Author: Charles

Recomposition

13 October 2009
Charles
2 Comments
Categories: natural burial

Interesting story on US National Public Radio (NPR) here.

Do listen to Bernd Heinrich, gentle and wise, talking about what he perceives to be our duty to return to nature in the most appetising way we can.

No coffin for him. Some of the things he says: “You know, being sealed up, totally removed from natural processes that normally occur with every animal on earth is somehow very frightening, it seems unnatural.” He’s not afraid of being eaten: “I find that comforting, to be part of the eco-system … it’s part of the cost, of giving back. I have killed untold hundreds of thousands to live–we all have; to remove ourselves so no one can feed off us seems somehow sacrilegious.”

I agree. With the honourable exception of those cultures which cleave to ancient customs (some Jews, Muslims, Tibetan sky burialists), our corpse disposal practices define humankind’s disconnection from the Earth; they seem to assert that we are not of it. Call it fastidiousness, call it aloofness, call it squalid squeamishness, we do not behave in a way which acknowledges that we are in debt to it and have a duty to return to it in the most useful way we can. We’ll never save this beleaguered planet of ours until we get real and embrace our oneness.

Natural burial is fraught with the dainty denial of destiny, wrapped in euphemisms to shield us from beastliness, preferring prettified aesthetics to earthy, elemental ethics. Yes, it’s pretty much useless if you do it that deep! You’ll only get to push up daisies and buttercups if you enjoy a vibrant, rapid aerobic rot in topsoil or, better still, on the surface. In Hamlet’s words, “We fat all creatures else to fat us,” and therein lies our duty to “fat ourselves for maggots.” Yes, it’s about bugs as much as buttercups. Come on, people, let’s get clear-eyed about this! We need body farms, not burial grounds.

If you like the sound of William Hamilton, here’s that quote in full:

I will leave a sum in my last will for my body to be carried to Brazil and to these forests. It will be laid out in a manner secure against the possums and the vultures just as we make our chickens secure; and this great Coprophanaeus beetle will bury me. They will enter, will bury, will live on my flesh; and in the shape of their children and mine, I will escape death. No worm for me nor sordid fly, I will buzz in the dusk like a huge bumble bee. I will be many, buzz even as a swarm of motorbikes, be borne, body by flying body out into the Brazilian wilderness beneath the stars, lofted under those beautiful and un-fused elytra which we will all hold over our backs. So finally I too will shine like a violet ground beetle under a stone.

Thank you, Cynthia, for the link.

Spirituality in contemporary funerals

12 October 2009
Charles
1 Comment
Categories: celebrants, ceremony

There’s some interesting research work going on at the University of Hull. This is what they’re up to:

This project reflects the growing interest in spirituality which we are seeing in society generally and the changing shape of modern funerals. We are interested, for example, to see what the ‘spiritual’ content of a so-called ‘alternative’ funeral on the one hand and a traditional Christian or Buddhist ceremony might be; how people, as individuals and communities, express their spiritual feelings and beliefs and the meanings they attach to particular practices and symbols.

Why do they think it’s important?

It will contribute to knowledge and theory in a changing field which is also of increasing public concern. It will also assist in refining the practical responses of professionals involved with mourners, and with dying and bereaved people in their creation of ceremonies and rituals which help people in their bereavement.

Here’s how they are doing it:

Subject to gaining the informed consent of all participants, we will first attend the meeting of the funeral director with the family when arrangements for the funeral are discussed. Then we will observe about fifty funerals of different types. At a suitable time after the funeral (perhaps one week) we will interview one or more family members about why they chose the funeral they did, the meaning it had for them and how it helped them with their loss. Finally, having analysed the funerals and family interviews, we propose to interview a sample of funeral directors and celebrants to obtain their views on emerging themes.

You can see how they’re getting on by reading the progress reports at the foot of the web page.

Interesting to note that, having attended 39 out of the fifty funerals they have set themselves, they are no longer finding anything new. For all the talk of grieving people reclaiming funerals from funeral directors and priests and creating life-centred ceremonies as unique as the life lived — ceremonies which articulate and express the personal and possibly idiosyncratic values and spirituality of the person who has died — the new paradigm has in most cases evolved into a new bog standard—a palatable, emotionally manageable ceremony served up by a second-rate celebrant comprising a handful of banalities tossed in a Henry Scott Hollandaise sauce, a eulogy spiced with a few nice jokes, the whole washed down with some saccharine Andrea Bocelli. Ritual comfort food.

