Author: Charles

Keeping them honest

13 September 2011
Charles
7 Comments
Categories: funeral directors, Legal rights

Posted by Charles

What do we think of e-petitions? Democracy at its finest? A place where the mad, the bad and the rabid can loose off a bit of spleen? Something in between? HM Gov describes e-petitions as “an easy way for you to influence government policy in the UK”. We never supposed our governing class cared so much about what we think.

Topping the charts just now is Convicted London rioters should loose all benefits. You can see the rest here.

Languishing at the bottom we have this: Hook up the national grid to the crematoriums

Also down there is this: Regulation of Funeral Industry 

I’ve been monitoring this Regulation petition for a few days. When I first looked it had 5 signatories. When I just looked it had 7. It seems not to have legs.

In a more or less scandal free industry this is to be expected. But when an undertaker screws up, it’s natural that the person who’s been screwed is going to conclude that regulation is the answer. There’s an example of this here. 

I don’t think regulation is the answer for three reasons.

First, when someone dies it is their executor who is the lawful possessor of the body, responsible for disposing of it. So the executor is the funeral director. The executor has to register the death. The executor has to apply for burial or cremation. The executor has to demonstrate that he or she saw it through. The role of the undertaker is secondary, subordinate and collaborative. It is to do those things (and only those things) that the executor is allowed to delegate and which he or she doesn’t want to do. Conclusion: if an executor doesn’t need a qualification, why on earth would an undertaker?

Second, professionalising and regulating undertakers can only reinforce the perception that they are the default disposers of our dead and, worse, move them a step closer to being the only people allowed to do so. We the people are the default disposers of our dead. An undertaker is our agent. That is our ancient right, and that right defines our responsibility both to ourselves and to our dead. Our dead belong to us. Let us not give them up. 

Third, it is hard to see how nasty undertakers could be transformed into nice ones by government regulation. It doesn’t work like that in any other industry. It doesn’t work like that in America where costs are high and scandals plenty.

Where there is room for improvement—and there certainly is—it will be brought about by clients who exert informed expectations on undertakers. We all have a responsibility to guard our best interests, even at a time like death.

In short, consumer scrutiny is the way to keep ‘em honest. Don’t sign the petition. 

What do atheists profess?

12 September 2011
Charles
35 Comments
Categories: Attitudes to death, celebrants, ceremony, funeral customs, funeral trends, Religious funerals, Secular approaches to death

Posted by Richard Rawlinson, religious correspondent

Vale makes interesting points in the thread beneath my Beyond the Abyss post, which discusses the gap between secularist individuality and religious communal ritual:

We (I) believe that community and the communal celebration of key events is important – yet secularism, at least as it finds expression in the west today – tends to be individualistic. Not surprising, perhaps when the only common bond is a lack of belief.
My own feeling, though, is that we are in a transitional phase and will over time evolve new and meaningful rituals to reflect the reality of people’s sense of personal meaning and purpose.

At first these will ape the religious ceremonies we are familiar with – because they are the ones we know. But they will diverge and in time consolidate new norms, patterns and meanings.

Actually, look at any civil ceremonies, the start has already been made’.

I’m trying to be open but find it hard to imagine meaningful death rituals devoid of any spiritual belief in an afterlife. I agree that non-religious funerals help bring comfort and closure, but wouldn’t a truly atheist ritual do this while professing the faith that God and souls don’t exist? Would it not be crucial to celebrate the fact that the deceased, however fondly remembered, is now nothing, incapable of pleasure or pain?

Some political and intellectual atheists can cope with such a nihilistic philosophy, but we seem some way from popular demand for rituals reflecting such secular realities.

Some stats…

Each year, around 500,000 people in the UK die, according the annual mortality statistics published by the Office for National Statistics. Over 30,000 funerals a year are currently non-religious, according to the National Association of Funeral Directors. This is around 6 per cent of deaths, or over one in 20 households affected by death.

This figure is increasing as families turn to celebration-of-life ceremonies rather than services conducted by a priest, either in church or crematorium. There’s certainly a growing willingness to admit non-belief, encouraged by secular educationalists, politicians and media pundits.

