Westie goes west

I know a lot of you like a good gangster funeral. This one’s not premier cru, but it’s not bad.

“My father was no saint,” Ryan McElroy, one of Mr. McElroy’s three children, said in a eulogy. “But people said he could light up a room. He’s been away 15, 20 years, and you still felt protected by him.”

Read the entire account in the New York Times here.

What is a funeral for?

Three views here about what a funeral is for by Christian holy people in response to this article here.


Something that allows space for people of all faiths and none to recognise that our lives are about more than the acquisition of wealth and bigger than the sometimes compartmentalised lives we liveuntil we have a national language and a pattern for doing these things that all can relate to, it is simply not going to meet a very human desire for ritual action that all can take part in.  Rev Adele Rees London

 

A funeral service is neither a “time for thanksgiving” nor “the celebration of a life”, even though that certainly seems to be what many mourners nowadays think they have to have, thereby hurrying past the all-important grieving stages. But the principal focus of the rite is the dignified and appropriate disposal of a corpseFr Alec Mitchell Manchester

 

Three really good things – a tribute by a family member, humour and applause excluding language about God limits what you can say about the richness and depth of human life.  Canon Robert Titley Rector in the Richmond team ministry

 

Having spent last night listening to religious choral music by that well known atheist Mozart I am moved to suggest to Canon Titley that invocations to the Supreme Being do nothing to detract from a sense of wonder and mystery.

A true one-off

The best obituaries are to be found in the Victoria Times Colonist. Its archive of obits will prove a treasure trove for social historians of the future.

Here’s an especially fine one — he sounds like a lovely guy. I like the scattergun approach. The task of collecting single words or phrases is something that celebrants could usefully set their families.

MILLER, Scott Alexander Scott Alexander Miller passed away unexpectedly at the age of 29 years on May 4, 2011. Scottie is survived by his mother, Joan; father, Gord; brother, Chris; sister; Ali; and brother-in-law, Jeff. Scott was born in Victoria and lived in Ottawa where he earned his BEng at Carlton University (where he was known as “The Liver”) before returning to Victoria, where he was working towards his PhD in engineering at the University of Victoria. Scott’s love for life, compassion and creativity will continue to inspire the many lives he has touched. He was fun-loving, academic, a bike guy, artistic, the ultimate techie, an adventurer, a musician, teacher and ultimate friend to all. To sum Scottie up proved a Herculean task, so we asked loved ones to describe him in a single word or phrase. Here are some words and phrases that people used to describe how they felt about Scottie and their time with him: Awesome, intelligent, kind, inspiring, amazing, innovative, free thinker, considerate, sensitive, family oriented, not afraid to march to a different drum, fun loving, own man, conceptual, biggest heart, charismatic, funny, extraordinary, brilliant, gifted in so many areas, thoughtful, “do-ityourself” er, genuinely great, random, gentle, insatiable curiosity of life, life hacker, humble, genius, lover of life, beautiful soul, always smiling, non-judgemental, open minded, unafraid, kinetic, consummate storyteller, easy going, caring, heart of gold, one of the most complete people, old soul, boundless energy, extremely compassionate, calm, warm and loving. With a constant hunger for new experiences Scottie packed more into his 29 years than most do in a lifetime. But despite his whirlwind life, Scottie ALWAYS considered others before himself and took the time to help anyone in anyway that he could. From the age of three he understood how the world worked, which he had concluded by working in his own space-time continuum.

When asked to explain himself, he would always say “It’s just logic”. We would like to send a special thank you to Greg and Ille Kaglik for all their help and support to Scottie and his family during difficult times.

Find this and other VTC obits here.

 

Making doubly sure

Back in April I reported the story of the undertaker who forged a client’s signature on a cremation form  and then had the body cremated without their knowledge. The body was that of a 26 week-old boy, Sonny. His parents had wanted to dress him and put special items in his coffin. Read it here.

Sonny’s parents, Mr and Mrs Lau, asked me to publicise the case because they don’t want anyone else to suffer as they have. We can’t know what it feels like to have gone through what they did; such a thing is unimaginable. On top of it all they had to contest the obdurate lies of the undertaker.