Starkness and drama. Love and lamentation. The strong sense of a silver cord loosed, a golden bowl broken, a life ended. The emotional reality of a date with eternity. All missing.

Showing up and just being there

9 October 2009
Charles
No comments
Categories: Reasons to go to a funeral

This is Tom Lynch:

There’s this wonderful essay that was written — I have it framed in the hallway there; the woman’s name, I think, is Sullivan who wrote it. She talks about how in her life the difference was not between doing good and evil. It was just doing the next right thing.

I needed to read that piece because I’m disinclined — when someone’s sick, when someone’s out of sorts, when someone’s dead — I’m disinclined to be around that. I mean, it’s uncomfortable, and I don’t know what to say any more than the next guy, and I don’t do strawberry rhubarb pie. But I find that if you just show up, if you just walk in the door, people think you’re a hero. And I have found that, whether I’m walking in the door with a stretcher and one of my own to help carry their dead out, or if I’m going to the hospital to visit a sick relative or friend, or if I show up for a funeral at another place, you know, at a distance, they thank you for that.

Here’s Sullivan. Deirdre Sullivan. She’s a lawyer in Brooklyn.

Always Go to the Funeral

I believe in always going to the funeral. My father taught me that.

The first time he said it directly to me, I was 16 and trying to get out of going to calling hours for Miss Emerson, my old fifth grade math teacher. I did not want to go. My father was unequivocal. “Dee,” he said, “you’re going. Always go to the funeral. Do it for the family.”

So my dad waited outside while I went in. It was worse than I thought it would be: I was the only kid there. When the condolence line deposited me in front of Miss Emerson’s shell-shocked parents, I stammered out, “Sorry about all this,” and stalked away. But, for that deeply weird expression of sympathy delivered 20 years ago, Miss Emerson’s mother still remembers my name and always says hello with tearing eyes.

That was the first time I went un-chaperoned, but my parents had been taking us kids to funerals and calling hours as a matter of course for years. By the time I was 16, I had been to five or six funerals. I remember two things from the funeral circuit: bottomless dishes of free mints and my father saying on the ride home, “You can’t come in without going out, kids. Always go to the funeral.”

Sounds simple — when someone dies, get in your car and go to calling hours or the funeral. That, I can do. But I think a personal philosophy of going to funerals means more than that.

“Always go to the funeral” means that I have to do the right thing when I really, really don’t feel like it. I have to remind myself of it when I could make some small gesture, but I don’t really have to and I definitely don’t want to. I’m talking about those things that represent only inconvenience to me, but the world to the other guy. You know, the painfully under-attended birthday party. The hospital visit during happy hour. The Shiva call for one of my ex’s uncles. In my humdrum life, the daily battle hasn’t been good versus evil. It’s hardly so epic. Most days, my real battle is doing good versus doing nothing.

In going to funerals, I’ve come to believe that while I wait to make a grand heroic gesture, I should just stick to the small inconveniences that let me share in life’s inevitable, occasional calamity.

On a cold April night three years ago, my father died a quiet death from cancer. His funeral was on a Wednesday, middle of the workweek. I had been numb for days when, for some reason, during the funeral, I turned and looked back at the folks in the church. The memory of it still takes my breath away. The most human, powerful and humbling thing I’ve ever seen was a church at 3:00 on a Wednesday full of inconvenienced people who believe in going to the funeral.

WHEN I’M 64 – music for Babyboomer Funerals

8 October 2009
Charles
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Categories: music

Simon Smith of green fuse contemporary funerals had a piece published in October’s Funeral Service Journal, the undertakers’ trade journal, which, I feared, had something of a flower of the desert about it. Despite the best efforts of its excellent editor, Brian Parsons, funeral directors are not great readers, nor are they great writers.

I asked Simon if I might put what he had written before more fertile eyes. He agreed. Here it is:
The earliest babyboomers are now 64, and many
are prepared to think about funerals, sweeping
away the 20th Century taboo with regard to
death. If you are one of them, one thing you
probably know is that you don’t want a Victorian
style funeral, with solemn black, a vicar and
Abide With Me. What you’ll want is something
different. And the music definitely must be
different, to reflect your own particular taste.
I always advise that the best music to play at a
funeral is the music the person who has died
loved, and which family and friends associate
with them. One lady in her sixties came into
Showaddywaddy’s Under The Moon Of Love and
went out to Abba’s I Have A Dream, another had
Blue Hawaii by Elvis. One man had his heartthrob
Doris Day singing The Deadwood Stage
(“Whipcrackaway!”) at the end of the ceremony.
I love music and I have studied over three
hundred songs for lyrics, style and tempo, many
of which have actually been played at funerals
and some of which are my own personal choices,
and have come up with a Babyboomer Top 20
(not in any particular order):

Read the rest of Simon’s piece here.