Of the four in 10 Brits who claim membership of the Church of England, it’s clear many are secularists, who increasingly see hypocrisy in using their church simply for baptisms, weddings, funerals and the Christmas carol service.

The NAFD has confirmed that most of those choosing non-religious funerals were ‘hatch, match, dispatch’ Protestants. Lapsed Catholics remain more likely to uphold the ceremonial traditions of their forefathers, hedging their bets, so to speak. This is borne out by weekly Mass attendance figures among the genuinely faithful – for the first time in the UK, CofE and Catholic attendance is neck and neck, each attracting between 800,000 and 1m a week, even though the starting pool of Catholics is smaller than those claiming to be culturally CofE.

But just as there are people of half-baked religious faith, so there are ‘atheist-lites’ for whom the fond belief in some sort of afterlife prevents them from totally parting ways with religion-inspired ceremonial.

Funeral direction

The muddled masses are only likely to reach clarity on one side or the other by authoritative guidance. In a nutshell, they need to be evangelised by fundamentalists, not in the nutty Creationist or Islamofacist sense but in the sense of inspirational leaders persuading others of their creed, be it religious or godless.

This is where the problem lies for anyone trying to devise new rituals devoid of quasi-religious elements. In the case of civil funeral celebrants, it doesn’t matter if they settle for a client-driven compromise. Who really cares if high priest of atheism Richard Dawkins disapproves of them perpetuating religious rituals? After all, he’s a biologist, not a philosopher or social worker, and, even then, considered a sloppy intellect by most of his academic peers.

In the case of priests, their vows in the Sacrament of Holy Orders mean they must serve God and the faithful of His Church by obeying and teaching God’s laws, handed down by the Holy Bible and Apostolic Tradition – the Mass with its divine liturgy and rituals as the focal point.

It’s at this point that Catholics must briefly digress – yes, there are priests who attempt sacrilegious ministry, and, of course, a minority who have committed vile crimes in the eyes of secular law, as well as mortal sins against God. But the point I’m making is that the way forward for the Church is not the same as for secular ritualists: a priest who dons layman’s attire for a civil funeral should be defrocked; a civil celebrant’s a la carte service, complete with religious appetiser, offers choice.

As Gloriamundi makes clear in his/her recent blog, ‘What You Need to be a Celebrant’, such choice forms a compassionate collaboration between celebrant and the bereaved. By the same token, the Church is being compassionate and indeed true by being relatively inflexible, as touched on in my post, ‘Individuality in the Requiem Mass?’.

True atheists and theists are dogmatic, not pragmatic. They are not relativists as they believe in orthodoxies: that we are just physical beings, or that our mortal bodies are vessels for eternal souls, saved by the grace of God.

Some religions do indeed seem to be committing slow suicide, but there are also fresh buds, a growing hunger for reverence among many younger Christians. In a parallel world, generations are growing up not even as cultural Christians, meaning they’re less likely to behave as their grandparents would have done when confronted by death.

But this seems more social consequence than conscious movement: has the average person really embraced the belief that a world without religion would be a better place, even if they do prefer living in the moment and banishing thoughts of life after death?

Apathy has wounded religion but a creed that denies belief cannot equal it, certainly not communally. True atheist diehards (die-easies?) will never replace religion as you have to fill a void with something, not nothing.

‘Teach them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and, lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world. Amen’. (Matthew 28:20)

Trouble up at t’crem

11 September 2011
Charles
4 Comments
Categories: Co-op, crematoria

Posted by Charles

When East Staffordshire Borough and South Derbyshire District Council sold Bretby crematorium to Midlands Co-op there were those who said no good would come of it. It’s been just a few weeks and the doomsayers are already feeling grimly vindicated. 

The Co-op has been refurbing the car park with this consequence to a mourner: 

“I was attending a funeral last Tuesday (August 23) and was standing outside the entrance to the crematorium at 10.30am with about a dozen other people and I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

“It was just disgraceful. The workers were shouting at each other over the machines and using foul language, right in front of the mourners with absolutely no thought for them. The people I was standing with were just as disgusted as me. 

“People are paying their last respects and saying their last goodbyes so they shouldn’t be expected to put up with this behaviour. It is disgraceful that mourners have to witness this.” 