Now, with the support of their local MP, they are asking the Ministry of Justice to require two signatures on an application for cremation, and for those signatures to be witnessed.

In an email to me Mrs Lau says, “Co-op need to be named and shamed. They had no respect for us and did nothing to support us throughout this ordeal … Fingers crossed I will be able to raise awareness prior to some legislation being introduced. I wondered kindly if you could blog the BBC report on your fine blog. I know it’s repetitive but think that the court report never captured the pain that we endured for the 9 months. I do get upset every time I talk about what happened to us but I gather strength knowing that everything I do is for my son.”

Read the full BBC report here.

Who’s the fastest of them all?

Ray Bidiss’s trike hearse world speed record got the newswires humming. When I heard it I paused and pondered. I think I said ooh. Maybe you did, too.

Didn’t hear about it? Read about it here.

Take nothing away from Ray, he blitzed down Elvington airfield at 114.1 mph with a coffin on board. But when the press says his is a motorcycle hearse they’re not technically correct. A motorcycle hearse is a hearse drawn by a 2-wheeled vehicle. A trike is not a motorbike.

By coincidence I’m off to have lunch with Paul Sinclair in a minute. I’d intended talk it over with him, and doubtless we’ll touch on it. But the blog he posted this morning answers all my questions, especially #1: “Haven’t you already done this faster, Paul? Aren’t you actually the record holder?”

Answer in a nutshell: Paul’s hearse has gone faster – 120 mph to be precise – but the Guinness Book of Records didn’t have a hearse category at the time so they didn’t chalk it up. Had they done… But it still wouldn’t have been like against like.

A head-to-head between Paul and Ray would make a great photo; bikers would love it. Any chance of a play-off? I’ll let you know.

Read Paul’s post here.

Ain’t no grave can hold my body down

Here’s another song. Johnny Cash used to sing it. This is the Tom Jones version.

I seem to be on a bit of a roll at the moment. It won’t last. There’ll be time to catch up, I’m afraid.

There ain’t no grave gonna hold my body down
Ain’t no grave gonna hold my body down
When I hear that trumpet sound I’m gonna get up out of the ground
Ain’t no grave gonna hold my body down
Go down yonder Gabriel, put your feet on the land and see
Oh, Gabriel don’t you blow your trumpet ’til you hear it from me
I looked way over yonder and what do you think I see?
I see a band of angels and they’re coming after me
Then I looked way down the river saw the people dressed in white
I knew it was God’s people ’cause I saw them doing right
Ain’t no grave gonna hold my body down
Ain’t no grave gonna hold my body down
When I hear that trumpet sound I’m gonna get up out of the ground
Ain’t no grave gonna hold my body down
I’m going down to the river Jordan and I’m gonna bury my knees in the sand
Holler “Ah, Hosanna” ’til I reach the promised land
Then I looked way over yonder and what do you think I see?
I see a band of angels and they’re coming after me
So meet me King Jesus, meet me, wont’ you meet me in the middle of the air
If these wings should carry me, I won’t need another pair
Ain’t no grave gonna hold my body down
Ain’t no grave gonna hold my body down
When I hear that trumpet sound I’m gonna get up out of the ground
Ain’t no grave gonna hold my body down
Ain’t no grave gonna hold my body down

Well, meet me mother and father, meet me down the river road
And momma you know that I’ll be there when I check in my load
Ain’t no grave can hold my body down
There ain’t no grave can hold my body down
There ain’t no grave can hold my body down

Absolute rotter

Here is the best post this blog will ever publish, so don’t glance at its length and give up. Read on!

Today is all about Bill Jordan. I first heard from Bill back in December 2010. This is what he said:

I am an aging reformed biologist, now more or less a writer, but more accurately a philosopher-poet-canary-priest, and I have come upon some uncommon conclusions on the proper relationship between man and nature in the course of my time on this remarkable planet. These will be set forth in more detail in a book I am writing, presuming I have the time to complete it. But considering my age (66) and heart condition, I must be realistic and plan for my return to the liberated molecules.

