Who needs one anyway?

KEYZER, Jacques (Jack) C.L.

October 15, 1926 – January 27, 2011.

It is with the deepest regret and extreme sadness that we announce the passing of Jack Keyzer, beloved husband to Kay, grand-father, father and dear friend. Born and raised in Brussels, Belgium, Jack and his family emmigrated to South Africa when he was 13 years old. Jack was a Rotarian for 50 years, and after emmigrating to Canada in 1985, he joined the Victorian Rotary Club, and subsequently became the Commodore of the International Yachting Fellowship of Rotarians.

At Jack’s request there will be no funeral or formal service, and flowers are greatfully declined. A get-together in Jack’s memory will be arranged in due course.

Every time I read the often excellent obits in the Times Colonist of Victoria, British Columbia, I wonder if this is going to take off in the UK. See how many unfuneral-ed deaths there are this week, and what people intend to do to commemorate their dead person.

Hideous or beautiful?

There’s the usual row going on in a cemetery (Colchester, actually) about who can dangle what from where, if anywhere, and what is decorous and what is simply grieving trash strewn by frightful common people mad with grief and commonness. Yes, the great memorialisation debate will run and run. I say memorialisation, but used not commemoration to be a perfectly good word for it?

Thanks to The Funeral Company for the link. Apols to Ms Goodall for breaching copyright: I can’t find your contact details to ask your permission. Mail story here.

Sage concern

In recent months there’s been quite a bit of interest in Britain’s bentest undertaker, Richard Sage. A glance at the search terms people use to find my website tell me that, since June ’10, 330 have been hunting ‘Richard Sage’ and another 110 ‘Richard Sage Funeral Director’. That makes him almost as popular as coffins.

Run out of Manchester in October 2009, Mr Sage resurfaced in nearby Burnley where he set up as J Kendal and Sons. All the while, his online cut-price undertaking service, Direct Funeral Services, continued to trade from an address at which another online cut-price funeral director, Nationwide Funerals, was also registered.

At the time of his departure from Manchester, Mr Sage had this to say to the Manchester Evening News: “In regards to my past, yes I have been convicted and served my sentence. Now I have rehabilitated myself back into society and that is what I now call my past – a past that I have learnt from and have moved forward, being a better person.”

This was not the impression formed by the GFG’s North of England Correspondent. He has kept me well-informed of nefarious goings-on. And in his most recent report he informs me that Mr Sage has upped sticks and done (another) runner. He says: “Just been to see his garage where he kept all the hearses and such, its completely empty and the signs off the windows and on the front are all gone, he still has the sign on the side door, which says J. Kendal and Sons Funeral directors and such, but i been keeping close eye on that place … I also been up to the funeral home and it is bare empty and up for sale the signs are still on but its up for sale.”

Whither has he flown this time? Chances are he’s battening down the hatches in his pad on the Costa del Sol. We shall see. But I think he may have learned a lesson, this time, about the power of the internet to disseminate information, enabling people to keep tabs on him. If that’s the case. I am pleased to think the GFG may have played a part.

If it has, then I’d like to say a big thank you on behalf of all of us to the GFG’s North of England Correspondent. I can’t name him, obviously. But I raise my glass to you, sir.

For more background on Richard Sage simply google ‘Richard Sage funeral director’.

Fogey funerals

There are two ways of looking at it – aren’t there always? Either funerals, by loosening up, jettisoning the f-word and calling themselves celebrations of life, are becoming more meaningful, more expressive of what people want to express; or they have become merely conventions of gaudily-clad denialists engaged in an altogether silly and fruitless buck-u-uppo displacement activity.

Wherever the truth lies we have reached a pass – it’s a sign of progress – where certain folk are going to dig their heels in, wind back the clock and go for something retro.

Blogger Matt Archbold (thanks for this link, Pam Vetter) is a Catholic and he wants to restore the oft-dropped tradition of praying for souls in Purgatory (well, his soul, anyway). Active interventions by the living to ensure the wellbeing of their dead, practised to the max by the excellent Hmong, died out with the Churches’ downgrading of Purgatory and the Other Place. All sorts of theological reasons. They don’t seem to be consistent with a loving and merciful God, do they, Purgatory and Hell? As for Protestants, they are taught that salvation is down to whether or not you deserve it. No amount of cheering from the touchline can possibly sway a just and omniscient Supreme Being.

Archbold holds no truck with this revisionism: “Here’s what I want you guys to say at my funeral: Matt Archbold was fairly despicable at times. He was meaner than he was kind, proud of his humility, and not all that nice to his family or friends. Vain. Sarcastic. Selfish. While these may be qualities of a good blogger, they do not bode well for sainthood.