Full story in the Burton Mail here.

The Last Outfit

10 September 2011
Charles
2 Comments
Categories: Art and death, Attitudes to dead bodies, Attitudes to death, Dress codes, funeral customs, funerals in other cultures

Posted by Charles

These last outfits were chosen by some of the 23 people taking part in a photo project initiated by The Straits Times, the leading Singapore daily, in partnership with Lien Foundation, a Singapore philanthropic house. Entitled “The Last Outfit”, the project showcases individuals in the clothes they wish to wear for their own funeral.

The Last Outfit seeks to remove the taboo of death and enthuse people to view life and death differently. 

Full text here.

On the map?

9 September 2011
Charles
3 Comments
Categories: celebrants, funeral, Plan your own funeral

Posted by Vale

Are you on the map?

On the 1st August a new information service for consumers was launched. It’s called ’Funeralmap’ and it aims to make it easier for someone to find out about funeral related businesses in a locality. You enter a postcode or the name of a town, select the type of business you are interested in and, bingo! the map shows you who’s listed and where they are located. Have a look for yourself here.

Funeralmap is designed for customers, but it doesn’t want to sell you anything directly. Instead it provides a location based directory with some additional information and helpful links. As a new source of customer information GFG is happy to applaud the initiative, but there are two tests to apply. Firstly, is it likely to be useful? Information is already widely available to someone with an Internet connection. Does Funeralmap add value? Will people using it be in a better position to make informed choices? Secondly, if you are a business associated with funerals, is it worth getting yourself listed?

Usefulness first. The site itself is professional and well presented. The map interface is clear and simple and, because it mirrors the sort of google maps search we all use, quite familiar. I found a few glitches in moving around the map, but, I guess, these are teething troubles (or my muddles).

A much bigger issue for me, though, was the poverty of the information available. It’s not just that the listings are so basic – the site is young yet and, if businesses pay for premium listings, more information will arrive. No, it’s more that there is so little opportunity for customer interaction. Funeralmap will not let you, as a customer, post local information, reviews, price or service comparisons or make personal comments. It’s a real weakness. It feels surprisingly old fashioned. It strongly suggests that – because the site is geared to present paid for advertisements – Funeralmap has been built as a businesses platform rather than consumer space. The result is that, as things stand, you can search on Funeralmap, but it’s not your forum and, while it will give you the information that businesses choose to present, it’s not necessarily going to help you make fully informed choices.

So, if you are a business, is it worth getting yourself listed? Well some businesses are there already. Basic information about funeral directors, burial grounds – including natural burial grounds – and crematoria are included for free. Other businesses have to pay for inclusion (and all businesses would need to pay for premium listings). The starting price is £75 a year for a standard listing*.

As a celebrant myself this is a real decision. Most of my business comes via funeral directors at the moment, but, maybe, if I advertised, it would let potential clients know that people like me exist and might prompt them to contact me directly. The evidence from celebrants with who have websites already is that people seem to like them, and, increasingly, expect them, but that they don’t yet drive much business.

People do like to know more about you and,  if you haven’t a website yet, a Funeralmap listing that allows for a photograph and some text may help a little. While thinking through my own options I checked out Seth Grodin’s blog. He’s an Internet marketing writer and I found an interesting piece there  called called Memo to the very small

Grodin suggests that for very little money, you can easily create a blog based website. The intelligent use of photographs, published comments from clients and customers and basic information about yourself can all help you make a strong local impact. Better than Funeralmap? Well, it’s early days yet – but I think it’s where I’ll start.

What will you do?

*original post corrected 18.00 9th September 2011

Yakuza funeral

8 September 2011
Charles
No comments
Categories: Gangster funerals

Posted by Charles

Belgian photographer Anton Kusters has just finished a project following a yakuza family. Yakuza? Japanese organized criminals. More here.

A magazine journalist asked Kusters this question:

Photographically, what was the most powerful situation that you encountered during this project?

He replied:

The funeral, which was mind-blowing. I got a phone call that Miyamoto-san, a high ranking boss of the clan, had a stroke and was dying, and I flew over to pay him my last respects. The family appreciated that gesture, and they allowed me to photograph the funeral.

