Author: Charles

Death Cafe

27 September 2011
Charles
3 Comments
Categories: Attitudes to death, Death; Good death

This post is reproduced with permission from Jayd Kent’s One Queer Femme Anatomy blog. It describes the first-ever pop-up death cafe, the brainchild of Jon Underwood, curator of the Death Cafe blog and one of the nicest and, underneath that, brainiest people you could meet. A death cafe is long-held dream of John. How marvellous to see it take flight.

Jayd Kent

I attended something called a ‘Death Cafe’ today. 

I was terrified at the concept of sitting in a room, with a random group of people I had never met, to talk about the one thing that terrifies me more than anything in the world – DEATH. I had been worrying about it quietly all week. 

A little background before I tell you of my experience – 
I have always had an innate fear (and nobody really knows this) of dying. I have ‘visions’ every day, sometimes multiple ones in any given day, of my own death. They are often violent and abrupt, and I keep this to myself for fear of being judged a madman – so now I am coming out. I have had them for years, the first one I recall when I was only 13 in a Graphics Class at School – of a man breaking in and stabbing me. They are often horrific accidents where I witness my own death, and sometimes take me out of ‘real space’ for a few moments, to which I then return and try and sweep it under the carpet. In times of stress they worsen and become more frequent, and when I’m happy and life is plentiful they become less so. But they are ALWAYS there. Constantly reminding me of my mortality and fucking with my head.

So, I had a wonderful whipping and sensory session with my good friend Faerie one time recently, and we were talking about my persistent coughing, to which he thought it could be a nervous cough due to underlying anxiety issues. When he asked me if I had any I could think of, I took a leap of faith and told him about my ‘visions’, and he told me about the ‘Death Cafe’.

I spoke to a delightful man via email who had organised it, and he reassured me that I had nothing to be scared of, and gave me the details of the venue. It was in somebodys house this time, being the first one of its kind in the UK, with a hope of getting a venue in future. The offer of tea and cake was there too, which made it hard to refuse. I decided I would go, although I was still terrified of what would come out that day.

Upon nearly getting lost on the way there, I came across a beautiful road tucked down the side of Hackney. It was lovely sunny and warm, so I had enjoyed the cycle there from mine – and decided it was a gorgeous day to talk about death in this contrast in the weather.

I was welcomed by the host, and we all introduced ourselves. Everybody seemed very outgoing and friendly, which comforted me, as well as the fact one of my friends was there – the very same close friend who had suggested I go in the first place. God, I needed that hug when I saw him. 

So, we were ushered into a vintage dining room with wooden floorboards, to a wonderfully presented table with plates and such laid out. Then, the conversation began. Before I even had time to let it sink in, I had started to well up. That’s what’s so bizarre about my relationship with death – I’m so scared of it, I can’t even think about it without being reduced to tears, so sitting here with all these people openly chatting about their past experiences with it made me instantly emotional. It’s not something I have ever been open about before either – something came up in discussion about how our British Society has quite a stiff upper lip regarding this subject, and talking about it upsets others so we should just shut up. 

There were times where I felt like I was going to walk out before it was even my turn to speak.

Then it came to my turn – and why I was here. I told the group of 7 or so about my ‘visions’ – the moment I had done, I broke down. It felt awful, and I carried on talking through my tears, telling of not wanting sympathy because it was something I couldnt control, and warned of possible further outbursts later on in the session – my coping mechanism of trying to declare my problems are tiny in comparison. But this was a place where people questioned me instead of making me feel like I couldnt talk about it, they were drawing it out of me instead- bringing more of the food for thought to the table. I learned ALOT about myself, and here are some of the key points, which could be life changing to me.

Q.) How do I deal with scary death-like situations in real life?
A.) I take control, and deal with them head on. Like when Fiona (my mother) got liver cancer, and I held everyone together and became the driving force the day she had her liver transplant, or the time my house caught fire and nearly killed me and my gf when we were 19 and I just woke up and sorted it out and put the fire out, without thinking about it.

Q.) Do I have any phobias?
A.) Yes, I have a phobia of shock tactics on TV and in real life.
(To which somebody pointed out my phobia sounds the same as my visions, and perhaps it’s connected to my phobia of shock rather than my fear of death?)