Funeralcare screwupdate

8 October 2009
Charles
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Categories: Co-op

THE SCENE: An undertaker’s premises in a shopping centre in the middle of a council estate on the outskirts of Hull. ENTER three ten year-old children…

Before we resume the narrative, consider for a moment what a ten year-old is. It is a half-size version of an adult. It speaks as a child. It understands as a child. It thinks as a child. It looks like a child. Dammit, it is a child.

The children ask if they can see the body of Daniel Trott, a 22 year-old who died when his motorbike collided with a lamppost. They are, they explain, friends of Daniel. The undertaker nods and ushers them into the chapel of rest.

Picture the scene.

What happened next? The little lads later bumped into Daniel’s brother and told them all about it. Daniel’s brother told his Mum. His Mum hit the roof. She had expressly told the undertaker that no one was to visit Daniel except those she authorised. The undertaker had helpfully given her business cards so that these people could identify themselves when they arrived. A good system, but not, it seems, foolproof.

A spokeswoman for The Co-operative Funeralcare, said: “Our member of staff acted in good faith, believing the boys, who explained they were friends of the deceased, had been given permission by the deceased’s mother. This was an error, for which we have apologised to the family.”

Hmnn. Read the account in the Hull Daily Mail here.

Marching to the edge of eternity

7 October 2009
Charles
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Categories: Processions

The purpose of a funeral is to express and reaffirm beliefs that make sense of a death in terms of, both, the tenets of the dead person and those of the living. We don’t see a lot of common purpose in an age in which faith has fragmented. All funerals alienate to a greater or lesser extent.

As a result, there is a move to make them less offensive, more inclusive. Secularists draw disparate mourners together by finding common ground: by focussing on the dead person and celebrating their life. Sorrow is tempered by joy. Where spirituality is addressed, it is with fondness rather than fervour. Heaven is envisioned not as an exclusive venue of staggering magnificence but, rather, a nice place for a picnic. Where such a ceremony is bland and euphemistic, we are indulgent. It is the price of compromise. Where there are football shirts on the coffin, banal poetry, Henry Scott Holland and mawkish or sniggermaking songs, we redouble our indulgence. We’ve all done the diversity training. We bite our tongues behind arranged smiles.

The secular funeral is an evolving rite. If it bungles sometimes, we should not be surprised.

The benchmark against which secularists measure its progress is, of course, the poor, bloody Christian funeral, a rite which has much to answer for, especially when conducted with the disengaged perfunctoriness for which it has achieved especial notoriety. For all that, we can only pity all those priests who have ever presided at funerals at which the congregation has glowered back at them with hollow, hostile eyes, alienated by the very liturgy that they had called upon the priest to deliver.

Christians, too, are now moving towards a more conciliatory, secular way of doing things. And this is the subject of a very interesting essay by Thomas G Long. “These newer practices,” he says, “are attractive mainly because they seem to offer relief from the cosmeticized, sentimental, impersonal and often costly funerals that developed in the 1950s, which were themselves parodies of authentic Christian rituals.” And yet, he says: “Contemporary Christian funeral practices certainly need to be changed, but change should be more a matter of recovery and reformation than innovation and improvisation.”

Christian funeral rites, he says, need to be ‘pristinised’. We note, here, that almost every innovation in funerals draws its inspiration from the past. But what is interesting about Professor Long’s analysis is that it is, I think, equally instructive to secularists.

He identifies three elements in a funeral: preparation, processional, burial. “The funeral itself was deemed to be the last phase of a lifelong journey toward God, and the faithful carried the deceased along the way to the place of final departure with singing and a mixture of grief and joyful hope.”

