Author: Charles

Costing the dead

9 September 2009
Charles
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Categories: funeral plans

I think we all buy into the notion that capitalism is a species of altruism, only more caring. So it comes as no surprise to discover that Sun Life Direct, vendor of financial services to the over 50s, cares like mad about us—all of us, not just on-the-way-out over 50s.

They’ve just commissioned research from Mintel which shows that funeral costs are rising (gasp) (nothing else is?) and that most people do not make provision for their funerals, either financially or by sketching out the sort of farewell they’d like. The’ve notified the newspapers of this by sending them a helpful press release.

Time was when journalists used to get off their backsides and find out what was really going on. Now they squash them into office chairs, wait for the press releases to roll in, pick out the ones they like, overcook them a bit and send them out looking like news. So it is that Rebecca Smithers in today’s Guardian writes about funeral costs “soaring” (aaarrgh!!) and informs us that even “Environmentally friendly funerals are, perhaps surprisingly, more expensive than traditional burials because of the expense of custom-made wicker caskets.”

Tcha!

She goes on to tell us what Mark Howes, caring managing director of Sun Life, thinks about this:

“As funeral prices are predicted to increase, it’s important that people think about putting the right provisions in place. Sharing your funeral preferences with loved ones can be particularly emotional and understandably this is a topic most of us would prefer not to talk about. But organising a funeral can be extremely stressful and painful, without the added worry of not being able to cover the costs.”

It’s anxiety raising stuff. Oh my god (headless chicken impression) can Sun Life help me?!

Yes, they can. They can sell me a pay-now-die-later funeral plan. Phew! And, best of all, I will be able to go into that good night knowing that my mortal remains will be borne to their final resting place by … … Co-operative Bloody Funeralcare.

It’s a devilish plan!

Instead of regurgitating her press release with hyperbolic colour added, Ms Smithers might have served her readers better by stripping away some of the secrets and lies surrounding these funeral plans and the methods used to sell them. She might have discovered that the NAFD rumbles itself in this matter. It recommends Perfect Choice plans to its membership as

“the perfect tool for your business … Designed FOR funeral directors BY working funeral directors.”

Er, not much customer focus there.

Ms Smithers might even have made the discovery that, for an undertaker, a funeral plan buys tomorrow’s customer today. And that what’s lending stridency to their sales pitch is that there’s an ugly, bloody turf war going on out there. The big conglomerates, Dignity and Effcare, are selling pre-need plans at a rate which threatens, come the near future, to throttle the life out of the independents.

People have been making provision for their funerals since time immemorial. What they have never done is prescribe how their families will feel about their deaths. But Golden Charter has a way of addressing this:

“Consideration for others is the most frequent reason for buying a Golden Charter funeral plan. With Golden Charter you know that your loved ones will be spared some of the burden of bereavement.”

Oh yeah?

No, this is just another fine way of disconnecting grievers from farewelling their dead in the way they’d wish.

“You’ll have specified every detail of the funeral in advance, selected the funeral director and made provision for the costs.”

Not all the costs, actually, not by any means. And so far as my own demise is concerned, choice of funeral director is 100% a matter for those who kindly take it upon themselves to dispose of me. I won’t care. I’ll be dead.

Whatever goods and chattels I bequeath to my heirs, a funeral plan will not be one of them.

Got that summer’s over feeling? Grieve it.

8 September 2009
Charles
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Categories: Jazz funeral, music

Do the waning of days and the coming of autumn make you come over elegiac? It probably depends on the length and sunniness of the summer. If it was brief and wet, that first nip in the air leaves you feeling cheated. But if the summer was long and glorious, the coming of autumn feels reasonable and seasonable. There’s a sense of relief, even.

Just how we feel about human lives, the short and the long, the happy and the sad.

Over in Bethany Beach, Delaware, they have a funeral on Labor Day to mark the end of summer—a jazz funeral. The expired summer, represented by a mannequin in a casket, is carried in procession to the town’s bandstand for a concert. Says the event’s founder, Paul Jankovic, “The most important thing is you’re guaranteed to have a wonderful time. Instead of standing on the sidelines watching a parade, (those in attendance) fall in behind us as we walk down the boardwalk, just like the jazz funerals they have in New Orleans.”

