Charles – Page 180 – The Good Funeral Guide

Not so first as he thinks

14 October 2010

Charles

2 Comments

Categories: alternative funerals, Attitudes to dead bodies, burial, burial depth, funeral cost; richard sage, funeral customs, memorialisation, natural burial

From Australia’s Herald Sun:

A CANCER victim yesterday became the first person to be buried upright at Australia’s only vertical cemetery.

Allan Heywood lost his battle with cancer last Tuesday and was buried in the unusual, space-saving grave in the new vertical cemetery outside Camperdown in western Victoria.

“It’s nice to be first at something. Everybody wants their little place in history,” the Skipton man said with the hint of a laugh.

“I’ve attended a lot of funerals over the years and I’ve never attended one that I’ve enjoyed … I’m an atheist as well,” he said.

Mr Heywood paid $2750 – about half the cost of a basic conventional burial – to be buried upright in a biodegradable shroud, conveyed to his final resting place on a steel trolley which is angled vertically to lower the body into a tubular grave.

He said the lower cost and that there was no graveside service, headstone, casket or grave marker meant his children wouldn’t face any financial burden and could arrange their own memorial service at the local pub or footy club.

Mr Heywood’s body was lowered feet first into its hole by cemetery officials. When his body has been joined by 39, 999 other bodies, the space-saving cemetery will be grassed over and grazed.

Vertical burial is approved in some Asian countries and also Holland – but I don’t think any have been carried out there.

Fact: The world’s first-ever vertical burial took place in England (or, as they say in the US, England, England). It was one of two last wishes of the delightfully bonkers Major Peter Billiere who died precisely nine months to the day after predicting he would.

His funeral was held on 11 June 1800 at Box Hill in Surrey in a hole reputedly 100 feet deep. Into this, Major Billiere was lowered head first, according to his instructions, and there he will remain, according to his philosophy, until the Day of Judgement when he will be resurrected right way up in a world turned upside down. The headstone reads: “Here lies Major Peter Labilliere, with his head in the ground and his feet in the air.”

Major Peter Labilliere’s headstone

The good major was an early adopter of the celebration of life style of funeral, so his other final wish was that the youngest son and daughter of his landlady should dance on his coffin. Apparently the lass demurred; the lad larged it.

This is all true, by the way. If you don’t believe me, go google.

Generalising from the particular

14 October 2010

Charles

5 Comments

Categories: Attitudes to death, ceremony, Formality vs informality

I enjoyed this article from the Catholic Herald by Francis Phillips:

I was at a Requiem Mass this morning; nothing unusual in that, of course. Yet this Mass was highly unusual in this respect: there was no panegyric of the dead. The deceased man had made it clear to his widow before he died that he wanted the homily to focus on the faith – specifically the theology of death and resurrection, with accompanying prayers for the dead – and not on him.

This must be the first funeral I have attended since the death of my father more than 30 years ago when a “celebration of the life” has not been a central feature of the service. How and when did it creep in that a funeral has to concentrate on a deceased person’s achievements, foibles and lovable frailties – indeed, on his or her imminent canonisation – to the exclusion of almost everything else?

…

There you have it: no mournful pop songs, no tributes to the deceased’s love of a pint at his local pub, his efforts on behalf of mankind; just natural grief at the loss and hope in the mercy of God. I left this morning’s funeral more comforted and consoled than at many a funeral I have attended in recent years.

Splendid spiritual confidence and theological integrity!

Read the whole piece here.

Claire’s last word

13 October 2010

Charles

11 Comments

Categories: Attitudes to death, celebrants, Co-operative Funeralcare, funeral directors, Humanists

Everyone looks at other people differently according to what they do. Hairdressers scan your hair, dentists your teeth, snobs your shoes… Undertakers? Why, they measure you for your coffin of course.

Surveying a funeral, the preoccupations of an undertaker are quite different from those of anybody else. Ordinary folk take in the procession, the flowers, the demeanour of the close family (grief bravely borne if they’re doing it by the script). But undertakers want to know who got it – who got the job. Their beady eyes home in on the registration plate of the hearse and decode the letters. Ah, CDF 1, Change and Decay Funeral Service (dignity assured, Daimler fleet, open 24 hours). They scrutinise the demeanour of the conductor (that watch chain’s a bit over the top), they log the condition and cleanliness of the cars and the aspect of the bearers. Who supplied that coffin? One of Wainman’s?

