Charles – Page 2 – The Good Funeral Guide

How to stay alive after you’re dead

13 May 2016

Charles

2 Comments

Categories: Immortality, memorialisation

Posted by Thomas Staley

“All living things seek to perpetuate themselves into the future, but humans seek to perpetuate themselves forever. This seeking – this will to ‘immortality’ – is the foundation of human achievement; it is the wellspring of religion, the muse of philosophy, the architect of our cities and the impulse behind the arts. It is embedded in our very nature” Stephen Cave

So if it is embedded in our nature, what potential do we have to perpetuate ourselves as humans in the 21st century?

In 2011 Russian entrepreneur Dmitry Itskov employed leading Russian specialists in the field of neural interfaces, robotics, artificial organs and systems, proposing the transfer of personality to an advanced non-biological carrier at the end of an individual’s natural lifetime. The ultimate objective of this project is the development of a hologram-like avatar with an artificial brain to which human personality is transferred.

Whilst many remain sceptical, and are concerned by the ethical implications of such technological developments, our physical presence in this world remains limited, for the time being, and is set to remain indefinitely so.

This is why the emergence of online digital legacy tools, that provide us with the opportunity to record our lives online and leave an everlasting legacy, provide a meaningful solution to the aforementioned conundrum concerning ‘immortality’.

Such tools have the potential to capture every aspect of our lives, enabling future generations to obtain a complete understanding of who we truly are; including what we achieved, the values we upheld, the causes we represented, and what we held dearest during our time on this earth.

Loggacy is one such digital legacy tool; founded with the intention of connecting generations of family and friends, so that our most precious memories and experiences may be preserved perpetually.

Loggacy was very much born from a personal desire to never be forgotten, as I find it a sad reality that I am only able to remember my ancestors through snippets of physical information, such as photographs or writings that were supplemented by short narratives from living relatives. I hope that my vision now means that when I pass this won’t be the case, and that my children, grandchildren and beyond will be able to learn about everything that I embodied throughout the course of my lifetime.

I contend that this feeling extends well beyond myself, and indeed, I believe that there is an innate human desire within us all to create a personal narrative, to leave something behind, to pass something on and make a mark on this world; which is as much future-oriented as it is an immersion in the past.

As such I created a platform that is available for all to use; because it is a fundamental right to be remembered, to achieve some form of immortality.

The beauty of the tool is that the account provided by Loggacy is yours to control, manage and share; and therefore you determine exactly what people learn about you and what they are subsequently able to remember you by. Whether it be detailing a romantic getaway, your wedding or your child’s first steps, Loggacy welcomes you to create a log documenting your life from birth through to the present day and share it only with those most precious to you.

Many of us make plans for end of life, whether it be in the form of a funeral or pension plan, but little emphasis is currently placed on how we may utilise technology to record our lives, and as such, preserve our legacies. I intend to change this through the creation of a safe, secure and intuitive platform that allows users to record the most poignant moments of their life; so that future generations may truly know and understand their heritage.

Regardless of how seemingly menial our personal stories or achievements may appear to us on an individual level, we all have memories and experiences that are of interest to others and it’s important that these endure.

I therefore encourage you to consider what you might want your legacy to be, and record it with Loggacy; so that we may all stand the test of time, and satisfy man kinds perennial quest for immortality…

Nice work if you can get it

9 May 2016

Charles

1 Comment

Categories: funeral directors

Here’s an attractive sounding job spec for someone considering a career as a funeral director:

It’s providing the service that leaves a lasting impression.

It’s being encouraged to gain new skills. And it’s delivering extraordinary service…

Joining our talented team, you’ll provide a … service to an exceptional standard, both front-of-house and behind-the-scenes.

You’ll prepare for and support functions of all scales.

Preparations back-of-house will be a big part of your role.

And front-of-house, you’ll welcome and take care of guests…

You’ll be proud to play your part … as well as supporting some truly spectacular events.

In an environment where development and training is commonplace, you’ll be supported to achieve an accredited … qualification too.

You’ll … challenge yourself to deliver to the highest standard every day.

Previous … experience is not essential, but you will need to be committed to developing a career in the industry.

It’ll be hard work and there will be a lot to learn, but you’ll be supported every step of the way. You’ll therefore need a proactive approach, a desire to learn and eagerness to tackle new challenges.

You’ll have outstanding team working and time management skills, and you’ll understand the need for these in delivering an overall smooth and efficient service.

Polite, friendly and approachable to all, you can naturally adapt your communication style to suit different situations.

With an eye for detail, you aim for and achieve the highest standards in all that you do.