These two revelations on their own were INCREDIBLY helpful, and I have got more from this one session talking to some amazing people, than I would have ever got out of say, a counselling session.

At the end of the session, we changed the subject to what we said we had achieved in life, what our obstacles were – this was kind of intended to be said on our deathbed so to speak.

It was so freeing to tell a group of strangers my life story, my achievements, hear theirs, and all share praise and thanks. We were then asked to place all the obstacles into an envelope, along with some of the fears of death we had written on pieces of card earlier, and they were ritually burned in a ceremony accompanied by some beautiful chanting melodies. We watched everything burn in that fireplace in silence, until there was nothing left. I cried quietly to myself, hoping nobody had noticed. I felt such a symbolic sense of relief watching those 15 years of fear go up in flames.

And then I ate cake afterwards, with a cup of tea to ground myself.

I can’t tell you how much this has helped me, and I feel compelled to sit here on my computer the moment I have cycled home and write down the whole experience, so I will never forget it, and never forget what those kind people have said, and try to not forget their faces on a day that will sit with me for years to come.

Perhaps the memorable day that I changed, and started on my path to ‘letting go’.

Faerie can be reached at his website
www.londonfaerie.co.uk

and The Death Cafe can be found at
www.deathcafe.com

The things they say

26 September 2011
Charles
3 Comments
Categories: funeral cost, funeral directors

 

Over at the Connecting Directors site in America a funeral director observes:

Never trust a funeral director who says, “This is the last thing you can do for your loved one.”

What other upselling tricks and wiles do our native undertakers possess? Including facial expressions? 

Undertakers’ nightmares #1 – the Social Fund Funeral Payment

26 September 2011
Charles
22 Comments
Categories: Social Fund Funeral Payment

Posted by Nick Gandon

Methinks that the lunatics have taken over the asylum at the Department for Work and Pensions.  Maybe lunatics is an unkind (and no doubt very non-pc) description, which on reflection, I should perhaps replace with the term “jobsworths”. 

Long known throughout the undertaking profession for their crazy deliberations over the claims for the Social Fund funeral payments, these nice people, of which there ARE some genuinely helpful souls, have hit an all-time NUL POINTS over the last 7 days. 

It would be great to know whether other funeral directors have come across these little gems before…

I found a payment into our bank account from the DWP last week.  On the statement, it included a DWP reference number, with the letters “SF” – which I decided must be a payment from the Social Fund.   Most payments are preceded by a letter advising payment and client details… but not this one! 

“Simples” I thought.    I’ll ring them up, quote the reference number, and ask which client the payment concerns.  

After searching their website to find the most appropriate contact number,  and talking with no less than 6 very nice but totally clueless DWP people,   I eventually got the right number – only to talk to the most unhelpful one of the lot. 

“I can’t discuss this with you” came back the aggressive Liverpudlian voice from the Belle Vale Benefit Centre.  “It’s against the Data Protection Act”.   So, I pleaded, with an element of reasonable rationality (or so I thought):  “You’ve paid us the money.   Can’t you at least tell me the name of the client whose account you’ve (part) paid?” 

Forget it!  Common sense way out of the window!     “I’ll have to contact the client (came the reply) and get their permission to be able to tell you that the payment relates to them.     When I’ve got their permission, I’ll call you back and let you know who they are”.   Crazy. 

Case No 2  

I got a call yesterday afternoon from (by coincidence) someone at the DWP office at Belle Vale Benefit Centre requesting information relating to a claim. (No connection with the above).    Unfortunately, we got cut off mid-call, and their phone ID does not register for callback. 

They didn’t call me back, and I couldn’t call them (no number). 

I did my best, and tried a series of numbers and, after over an hour of waiting to be answered,  BINGO! I got the right call centre. 

Yes, you’ve guessed it – my hopes were short-lived.  I explained that I was trying to give them the information they requested from me regarding a Mr X, and could they kindly take the details. 

NOPE. 

“Even if you give me the name and address of the claimant, I can’t talk to you about them because of the Data Protection Act” came the reply. 

“To identify the claimant, I need their national insurance number, but I still can’t talk to you about them, even with that.” 