The metaphor of life as a journey collapsed in theological uncertainties. The result? “Dead Christians have nowhere to go but to evaporate into the spiritual ether and into our frail memory banks. With heaven domesticated, the soul morphed into an immortal gas, the corpse become a shell and the cemetery moved out of sight, it was almost inevitable that the dead with their embarrassing bodies would be banned from their own funerals and the living would be condemned to sit motionless, contemplating the meaning of it all and pretending to celebrate life as the nephew of the deceased sings ‘When Irish Eyes Are Smiling.’”

So like a secular funeral, yes?

He concludes: “Surely our culture will eventually weary of such liturgical and spiritual thinness and be ready for more depth, for more truth—for our sake and for the sake of those we love. When we are, the great drama of the journey to God will be there, beckoning us to join the procession of the saints. We will travel toward eternity with those we have loved, singing as we go and calling out to the distant shore in words of confident hope.”

It’s heady stuff, imbued with a sense of certainty unattainable by secularists with at best a fuzzy spirituality.

Yet the metaphor of life as a journey is just as strong and relevant to secularists, just as much of an inspiration, as is Professor Long’s metaphor of “the cosmic drama … of marching to the edge of eternity.”

Secular funerals are beginning to find words and music with which to celebrate a life and even expound a fuzzy spirituality. What they have yet to find is the actions, the rituals. But do they not, also, enact the cosmic drama of marching to the edge of eternity—even if that is an eternity of nonexistence?

Yes, they do. The element of processional is indispensable.

Read Professor Long’s essay in full here.

Hear him speak here: http://wjkbooks.typepad.com/files/wjk-radio-8_-thomas-g.-long-on-the-christian-funeral.mp3

 

Going back for the – er, erm…?

6 October 2009
Charles
1 Comment
Categories: funeral food

There isn’t a name we all use for the gathering after a funeral, is there?

Once upon a time there was the funeral feast, with bakemeats and all the booze you could drink—a good way of ensuring the dead person would be remembered fondly. But the feast petered out and became a bleak little tea. And now we don’t really know what to call it. Not a party, for sure—far too jolly, for all that many gatherings after a funeral evolve into something indistinguishable. Refreshments? A wake? A reception? A ‘do’?

None of these is entirely satisfactory, least of all ‘wake’. Waking a body is spending time with it between death and burial; it means watching over. Sorry, it’s too late for a wake.

There ought to be a word. A very specific word. It’s a very specific event, and a very important one. It is part of the funeral ceremony—the coda. It is a test of any resolutions we may have made in the presence of the coffin, summed up, perhaps, in the concluding lines of that popular funeral poem He/She is Gone: “smile, open your eyes, love and go on.”

After the emotional intensity of the funeral, the ‘do’ afterwards usually comes as a relief and a release. It depends on the circumstances, of course, but even the saddest funerals tend to be followed by a significant lightening up. There are other factors at work. When it comes to pulling power, only a dead person can reunite so many people—distant relatives, old friends. We gather for our dead in a way we never would if they were still alive. We gather for each other, too. At a time like this we want to be with each other, there for each other.

So there we are, raising our glasses and and nibbling quiche even as our dead person burns.

The longer a funeral party goes on, the more it begins to resemble a wedding. There may be everything to be said for letting it go on as long as it wants—days, if necessary.

But what should we call it? Zinnia Cyclamen comes down in favour of ‘do’. Lot to be said for that.

Have you got a better word?

Feeding the elderly

5 October 2009
Charles
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Categories: Uncategorised

Here are some extracts from Nigel Slater’s essay Feeding the Elderly, taken from Eating for England.

It is December 2004, and I am sitting in an old people’s home just outside Birmingham. I am holding my aunt’s hand. My aunt is ninety-nine, my eldest surviving relative on my father’s side of the family, and probably the person I am closest to. The home was chosen not for its convenient location, or even for its price, but simply because it was the only one I could find that didn’t smell of pee.

A woman moves past us pushing a Zimmer frame. As she gets level with us she starts to fart, a sound that goes on for what seems like eternity as she continues to move along in her bumpy, caterpillar fashion. My aunt, who has much the same schoolboy sense of humour as me, starts to giggle.

‘What is it about Zimmer frames that makes people trump?’ I ask, having heard her parp her way round the communal lounge on several occasions.

‘It’s all the pushing,’ she says. ‘Those things take a lot of pushing.’ Her giggle becomes a helpless, stuttering cough. ‘They just come out. You can’t stop them. You’ll be like that one day. And sooner than you think. Anyway, they give us too much cabbage in here. We had it three times last week.’

