Author: Charles

Dying inside

28 June 2010
Charles
2 Comments
Categories: prisons

Our prison system is a seldom explored area of death and dying. In fact, little is known about what goes on in our prisons, mostly because people don’t care enough about those inside to be remotely interested in what happens to them. This doesn’t surprise me. Crime angers people. But I’ve spent time in prisons and I met lots of people almost all of whom would benefit from a programme which made a real and earnest effort to rehabilitate them.

If you’re interested to find out what prison is like, have a look at Ben’s Prison Blog. Ben was imprisoned at the age of 14 for killing  a friend in a fight. He’s still there 30 years later. He is the UK’s first and only prison blogger.

If you want to know what extreme old age in prison looks like, here’s a film from the US. It is only partially descriptive of what happens in UK prisons because Americans lock up more people for longer than we do. But it shows you the consequences of the throw-away-the-key approach.

My thanks to John Hirst for pointing this film out to me.

Cross patch

26 June 2010
Charles
No comments
Categories: cemeteries, memorialisation

We must hope that spending cuts will result in the excision of not just waste but also the sort of local authority insensitivity which manifests as brainless heartlessness.

Here’s an example from Somerset as told by the Daily Mail:

Liz Maggs placed a 26-inch high wooden cross bearing a personal inscription on Rosemary Maggs’ burial plot at the Ebdon Road cemetery in Weston-super-Mare, while the family waited for a headstone to be made. But when Mrs Maggs, 43, returned to visit the grave … just a few days later she found the cross had disappeared … The authority said that because the cross stood about 2ft up from the ground it was a health and safety risk.

But it turns out that, though this was the pretext the council used, this wasn’t what they actually meant. It didn’t mean they they thought the cross presented a hazard to life, limb and the pursuit of happiness. No, what they were trying to get across was that this is a lawn cemetery; everything must be laid flat.

Ms Maggs was poorly advised by those with a duty to advise her. And by the example of many other wooden crosses in the same cemetery. Perhaps an example of belated, retrospective enforcement of regulations?

Whatever, a sorry mess. If you haven’t heard enough, find the whole sorry story here.

Hat-tip to Tony Piper for this.

Get Low

25 June 2010
Charles
3 Comments
Categories: Movies

Here’s a very interesting looking new film. Synopsis follows. Hat-tip to Liam Roberts for this.

For years, townsfolk have been terrified of the backwoods recluse known as Felix Bush. People say he’s done all manner of unspeakable things — that he’s killed in cold blood; that he’s in league with the Devil; that he has strange powers — and they avoid him like the plague. Then, one day, Felix rides to town with a shotgun and a wad of cash, saying he wants to buy a funeral. It’s not your usual funeral for the dead Felix wants. On the contrary, he wants a ‘living funeral,’ in which anyone who ever had heard a story about him will come to tell it, while he takes it all in. Sensing a big payday in the offing, fast-talking funeral home owner Frank Quinn enlists his gentlemanly young apprentice, Buddy Robinson to win over Felix’s business. Buddy is no stranger to Felix’s dark reputation, but what he discovers is that behind Felix’s surreal plan lies a very real and long-held secret that must get out. As the funeral approaches, the mystery – which involves the widow Maddie Darrow, the only person in town who ever got close to Felix, and the Illinois preacher Charlie Jackson who refuses to speak at his former friend’s funeral – only deepens. But on the big day, Felix is in no mood to listen to other people spinning made-up anecdotes about him. This time, he’s the one who is going to do the telling about why he has been hiding out in the woods.

The terrible price of longevity

25 June 2010
Charles
2 Comments
Categories: Assisted suicide, Attitudes to death, euthanasia, Longevity

Here’s an incredibly powerful and superbly written account from the New York Times about the consequences of life-extending interventions by medics.

It begins:

One October afternoon three years ago while I was visiting my parents, my mother made a request I dreaded and longed to fulfill. She had just poured me a cup of Earl Grey from her Japanese iron teapot, shaped like a little pumpkin; outside, two cardinals splashed in the birdbath in the weak Connecticut sunlight. Her white hair was gathered at the nape of her neck, and her voice was low. “Please help me get Jeff’s pacemaker turned off,” she said, using my father’s first name. I nodded, and my heart knocked.