“We have no reason to suspect that Matt Archbold is in Heaven. In fact, I’d just about guarantee he’s not. If God in his infinite mercy somehow allowed Matthew to enter Purgatory it would be a reflection of His mercy rather than any attributes Matt evidenced throughout his life.

“Let us all assume, to be safe, that Matthew is in the bottom rung of Purgatory. Matthew’s fingernails are firmly dug into a cliff at the furthest edge of the Purgatory city limits and he’s hanging on there, his little feet dangling over Hell.

“And the only way you can get him out of there and nearer to Heaven is through your prayers. Pray now. Pray on the ride home. Pray when you get home. Pray. Pray. Pray for days, weeks, and years to come. Please pray.”


Sky News journalist Colin Brazier, who recently survived cancer, shares related retrogressive tastes in funerals:


“Do not go to Tesco and buy one of the supermarket’s tasteless In Sympathy cards. They come in a range of bright colours. Many of them display a lily – popular even before the death of Our Lady Of Versace – but even more so now.


“Do not buy one of the Hallmark cards which could easily be mistaken for an invitation to a child’s birthday party. Contrary to the message these cards are trying to communicate – death is actually grim, frequently bleak, and my (hopefully) grieving family will not be comforted by mass produced frivolity.


“Do not, if you are invited to my funeral, turn up wearing colours of a celebratory hue. I deplore the fashion for “wearing bright colours” – a trend in danger of becoming every bit as obligatory as the rigid absurdities of Victorian widow’s weeds were a century ago. There is nothing starchy and stuffy about wearing black. Dignified dark clothing is not an expression of despair. It is a way of stopping other people bathing in the attention which should be reserved for the deceased and his or her close family. I want my life to be remembered, not celebrated. I do not want my faults airbrushing from history.”

More Matt Archbold here.

More Colin Brazier here.

Resurrecting Six Feet Under

I’m delighted to host a post by Brian Jenner. Brian is a words-for-hire person (I know how that feels) who does everything from gilding the tongues of politicians to writing terrifically good books. This summer he is holding a Six Feet Under convention in Bournemouth. As soon as I heard about this I fired off emails to him. Obligingly he has come up with what he does best — some words for this blog. Not that he isn’t a dab hand at organising events, mind. He’s done quite a bit of that, too.

Those who enjoyed Six Feet Under unanimously agree that it was the best telly ever. It had the breadth of War and Peace and the psychological acuity of a louche Henry James. It is amongst the finest dramatic achievements of all time (eat your heart out, Homer).

Enough of me. Here’s Brian. Oh, before he starts — one moment, Brian — let me endorse what he says about Bournemouth. Once the only UK cemetery with traffic lights, it is now the sort of place that hip Europeans fly to for a weekend of clubbing. It is all sorts of vibrant these days.

IT’s five years since the quirky American TV series Six Feet Under came to an end and I’ve missed it terribly. Tender, intelligent, funny, mystical and beautiful, these are not epithets you often apply to TV drama, but Six Feet Under was all of those things.

I live in Bournemouth, a popular beach resort on the South Coast of England. A few years ago, I was walking through a cemetery and I remembered how the character Nate would go jogging on a path through the gravestones. It gave me two ideas. Here was a place to go jogging and wouldn’t it be fun to have a Six Feet Under convention?

I never did go jogging, but last year, having organised a couple of conferences, I put my morbid imagination to work and devised the ultimate weekend break.

It would be like a Star Trek convention, but a lot more classy. We’d host lectures about embalming, green funerals and obituaries. We’d have a Thomas Newman concert and a talk about the music we’d like to accompany our departure. We’d have an audience with one of the stars from the series, go for a picnic in our equivalent of Forest Lawn and offer the chance to sit in a real hearse.

When posted to my blog, I was sure it was all too weird. Within 24 hours someone had responded: ‘Sounds fascinating, put me down for two tickets.’

Bournemouth has a reputation for gerontocratic torpor, but we’re also keen to promote its more creative and hedonistic side. Six Feet Under embraces both. We’ve picked 12-14 August – the height of summer – with our pine trees, sandy beaches and boulevards we can give the town the best chance of being mistaken for California.

Can you have a weekend devoted to celebrating the grim reaper? Isn’t it going to be crass and insensitive? Well, here’s the paradox. Works like Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One, Hal Ashby’s Harold & Maude, Jessica Mitford’s The American Way of Death Revisited don’t fill you with gloom, they give you a spring in your step.