It is from this viewpoint that they will regard the funeral of lovely Claire Rayner, who died on Monday. As the chair of the Co-operative Funeralcare Forum (2002) Claire abetted this admirable organisation in its mission to bring about a “major shake-up in the UK’s funeral provision” and meet the “need for more information to help people make every funeral special.” So will she go with Co-operative Funeralcare? Why not?

What could possibly go wrong?

Claire was also a president of the British Humanist Association. It’s no surprise, then, that she will have a humanist farewell ceremony. This may pose a problem for the celebrant (if they use one), a problem which is becoming increasingly common. Humanist celebrants have, most of them, always gently outlawed hymns from funerals. Now they’ve got a new ontological problem with their clients. For though they may profess themselves to be hardened atheists, they later reveal a fuzzy belief in an afterlife of some sort, a freestanding heaven where no one’s in charge, a cake-and-eat-it sort of a place. Atheists are not the rigorous (left-leaning, often puritanical in the best sense) rationalists they used to be. They just don’t like, I don’t know, authority figures?

Whatever, Claire, who revealed a capacity for inconsistency when, as a lifelong republican she accepted an OBE, uttered these last words: “Tell David Cameron that if he screws up my beloved NHS I’ll come back and bloody haunt him.”

Only joking, for sure. But Claire, I hope you will.

Thanks to Tony Piper for popping these mischievous thoughts into my head

Indy undertakers on the counter-attack

12 October 2010

Charles

8 Comments

Categories: Co-operative Funeralcare, Dignity, family funeral directors, funeral cost, funeral directors, Plan your own funeral, pre-need plans, SAIF

Saif’s IPSOS-Mori price comparison survey published in February 2010 was dynamite. It showed that independents are generally cheaper than two big beasts of the industry, Co-operative Funeralcare and Dignity. Had Saif got the message out to the funeral-buying public it would have hit the big beasts’ bottom line bigtime.

But the message never got out, not in a big way – an eyebrow-raising non-occurrence considering the price obsession of British funeral consumers. Saif didn’t bang the drum and blow the trumpet. A number of its members are cross about this. All that money to create a weapon of mass destruction only for it to hastily hidden under a bushel. What a waste, they said.

Is Saif dumb or did it have its tongue cut out? The story cannot be told for fear of litigation. There was a rumour swirling that one of the big beasts put pressure on Saif’s suppliers to take sides: either you ditch your indies or we’ll ditch you. I don’t think we can attach any credence to that.

The advance of the clunking conglomerates has been inexorable. They have circumvented the nobody-does-it-better claim of the independents and fought the war instead on the unpropitious battleground of financial planning, employing expert messagemakers to seduce consumers with sweet-talk about empowerment. As a result, the future now belongs to the big beasts: they’ve got the paid-up pre-need plans to prove it. It’s been a strategic masterstroke. Who wants today’s car, phone, anything tomorrow? No, we want the upgrade, next generation, as-yet-undreamt of. And yet… the funeral planners have conquered obsolescence . Hats off!

How to reverse this? By playing the big beasts at their own game? Golden Charter is fighting the good fight pluckily enough, but is beginning to look like the British army in Basra. In any case, there are far, far better ways of making provision for funeral expenses, ways which do not disempower those left behind.

No. The way forward is to get back onto the battleground of value for money, quality assurance and individuality. At a time like death people want to be looked after by a brilliant boutique business, not Funerals R Us. It ought to be easy enough.

It will need concerted action, though. Ay, there’s the rub.

So it’s really good to see a togetherness initiative come out of last week’s discussion of the new Co-op website MyLocalFuneralDirector. It was sparked by Nick Armstrong. He spotted that the Co-op had failed to buy mylocalfuneralservice.co.uk and yourlocalfuneralservice.co.uk.

“I’ll give you a guess who has just bought them. I’ll get a list of independent funeral directors on there as soon as I work out how to do it. Ill post back on here when I have a template up and running.:-) … It won’t be a quick thing as I want to get it right but it will be honest that’s for certain! If anyone has any ideas on compiling the database easily please let me know.”

His challenge was taken up by Andrew Hickson:

“Nick, here’s an idea off the top of my head. Follow it up, ignore it, change or work on it, I shan’t be offended by any of them!

It seems that there’s a fair bit of animosity and dislike of the website that is being discussed here, so, how about we, ourselves, research and compile a database? By this, I mean every reader and follower of this blog, each contributing what he or she knows.