Read the full story here.

Way to go

7 September 2009
Charles
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Categories: Processions

Elmer Johanning, of Douglas County, Kansas, sold tractors for 35 years. He died at the age of 91 ten days ago. He was borne to the cemetery on a tractor-drawn trailer, and followed there by nine other tractors.

Now that’s what I call a procession.

Watch it here.

Dulce et decorum est?

7 September 2009
Charles
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Categories: Processions

I don’t suppose anyone is left unmoved by news coverage of the repatriation of dead soldiers from Afghanistan and their subsequent solemn processions through Wootton Bassett. Everyone has an opinion, as is their entitlement. These soldiers are members of that group of people who have both a public role and a separate personal life, so, like dead firefighters and policemen, many will have a dual funeral.

People’s feelings run the full gamut, of course, from pride to despondency. These deaths are glorious or they are terrible waste of young men’s lives.

To be sure, they take some justifying in the public arena. It was halfway through the last century that Britain conceded that that it is futile folly to foist its values on people who don’t want them. “Lesser breeds without the law”, as Kipling described them, have every right to misgovern themselves—or just govern themselves differently.

Britain gave away its empire but forgot the lesson it had learned. Subsequent adventures in nation building as ill-equipped junior partners of the US have led to defeat in Basra and a losing fight in Afghanistan. Liberal democracy doesn’t grow well in all sorts of soils. Dammit, the Italians have been toying with it since 500 BC and they’ve still got no further than Berlusconi.

So, these deaths. They affect us all. Those processions through Wootton Bassett, they focus our feelings, whatever they are.

My own feelings scapegoat the undertaker leading the procession. What’s he doing there? What’s his purpose? Why hearses? Don’t these dead soldiers still inhabit their public role? Why has the Army handed them over to civilians? Can’t the Army see it through with them and convey them in suitable military vehicles?

I picked up the phone.

First, who are the undertakers? Kathryn has a hunch they’re Barry Albin’s men. I rang to confirm. No, I was told, these are Kenyon’s men. Kenyon’s, if you didn’t know, is a branch of Dignity. This is their repatriation arm—in which, Albin’s conceded, they have a sizeable financial stake.

Next, I rang the Ministry of Defence press office. Why hearses? Because they’re appropriate, dignified; we couldn’t put them in the back of a 10-ton truck. I’m not suggesting that; haven’t you got anything else that would do? No, we haven’t. Okay then, what about the undertaker? What’s he doing there? I thought you guys were world leaders in ceremonial? Why not a military figure? After this the conversation came apart somewhat. I asked, These soldiers are going to the coroner, right? So why hearses? We use hearses for funerals, not removals. The reply: I think you’ll find that those who witness these processions consider them to be very moving and dignified. Yes, okay, but couldn’t you do it better? I put it to you, here’s another way of looking at it, it’s a possible point of view, couldn’t you do better than have these brave young men and women led by a mincing popinjay twirling a stick?

No. The overwhelming majority of people would wholly disagree with me.

It’s possible that my animus is simply displaced anger; that these blameless men in cod-Victorian clobber are not proper objects of my wrath. Yes, I concede that.

But I can’t shed a strong sense that it could all be done much better.

Jonathan Taylor’s funeral preferences

1 September 2009
Charles
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Categories: funeral plans

Jonathan Taylor is an independent funeral celebrant in Totnes, and an occasional funeral arranger and conductor for green fuse. That’s not all he is, of course. There’s a lot more to Jonathan. He’s got a literary side, for example, and refers to one of his short stories in what follows.

Everyone’s funeral wishes are different. Probably the knack is to get the weight of them right, expectationwise. Too prescriptive you end up telling people how to feel.

You can tell that Jonathan is an industry insider. His funeral wishes give an insight into it.