Six Feet Under was great because it wrestled with religion, sexuality, family, drugs and work in raw ways. I want to hang out with sensitive and intelligent people who want to be honest about life. We need to club together. Sadness, fear, joy, uproarious laughter – the weekend will elicit all those things. And we’ll go home reminded how great it is to be alive.

The Six Feet Under Convention, Bournemouth, 12-14 August 2011. For more details go to http://www.sixfeetunderconvention.co.uk

Crestone End-of-Life Project


Crestone Colorado is a bit like Totnes on steroids. It is home to all manner of nice folk and all sorts of religious communities. Alternative. (To capitalism on steroids).

Crestone is home to one of only two legal open-air cremation sites in the US. That’s two better than the UK, where open-air cremation was declared legal on 10 Feb 2010 – but that doesn’t mean to say it’s going to be easily legalisable. There are very few campaigners for it. Chief of them are Carl Marlow (who actually performed an outdoor cremation in 2007), and Rupert and Claire Callender.

The Crestone site could well be instructive to those who would like to create an open-air cremation site in the UK.

If you’ve ever wondered how you’d feel if someone you were close to was cremated in this way, hear this from Tessa Bielecki:

My father, Dr. Casimir Bielecki, was cremated on July 19, 2008 at the Crestone End-of-Life Project’s open-air site. This was my first open-air cremation, and I was so profoundly moved, I’m already working on the documents that will enable me to choose this kind of cremation for myself.

CEOLP supports simple, natural and humanizing end-of-life choices. We were able to bring Dad’s body directly home for the hospital in our own car only two hours after he died and put him back in his own bed, giving us ample time to complete our farewells.  He wasn’t whisked away from us to some gloomy funeral “parlor” and polluted with smelly embalming chemicals.  He wasn’t confined, as poet Emily Dickinson pur it, “Safe in [his] Alabaster Chamber – Untouched by Morning – And untouched by Noon [under] – Rafter of Satin – And Roof of Stone.”  Instead, he was consumed cleanly  and purley out in the open air by what Carmelite mystic John of the Cross called the “Living Flame of Love.”

Everyone present laid green boughs of pinon pine and bright red and yellow carnations of over Dad’s body on the pyre, and as an afterthought, we added his old straw golf hat.  Thick dark smoke billowed out to the west towards the full moon setting over the San Juan Mountains, then cleared, whitened, and rose heavenward, a symbol of Dad’s rising from the dead, as we Christian’s believe.

The cremation was no abstract theology or philosophy about death, but a profound existential experience of it:  a falling away of the flesh and soaring of the spirit in roaring flames and sparks spinning into the sky.  Gathering the ashes and bits of bone 24 hours later continued our family’s deep meditation on passing from this world to the next.  As St. Paul wrote to the Corinthians, “Behold, I tell you a mystery.  We shall not all fall asleep, but we will all be changed, in an instant, in the blink of an eye.”  The fire took more than the blinking of an eye to burn, and that was part of its beauty and healing.

All the Abrahamic traditions were represented, and Buddhism as well.  My sister Connie sang the splendid Exsultet from the Roman Catholic liturgy for Easter Sunday.  We said traditional Christian prayers for the dead.  Shahna Lax prayed the Jewish Kaddish.  Roshi Steve Allen and his wife Angelique chanted the Buddhis Heart Sutra.  And then William Howell faced east and cried out the Muslim Call to Prayer as the sun rose of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.  There were long reverent periods of silence and, quiet loving exchanges between family and friends.  The fire tenders went about their tasks unobtrusively.  Fireman Steve Anderson stood by, tall and stalwart, in case the surrounded desert might beckon an unwanted spark.  All our senses engaged.  And all the elements were there:  earth, air, fire and water.

Everything about the cremation was personal, intimate and meaningful.  We took care of Dad’s body ourselves.  We cut the evergreen boughs from our own land.  We created our own altar to express the uniqueness of Dad’s life and included his black medical bag and stethoscope, his wedding portrait, and the last photo taken of him four weeks earlier with the nephews (and lobsters!) he loved.  We chose his shroud, one I’d brought for him a year ago from the ancient city of Jerusalem.  (It’s traditional for Orthodox Christians to bring their own shrouds home after making pilgrimage to the Holy Land.)

This whole experience was a gift for our family and friends, for the earth, which is left undisturbed, and for Dad himself, who knew we were going to do this and liked the idea.  We are blessed to have open-air cremation here in Crestone.  Many thanks to the Crestone End-of-Life Project for helping to make the experience of death so natural, human, reverent and, above all, sacred.

There are some superb photos of open-air cremations at Crestone here.

Washington Post article here.