I’d be surprised if between us we weren’t pretty well-informed of the true identities of a huge number of companies.

An immense task, and one which would require every contributor to be really focussed. But, very exciting, and think of the satisfaction when it was complete.

I’d be happy to help out wherever I could, so do let me know your thoughts!

This could be big if we all made it so … the start of a collaboration of FD’s willing to challenge the boundaries of the truth with which we all contend on a daily basis?”

Nick has responded:

“Hi Kingfisher. I’m game. Any help on content etc would be appreciated as well as any help with compiling a database. Thinking of a searchable google map with premises photos and branch info might be a good start. Bit more interactive than a list.

I’ve been doing one on my website with local churches, cemeteries etc. http://tinyurl.com/2v54rzz

I’m happy to build and host the site(s) and any info would be greatly appreciated.”

So there we are then. The go-to man is Nick: office@funeralhelp.co.uk.

Let’s make common cause!

Sarah Walton’s memorial birds and birdbaths

11 October 2010

Charles

No comments

Categories: memorialisation, Memorialising

Sarah Walton, a potter of 35 years’ standing, whose work can be found in 13 museums in Britain, is a great favourite of the Good Funeral Guide. We admire and like her work enormously.

Here, she tells us about her work:

For years I’ve sold my Birdbaths as simply that. Only recently has it occurred to me to propose them to those looking for a Memorial. Why am I doing this? Because I believe they have the qualities that such a piece requires. I will try to explain.

I began making them in 1985 after having been a potter for the previous 10 years, one who made teapots,mugs, bowls and jugs. Their evolution was slow and co-insided with a time of reviewing early influences. Some people look at these birdbaths and ask if I acknowledge a debt to Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth and I say ‘Yes, a huge one.’ But I also think it’s a case of those artists having also both looked at the same things as I have; at England’s landscapes, at the axe heads and megaliths of the Neolithic period, at Egyptian, Buddhist and Hindu stone carving, at the art of ancient Mesopotamia, at the surfaces of wood and stone eroded by water and wear, at the flints and pebbles beneath our feet. I saw in such forms and textures a language that I’ve tried to make my own.

When it came to evolving an upper surface that enabled water to have the necessary room to expand outwards and upwards on freezing it was the dew ponds in the South Downs I’d known since childhood that offered a solution. While a ceramic student I was struck by photos of Tibetan Stupas on Himalayan mountainsides. These tied in with the cairns I’d seen along tracks in the Lake district and Norwegian mountains, the same landscapes where I’d seen tarns encircled by hills. In my Birdbaths I’ve tried to recreate on a small scale what I saw on a larger one there.

Later in the work of the Romanian sculptor Brancusi I saw how this artist incorporated the pedestal base so that it became an integral part of his sculptures. I have conceived the bases of these Birdbaths in a similar way; their bases are an essential part of the piece as a whole. There are other people who say there is something ecclesiastic about the Birdbaths and again I say ‘ Yes, certainly.’ Because I’ve criss-crossed England looking at Saxon and Norman churches with their intimate chancels, their deeply recessed windows, their worn stone flags, their polished oak surfaces, their fonts, doorways and towers.

Recently someone said he saw something sad in the birdbaths. I beg to differ. I don’t deny their austerity but I employed this consciously at the very outset believing it could be a safe vehicle for strongly sensual qualities. There’s a gravity in the work of such painters as Giotto, Masaccio, Piero della Francesca, Rembrandt and Velasquez that exists alongside a profound tenderness. From studying them I got a taste for seeing these two things combined.. I’ve seen this combination in all kinds of great art since.

As well as birdbaths I make birds that are hollow and can serve as Cremation urns. For a long time this bird has determinably had its head tucked under a wing in sleep, something I saw beside a local pond some 12 years ago. For almost as long a customer has urged me to try a form with more inherent movement , perhapes a bird about to launch itself in flight. But I see now that what interests me is to find an image that at one and the same moment has both vitality and stillness.

Some practical points.

