Author: Charles

More than just a matter of tone

4 February 2010
Charles
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Categories: celebrants, ceremony

This is an interesting blog post. Here’s a taster:

What I hate most at funerals is the tone used by the officiant (almost wrote: the presiding officer). No matter what the religious faith may be, the person in front of the congregation speaks as if he knew … I think it’s the tone of voice that does me in. As if the officiant had a direct line into whatever deity resides in that particular structure. I’d rather hang around with the person’s old buddies, whoever they may be … We’d drink to his peace of mind and ours, then we’d start working his absence into the fabric of things.

Read all of it here.

Pets and people together forever

3 February 2010
Charles
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Categories: pet cemeteries; pet and owner burial

It’s intriguing to see what grabs the attention of people, especially when it’s something you don’t, yourself, reckon to be at all eyebrow-raising.

Down in Cornwall, Penny Lally at Penwith Woodland Burial Place is burying pets with their owners. So remarkable is this reckoned to be that the story has whizzed round the world in the last few days. People are needing to get their heads around it – but they’re doing that and they http://www.honeytraveler.com/pharmacy/ like it. Interesting to note that the Daily Mail ran the story in Femail. Ain’t it a bloke ting too, huh?

You can also be “Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course / With rocks, and stones, and trees” together with your dumb chums at Tarn Moor.

And at a natural burial ground near you, shortly, no doubt. Good oh!

(Love that memorial at Tarn Moor. See pic in the Mail story.)

Does mass burial horrify you?

3 February 2010
Charles
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Categories: memorialisation

Interesting piece in USA Today on mass graves in Haiti and the importance people attach to marking the spot where their dead are laid – a physical point of connection. “We are hard-wired to want to know where our dead are, whether we believe in a superior being or not,” asserts Curtis Rostad, an Indiana funeral director. Even Neanderthals, he reminds us, buried their dead with flowers.

Curtis, we remind ourselves, has a commercial interest in burial. And when he uses that seductive metaphor ‘hard-wired’, is that how human brains really work?

We pride ourselves on having evolved somewhat since the days when Neanderthals roamed the earth. We’ve done that by suppressing many of our Neanderthal impulses. We value reason over instinct. It’s what makes us civilised.

Or does it?

Read it here. Don’t miss the link to a sprightly piece on orphan-napping.

Letting go

2 February 2010
Charles
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Categories: Attitudes to dead bodies, ceremony, cremation

Obachan Funeral 2008 from Steven S Friedman on Vimeo.

There’s a thought provoking post over at Mindfulness and Mortality about the role of the body at a funeral. Among many other interesting ideas, blogger Gloriamundi articulates this:

Somehow, people have to let a body go. It’s very difficult to do, because the life of the person they knew was embodied – literally, in that body. The life and the body were the same thing. The body is now a different body, and the mourners have to move towards seeing it as different – something they must let go of. They have to leave with something non-physical, with an enhanced sense of the meaning of the life that is ended.

This is something we have to think through if we are to engage with the nature and the purpose of a funeral. It’s a terribly tough emotional and philosophical transition to make, from caring tenderly for the body of a dead person through to destroying it or permitting it to be destroyed. In the case of cremation, the destruction of the cherished body happens hardheartedly fast after the funeral ceremony. This is illustrated, I think, by the video above.

On whose authority?

1 February 2010
Charles
3 Comments
Categories: funeral directors

It’s an interesting fact that a funeral director can go to a hospital mortuary and collect a dead person to bring back to their funeral home on the verbal instruction of that dead person’s executor. That’ll be good enough for the mortuary. If a funeral director whom they’ve never seen before turns up, they may ask for proof that he or she actually is a funeral director. A letterhead will normally suffice. What the mortuary doesn’t ask for is written authorisation from the executor.

So far as I know, no one has ever collected from a mortuary a body to which they had no entitlement. Could a couple of Satanists in disguise go and get someone? I rather think they could. Please tell me I am wrong.

Teresa Evans runs a campaign whose object is to require public bodies to inform the public fully on all matters concerning bereavement. She wants their consumer rights and human rights to be properly respected.

She is presently researching this matter of authorisation, so I asked her to write something for this blog. If you want to respond, please do so in a comment below or direct to Teresa through her website.

A NHS Mortician unlawfully gave clothing worn by my son at his death to my contracted funeral undertaker who did not have my consent to collect these items.

The undertaker took it upon himself to bury the clothing, which he claimed was heavily blood stained, in a plastic bag beneath my son’s body in his coffin.

This experience has highlighted to me the necessity for funeral undertakers to produce a letter of authority that is specific to whatever personal property they might be collecting on behalf of their contracted party (the bereaved) from either a NHS Mortuary or a Public mortuary.