“I only want to give you the information you have called and asked me for,” I protested.    “I’m giving you the info – not the other way round.  The Data Protection Act was never meant to obstruct simple conversation like this,” I protested. 

“Call your client and ask them for their national insurance number” replied the robot woman. 

I was struggling for a professional variation of the word “BOLLOCKS” but decided on the more polite   “we’re wasting each other’s time, aren’t we?  Goodbye”. 

Anyone else had such a ridiculous wasted few hours with the DWP social fund representatives?

Keep calm and carry on

23 September 2011
Charles
1 Comment
Categories: Attitudes to death, bereavement, bureaucracy

Posted by Charles

There is a tendency among some visitors to this blog vastly to overrate the significance of death. How salutary it is, therefore, to remind ourselves that our legislators keep mortality both in perspective and in its place.

Maternity leave

As an employee you have the right to 26 weeks of Ordinary Maternity Leave and 26 weeks of Additional Maternity Leave making one year in total. The combined 52 weeks is known as Statutory Maternity Leave. 

Paternity leave

As long as you meet certain conditions you can take either one or two weeks’ Ordinary Paternity Leave. You can’t take odd days off and if you take two weeks they must be taken together. 

Compassionate leave

If you are an ’employee’, you have the right to unpaid time off work to deal with emergencies involving a ‘dependant’ – this could be your husband, wife, partner, child, parent, or anyone living in your household as a member of the family.  

When a dependant dies, you can take time off to make funeral arrangements, as well as to attend a funeral.  

If you need time off to cope with a situation that doesn’t fall under the ‘time off for dependants’ right, you may have a right to time off under your contract of employment. Many employers will have a scheme for compassionate leave and details should be included in your contract or company handbook. If the situation is not covered by any scheme then you can still ask your employer for the time off, although they do not have to agree to your request. 

Source: directgov.co.uk

The bitter spice that sweetens the dish

23 September 2011
Charles
4 Comments
Categories: Attitudes to death, bereavement, celebrants, ceremony

Posted by Jonathan

A celebrant said today:

“Even when funerals are designed to be a celebration of life, I nearly always begin by acknowledging people’s grief and sadness.”

Jose (see his thought provoking blog post of 19th September), ever enquiring and studiously leaving no stone unturned, wants to know about incorporating grieving and celebration of life in the same goodbye ceremony.  His tenaciousness is stimulating for us celebrants, who must every day question our way forward.

His query:  “Which are the elements that you use afterwards to move the mourners and their emotions to a more positive feeling?” is not an easy one to answer.  I never thought of it in terms of involving ‘elements’, and I never thought of grief as being any less positive than celebration of life.

Grief has to do with sadness, not unhappiness.  There’s a big difference between the two. Unhappiness is isolating and unattractive and faces towards depression.  We’ve all been there.  It’s not grieving, it’s self pity.  Sadness, particularly about death, is beautiful even when it’s unbearable.  It’s feeling sorry not for yourself but for your loss – loss is not separate from you, but it is not you; it encompasses you, and it’s helpful to share it with others. We’ve all been there, too.  It is a noble feeling, and one I certainly wouldn’t want to be deprived of after even a tragic loss.

Following the last funeral I conducted, when I was trying to ‘let it go’, I found I couldn’t do so until I’d understood what it had taught me.  I was feeling uncharacteristically sad that it had ended, but I didn’t want to stop feeling sad because I knew if I did I’d miss something very important.  So I sat at the pavement table outside a café, watched the human beings go by with all their inner concerns showing or not showing, had a fag and a double espresso, and I thought deeply and wrote down what these last ten days of ‘funereality’ had given me.  Why was I reluctant to release it, this recent experience that my sadness was holding so close to me? 

It was only then, after I’d understood just what I was losing, that I was prepared to say goodbye to it and feel glad I’d had it while I did.  That’s what a good funeral does, too.  You could say it bequeaths you with a greater energy, a wisdom, as this did for me.  It crystallized into a poem, which I kept to remind me why I do this (and incidentally why, unlike some bereavement workers tell me they feel, I actually find myself energized rather than burnt near the furnace of recent death).  It also approaches the matter of our relationship with, and our role in, others’ grief, so I can happily share it with you here:

‘The funeral nourishes me
by embrace in the humanity of strangers.