MY FUNERAL PREFERENCES

I know that families’ dearest wish for a dead person’s funeral is to do “what he would have wanted.” What I want is for my funeral to be the way you want it for me; so as you know, these are my preferences:

I haven’t left a will because there’s no money whatever in my ‘estate’ – hah! (though you can have my car and laptop and anything else you can find if you’re a friend or relative, work it out between you, just get there before any official person does, don’t wait for a decent interval) – so don’t pay any professional for anything at all that you are able and willing to do yourselves, especially not a funeral director or celebrant because we’re expensive. That includes handling, transporting, preparing and storing my dead body (you can use someone’s living room or garage if they’ll let you, take plenty of dry ice to stop it smelling), making its shroud (or coffin), digging and filling in its grave, using a venue (see if you can find a willing café owner), conducting a ceremony for me, and anything else that needs doing. Funerals are a piece of piss, believe me, so don’t get your knickers in a twist about anything, take your time and figure it out together. Particularly, in case anyone wonders, please don’t ask a humanist to officiate because they have their own reasons for wanting to conduct funerals. (And if a funeral director or someone arranges a vicar behind your back by some horrendous misunderstanding, refuse to pay their bill, dig my body up and do it again properly.)

Ideally, I’d like nature to deal with my remains, which means their being left out for the animals and insects to make good use of. In practice, that’s not likely to be legal; but if you can bury my body on private land in a shallow enough grave to turn it into compost (use worm compost to fill the grave if you can), do your best – Sam might know where there’s a field somewhere. I’d rather it wasn’t cremated because its crushed bones (‘ashes’) will still be a disposal problem, and they don’t seem to me to have much significance after they’ve been through the industrial process of a cremator – but again, suit yourselves. (If you go that way, balloon them – ask Ash!)

For my ceremony, if you want one, be as informal as possible. Some of you have read my story, ‘The Wrong Side of the Sky’, and that tells you all you need to know; in fact you can read it out if you like, rather than a poem unless it’s one of mine (top drawer in my filing cabinet). You can play Shel Silverstein’s ‘Have Another Espresso’ from his 1963 album ‘Inside Folk Songs’ (Jenny at World Music & Video can get it, £16). I’ll come back and haunt anyone who turns up in anything other than their work clothes, or who shows any contrived respect for the occasion. Think of it as going for a cup of coffee with me, and take it from there. Above all, I’d like my body to be taken to the ceremony and on to the grave in a works vehicle of some kind such as a van, certainly not a hearse unless it’s someone’s classic toy. Some of you can ride in the back with my corpse if you like.

Gather close round my grave and play Pink Floyd’s ‘Great Gig in the Sky’ at full volume when you settle my coffin (I love that lady who sings on it, she’s got guts), and join in the words. You’re going to miss me and it will hurt like hell, and you’ll need each other, so yell and scream and let each other know about it, it’s okay with me. I’ll miss you too.

Lots of love,

Dead letters

26 August 2009
Charles
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Categories: Grief

I’m not an expert in grief therapy—or therapy of any kind. I was sent to boarding school when I was six. Sounds privileged, I know, but think upmarket orphanage. Boarding schools pride themselves on teaching children to be independent. Don’t children become independent anyway? Whatever, a good British boarding school teaches you the art and craft of emotional self-defence—and not necessarily in a good way. You can become emotionally fortressed, profoundly private, a no-entry zone. You learn to protect your privacy by playing parts. Okay, so everyone learns to do that a bit. But British boarding schools bred some of the most brilliant and deadly people ever to spy for Russia. I’ve been trying to unpick the habits I learned ever since. I undoubtely need therapy.

Back to grief therapy. There’s a school of thought, isn’t there, that the goal of it is a wound closed over, a working through, a putting behind, the shutting of a door and a moving on? Something like that? Call it the Let My People Go school of grief therapy.

And then there’s probably a Stayin’ Alive school of therapy. If so, that’s the school for me. I talk to my Mum all the time, and she’s still a strong influence on my opinions and behaviour. Her absence is not negative space, it’s a species of presence. No closure for me, thanks.

Back in June Norm (I love Norm) posted a blog which moved me. It’s a letter. In his own words, “I wrote this letter for my grief support group several years ago trying to help them realize the one who is gone is their greatest cheerleader. That person still loves them deeply and wants them to succeed in their grief journey. As Jack Lemon said, ‘A person died, not a relationship.’”