Thinking of applying? One small snag. This is a job description for a trainee butler at Buckingham Palace. We have always felt, here at the GFG, that there’s a close affinity between undertaking and domestic service.

The soft bigotry of low expectations

6 May 2016

Charles

7 Comments

Categories: celebrants, Ritual

Posted by May Andrews

“If we can just get through this, then we can get on with our lives.”

I’ve heard it so many times, in so many different ways, but it all boils down to this: many families perceive a funeral to be something they must endure, an unpleasant trial, which they must ‘get out of the way’ before the real process of healing can begin.

And we can’t really blame them. There remains a taboo around death, such that, when called upon to confront it, people still feel a sense of existential discomfort, as if they have stepped onto forbidden soil. As a celebrant, I see it almost every day: the apprehension in the faces of the guests who have just entered the chapel. What is going to happen? To whom has our loved one been entrusted? How should I behave?

If I can break through that dreadful self-awareness and allow each guest to experience a personal journey of memories and acceptance, both of the death and of their grief, then I have done my job.

Yet there are days when I feel I struggle against another great barrier – one that has developed out of this sense that, in a secular world, funerals are no more than trial and tribulation. And that barrier is low expectation.

I meet often with families who shrug and say, “oh, he’d have been happiest if we’d just wrapped him up and chucked him in the ground.” “He always said, once you’re dead, you’re dead.” And other such comments in this vein, usually suggesting that the family are enduring the funeral out of a sense of appropriate etiquette. The ritual has ceased to have meaning and, as such, I am often asked to ‘get it over with as quickly as possible.’

If that is what people want then that is what I shall give them, but more often than not, I find that, once we begin, families find solace, not only in the ceremony itself but in its creation and planning. Seeing them discover this very often gives me a renewed faith in what I do.

On the other hand, I am aware that, if the public continue to have a broad belief that the content of the ceremony is of less importance than getting it done, then our industry has a problem. If the public expect empty ritual, then on the occasions that they ARE confronted with empty ritual, they are far less likely to complain. As such, unlike any other industry, the funeral industry has less motivation to change, evolve and improve. One only has to look at the sharp increase in direct cremations to see where this might lead.

There are celebrants out there who use cut and paste services and only change the name of the deceased. There are celebrants who don’t even take the time to visit the family. There are also excellent celebrants who go above and beyond. But while public expectations from a funeral are low, there will remain little incentive to weed out those of a poorer quality. By way of example, I can paraphrase from a private online group (luckily this celebrant was in the US, so I can but hope they are not representative of the UK): “I always write weddings from scratch, but funerals? I don’t have time for those. I just change the name.”

I use this example because it points to a vast divide in public attitude to tradition and ritual. People rarely just want to get weddings over and done with! They are an important rite of passage, and a time of celebration.

…Which brings me back to my very first quote, “If we can just get through this, then we can get on with our lives.”

The key is in these words, which upon first glance, seem so negative, so lacking in expectations. Yet they are key to understanding, not only what people need from a funeral, but the standards to which the industry needs to aspire, in order to rid itself of the idea that what we do is merely proper etiquette.

As celebrants, we have a responsibility to show people that they need not be passive observers of an empty ritual, but if a funeral is done right, they will be active participants in the very process that allows them to ‘get on with [their] lives,’ by helping them to manage and accept the changes that the death of a loved one can bring.

If we can sparkle he may land tonight

2 May 2016

Charles

4 Comments

Categories: Ritual

What is the role of ritual in a secular funeral service? What does a contemporary ritual look like? These and related questions have been debated many times on this blog.

So we were intrigued to learn of a brand new ritual created by the Church of England to celebrate Godparents’ Day. Quoting from today’s Times:

“The Godparents’ Sunday liturgy suggests that the service should begin with an informal welcome, the minister telling the congregation that they can behave like a football crowd, clapping, raising arms and shouting Alleluia “really loudly”. A “cantor or group of voices” should shout “God is great!” with the worshippers responding “Let the people praise you!” The guidelines state: “Repeat as often as feels right.”” … The clergy should “invite people to hold up hands, palms forward, fingers spread and move them like twinkling stars”. The minister then states: “As we think of the stars that shine, so we remember those who shine brightly in our lives and in our church.” … [The order of service] suggested that vicars should bring felt pens and Post-it Notes to church so that their congregations can contribute to a “memory wall”.

We were all the more intrigued to learn that this ritual has been created by the Rev Sandra Millar, head of projects and developments at the Archbishop’s Council and i/c restoring the popularity of C of E funerals. We’ve spent quite a bit of energy, in our ecumenical way, trying to maintain a dialogue with Sandra — without a great deal of success, it has to be admitted.