The Birdbaths are not at all porous being made in high-fired Salt glazed stoneware. They are therefore frost proof. [Those of you reading this in the North of England will be familiar with the robust sinks, pipes and garden ware produced around you for centuries in this technique.] They will withstand English winters – with a caveat. Because water when it becomes ice has the power to crack open the hardest granite, so too ice if it stands in these birdbaths for months in sub-zero temperatures, can in a small percentage of cases crack these birdbaths. To avoid any risk of this do the following. Empty the birdbath of its water once heavy frosts arrive. Cover the birdbath so that no more rain can collect in it. When the hardest weather is past uncover it. Then the piece will last millennia.
Five shapes are produced .But by virtue of their making and firing processes no two pieces are alike or able to be repeated exactly.
Some people choose to have a metal plaque recessed into the wood base on which a dedication may be engraved. Such a plaque can be provided by Sarah Walton.
Sarah Walton’s work may be seen on her website www.sarahwalton.co.uk and she may be emailed on smwalton@btconnect.com She is happy to send digital images of current stock and if a piece has been selected in this way to arrange its dispatch via a courier.
She is also happy to have visitors to the studio at Keeper’s, Bopeep Lane, Alciston, Near. Polegate, East Sussex, BN26 6UH. where there is an extensive display of her Birdbaths and Birds. This is how the majority of customers have always bought these pieces. She has become adept at getting Birdbaths and their bases into customers car boots!
She recommends that the Birdbath be sited in a secluded part of a garden, but somewhere where a viewer may enjoy the sight of its use from a comfortable armchair indoors – or from the kitchen sink.
The oak bases are very heavy. Strong people are required to locate them. An 18” square concrete slab is best positioned beneath the wood base to avoid it becoming sodden by standing directly on earth or turf. These may be supplied with the Birdbath.
Re-siting a Birdbath after its initial positioning is not unusual. It can take time to discover the very best place for one.
PRICES.

Nos.1,2,3 and 5 shapes [ including their oak base ] are 997 pounds each plus 100 pounds for P & P.

No.4 shape [ including an oak base ] is 1225 pounds plus 100 pounds for P & P.

Provision of a plaque in brass, copper or bronze on which is engraved a dedication is a further 75 pounds.

Parish notices

11 October 2010

Charles

3 Comments

Categories: alternative funerals, Art and death, Attitudes to death, Books, green funeral, natural burial, Plan your own funeral

First, an event, Dying to Live.

It is organised by Archa Robinson at Living and Dying Consciously and is billed as: Suitable for anyone facing death in the next 90 yrs… a reflective, meditative, poignant, life changing and fun weekend !

Here’s more:

We live in a society conditioned to deny death. It’s a taboo subject and is often seen as a failure or at best ‘unfortunate’. We live as if we live forever, ignoring the truth of change and impermanence. Yet the acknowledgement of them holds the key to life itself. To be truly

conscious in our lives and present to each moment means to ‘let-go’—to die to the last moment and open to the next—to live and die consciously, moment to moment. Death is the ultimate ‘let-go’. From the moment of our birth our bodies are dying, so the more we face the fears of our own death the more we are able to love and celebrate our lives now.

We will use image-making, meditation, writing and other experiential ways of exploring these themes To support participants on their own inner journey they will be asked to stay in silence during the workshop.

Venue: Boswedden House, Cornwall.

Dates: 12, 13 & 14 November.

Cost: £125, with an early bird fee of just £95 if you book before 22 Oct. B & B available at £96 for 3 nighsts; £70 for two. Sounds like terrific value!

Further information and booking here.

Boswedden House

Second, a survey conducted by Jean Francis, author of Time to Go and one of the team at ARKA Original Funerals.

Jean conducts workshops on funeral planning and would love you to respond to a survey she is conducting into the importance people place on environmental considerations when planning a funeral. It’ll take you less than five minutes (I know, I’ve done it myself). You’ll find it here.

A real funeral

8 October 2010

Charles

6 Comments

Categories: Uncategorised

When Fiona Hughes died of cancer in September ’10, her sister Dina, her family, and Melanie, Fiona’s daughter, followed their hearts and gave her a colourful, creative, fear-free and happily sad funeral which embodied the customs, culture and language of her family (if not those of their funeral director).

She wrote the following uplifting account and sent it to Rosie Inman-Cook at the Natural Death Centre.

I have never liked funerals & in particular I have never liked being anywhere near a coffin let alone touch one.

My sister Fiona died of cancer, she was 52 years old & left an only child, Melanie, of 13 yrs old.

Almost all the family were with her throughout the last two weeks of her life & on the 4^th September 2010 she decided to leave us to do much more important things in the universe.