A time to die

Every week in the Spectator magazine Peter Jones takes an occurrence or development in contemporary society and politics and considers it in the light of what the ancients did when faced with the same circumstances. This week he considers the art of dying. I’d now bung you a link but I can’t: the Speccie does not unleash its content online til it has gathered some dust. The joy of the Spectator lies in the quality of its writing (sadly not its politics). It’s almost worth the cover price for Mr Jones alone. I hope he won’t mind a quote-strewn precis.

He begins:

“So everyone is going to live much longer and will therefore have to work much longer to pay for their pensions. But what is so wrong with dying, Greeks and Romans would ask?

“Homeric heroes sought to compensate for death with eternal heroic glory … Plato argued that the soul was immortal. The Roman poet Lucretius thought that was the problem. For him, life was an incipient hell because of man’s eternal desire for novelty. So as soon as he had fulfilled one desire, he was immediately gawping after another. What satisfaction could there be in that? The soul was mortal, he argued, and death, therefore, should be welcomed as a blessed release.”

Cicero concurred. We run out of things to interest us and are glad to go. “A character in one of Euripides’ tragedies put it more succinctly: ‘I can’t stand people who try to prolong life with foods and potions and spells to keep death at bay. Once they’ve lost their use on earth they should clear off and die and leave it to the young.’

“For Seneca the question was whether ‘one was lengthening one’s own life — or one’s death.’ “

Jones concludes: “Marcus Aurelius put it beautifully: ‘Spend these fleeting moments as Nature would have you spend them, and then go to your rest with a good grace, as an olive falls in season, with a blessing for the earth that bore it and a thanksgiving to the tree that gave it life.'”

Caw blimey

Here’s a roundup of my week’s tweets — and not a weak link in any of them.

Before you look through them, make sure you haven’t missed this week’s most important discussion. It was about shrines and it features two of this blog’s brightest and most questing minds, those of Rupert Callender and Kathryn. Find it in the comments here.

Right, here we go:

GoodFunerals Charles Cowling

Someone with a ranterly grudge against Co-op Funeralcarehttp://bit.ly/fLazLP Whois? http://bit.ly/fk872a

GoodFunerals Charles Cowling

Nice home funeral story here: http://bit.ly/gH1pkU

DyingMatters Dying Matters

by GoodFunerals

Fascinating blog at the Telegraph: are hospice nurses more empathetic than general nurses: http://tinyurl.com/6zjkp7h

GoodFunerals Charles Cowling

‘When that time comes, when my last breath leaves me, I choose to die in peace to meet Shi’ dy’ in.’ Navajo ADRT. Cool http://nyti.ms/gIesvk

GoodFunerals Charles Cowling

Very smart move here by Nottingham undertaker Lymn’s:http://bit.ly/epBt7l

GoodFunerals Charles Cowling

The Economist Intelligence Unit ranks UK best in world for end-of-life care, India the worst. Does this actually stand up??

GoodFunerals Charles Cowling

Peter Sissons on the bespoke sombre suit all newsreaders had on stand-by in case a Royal death required announcement:http://bit.ly/gi4tqk

GoodFunerals Charles Cowling

‘How to Die in Oregon’ — film about self-deliverance:http://youtu.be/tB8yX3QmmVE

GoodFunerals Charles Cowling

‘It is a Jewish tradition (though not exclusively Jewish) to not delegate the burial of a loved one to strangers’ – http://bit.ly/erkMfW

GoodFunerals Charles Cowling

Is physician assisted death a slippery slope to killing the vulnerable? Not in Oregon it seems: http://bit.ly/f1zDje

GoodFunerals Charles Cowling

In The Event Of My Death | Colin Brazier |blogs.news.sky.com/familyaffairs/… via @SkyNewsBlogs

suebrayne Sue Brayne

by GoodFunerals

Nelson Madella ‘not in danger’, says BBC Radio 4 news. For heavens sake, he’s 92 and getting ready to die.

GoodFunerals Charles Cowling

Undertaker charged with ‘offering indignity to human remains’. Love the phrasing. He looks such a nice guy, too… http://bit.ly/hJmW1L

GoodFunerals Charles Cowling

73 year old man who smothered wife cos she begged him released from gaol. 73, FFS!!! The pity, the sorrow. http://bit.ly/fo9gNM

GoodFunerals Charles Cowling

Giant catfish gorged on human flesh from Indian funeral pyres. Terrifying. http://bit.ly/hX4S1a

GoodFunerals Charles Cowling

Obit as love letter. Nice idea. http://bit.ly/gymC2f

GoodFunerals Charles Cowling

Amazing how often you find, in the midst of a muddle, the chimps at Co-op Funeralcare. Just a coincidence, of course.http://bit.ly/icD2S3