Dr Nazir-Ali, former Archbishop of Rochester, harrumphed when he heard about Sandra’s new ritual. He said “lapsed churchgoers expected reverence and awe rather than “touchy-feely group dynamics and the atmosphere of a class in primary school. When they come into a church, worshippers should sense the presence of a holy God, not the bonhomie they may experience at bingo.””

Worshippers, however, seem to have liked it. So is there anything here for secular funeral celebrants to plagiarise?

What about the star-twinkle finger thing as the curtains close?

Why do funeral workers creep people out?

20 April 2016

Charles

1 Comment

Categories: funeral directors, perceptions of funeral directors

Everyone in the death business knows what normal people think of them. They are reminded of it every time they’re asked what they do for a living. I often lie. Perhaps you do, too, sometimes.

A freshly published academic study titled On The Nature Of Creepiness offers us, perhaps, some insights into this unflattering characteristic commonly ascribed to deathworkers – alongside avarice, weirdness, morbidity, shiftiness, cunning, lizard complexion, predation, formaldehyde breath, yellow fingernails, hollow chuckling, inability to meet your eye, etc.

If deathworkers absorb the lessons of this study they may be able in some way to mitigate the adverse esteem in which they are held. It’s called image management.

Here are the headline findings of the study:

1) The perception of creepiness is a response to the ambiguity of threat. Males are more physically threatening to people of both sexes than are females

2) We are placed on our guard by people who are drawn to occupations that reflect a fascination with death or unusual sexual behavior. People who have hobbies that involve collecting things that we are predisposed as a species to fear such as spiders and snakes or things that can only be acquired after something has died (e.g., skulls or bodies to be stuffed) seem creepy to us as well.

3) We do not necessarily assume ill intentions from people who are creepy, although we may still worry that they are dangerous.

I was going to conclude that I have met very few people in the death trade who I’d regard as being remotely until I read this: Most of our subjects believed that creepy people cannot change, and only a small minority of our subjects (8.6%) believed that creepy people are aware that they are creepy.

NDC birthday party

18 April 2016

Charles

No comments

Categories: Natural Death Centre

Nicholas Albery, founder of the Natural Death Centre

By Josefine Speyer

The Natural Death Centre was 25 years old on 14 April 2016!

Celebrating this event with two Natural Death Salons to benefit the NDC.

There are still places at the next Natural Death Salon on Sunday 8 May. We will be showing the documentary film Death Makes Life Possible with Marilyn Schlitz and Deepak Chopra, including Rupert Sheldrake and many others, followed by a celebratory Death Cafe, which means conversation about death and including issues raised by the film etc. accompanied by delicious teas, coffee and cakes. We ask for a donation of £30. If you cannot afford it, do get in touch as we do not want you to miss out on this wonderful event. For booking and more info contact me. Places are limited. See flier attached. There will be a second benefit Salon on Sunday 19 June, with Rosie Inman-Cook of the NDC and others, which will be more of a party, celebrating NDC’s story so far and looking to the future. More info on this later.

I am so proud of everyone who has become involved in the natural death movement to bring back power to the people and embrace death as part of life, the place it should have. I believe it is to the benefit of everyone, but perhaps not to the big funeral companies who wish to have their pockets lined by families in distress who are unaware of what choices there are and do not realise there is another way than the Victorian way. Bring on the 21st century!!!

And thank you to Nicholas, social inventor, writer, editor, poet, activist and mentor for all his work in setting up and running the Natural Death Centre, the Association of Natural Burial Grounds and all his inspiration. Wish he were here to see how massive the movement has become and what impact the Natural Death Centre charity and the Natural Death Handbook have had, not just in the UK, but worldwide! A major toast to everyone who has been involved in the past and is involved now! and everyone who has benefitted!! xx I also love the work of the Home Funeral Network, The Good Funeral Guide, Death Cafe, Dying Matters etc. etc. I could go on, the list is long and growing! xx Thanks to everyone! It is a great legacy to be part of.

Please support the Natural Death Centre it help continue its work!

ED SAYS: You can download the flyer for these events here – NDSalon

Why am I still here?

15 April 2016

Charles

No comments

Categories: Assisted dying, Assisted suicide, Longevity, self-deliverance

When other helpers fail and comforts flee,
Help of the helpless, O abide with me.

First there was the cancer diary. Nigella Lawson’s husband John Diamond wrote one, you remember. Since the advent of the self-published blog countless people have died out loud.

Next, boomers started writing about the slow and distressing decline of their parents. You’ll find an example here.