We have always been a very open family & to be honest we are pretty unconventional & some might say completely mad! So before Fiona died, when the nurses at the MacMillan unit told us we could ‘brighten’ up her hospital room with some nik naks, we took them at their word & went straight to our local party store and bought bunting, strings of floating butterflies, beach scenes, a palm tree, a blow-up flamingo (which we named ….) and lots of balloons which we got friends to draw pictures on. We brought pictures & ornaments from home & proceeded to ‘pimp out’ her room in style. When the nurses returned to her room they couldn’t believe how literally we had taken them & from then on Fiona’s room became known by hospital staff & patients alike as ‘the party room’.

As we knew Fiona was dying, we started to talk about funeral arrangements but we all had difficulty with the thought of a conventional funeral. None of us liked coffins; we all felt that they were sterile, characterless, cold & impersonal & none of us liked the rigid formality that always seemed to be associated with funerals.

We all hated that moment that the coffin goes past you down the aisle & personally I have always found myself crying uncontrollably, even becoming hysterical at that particular moment. I have always felt embarrassed & ashamed of my behaviour as I have often behaved like this at funerals of people I barely know, it has even happened at a funeral of someone I had never met!

Over the years I have come to realise that my tears are not really authentic, they are not tears related to the person who has died, they are not tears of sadness & loss but they are tears of shock & fear & of the taboo that surrounds death. I realised that at that moment that the coffin goes past, I have only ever been able to think about the fact that there is a dead body inside & it has always terrified me & I realise that my feelings are not truly genuine & I have never liked the fact that I am operating out of fear.

I have given this much thought over the years & how much it bothers me that, for some reason, with a conventional funeral, you don’t seem to have permission to be yourself. It seems like the event is so controlled by convention & by funeral directors that it leaves little room for originality and for a sense of feeling for the character of the person who has died. If it weren’t for the eulogies & music it would be hard to differentiate between one funeral & another. In my opinion most funerals seem to be cookie cutter and almost totally empty of any positive energy.

I have often considered how strange it is that we go to such incredible lengths to personalise a wedding, to make it ‘say’ everything about you as a person & as a couple, yet with funerals people seem to spend little time considering what we want to ‘say’ about an entire person’s life. I doubt any bride-to-be would be happy with being shown a handful of wedding dresses & then expected to pick one & very possibly under pressure to pick the most expensive & I doubt any couple would be happy to have one choice of vehicle to take them to & from the church & maybe even told that they didn’t have any other choices.

Obviously a lot of this has to do with the lack of time for preparation for a funeral & the incredible emotional distress that people are dealing with. I think this is why we look to the funeral directors to take the weight off & to handle everything. The danger here though is that the funeral directors can ‘take over’ & at times take advantage of the vulnerable state of the mourning relatives. I don’t think people realise how much choice there is out there & how relatively easy it is to personalise a funeral so they end up taking the funeral directors advice & leave it at that. But I feel that we can then be left with a hollow memory of our beloved’s send off which is a real shame.

In the case of Fiona’s funeral we felt we were in a dilemma, we didn’t want to go with the formality of a conventional funeral, but not realising we had any alternatives we felt we had to make the best of a far from ideal situation.

We ended up deciding that the only way we could cope & the only way we could avoid a coffin, was to have Fiona cremated without anyone present & then have a church service with her ashes & only have the immediate family members present, which would amount to about 11 people. We felt that at least this way we wouldn’t have to have a coffin & we could make it a more intimate & personal affair. We then decided we would have a personalised service at the venue where we would have the reception that would be run by the family.

However, my daughter Natalie, mentioned how it wasn’t giving Fiona’s friends a proper chance to say goodbye & that we would somehow be cheating them out of the experience.

Having spoken at length with Natalie & the family, we ended up agreeing that Natalie was right. But this then left us with the whole ‘coffin dilemma’ as we felt it would be very odd to have a full church service with just an urn of ashes, but we still couldn’t come to terms with having a coffin which still left us in a state of conflict. We really didn’t know what to do. We felt that maybe we were just going to have to have a coffin & deal with it, but we really weren’t happy about it.

Then I started thinking about whether they might be any alternatives. I knew that cardboard coffins existed and we thought about using one of them, so that at least we could go down the environmental route, which might soften the experience & make it a bit more ‘friendly’ & approachable.