…

Many of the residents have their food put through the mincer, so the only difference between meals is the smell. It’s like baby food without the bright colours … It must be interminably dispiriting to cook in an old people’s home, to watch your careful cooking, a neatly peeled vegetable or a delicately filleted piece of fish, being pushed through the mincer, but that is the long and short of it. The advert in the Caterer and Hotelkeeper will insist that applicants must have passed their catering exams, should have the requisite experience and a love of cooking for other people, but it is unlikely to point out that everything the successful interviewee cooks will end up as a puree. One can only imagine they know that easily-swallowed food goes with the territory. Like having no hair or teeth and filling your pants, eating purees is what you do when you come into this world, and again when you go out of it.

Going Out Green

2 October 2009
Charles
1 Comment
Categories: green funeral, natural burial

Rupert Callender made this observation of Dan Cruickshank’s The Art of Dying:

I was surprised by how little thought Dan had apparently given the matter. I thought everyone mused endlessly about their own deaths.

I don’t know that they do, Rupert. When, over in the US, Bob Butz was asked by his publisher to write a book about green funerals in three months, this was his response:

“Three months?” I said, incredulous. “That’s some deadline. Har. Har. But seriously, what do I know about planning a green burial? I’m no expert.”

For all his ignorance, Bob is predisposed to a green funeral:

Green burials came to interest me because, frankly, all the traditional ones I’ve seen over the years were a real drag. They left me thinking that there had to be a better way.

He’s a realist:

Although a reviewer once called me a nature writer, I’ve never been accused of being an environmentalist. I do what I can where the planet is concerned … At this point, I doubt very seriously that “going out green” will come anywhere close to rectifying the environmental mayhem I’ve wrought simply by virtue of being born

Bob embarks on his researches:

Only three weeks into this project and I’m beginning to wonder if I’m cut out for thinking about being buried all the time. For one thing, and I know this is going to come as a shock, it’s depressing.

He tracks down the Natural Burial Company, which is run by a good friend of the Good Funeral Guide, Cynthia Beal, with whom he tangles. He is withering about Ecopods:

…the Ecopod seemed to run contrary to the fundamental tenets of the natural burial movement … In the words of Jim Nicolow, “shipping a $3000 recycled coffin 5000+ miles to reduce burial’s environmental impact feels a bit like selecting the rapidly-renewable bamboo trim package to reduce the environmental impact of your Hummer.”

Bob digs his own grave—to see what it feels like. He reflects on the way people don’t discuss funerals:

I found this odd given that every other life-defining decision up to that point—getting married, having children, where to school those children—involved long and careful deliberation

He researches home funerals and embalming. He goes to see his father’s grave for the first time in years, to see how it makes him feel. He concludes:

For three months I thought about death more intensely than I think the average person should have to.But in an odd sort of way that was also the best part, too—that maybe in trying to die and be buried green I may now live my life a little bit better, too.

I hope this has whetted your appetite. This is an unpretentious and informative blunder through some of the mysteries of death and dying written by, this is important, an industry outsider. It is serious, funny and highly readable. At £11.25 it is a tad pricey—but heck, you can’t take it with you.

The Art of Dying

1 October 2009
Charles
No comments
Categories: Attitudes to death

Is death really a taboo in our society? It’s a strong word, taboo, and I don’t know that it’s the right one. If there is a reluctance to confront death it is just as likely that it is because we are all having such fun being alive and feeling healthy. Reaper G is a spoilsport. If we turn our faces from the old curmudgeon, I don’t know that that isn’t an entirely natural thing to do.

For all that, we owe it to ourselves to get our heads around it. It’s all about taking responsibility. We have to rehearse the deaths of those we love in our imagination if we are ever to be able to cope with them. And we have to rehearse our own death, work out how we feel about it and imagine how others will feel about it—and, yes, talk about it, prepare them.

We owe it to ourselves to preserve ourselves from helplessness and hopelessness and dependency (not to mention the well intentioned ministrations of a Cruse volunteer).

So I liked Dan Cruickshank’s encounter with death on the BBC, and I applaud another programme which, however imperfectly, deals with the subject seriously and contemplatively—with what Sister Wendy called “a breathless, a fearful wonder and joy at what will happen after death.”

There’s no definitive take on this. It’s all well beyond the grasp of reason, so let’s just clear the deck of academics. To blunder about for a bit is the best it gets.

Watch Dan blundering about here.