It was incredible not only because it was a traditional Japanese funeral — the body was cremated in a special manner, there were flowers filling the coffin and other cultural specifics — but on top of that, it was a yakuza funeral, so there were 250 or perhaps even more standing in line to be greeted. Every time someone came to pay their respects, they would all bow. It was impressive to watch, and at the same time, it was a very touching moment.

Read the whole article here. 

Beyond the Abyss

8 September 2011
Charles
5 Comments
Categories: Academia and death, Atheism, Attitudes to death

Posted by our religious correspondent Richard Rawlinson

The North Texas Church of Freethought, according to its website [http://www.churchoffreethought.org], offers “atheists, agnostics, humanists, and freethinkers all the educational, inspirational, and social and emotional benefits of traditional faith-based churches”. 

A group of non-believers who acknowledge how many aspects of religion continue to attract, their interest is in what they hold to be the human imagination which dreamt up gods and creeds. They recognise that religion embraces architecture, art, nature, marriage, death, ritual, time – and that by getting rid of God, one is dispensing with notions that have held societies together.

This secularised version of Christianity is not new. In the early days of the French Revolution, painter Jacques-Louis David unveiled “A Religion of Mankind”, which aimed to build upon the best aspects of religious tradition, with feast days, wedding ceremonies, revered figures (secularised saints) and atheistic churches. The new religion would use buildings, good books and academia (seminaries) to try to make us good.

David’s experiment never took off. The Church of Freethought tried to open a ‘parish’ in California but it, too, folded. Is it surprising that secularismhasn’t been able to inspire communal rituals as religion does? Most secularists are content to act individually rather than communally. Why wouldn’t one sleep in, go shopping or read online on Sunday rather than go and hear a secularist lecture (sermon)?

Religions require sacrifices, and reject the secular assurance that everyone can discover happiness and meaning simply through physical life – work and love.

Theists find this as difficult to comprehend as atheists do the belief in a life after death, and the division seems unbridgeable. To some theists, an atheist is necessarily a nihilist, for whom beliefs are unfounded and existence senseless. If each generation’s death means the end of those individuals, then we’re faced with an endless cycle of creation and destruction, the meaning of which, if any, is incomprehensible.

Certainly the bereaved are affected by death, but death cannot be of any consequence to the purely physical human being who no longer exists. If you cease to exist, you need not fear death, where you will feel neither pain, nor pleasure, nor peace, nor torment.

But humanists assert that a person’s life before physical death has existential meaning. Belief in some kind of physical persistence of a human being’s past is the rational argument for the conclusion that even if physical death is the end, living a good life gives meaning and value to human existence.

Humanist philosophers also often speak of the void that would follow death as “the abyss”, suggesting a journey to an unknown place which lies at the end of our physical lifetimes. They seem to be giving substance to “nothing” as we cannot understand or visualise nothing.

Several of today’s physicists concur that we exist in some kind of four dimensional “space-time”. Mathematician Hermann Minkowski said: “Space by itself, and time by itself, have vanished into the merest shadows and only a kind of blend of the two exists in its own right.” Space-time is essentially the history of the universe, containing every event that ever happens.

While it appears to be impossible to scientifically prove that life has meaning, it is equally impossible to prove that it does not.

What You Need to be a Celebrant (the unofficial version)

7 September 2011
Charles
17 Comments
Categories: celebrants, ceremony, crematoria, funeral directors

Posted by Gloriamundi

Health warning: this will be opinionated – it’s only my view 

1. Ask yourself why you want to do it, and listen to the answers. The motivations of celebrants are varied, and not necessarily clear to themselves at first. It’s a role that reveals yourself to yourself. That can be quite a tough process. You’ll want to feel happy with some robust, clear non-financial reasons for doing it.

2. Another income stream is essential; it is all but impossible to earn a sensible living. The demand for your services will be unreliable and unpredictable. There may be a very few people who can take enough ceremonies each week to earn a very modest living, but they must be super-efficient, emotionally and spiritually tough, and have a fade-proof capacity for empathy.