So I started scanning the Internet & came across a couple of sites that supplied cardboard coffins. I noticed the coffins that were already painted & how you could commission one to be decorated to order. This started to feel like a real possibility. Now at least we could make the coffin say something about Fiona.

Fiona always liked to think that she was a mermaid so we thought that we could commission a coffin with a mermaid on it. I started to feel excited, as now there was some creativity flowing and it seemed like we could have some control over what we could do for Fiona’s final send off.

Then I noticed the plain cardboard coffins. On their own I thought they looked a little basic & to be honest I thought it might look a little like we had just put her in a shoe box & that it might look a little sad & lonely. But then I wondered whether there was the possibility of decorating & graffitying the coffin ourselves. This was an idea I had had years ago but had never thought it might actually be possible.

I phoned the company, Greenfield Creations, & rather nervously asked if we could decorate a cardboard coffin ourselves. I really wasn’t sure how this suggestion would be taken & I thought he might think I was off my trolley, but to my delight he told me this was perfectly possible. It was such a relief to know that perhaps we weren’t so weird & that other people do have unconventional ideas. Now I was very excited & told the rest of the family about this possibility. They were all enthusiastic & thought it was a great idea.

Then we suddenly realised that this thought changed everything.

We realised that if we were going to have a coffin & decorate it ourselves then all of a sudden we wanted lots of people to be at the church. We wanted people to be able to participate, to send us their poems, pictures etc & even sign the coffin at the church.

It went from us wanting to keep the service very small because of dread & fear to wanting to make it huge because of love, participation & creativity. Now we wanted to celebrate & the whole energy surrounding her funeral arrangements started to change. Now we started looking forward to her funeral instead of dreading it.

So we had the coffin delivered to the funeral directors and armed with a basket full of coloured markers, paints, sellotape, scissors, glitter glue, photos etc. about seven of us all went along to our first decorating experience.

I wasn’t sure how I would feel when we saw the coffin for the first time. To be honest I did feel a little un-nerved but it certainly wasn’t anything like I had experienced in the past.

We filed into the tiny room & we each chose a section of coffin to work on. At first it was a little difficult, like staring at a blank canvass, but then as we made a start, the ideas just started flowing.

Melanie, Fiona’s daughter, started first by drawing flowers on the lid that trailed on over the side. My sister Mandy started drawing an abstract mermaid, Natalie my daughter drew a whole ‘Finding Nemo’ scene & I started cutting out photos & poems that people had sent us, while others wrote their own messages.

After about ten minutes my elder sister Mandy looked at me & smiled & she said ‘isn’t this lovely’ & I smiled & nodded in agreement.

We were only there for about half an hour that first day but that half an hour was the most peaceful, most amazing experience that I can even begin to explain. For the first time, since the trauma surrounding Fiona’s death, we felt calm & joyful. Not one of us expected to feel what we felt.

We went back three more times to continue with the decorating & each time was a profoundly uplifting experience. We sat on the floor of the chapel of rest surrounded by pens, paint, glitter, scissors & glue & had the time of our lives, often laughing out loud at the ideas we were having to decorate the coffin.

After each visit we all remarked to each other what an incredible experience it was & we all started to realise that decorating Fiona’s coffin was going much deeper than any of us could have expected.

At first thought, it just seemed like an unconventional, wacky creative idea that could add some humour to an otherwise sombre event. But we started to realise that the act of drawing & creating was allowing ourselves to express ourselves & our grief. And the photos, messages & poems that people were sending to us to attach on their behalf was allowing us to participate in their energy & love for Fiona & was also in turn helping them with their grief by having their feelings displayed for all to see.

Unlike sympathy cards, which only the family get to read, we realised that this giant piece of artwork could be read by anyone who wanted to come to the funeral parlour or come early to the church to see her coffin. Now instead of this coffin representing fear it represented love, happy memories, joy & creativity.

We started to realise how symbolic the whole thing had become we likened it to the desire for some people to have tattoos and we also considered the deeper meanings behind why people do graffiti and that perhaps there might even be a tribal meaning behind what we were doing. It certainly was an incredibly loving experience where family & friends could get together in this one space & share their creativity. I don’t suppose you often get visitors to a chapel of rest who stay for several hours who had as good a time as we had!

We also realised how lovely it was for friends of Fiona’s from abroad who could not attend the funeral, but could send us a memento for us to attach on their behalf, how in some way this was able to make them present at the funeral despite their absence.