I have found my own spirituality in biology and this now sustains me with remarkable equanimity. It is based on how the natural world functions–how it lives–and I wish my remains to return to the living molecular plasma that the surface of the earth nurtures and maintains. Consequently, I am almost obsessed with having my corpse laid out upon the surface, to fulfill the needs of the natural world. I am attaching a short musing on the subject.

Anyhow, such a disposition is simply blasphemous to normal, traditional societies, and I will have to work hard to fulfill my wishes. My question to you is simply to ask your initial reaction to such an odd request. Of course if you have any notions of how my wishes could be carried out, I would be most grateful to hear them. I live in California, USA.

I suspect my body would be willing to travel.

I directed Bill’s attention to the example of Bernd Heinrich and William Hamilton here, and I touched on the difficulty of finding unpeopled wilderness on our crowded planet. I suggested the body farm in Tennessee. All the while, I chuckled at Bill’s developed rationale, which he attached as a Word document. I asked him if I might post it. He told me he wanted to redraft it first. He’s just sent it back to me. He also sent me photos of his cat, Brutus, his duck, Jacqi, his neighbour, Polistes exclamans (a paper wasp) and his back yard (garden, we’d say in Britain) unmown for four years because “I was interested see what the poor, craven, downtrodden grasses of a typical yard would become, if liberated from the obsessive-compulsive human urge to manipulate and control all that which surround them.”  These photos illustrate his text.

Green Departures — Das Lied zu der Erde

William Jordan

Having come to a point much closer to the end of life than the beginning, having survived a close call with my mortality, age having its inevitable way, it seems time to get my affairs in order….. Or more specifically, to make my bed. If you know your bed is waiting, the sheets turned down, climbing in is a formality, maybe even a pleasant one.

When I go, I want my body laid out on the ground, so the insects and other small scavengers can participate in their rightful and overdue feast. Human civilization is based on the deepest, most cardinal of ecological sins–burial–because for the vast majority of terrestrial life you lie where you die, and the entire ecology depends on the unfettered redistribution of nutrients. This means there can be no such thing as “green” burial, because in nature there is no burial at all. The corpse is the groceries of a living system; a corpse represents a health-food supermarket stocking the nutrients, minerals, etc., that we have gathered and assembled in our bodies during the course of living. When we die, nature wants the ingredients back, because they are only on loan, and all living things excepting the human being, are happy to oblige. The custom of burial, however, seals the nutrients off, slowing the redistribution, if not outright arresting it. But, because of the incalculable stench of a decomposing human corpse, particularly that of a right-wing conservative, we simply cannot obey the normal, physiological ways of nature. Civilization –which requires existence in one place–also requires us to stuff our cadavers under its synthetic rug, starving the world that nurtures us through life. The same principles hold true for the turd. A turd is a vital repository of essential vitamins, minerals, proteins, fats, oils that represent the expenditure of much time and energy to concentrate–but civilization cannot long endure without the nihilistic practice of burial and sewage disposal–or at least that’s the way its values are currently structured.

I would offer myself back. My god is in nature, although I don’t think of it as a god, just a vast, all-pervasive, incomprehensibly nuanced reality from which I have bubbled up like hot-springs mud and will subside back, only to bubble up again in some other molecular form. So for me, to know I’ll be going back into the air, the soil, the rain, the mist, the snow–back to the ecstasy I feel while walking–these experiences are so comforting that I almost look forward to being laid out on the festive table of a Sierra Nevada meadow, or the large rocks in the Australian Alice, or the sagebrush scrub of the Great Basin. I would like to delay my departure, of course, because the essence of life is procrastination. Those live longest, who procrastinate best. But, like everyone else, I suppose I’ll just have to wait and see how much I can delay things.