Now those boomers are old enough to write about their own dissolution and are doing so to debunk the myth that too-long life is an unmitigated good thing. In last week’s Spectator magazine Stewart Dakers (77), reflecting that the reaper has changed from terminator to tormentor, dwelt on the horrors of longevity with both dread and splendid prose. Here are just a few extracts:

The existential reality of decline is aggravated by the prospect of total physical and cognitive disintegration, the details of which are well known to us, so we live in physical discomfort and mental terror. Old age has graduated into a form of pre-traumatic stress disorder.

We are a waste of space on a seriously overcrowded planet. We are in the way and those who are most impeded are the young. We can see this and are, of course, ashamed of ourselves.

My advice to young people is simple. Eat, drink, even smoke, and be generally merry, because that way you might be spared too many days of misery for yourself and your friends and family. Live short and prosper.

Old-age rational suicide will be with us any day now, just you see.

Bet his is bigger than yours

14 April 2016

Charles

8 Comments

Categories: Dignity

Dignity’s figures are out. All going swimmingly, obviously. Mike McCollum looking good on his salary of £50K a week.

Find the report here.

Repairing the dead

9 April 2016

Charles

2 Comments

Categories: Embalming

SIn Shanghai a funeral home has started using 3D printing technology to replicate parts of the face of a dead person whose head has been badly smashed and disfigured.

Chinese people reckon it to be of paramount importance to present a dead person at their funeral looking good.

The 3D printing process is reckoned to achieve at least 95 per cent resemblance. It is achieved by scanning a photo of the dead person and taking a 3D scan of their head. The new part is then printed and slotted in. The printer can reproduce hair and even a moustache.

It takes hours to do this. Conventional reconstruction using wax and clay can take days.

The value of embalming is hotly debated, the value of reconstruction not so. The value of being able to present to parents the reconstructed features of a child who has died violently is inestimable. The skills of the best embalmer-reconstructers are marvellous, their dedication amazing.

They could soon find themselves being superceded by a soulless machine.

Help yourself to some of this

8 April 2016

Charles

4 Comments

Categories: funeral cost, funeral plans, pre-need plans

When John Taplin of Open Prepaid Funeral Plans first proposed that we work together to create a GFG funeral plan I told him to f*** off.

Not in so many words. I was icily polite. I was practised in the art having previously spurned the seductive sweet talk of another funeral plan pedlar which wanted to fly me to Scotland and show me how shiningly ethical it is. In their case I explained (courteously) that I failed to see how it could be a good deal for the consumer to lavish hospitality and double-jointed accountancy on an innumerate dingbat like me.

John persisted. What did we want a funeral plan to look like? I fired impossible specifications at him and hissed “See what I mean? Can’t be done, cannit?”

And he replied, “Oh I think it can.”

So (finally) we met and the rest is, as they say, the present and the future. We showed our freshly-minted prepaid plan to a fifth-generation funeral director of impeccable credentials and all the risk aversion you could ask for. He mulled and he mused and finally he spoke: “With this plan I get to charge every funeral at the full at-need price.” I’d been blind to that because John and I had focussed exclusively on the interests of the consumer. But you can see why our heritage FD liked what he saw when you consider this from Golden Charter’s Ts and Cs:

“Upon completion of the Beneficiary’s funeral arrangements the Selected Funeral Director will be entitled to payment from us … The Selected Funeral Director will have no recourse against us or the Trust in the event that the sum so intimated by us is lower than the relevant parts of the original Funeral Plan cost”

Yes, what an absolutely crap deal for consumers. I pay for a £3500 funeral and get one costing hundreds of pounds less — a bit like finding myself in a 2 star hotel when I’d paid for 4.

And yes, what John and I had created is a thing of unparalleled and luminous beauty which is also very badly needed. We call it GFGPlan.

Your conventional prepaid funeral plan is beginning to look as dated as the mullet. Imagine a restaurant that serves only fixed 3-course meals cooked to recipes first published in Woman’s Own in 1958; that’s what you get with a conventional funeral plan.

Today’s funeral buyer wants cafeteria service – a bit of this, some of that, no limousine thanks.

Today’s funeral director doesn’t want to have to shoulder the risk of its plan provider finding itself a bit short.

The beauty of GFGPlan is its simplicity. It’s a pot. Into which you put money. As and when. It grows at 4% pa. None of the money is spent on salaries, commissions or freebies for noisy bloggers. It empowers the consumer to buy what they want and no more than they want. It pays a proper price to funeral directors.

Is it risk-free? If there was a total global financial meltdown, no. But if every GFGPlan-holder died today, the trust fund would be able to cover every single one of them. Can any other prepaid plan provider can say that?

If you’ve not yet studied GFGPlan, we strongly recommend that you do so. Start here.