 3. There are probably some people who should never try to be teachers or airline pilots or…celebrants. You need a basic toolkit:

*   empathy and patience to deal with the bewildering variety of responses you’ll come across amongst bereaved people (they can even be startlingly rude sometimes!) 

*   a reasonably wide knowledge of the ways of the world – you meet all sorts of people, and you’ll want to pick up very quickly on cultural signals, work references, social contexts 

*   an understanding of, preferably a gift for, ceremony and ritual

*   the ability to write and speak in a way that creates enhanced meaning, and draws people towards you rather than keeping them at a stiff distance.

Some but not all of these things can be improved with training – provided they are there to begin with. (Fair enough, I couldn’t fly an Airbus if I trained for ten years…)

 4. Here’s the big stuff: for the bereaved people you work with, you need to be able feel and show some love. Not the sentimental version, the real, unselfish, compassionate thing. You’re not there just to take efficient notes about someone’s life, stick some philosophical niceties fore and aft, and play a CD or two. You need to be able to enter a circle of grief and share a little of it without being knocked over yourself. You’re on a journey with these people. They’ve not been on it before, nor have you, and you can’t know your final destination when you start the journey.

 5. Obvious enough: you have to put your own preferences and beliefs at a working distance, while you help people explore what they need. This sometimes means letting go whilst family members do something you may think you could do better yourself. A funeral isn’t an artifact, it’s an event; your control over it won’t be total.

 6. You need to stay calm if unexpected things happen (mostly they don’t.) In fact, reducing tension without being superficial is something important you always need to do, so people can feel what they feel, not what they might think they are expected to feel.

 7. If you’re good, you’ll find a sense of balance, constantly shifting as you read people’s responses and tune your voice, your gaze, your stance; you need what people usually call presence, and yet it’s not about you. The ceremony needs to belong to them; it’s not a showcase for your erudition and eloquence. You’re sharing the floor with them, even if yours is the only voice heard.

 8. OK, so:

*  being a celebrant is badly paid (at many funerals, the flowers cost more than the celebrant’s fee) and the training is expensive

*  some crems are dreary, some undertakers can be difficult

*  it can be nerve wracking (at the first one or two, nerves are predictable, but things can go wrong however well-experienced you are)

*  it is sometimes deeply upsetting; a tragedy that has resulted in a phone call to you from a funeral director you’ve met twice and don’t much like, asking you to visit a family you have never met – who are in pieces

*  even with traditional British levels of self-control, raw grief is a difficult thing to share a room with. The only guide is your compassion, the only help is your skill.

 9. If you are being honest with yourself, (if you’re not, you’ll never be a convincing celebrant) if you still want to do it, welcome – it’s a deeply fulfilling job that may overturn your preconceptions about your own mortality. If you wonder why you feel elated as you leave the crematorium. It’s because you’ve been privileged enough to help people with a unique event at a major crisis in their lives. 

The inexorable advance of the Co-opoly

6 September 2011
Charles
4 Comments
Categories: Co-op, Co-operative Funeralcare

Posted by Charles

When a public service organisation falters as a result either of market change, incompetence or poor leadership, it doesn’t fix what needs fixing, it repudiates its public service ethos and starts wooing the psychopathic private sector. The public service ethos is systemically unbusinesslike, couldn’t run a whelk stall, etc. The private sector exemplifies gleaming, exemplary efficiency. Hello and good morning, Southern Cross.

Royal Mail has been riven with self-doubt for years, and the great British public has not been helpful in enabling it to evolve in an age of email. Take post offices, the public sector equivalent of Woollies. Both inspire affection levels which rival those for guide dogs and lifeboats in the hearts of all those millions of people who never use them yet campaign so tirelessly against their closure.

The Post Office has been trying for years to stem its losses by selling financial products. As far back as 2007 the ill-effects of this were noted.

Now the Post Office has entered into an unholy alliance with another crap business, The Co-operative:

The Post Office® has today launched a new Funeral Benefit Option as part of its Over 50’s Life Coverplan offering customers £250 towards funeral costs, available from today.