I seek to challenge that this practice be applied so to serve protection on public bodies within the NHS and the bereaved alike, and would welcome other people’s viewpoints.

Funeralcare screwupdate

1 February 2010
Charles
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Categories: Co-op, Co-operative Funeralcare

Naughty scenes, it seems, recently shattered the reverent if gloomy atmosphere of George Pettit and Son, undertakers to the good people of Chester. At the staff Christmas party all manner of impropriety seems to have been committed. In an admirably tight-lipped and understated report, the Sunday People spells out in caps the words STRIPPING, THONG, BOOZED and KARAOKE. Gives you an idea. A sample sentence reads: “One video shot from the Christmas Eve party shows a worker with a nipple chain wearing only a thong with the slogan ‘Jingle My Bells’”.

Let not your indignation target the blameless Mr Pettit. It would never have happened in his day. The eminence grise behind the name above the door is none other than…

Co-operative Funeralcare.

Read the People report here.

Thomas G Long

29 January 2010
Charles
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Categories: ceremony

Thomas G Long here, one of this blog’s great heroes. Though he comes at funerals from a Christian viewpoint, most of his ideas have a universal application.

He talks about the growing practice in the US to have a funeral without a body (though with ashes, often). That’s not happening to any great extent over here in the UK. But there is a conversation to be had about the role and purpose of a body at a funeral. In most UK crematoria it is set well apart from, and never in the body of, the audience. It is present, but not involved. There’s a lack of conviction in this, a grudging acquiescence, you could say.
Great to hear Mr Long talk of funeral directors (and priests) who get it.

Worst funeral songs #1 – My Way

28 January 2010
Charles
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Categories: music

There was a little light larking at the Dead Interesting blog last week as we debated best funeral songs for atheists. Off the tops of our heads we came up with You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere – Bob Dylan, No God – Darkest Hour, Heaven is a Place on Earth – Belinda Carlisle, and, from Rupert, a variation on the famous Bob Marley song: No Jesus, No Cry. Perhaps you can think of others?

Then I found this string over at Fluther in response to: What would be an inappropriate song to play at a funeral? Most of them are a little weak, but I have to declare a weakness for We’ve Only Just Begun – Carpenters, Stayin’ Alive – Bee Gees, and Who Wants To Live Forever? – Queen. Bitches Ain’t Shit by Dr Dre sounds a contemporaneously anarchic note much favoured at Brit funerals. But for me the clear winner is: Anything by ABBA. I don’t know that it’s possible to get inappropriater than that. Made me chuckle for the rest of the day. Oh, except that, now I think of it, Take A Chance On Me has got to be a pretty good way to go for an agnostic:

If you need me, let me know, gonna be around
If you’ve got no place to go, if you’re feeling down
If you’re all alone when the pretty birds have flown
Honey I’m still free

But. Seriously. Worst funeral song. It’s got to be My Way, surely? It’s clear in its renunciation of any divinity (otherwise you’d have done it God’s Way). Nothing wrong with that: it’s a defensible existential stance. But what about the message to spouse/partner, family, friends, work colleagues, neighbours – indeed, every else in the entire world? It’s perfectly clear. I didn’t need you. You meant nothing to me. I did it without you. Yes, and in case you were wondering, I was self-created, too.

For what is a man, what has he got?
If not himself, then he has naught

Could there be a more self-regarding, more narcissistic funeral song than this?

I hate it. Got anything worse?

Some conflict of interest, surely?

27 January 2010
Charles
No comments
Categories: Co-op, funeral plans

 

Michael Parkinson
 
HM Government Dignity Ambassador for old people, and…
 
…the face behind Sun Life funeral plans, which are…
 
…Co-operative funeral plans.
 
Tut tut.

Singers for Funerals

27 January 2010
Charles
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Categories: music

 

From their press release:

Singers for Funerals is the brainchild of two professional opera singers, mezzo soprano Kirsty Young and soprano Toni Nunn. Both have performer with professional opera companies across the UK and beyond, including Kirsty’s own company, Hatstand Opera. Between them, the two ladies have sung in over 600 venues in the UK, from cathedrals to tiny parish churches, theatres to town halls, mansions to marquees.

Kirsty Young is keen to bring all that performing experience to provide quality singing for funerals:
“After singing at various funerals over the years, we realised how music could be a great comfort to family members at a difficult time, by celebrating what their loved one enjoyed in life. It is often very difficult for churches to provide a choir to sing at funerals or cremations. Many families therefore had no choice but to use recorded music, where they might have preferred a real ‘live’ singer. We give families back that option for live music, sung by an experienced professional, at an affordable price.”

I like them. Check out their website and their voices here.