It’s a gruelling read, and worth every word. You can find it here.

Nokanshi

24 June 2010
Charles
4 Comments
Categories: Movies, Nokanshi

I had an email today from someone in Atlanta, Georgia USA. Is there any funeral home in this area, she wondered, that practises nokanshi. I explained that I couldn’t help: the GFG is UK-based. Then I googled nokanshi. And discovered that it is the ritual preparation, in Japan, of the body for cremation.

There’s a fuller description of a nokanshi here.

And you can see how it’s done in the opening scene of the film Departures. (I put some trailers for Departures up on this blog a while back.) Now, I see, someone has posted the entire film on YouTube in 10-min chunks. It’s incredibly beautiful. Okay, the nokanshi discovers halfway through the ritual washing that the beautiful dead girl is actually a boy. No matter. You get the point.

There are no subtitles on the (presumably pirated) YouTube version. But it’s easy enough to follow. And it really is a lovely piece of work.

Hardening of the heart

24 June 2010
Charles
9 Comments
Categories: Dead people's rights, Embalming, funeral directors

What happens to the minds of those who deal with death every day? How do they cope with the endless procession of grieving people and dead bodies? Is it emotionally healthy to specialise in death? Isn’t undertaking something best combined with a therapeutic something else – a little landscape gardening or, in the case of Jeremy Clutterbuck, undertaker to the good folk of Cam in Gloucestershire, ironmongery? It is difficult to see, on his website, any affiliation to any of the funeral industry trade bodies, but he is proud to proclaim his membership of the British Hardware Federation.

In his excellent book Curtains, Tom Jokinen quotes Alan Wolfelt on ‘funeral director fatigue syndrome’. He lists the following symptoms:

  • Exhaustion and loss of energy
  • Irritability and impatience
  • Cynicism and detachment
  • Feelings of omnipotence and indispensability

I wonder if any funeral director out there has any comment on this? How do you look after your emotional health?

Funeral directors apart, what happens to those at a less exalted level – the trade embalmers, those who work in mortuaries, especially hospital mortuaries? What coping skills are they taught? Anecdotally, we are aware that mortuary practice in some of Britain’s funeral homes is not always what it should be and can be deplorable.

Here are two recent stories which illustrate what I’m getting at. See what happened to these people:

Staff at a historic cemetery in Genoa are being investigated for allegedly stripping gold fillings, jewels and artificial limbs from corpses for resale.

Seven employees at the wooded Staglieno cemetery, built in 1851, are suspected of having secretly amassed their booty in a workroom where buyers purchased materials by the pound.

Zinc stripped from coffins, as well as wooden coffins themselves, stolen seconds before cremations, were also up for sale, reported Genoa daily Il Secolo XIX. Artificial limbs were prized for their titanium content.

Read it all here.  Hat-tip to Tony Piper.

Questions about staff turnover, working relationships with funeral homes and the treatment of bodies at the Snohomish County Medical Examiner’s Office merit a review by an independent, third party, County Council Chairman Dave Gossett said … The scrutiny comes after an anonymous, online complaint the county received in August 2009.

The writer claimed to help run one of the county’s largest funeral homes and said bodies the funeral home received from the medical examiner’s office were “in vile condition.”

Read it all here.

Test drive it first…

24 June 2010
Charles
2 Comments
Categories: coffins, DIY funeral, home funerals

Here’s an intelligent, beautifully written piece from Salon magazine in which the writer describes the consequences of his father’s final request No. 5: “My body is to be placed in a plain pine box. I would like my children to make the box.”

In his last years my father, the writer William Manchester, told me, “When I die, I want you children to build my coffin.” He’d gotten the idea sometime in the ’70s, when a Wesleyan chemistry professor died, and his sons, following a Catalan custom, spent the night before the funeral building his coffin in their basement. My dad explained, “It will give you and your sisters a focus for your grief.”

I nodded and held my tongue. It was pointless to explain what he already knew: My sisters had never done any carpentry, and my own modest skills had diminished since I’d become afflicted by carpal tunnel syndrome.