The Funeral Benefit Option is a free addition to the Over 50’s Life Cover plan and means that Post Office customers who choose to arrange their funeral through The Co-operative will receive an additional £250 contribution towards the cost from The Co-operative Funeralcare. Using this £250 contribution, and the lump sum from the Post Office Over 50s plan, The Co-operative will help make the funeral arrangements – simplifying matters for family and friends. [Full text here]

When a public sector organisation makes an assault the market share of honest, decent traders and, thereby, damages the best interests of consumers, it can truly said to have lost the plot.

The Letting Go

6 September 2011
Charles
No comments
Categories: Attitudes to dead bodies, Attitudes to death, End-of-life issues, funeral customs, Secular approaches to death, Tahara
First published in the New York Times by SIDDHARTHA MUKHERJEE

It had rained heavily the night before. The steep stone steps of the ghat are slick and slippery, and when my father pulls me onto the boat, the water feels more stable than the ground. The boatman rows out toward the open river, and the city of Varanasi swings into full view.

On the bank, wrestlers are performing calisthenics; a vendor is selling marigolds; a man is throwing birdseed at pigeons. The river moves sluggishly at first — but then a current forces the boat around the bend, and we are floating silently by the Manikarnika ghat, where the dead are burned.

I am 8 or 9 years old. Save a distant uncle who has died of renal failure, I have had no personal experience of death. I imagine it as little more than a corporeal exit from the world.

It is an unforgettable sight: row upon row of burning bodies on wooden pyres by the river’s edge. There are dozens of pyres lighted at the ghat, like lanterns along the river. Around them, a circus of death unfolds. There are sons waiting for a professional barber to shave their heads. Men carry the bodies down to the water.

The bodies, swathed in white cloth and strewn with flowers, are bathed, washed and then taken onto a bedlike pile of wood and set alight. The fires burn sometimes for hours. When the flames begin to sputter, the priest shovels the ashes, still smoldering, into the river. The melodrama of the scene is nearly perfectly offset by the glum, mechanical matter-of-factness of its participants. Mounds of ash and marigold and wood chips are floating all around the boat.

There is a man standing by one of the fires and facing the boat, with his arms still taut, as if holding the body — except he is holding air. I bury my face in my father’s lap, but curiosity, literally morbid, forces me to look and to look again, as we drift past. The scene on the bank is mesmerizing. Then the boat rounds another bend, the haunted tableau vanishes, and we debark at another ghat.

Decades later, having trained as an oncologist in Boston, I attend the funeral service of a woman who has died after a long battle with cancer. I remember approaching the coffin, and then registering something odd: the woman has been coiffed and dressed up, and there is the faintest blush of lipstick — lipstick? — on her mouth.

The eulogies at the service are moving and emotional. But the funeral itself seems cleansed and sanitized into a clinical, nearly forensic, ethereality. There are children in dark suits sitting on the aisles looking like miniature adults. I wonder if any of them will be haunted by this funeral, or dream often about it, as I did after that disorienting vision decades ago.

At medical rounds a few days later, I ask some residents and interns about death: how many have carried the body of a parent? What does the weight feel like? And what about the ritual of bathing and cleansing?

In the United States, most terminally ill men and women die in hospitals or nursing homes. The death is typically “pronounced” by an intern on call. The body is lifted out of its bed by an attendant and wheeled to a morgue by another shift worker in scrubs. Undertakers clean and dress it.

Before a cadre of professionals took over the job, people of many faiths took part in the care of the bodies of the dead. Early Christians typically prepared their dead for burial themselves. The novelist Catherine Madsen writes about the Tahara, a Judaic rite in which bathing the body in warm water is accompanied by the reading of ecstatic love poetry to the dead man or woman. If the ritual were revived today, Madsen predicted that “there would be nervous giggling about . . . necrophilia; the plan would be . . . declared inappropriate and quietly dropped.”

Indeed, when I recount Madsen’s description to the residents, it makes them nervous. Our experience of death has become disembodied. The corpus has vanished from the most corporeal of our rituals — and we are left standing with our hands outstretched and taut but with no counterweight to bear, like the man on the riverbank holding air.

Siddhartha Mukherjee is an assistant professor of medicine in the division of medical oncology at Columbia University. He is the author of “The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer.”

Hat-tip to Beth Knox of Crossings