We noticed how everyday that we went to the funeral parlour Melanie became less & less afraid. She told us that if had it been a regular coffin she would not have gone anywhere near it. She said she still had some uncomfortable feelings but simply being in such close contact to the coffin helped her. She started to see how the energy of all our artwork was literally transforming the coffin before our very eyes from something linked to death to something linked with life. It almost became a ‘living thing’ as it started to express so much energy from so many people.

For me it became a transformational experience & I know the other members of my family feel the same. And it did not end with just decorating at the funeral directors. We chose to have Fiona’s coffin taken to the church in our camper van, which we also decorated and we asked our local paper to come & take pictures & do a report on it so that others might learn that there are more choices available to you than many people realise.

I will never forget the camper van arriving at the church with my husband Scott driving it. I will never forget seeing Fiona’s coffin in the back of the van & how happy I felt when my son & Scott & other members of the family carefully took her out of the van. The coffin looked amazing & I just remember feeling excited as they took her into the church.

And then the decorating continued in the church.

We had decided to have Fiona taken to the church an hour and a half before the ceremony so that people could see the coffin. We supplied pens, glue & sellotape for last minute attachments & graffiti. Right up to about 30 seconds before the service people were milling around the coffin, looking for a space to write something or attach a last minute memento. Even Melanie’s friends, also 13 yrs old, came to write on the coffin. This was all the more incredible as obviously at this point there was a body inside. It caused us all to think how amazing it was that no one, in any way, was afraid to get close to it – even knowing that Fiona was inside.

I remember standing there smiling so hard, feeling so happy at the site of all these people surrounding her coffin & how amazing it looked.

When everyone settled into their seats, I looked at the coffin & all I could feel was joy & true, authentic sadness at the loss of my beloved sister. It felt so right, I did not shed a single fearful tear that day. Every tear came from my heart, from my sorrow & from my sense of loss. At no time did I ever feel revulsion or fear for the coffin & at no time did I find myself fixated on the fact that a body was inside the coffin. The only thing that was present in the church that day & in the massive celebrations afterwards was love & sadness.

My mother pointed out that at a regular funeral the coffin is largely ignored. I myself have always felt a sense of separation as though there is some sort of invisible barrier between yourself & the coffin, instead Fiona’s coffin became a focal point & an integral & important part of the service & it felt very holistic.

I believe this experience has helped massively in my sense of grief & I can honestly say that the experience of decorating Fiona’s coffin is one of the most memorable, transformational & uplifting experiences of my life. I also believe it could be an incredibly therapeutic & healing experience for children.

For most people a funeral is a morbid, dark, sombre occasion & a day that you ‘just have to get through’ this was far from the case for us. Yes, we shed many tears but it has left us with extraordinary memories of togetherness, fun, love & celebration.

As you can imagine I feel passionately about this now. I have taken a copy of the newspaper article & some photos of the coffin to our local MacMillan unit where Fiona died & they are excited about it & are passing the information on to the family support team. They are looking at investigating the idea to help children, as I believe this has truly far reaching potential for helping children come to terms with losing a parent or other loved one.

Fiona’s doctor is also very interested as he said he has never come across anything like it & says how he is interested in anything that helps to break down the taboos & fear surrounding death & making it an approachable subject.

As we had such a dreadful experience with our funeral director my daughter & I are now seriously considering whether we could open some sort of coffin decorating parlour or alternative funeral directors. We thought how wonderful it would be if we could supply beautiful premises to people to decorate their coffins in a supportive, friendly environment, where we could give advice on alternative funerals & encourage people to investigate other possibilities. We are not sure whether this is remotely possible but we are passionate enough & feel strongly enough to want to investigate it further.

Fiona was 52 when she died & the last 2 weeks of her life were hell on earth for us. We had to watch her die & the feeling of helplessness was profound. There was absolutely nothing we could do to stop her impending death, we had no control of her illness, she was too young to die, she was leaving a young child behind & it was a deeply traumatic experience. But how we said ‘goodbye’ was very much within our control & myself & my families’ experience was beyond amazing, despite having a funeral director that tried to block us, undermine us & mislead us at every turn.

I believe that, not only was there a financial issue with our funeral director, as he did not make anywhere nearly as much money out of us as he could have done, but there was also a ‘control’ issue & I think it is highly possible that this was even more of an issue than the money.