 

Such a disposition would require preparation–some kind of cage or enclosure to keep bears and other large omnivores from scattering bones about. That wouldn’t bother me. My tolerance would be infinite–besides, there’s nothing wrong with a little flinging of the feast. But law enforcement would pitch a fit, and Forensic Files would produce a 2-hour special. It’s a bizarre sign of the times that when a human body is found in some natural place like a field or a forest, people treat it with horror, because most never have, and never will encounter one. If a world of 6.9 billion people were self-sustaining (impossible given the current nature of nature), bones would lie scattered everywhere, like styrofoam; you could not find an uncluttered landscape. But society stuffs its cadavers under the ecological rug, so the land shows no evidence of the human hordes that dominate it. Nevertheless, in my ideal world, all I’d need would be enough time for the soft parts to be carried off in the bodies of the flies and ants, which are the first-line distributors of the invertebrate world. The bones, cartilage, mummified skin, hair–I’m fine with burying those, but directly in the soil, not sealed in some sort of unholy canister.

The challenge becomes finding some remote land, protected, if necessary, by remote people for several summer months while the feast proceeded. At this point I am open to any and all suggestions.

Perhaps the best way to sum up my thesis is to consider the diametrical opposite of a green disposition: The ex coronation of Pope John Paul, preceded by an undertaking to make the Pharaohs weep.

First, they embalmed the Pope’s corpse, rendering him inedible. Then they placed his body inside a hand-crafted black-walnut coffin. Then, they placed that coffin inside a larger coffin made of lead and soldered it shut. Then, they placed the body-inside-the-coffin-inside-the-leaden-box inside a huge stone sarcophagus, and finally, maybe to make sure the Pope didn’t rise up like his Boss, they placed the body-inside-the-coffin-inside-the-leaden-box-inside-the-sarcophagus into a crypt, and there the pope’s remains remain, sealed off from the living earth like an old reactor with a half-life of eternity. I cannot imagine a more horrifying, claustrophobic limbo-hell. Like that of all other creatures, my distribution would cost nothing and give back to nature the nutrients essential to a living world.

Aside from all that, well, I figured it was about time for something to show up. It’s been a wonderful existence; the molecules have treated me well; there is nothing to regret….well…. maybe a little to envy in those dealt an even better hand….

 

Funerals are for…

Four comments here from this article in yesterday’s Guardian.

Organising the funeral for my 17 year old son, who died in an accident overseas in Sept 2008, was made vastly easier by the wonderfully kind funeral director and an equally wonderful C of E Canon – a Canon whose first words on meeting us were to offer us the keys to his Church so we could go in, lock the door behind us, and curse God.

Yes, funerals are for the living but there is virtue and comfort across generations in familiar rituals. We sang no hymns apart from the Lord is My Shepherd. But we said prayers and despite my rage and despair I said them with heartfelt sincerity. My daughter and I spoke about the boy we loved so much. The Canon gave a fiery and angry sermon of amazing power on about the cruelty of loss and the pain of grief. The rest of the music consisted of Max’s favourite songs. We had 500 people at the crem, standing room only, many of them stunned and tearful teenagers who couldn’t believe what they were a part of. The funeral service was just right because it was mostly about him but also about those of us left behind to cope with his loss.
My real point is that it’s all very well to intellectualise and pontificate about these things but when it comes to deciding on a funeral service we must go with what our heart tells us, not our head, and we must remember that like the other great set-pieces of our lives the rituals exist because they express a deeper meaning than we sometimes realise.

 

Over the years, I’ve been asked to recite eulogies at Atheist, Jewish and Salvationist funerals.

The approach I used on all these occasions was more or less the same; fully acknowledging the grief of the bereaved, offering the solace of friendship and respect and duly celebrating the lives of the departed. In all cases, there was a lot worth celebrating.

Following the very dignified, secular funeral service of a dear and respected friend and mentor, a formerly Catholic Atheist, I felt there was something missing, if not for him then for me.

So, being Jewish, I went home and recited Kaddish for him and continued to do so for a year. Given his tolerant indulgence of religiosity , I can’t imagine that my old pal would have objected.

It was my way of thanking whatever forces may or may not shape our destinies for the apparent serendipity of friendship.