GoodFunerals Charles Cowling

“I will never again give somebody I love’s death away.” My kind of story bigtime. http://bit.ly/gH1pkU

GoodFunerals Charles Cowling

Are funerals passe? I can’t see virtual attendance ever trumping being there: http://bit.ly/i1A5mQ

GoodFunerals Charles Cowling

“Pile it all in one place and keep an eye on it.” Delightful funeral + a delicious Will . You’ll love this: http://bit.ly/eA7B2E

GoodFunerals Charles Cowling

What’s that I keep saying — if there’s an eff-up there’s a Co-op chimp in the midst? Am I right? http://bit.ly/fPOWz1

GoodFunerals Charles Cowling

Only 4 per cent of Scots want to be buried in a kilt. Donald, where’s your troosers?

GoodFunerals Charles Cowling

Two in one day. Wherever there’s a funeral scandal there’s probably a Co-op shit in the middle: http://bit.ly/frx8sT

GoodFunerals Charles Cowling

Rupert Callender on indoor shrines. Coruscatingly brilliant. It’s a comment here: http://bit.ly/gTr1VY

GoodFunerals Charles Cowling

Really impressive just-published Code of Ethics from US Home Funeral Alliance. Come on, Britain! http://bit.ly/ifhKl8

GoodFunerals Charles Cowling

Good learned stuff here from the excellent Digital Dying on death by fasting: http://bit.ly/f42GFE

DeathRef Death Reference Desk

Butterfinger Zombie Graveyard! http://bit.ly/fQkaFu

GoodFunerals Charles Cowling

@DeathRef Dat iz well silly innit. I found 4. Pathetic. There, I said it first. And I was laughed at by Zombies. Scarily good fun!

GoodFunerals Charles Cowling

Ah ha, Co-op Funeralcare now has a Facebook page. I can Like them (have to hold my nose) then hate them up close. But why no Hate button?

GoodFunerals Charles Cowling

Ooh look, Carl Marlow has launched his direct-to-public coffin website. Quel geezer! Love him! http://bit.ly/dDXq5Q

GoodFunerals Charles Cowling

Great pics here, theme of loss, on @thelate blog:http://bit.ly/gmCTmf

 

Decompiculture and the Mushroom Project

“Decompiculture is the growing or culturing of decomposer organisms by humans. The term is intended to establish a contrast with the term agriculture. Agriculture encompasses the production systems based on the culture of herbaceous plants and herbivore animals. In effect, agriculture is human symbiosis with select organisms of the herb-herbivore-carnivore food chains comprising the live plant food web. Decompiculture, in contrast, human symbiosis with organisms of the decomposer food chains comprising the dead plant-based, or plant cell wall-based detrital food web. I believe that decompiculture is equivalent in importance to agriculture and perhaps more important in terms of integrating human activities in a sustainable way with the biosphere. I also believe that just as the origin of agriculture initiated the dawn of civilization, decompiculture may now initiate the dawn of a new leap forward in human evolution.”–Timothy Myles

Infinity Burial Project website here.

 

 

Exclusive! Dover undertaker achieves UK first.

I was going to blog today about the public meeting at Redditch town hall to debate the contentious matter of whether or not the crem should be used to heat a nearby swimming pool. I wanted to give you a blow-by-blow account. But in the event it was a non-event. There were perhaps thirty people there. We listened to cogent presentations. We heard how the council has received messages of support from all over the world and even been approved by 90 per cent of Daily Mail readers. A ‘Christian’ stood up to protest, but he wasn’t a representative Christian, he was an oddball. And that was that, really. The peaceable, pragmatic and eminently sensible citizenry of this lovely Worcestershire market town were unanimously in agreement. A most satisfactory anticlimax.

Instead, let me tell you about something else.

Paul Sullivan recently set up on his own in Dover. Always a brave thing to do, open for business with all the established undertakers glaring at you — or worse, chuckling. Business is notoriously slow to begin with (“Forty in the first year would be nice,” they all say) but Paul has bucked that by offering a low cost funeral, keeping his prices transparent and generally being an exceedingly nice fellow.

He has now achieved a UK first. Using his website you can price your funeral before you even go to see him. You can spend time doing it, think about the sums, change your mind and try again. You simply go down the list checking the items you want, and it adds it all up as you go — a bit like being in a taxi only more alarming.

I think it’s brilliant. And I can think of reasons why other funeral directors wouldn’t dream of having one of these on theirs (if they’ve got one)(a website, that is).

Have a play with it. Find it here.

What do you think?