I relieve them of their bewilderment
and reveal them to themselves in the majesty of their pain,
with words, with voice, with actions.

I touch their hurting hearts
to know they are not in isolation;
that their own grief is universal;
that healing lets love in and does not banish it;
that anguish is their invited guest;
that tomorrow will still come.

And then I leave.’

OK, I was only losing an experience, not a real live person, but the principle is the same; you have to be aware of what and whom you have lost, and the desirable pain to which love commits you, to move you on from just the raw feeling of pure loss before you can celebrate what you did have and what you still will have.  The pain of loss doesn’t go away with celebration of life.  It just becomes less overwhelming and more manageable when you’ve identified your loss, and understood that you still have something real and priceless, yours to keep.  And it brings to your attention that we are all human, and that this is the deal.

If a bad funeral damages you by making you unhappy, that detracts nothing from the healing value of a good one, even a good sad one.  And I think there’s something to do with loyalty where grief is concerned.  We can’t in good conscience abandon our dead by just getting intoxicated at a hooray party, any more than we could by indulging in the misery of a self pitying orgy, or going through the motions of an irrelevant tradition. 

Our dead leave us through no fault of their own.  We have to include their absence in our funeral for them, painful as it is, and I believe we owe them our mourning as much as our appreciation.

 

A good funeral: part 1

22 September 2011
Charles
8 Comments
Categories: Attitudes to death, bereavement, burial, ceremony, death and funerals, DIY funeral, funeral

Posted by Sweetpea

In the light of our recent discussions about the merits of secular, civil and religious funerals, one interesting thread started to appear.  Namely, what should a funeral not fail to include?  Can a funeral ever really be meaningful to anyone?  Does any funeral do the things that people need it to do? Well, for the sake of clarity, I’d like to leave the actual ritual contents of a civil or secular funeral for another day.  For the moment, I think we should go one step further back, to examine how the foundations of a good funeral rite are laid. Cutting through all the arguments about the contents of a funeral, be it of whatever shade, I think the key to the success of a funeral rite (and I have no doubt that a successful funeral is possible) is one overarching thing:  Relevance.

And the mechanism for allowing the door to open to Relevance?  Well, that begins with well informed people who instinctively know what will be right for them, and just as importantly know where to find it.  Failing that, a knowledgeable and empathetic funeral director who can guide those people towards what is the best path for them.  And failing that, an experienced and skilful celebrant/member of the clergy/friend to offer advice and support to bring them to where they need to be.

The notion of Relevance should permeate the entire proceedings from beginning to end – from funeral preparations to the enactment of the rite itself.  It doesn’t happen by accident, and needs empathetic, practical and experienced people working together to make it happen.  As has been so wonderfully written elsewhere by Jonathan: ‘if you just listen to a family it brings it all down out of the whirlwind in the sky and settles it more easily on the ground.  Stop.  Do nothing.  Tell me how he died; how do you feel about his death; where does that leave you now; let’s look after him gently while we all decide what to do and, far more importantly, why we’re doing it and what we hope it will achieve. Does that involve some choices?  Okay, let’s deal with them in our own good time, it’s not the choices that matter anyway.’    

This simple, intuitive and effective process leads eventually to arrangements which, as Tom Lynch states ‘get the dead where they need to go and the living where they need to be’.  This might be a whole day spent on a hillside, with a grave dug and filled by friends on their own land, singing around a campfire until the early hours, it might be a requiem mass, it might be a twenty minute ceremony at a crematorium, followed by a celebratory knees-up at a favourite pub, it might be a C of E service followed by ham salad and scones in the village hall.  If it’s relevant to these people, then that’s the nearest we are going to get to achieving those aims.

But let’s be under no illusions.  Real emotional pain and damage is caused to grievers when a rite has no relevance to them – it’s traumatic and stays with them until their own dying day.  We are perhaps more familiar with stories of religious rites leaving people disorientated and even more bereft because of a mis-matching of their needs and its expression.  But this can be just as true for civil or secular funerals, something which I have observed when, say, a religiously inclined adult child has been painfully overruled or excluded from religious or spiritual expression by a surviving parent.  Which leads us to part 2 – what should or shouldn’t be included in a successful funeral rite?