Our funeral director simply didn’t want to give away his power. He seemed to dislike intensely that we had minds of our own, that we were making unusual & unconventional choices & the more we asserted ourselves the more he seemed to dislike it. I am also suspicious of the fact that I am a female & stood up to him & that this factor may have come into it.

I think our decisions took away his significance & his perceived role as a funeral director, as all we basically needed him for was all the paperwork & physical collection & preparation of Fiona’s body. By decorating our own coffin, that was not supplied by him, & by using our own vehicle, we were taking away his ‘visibility’ & I think he had serious issues with giving that power up. He just wanted to control the whole thing from start to finish. I think his whole identity was tied up with doing things ‘his’ way & he just couldn’t conceive that someone may want to do it differently.

We have come to believe as a result of our experience, that it is distinctly possible that if people knew they had more choices, that people would much rather be in control of their loved ones ‘send off’. After all, death is inevitable; it is not something we can control, but having as much input as possible into the last opportunity we have to celebrate our loved ones life, gives us back some of that control & has certainly left us with some unforgettable memories & a day that reflected who Fiona was & who we are as a family & I can only hope that our experience can be used to help others.

Dem bones

8 October 2010

Charles

No comments

Categories: Attitudes to dead bodies, Attitudes to death

Here’s one of those ‘only in America’ stories:

The owner of Memory Gardens Cemetery says he did nothing wrong disposing of human remains that were used for medical research. A resident called police after finding the piles of bones out in the open on cemetery property … Parker says he’s sorry if people are hurt, “It tends to get sensationalized because it’s a taboo subject. It’s death. This is the family’s choices to donate the bodies and if they wanted the remains back they certainly could have said so at any time.” Sgt. Ben Renya says there are no charges to file because there is no law on the books which says this is illegal.

Full story + video here. Hat-tip to Funeral Consumers Alliance for this — a beautiful body which, if you don’t know it, you need to set aside an hour or two to check out.

Going down

7 October 2010

Charles

5 Comments

Categories: sex and death

This from the monochrom website:

In the age of data mining, a person’s sex life may contain less embarrassing details than their web search history. Does it make sense that the former is a tightly guarded secret while the latter is shared with anonymous corporations daily? Even though a sexual nature is one of the few things most humans share in common, our social convention is to push all trace of it out of the public sphere. The Six Feet Under Club offers attendees a unique opportunity to experience the warping of public and private intimate space.

At monochrom‘s Arse Elektronika conference, couples can volunteer to be buried together in a casket beneath the ground. The space they occupy will be extremely private and intimate. The coffin is a reminder of the social norm of exclusive pair bonding “till death do us part”. However, this intimate scene will be corrupted by the presence of a night vision webcam which projects the scene on to an outside wall. The audience will be privy to the scene inside, but the volunteers in the coffin will be completely isolated from them. The scenario keeps the intimacy of a sexual moment intact while moving the private act into public space. It can be seen as an absurd parody of pornographic cinema or an examination of the high value placed on sexual privacy. Either way, won’t you become a member of the Six Feet Under Club?

Cunning stunt

7 October 2010

Charles

22 Comments

Categories: Co-operative Funeralcare

A consumers’ co-operative whose aim is to enable ordinary working people to buy things they would not otherwise be able to afford; one which exists to provide a service for its members rather than generate profits for shareholders. A good thing, yes? It gets better. This consumers’ co-op also has an altruistic, ethical agenda for social change.

You’d think any such enterprise would be incredibly proud of itself. Dammit, it ought to be a national treasure.

So where did it all go so wrong for Co-operative Funeralcare?

And here’s the big question: What’s the point of it?

Let’s not get started, we’ll still be at it come Christmas. Let’s just look at Funeralcare’s new marketing trick for luring funeral consumers into its lair.

Mylocalfuneraldirector.co.uk

It looks like quite a helpful website for anyone planning a funeral and looking for a funeral director. It looks and reads like an (indifferent) independent consumer cheap online pharmacy without prescription resource.

Until you type your town into the Find Your local Funeral Director box.

Only a deeply damaged brand behaves like this.

Domain name:

         mylocalfuneraldirector.co.uk

     Registrant:
         The Co-operative Group

     Registrant type:
         UK Industrial/Provident Registered Company, (Company number: IP0525R)

     Registrant's address:
         9th Floor
         New Century House
         Corporation Street
         Manchester
         Greater Manchester
         M60 4ES
         United Kingdom