The writer goes on to recount the story of how the coffin gets made, and concludes:

He would not be buried in it. His instructions stated that following the funeral, he would be cremated. It felt weird to have gone to all that trouble, just to have the coffin burned up a few days later. But its purpose was never practical. My father was a storyteller at heart, and this made a good one. It even had poetic potential: something about all those trees sacrificed to make all his books offering up a few boards for his last story.

Read the whole piece here. I hope you’ll enjoy it as much as I did.

At the top is an unrelated account of DIY coffin making. Make sure you watch both episodes. It’s a very charming story.

Does poetry make nothing happen?

23 June 2010
Charles
8 Comments
Categories: funeral poetry

The Tide Recedes

The tide recedes, but leaves behind

Bright seashells on the sand.

The sun goes down, but gentle warmth

Still lingers on the land.

The music stops, and yet it lingers

On in sweet refrain.

For every joy that passes

Something beautiful remains.

MD Hughes

What do you think of that little poem? Are you prepared to make a qualitative judgement? Yes, you probably are. We are taught to be critical, to rank things, to understand that there is good writing, bad writing, genres of writing, writing for Them, writing for Us. By the age of 14 we were backseat-driving Shakespeare, for heavens’ sake. It’s become a habit. We are all snobs, and snobs are not nice people.

I’ve used that little poem a few times at the close of a funeral. It’s been a good fit for families who like that sort of thing. Empathy, I flatter myself, guided me to pick it for them. And already I sound as if I am talking down. I don’t mean to, I really don’t. Yet if you were to get me in an armlock I’d confess that it wouldn’t do for me. If you were to advance on me with an electric cattle prod I’d whimper that I think it somewhat sentimental and mawkish. My shameful secret is that I know the difference between poetry, verse and doggerel. Once learned, never unlearned.

I guess a lot of celebrants feel this way about stuff they read at funerals. Arguably it doesn’t matter if it doesn’t show. Celebrants are role-players, after all.

Or does it matter? Does it? When a celebrant recites a prayer she doesn’t believe a word of, does that matter? Or ‘Do not stand at my grave and weep’, which she despises? Is this suspension of self? Or is it insincerity? I don’t know the answer to that. Do you?

Poetry at funerals tends to be, according to critical measurements, clichéd, corny or worse. So what? Isn’t the important thing that we like it? Why do we like it? We like it because at times of great grief poetry’s what we turn to. Why? It’s something very deepseated that makes us do this. And we don’t just read it, either, we write it. Look at the cards left at roadside shrines. We like it, dammit,  for its own sake.

We like poetry rich in sound-effects: rhyme, rhythm, assonance. We like poetry which paints pictures – what posh folk call ‘imagery’. We like poems we can easily understand at one hearing even though we are not at our cognitive best. The right poem is a good ride.

It goes to the heart. It enables emotional release—catharsis. We feel better for it. Does it change anything for good? Does it deepen insights? Can bad poetry work as effectively as good poetry? Can it lead us on, only to cheat us? Can it wear off quickly and leave a bad taste, a hangover, a void?

Poetry reaches the parts reason can’t get anywhere near. It is psychotropic. It is verbal MDMA. And interestingly enough, the therapeutic benefits of MDMA are attested in cases of post-traumatic stress and high anxiety in both terminal cancer sufferers and their partners. So you can see where I am going, can’t you? I won’t, because I think you don’t want me to. For today, that is. I’ll be back.

Here instead is a poem by David Harsent. It is called Elegy.

On the day of your death there were leaves drifting

Down to English lawns as season

Drifted into season, winter coming; rooks were pouring

Across the sky, thick as falling leaves and giving

Their hoarse Kyrie Eleison,

The best of the day now fading, you yourself fading

For no good reason, it seemed, for no good reason.

And in every part of the garden dark doors closing.

Hollowing out hallowed ground

22 June 2010
Charles
No comments
Categories: Attitudes to dead bodies, burial, Dead people's rights

Some interesting reflections here on humankind’s relationship with the dead human body and the forces of nature. I especially enjoyed the observation that the prairie dogs happily digging in this cemetery are no respecters of social status: they have even dug up a state governor. What deplorable absence of deference so far down the food chain!

Hat-tip to the FCA for this.