Words, words, words

21 September 2011
Charles
19 Comments
Categories: celebrants, ceremony, funeral customs

First posted by Charles on 9 Feb 2010

I’m putting this back up as a contribution to recent debates started by Jose and Richard.

Following my post about the ineptitude and ineffectiveness of words, I stumbled on this piece in the Sydney Morning Herald. It’s actually about citizenship ceremonies, but you’d never guess it from the way I’ve plucked the extracts:

Traditionally, ritual, including rites of passage, is embedded in our religious culture. And it is true that religion seems to have a competitive advantage when it comes to this stuff. Religions have been practising their liturgy for a long time. The godly are very good at all of the non-verbal aspects of ritual from bells and smells to crazy cozies to speaking in tongues. Great ceremony is about an absence of speeches and many faiths get this.

Moreover, the godly have the advantage that they feel that they are consecrating their rites in the presence of their transcendent God. That ineluctably gives an ineffable power to the ceremony. The godless will obviously struggle to match that attribute of faith. And we need to get better at the non-verbal stuff. We atheists can talk the leg off a chair but we can’t sing or chant or dance the leg off an amputee.

Now a real rite of passage doesn’t just rejoice in change. It is the change. A ceremony which merely celebrates but doesn’t cause the change is not strictly a rite of passage. Graduation ceremonies from university are rites of passage because you don’t get the damned piece of paper without enduring the ceremony. On this definition, school graduations strictly aren’t rites of passage because the exam marks after the ceremony are the life-changing event, not the school graduation or valedictory service. So funerals aren’t strictly rites of passage because unless you’re a time traveller, your funeral won’t end your life, just celebrate it.

We, of the secular world, often fail to employ those non-verbal rituals that make a ceremony. You can easily cock up even the most moving event by speeches. During my days of municipal service, these ceremonies meandered between inspirational and pedestrian. The pedestrian bits were inevitably the speeches. The best bits were non-verbal – the Mayoral handshake, the familial hugging, the singing of the national anthem, the presentation of the symbolic wattle and the giving of certificate. All of these had no words merely music or actions.

Religions don’t have a monopoly on rites of passage but they do them better than us. The secular world needs to learn more about celebrating without speeches. We need to have rituals we perform together and not passively watch. I think we are still a century or so away from really learning these skills.

At the heart of great ceremony is performance that is not normal. Normal is pedestrian. Words are dull. We need transforming ceremony and that requires anything but speeches.

Read the whole article here.

Euphemisms 1: Officials and officiousness

21 September 2011
Charles
1 Comment
Categories: Art and death, Attitudes to dead bodies, Attitudes to death

Posted by Vale

Euphemisms are all about not facing up to reality. We like to think we use them for good reasons, but they have a darker side too. This poem, written by Harold Pinter in 1997, uses one of the words we often shy from, yet it too is a euphemism. It was written in the year that his own father died and I think that, writing about death in this way, he was describing something of his own experience of the way that deaths are managed and, in the midst of the form filling, the way that language can help us hide from what has happened and what we have both done and not done.

Because it is Pinter, of course, I think he was also making a point about the way that being ’official’, can lead to the denial of both feelings and humanity at many different levels. Of course the poem is an extreme version of unfeeling officiousness but does it remind you at all of the way that some funeral businesses handle their first contact with families?

Death (Births and Deaths Registration Act 1953)

Where was the dead body found? Who found the dead body?
Was the dead body dead when found?
How was the dead body found?

Who was the dead body?

Who was the father or daughter or brother
Or uncle or sister or mother or son
Of the dead and abandoned body?

Was the body dead when abandoned?
Was the body abandoned?
By whom had it been abandoned?

Was the dead body naked or dressed for a journey?

What made you declare the dead body dead? Did you declare the dead body dead?
How well did you know the dead body?
How did you know the dead body was dead?

Did you wash the dead body Did you close both its eyes Did you bury the body
Did you leave it abandoned
Did you kiss the dead body

The poem was silkscreen printed on 7 hospital bedsheets and 7 forensic dissection tables surrounded by the smell of lysol.