern for people as they die? How well are patients supported at those last moments? How easy is it for people to sit with the person they love; hold them and comfort them; share in the business of dying?
I’ve tried to find the relevant NHS guidance, but with little success. I did, however, turn up a Scottish NHS report called Shaping Bereavement Care – a framework for action. It has 14 recommendations, some of them recognisably relating to the good work that Pat does. The recommendation relating to the process of dying though is this one. It is a commitment to:

“undertake a review of all current policies and procedures relating to care of the dying patient, and care of the deceased, to ensure that they reflect good quality care and to assess and reduce any real or potential negative impact of these processes on those who have been bereaved.”(Recommendation 3)

It suggests that there are important connections yet to be made in this area – in the Scottish NHS at least. Although, surely, it’s not hard to join the dots between the way that people feel when they are not involved in a death and the need to involve them more in the process of dying itself? It seems clear enough to me that if the humanity, care and understanding that Pat so clearly brings to her work after a death could be brought into the hospital itself and allowed to take their place at the bedside of the dying patent, then acceptance, understanding and the grieving process itself would be immeasurably improved.

But maybe the NHS in England is already there?

Quote of the week

7 October 2011
Charles
No comments
Categories: Uncategorised

 

“I don’t want a funeral. All I want when I die is a simple tribute concert at Wembley Stadium. And maybe a covers album.”

Chris Martin

Pull yourselves together, you wailing wimps!

7 October 2011
Charles
4 Comments
Categories: Uncategorised

Guest post by Seneca (4 BC – 65 AD) , our Stoic correspondent 

Is it solace that you look for? Let me give you a scolding instead! You are like a woman in the way you take your son’s death; what would you do if you had lost an intimate friend?

A son, a little child of unknown promise, is dead; a fragment of time has been lost. We hunt out excuses for grief; we would even utter unfair complaints about Fortune, as if Fortune would never give us just reason for complaining! But I had really thought that you possessed spirit enough to deal with concrete troubles, to say nothing of the shadowy troubles over which men make moan through force of habit. Had you lost a friend (which is the greatest blow of all), you would have had to endeavour, rather, to rejoice because you had possessed him than to mourn because you had lost him.

But many men fail to count up how manifold their gains have been, how great their rejoicings. Grief like yours has this among other evils: it is not only useless, but thankless.

Has it then all been for nothing that you have had such a friend? During so many years, amid such close associations, after such intimate communion of personal interests, has nothing been accomplished? Do you bury friendship along with a friend?

And why lament having lost him, if it be of no avail to have possessed him? Believe me, a great part of those we have loved, though chance has removed their persons, still abides with us. The past is ours, and there is nothing more secure for us than that which has been.

We are ungrateful for past gains, because we hope for the future, as if the future – if so be that any future is ours – will not be quickly blended with the past. People set a narrow limit to their enjoyments if they take pleasure only in the present; both the future and the past serve for our delight – the one with anticipation, and the other with memories, but the one is contingent and may not come to pass, while the other must have been.

What madness it is, therefore, to lose our grip on that which is the surest thing of all? Let us rest content with the pleasures we have quaffed in past days, if only, while we quaffed them, the soul was not pierced like a sieve, only to lose again whatever it had received.

There are countless cases of men who have without tears buried sons in the prime of manhood – men who have returned from the funeral pyre to the Senate chamber, or to any other official duties, and have straightway busied themselves with something else.

And rightly; for in the first place it is idle to grieve if you get no help from grief. In the second place, it is unfair to complain about what has happened to one man when death is in store for all of us.

Again: it is foolish to lament one’s loss when there is such a slight interval between the lost and the loser. Hence we should be more resigned in spirit, because we follow closely those whom we have lost.

Meet Trudy

6 October 2011
Charles
3 Comments
Categories: Hearses

 

Some things have Wow Factor and they may or may not wow you. Here at the Good Funeral Guide we are far more susceptible to things that have Oh Wow Factor (big difference), and the latest thing to Oh Wow us is the brand new, not yet launched, 1965 Morris Minor hearse.

She’s called Trudy. Trudy the Traveller.  Here’s what her owners, Andrew and Judith Bywater, have to say about her:

Trudy was built and registered in 1965. She was supplied by Colmore Depot, based at West Bromwich in the West Midlands. She led a normal life, becoming gradually run-down through daily use, until Andrew bought her as a complete wreck in April 2009. It has taken two and a half years of painstaking work to restore her to show condition, and she is due to be displayed at our launch at the NEC classic car show in November 2011.

She looks like a lovely piece of work, and here at GFG HQ we request and require all funeral directors who read this blog (we know there are lots of you; we suppose you to be the best) to get in touch with Andrew and Judith and offer this to your clients. Baby Boomers throughout the land will have their heartstrings tugged by this little beauty. Their first car was probably a Morris Minor. 

Photos from the Morris Minor Hearse Company, which you can find here. 

If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?

6 October 2011
Charles
7 Comments
Categories: Attitudes to death

Steve Jobs

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

Whole speech here. 

Gail Rubin’s 30 funerals in 30 days challenge 2011

5 October 2011
Charles
No comments
Categories: funerals in other cultures

Over in the United States the indefatigable and brilliant blogger Gail Rubin has already embarked on her 30 funerals in 30 day challenge. Yes, she is going to cover one  day for a month, and today is actually Day Six, so you’ve got some catching up to do. Don’t miss Day Five, when she visited a pet cemetery on, most appropriately, St Francis’ Day.

Gail attends the ordinary funerals of ordinary people, and that’s what makes this project so gripping and also, I think, important. All ordinary people are extraordinary; their funerals speak to everyone.

For us here in the UK it’s very interesting to gain this insight into the way they do things over there. Best of all, there are things we can learn.

If you missed last year’s 30 in 30 you can find it in Gail’s blog archive. 

Find The Family Plot blog here. 

Order a copy of Gail’s book here. It’s good. 

And here is some music from Gene R Spence’s funeral (Day 5) 

I am not gonna lay around and whine and mourn for somebody that done me wrong
Don’t think for a minute that I am gonna sit around and sing some old sad song
I believe it’s half full not a half empty glass
Every day I wake up knowing it could be my last

[Chorus:]
I ain’t here for a long time
I’m here for a good time
So bring on the sunshine, to hell with the red wine
Pour me some moon shine
When I’m gone put it in stone “He left nothing behind”
I ain’t here for a long time
I’m here for a good time

Folks are always dreaming about what they like to do but I like to do just what I like
I take the chance, dance the dance, it might be wrong but then again it might be right
There’s no way of knowing what tomorrow brings
Life’s too short to waste it I say bring on anything

[Chorus:]
I ain’t here for a long time
I’m here for a good time
So bring on the sunshine, to hell with the red wine
Pour me some moon shine
When I’m gone put it in stone “He left nothing behind”
I ain’t here for a long time
I’m here for a good time
I ain’t here for a long time
I’m here for a good time