 

I think the divine spirit can be just as much in so called ‘secular’ words and music as in so called ‘religious’ words and music.
to say something is ‘god free’ doesn’t mean that god is not present. I think we try to separate the ‘spiritual things’ from the ‘non-spiritua’l things creating a dualism that isn’t really present in our world

 

Quoting: ‘At my age, I go to more funerals than weddings nowadays. What dismays me about them (except in the case of humanist occasions, which have proved excellent celebrations of life, not death) is the way the person officiating is always a priest, and the true object of the funeral is a recruiting pitch for the church. The person concerned is forgotten as promises of eternal life for those present are made – providing, of course…’

I understand where you are coming from, really I do but I wonder why – if the deceased or their family, have chosen to have their funeral service taken in a church, anyone would be surprised that a priest is taking the service – in the CofE, a licenced Reader may also take the service. My husband is a Vicar in the CofE and as such, has a responsibility to ensure that certain protocols are adhered to within that church – the church belonging not to him, but to the Parish. The other point that I can speak of from personal experience is that when my husband is arranging the funeral with relatives of the deceased, he asks if they would like the service to have a evangelistic aspect or not; many times people say yes. If people say no, my husband obviously respects their wishes and at all times, at least in our church, the service is about celebrtating the life of the deceased and what that person meant to their family and friends. Christians believe in an afterlife; why would this belief not be a part of a Christian funeral – indeed it is part of the liturgy. Nobody is forced to have a funeral service in a church.

By contrast, my daughter – not a church-goer and a Guardian reader to boot, went to a humanist service and was appalled at the ‘advertising’ for atheism. It can cut both ways.

Seeing doppel

The toiling wretches at GFG Central were arrested in their labours the other day by the discovery of a doppelganger in New Zealand — Good Funeral Guide NZ. They uttered a heartwarming if parched cheer as the overseers, puzzled by the commotion, moved in with their whips.

GFG NZ is the brainchild of Tamara Linnhof, who also works with her husband Andrew making eco-coffins of more than ordinary design excellence. You can see them pictured here.

Tamara’s background is in consumer protection and she is keen to influence government policy-making in the area of the still-young natural burial movement in New Zealand. She is keen to talk to all with an interest in natural burial anywhere, so do contact her if this is an important area for you.

We wish Tamara and Andrew every possible success.

GFG NZ here.

TenderRest here.

Buried along with their names

When the media reports events around death and funerals it customarily seeks to jerk tears or generate fury with stories fuelled by ignorance. Research is boring and in any case truth is far too dull.

Take this piece here from WalesOnline. It begins HUNDREDS of people are being laid to rest in empty funeral parlours – because they have no-one to grieve for them. Daft or what?

The story is a hardy perennial: pauper funerals. The facts are sad: some people die alone and unknown. The truth is boring: they are not tipped into mass graves as once they were. No, they are given a public health funeral which is pretty much the equal of the funeral that anyone else gets. But hey, let’s bandy the pauper word around a bit anyway.

The journo responsible for the story has made some calls for quotes, one to Kate Woodthorpe at CDAS, and another to Simon Lewis of Merthyr, onetime president of the BIFD. And he seems to have googled ‘pauper funeral’. I wonder how much dull truth he discovered and decided to omit. Never let the truth get in the way of a corking lapel-grabber: HUNDREDS of people are being laid to rest in empty funeral parlours – because they have no-one to grieve for them.

The figures quoted are interesting. Between 2008 and 2010, 288 public health funerals were carried out in Wales at a total cost of £218,100 – an average of £757.29 per funeral. One funeral in Merthyr Tydfil in 2009 cost the local authority just £109.99 … Other budget services … included a £149.69 service in Caerphilly in 2008, a £250 send-off in 2008 in Merthyr and a £275 service for a funeral in Monmouthshire last year.

With the price of cremation in Merthyr now £460, I’m scratching my head here. A lot of paying customers would like to be able to get their costs down to figures like these. Can anyone shed some light?

Read the article in WalesOnline here.

More on pauper funerals here.