Here it is:

Sweetheart,

It’s wonderful to be able to write you and let you know how I feel. To begin with, I’m fine. The pain is gone, the suffering is over and so many things that seemed important are no longer so.

I must tell you immediately, once again, how much I love you. That was true then, now and forever.

It’s good to see you making steps toward discovering who you are and how you feel about the life you now have. You always had inside you what you are discovering now. How happy I am that you are seeing the “you” that I have known for a long time. You are also finding many strengths I did not see in you, but were there nonetheless.

I know things changed dramatically when I died. But you have been remarkable in making progress in your grief. I am so proud of you. No one could be prouder or love you more.

I’ll never forget our lives together, just as you won’t. Know that I am pulling for you and loving you all the more from this side. I love you.

Your Love, forever

In the Guardian last Saturday there was this letter from a daughter to her dead mother:

It has been a long time since I wrote that first letter to you the summer after you died. I wrote several letters, and of course you never replied, so I carried on writing to myself, for myself. Without you there to guide me, I studied every memory of you and analysed every facet of my own grief. I’ve dissected my own character, identifying which components were you, which were Dad, and which combinations were the best way to decipher the puzzle of grieving. I’ve read my notes all over again, to try to unravel the mystery of you not being here any more.

I keep your spirit alive: retelling your stories, proudly wearing your jewellery and perfume. I have your sense of humour, your style and your creative flair and I sprinkle them around so that everyone I know will unwittingly know you too. And much as I cannot replace the wholeness of you, I have found “other mothers” of all ages who have bolstered me, soared with me and stood beside me at various points in my life, each having some quality I missed in you.

Always, I wish for you to be here. The success and happiness I have achieved in life are for ever tinged with sadness, because I want so desperately for you to share it. The good times we have are shadowed by your absence, because you would have been here, the first to take to the dance floor, cajoling all my friends, twirling in a red dress.

As I grow closer to you in age, and even surpass some of your experiences, I feel closer to you than I have done in years. It seems crazy, but our relationship is full of an energy that I haven’t felt since you were alive. And although it is a bittersweet realisation, I’m sure that somewhere beneath the ether you are smiling too that I have finally come back to you.

But now I must explain the reason for my writing to you. Often I have wished to have one more day with you: one golden day to ask the questions, hear your stories, hold your hand. Last night a question entered my head like a bubble bursting. We were watching a beautiful film, having spent a wonderful night together. I started to cry and I said to him: “I never thought I could be as happy as this.” Instantly, the bargain entered my head: “Would you swap this for a day with your mum?” I knew the answer at once, and it sunk to my stomach like a lead weight, because without hesitation I chose my future over my past. I’m sorry, Mum. I haven’t deserted you, but I have found a love, an affection that is real and palpable. And in spirit, I have found you again, so this is as perfect as it can ever mortally be.

All your love, for ever in my heart, your daughter, Anna xxx

Getting over it

25 August 2009
Charles
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Categories: bereavement

For the Victorians, sex was the great taboo. Nowadays, it’s death.

Every time I hear someone begin to say that I jam my fingers in my ears. I may even moan softly. Gibber a bit, even. I’m, I can’t tell you, I’m just so sick of it. Talk about cliché, god, it makes even the most clichéd cliché look fresh.

For the truth is that we love talking about dying and death. We’re spellbound by it. The media are always talking death, doing death. We love a good funeral. Does Wootton Bassett look taboo-struck?

And every time someone writes about it they say, “For Victorians…” Aaaaargh!!

Matthew Parris doesn’t say it because he’s fastidious and he picks his idioms judiciously. Perhaps it’s his age, but he’s writing about death more than he used—and very well, too. He’s getting older, of course. He’s reached that age when we realise that we are not going to be the first one ever to slip beneath Reaper G’s radar (the bastard).

Here’s how he begins a recent piece in the Spectator:

It is five years since my father died. I thought I would get over it, but I haven’t. This is not a plea for sympathy — I’m fine, all’s well — but simply an observation, a report. Unusually for a man of 54 I had never, before Dad’s death, lost anyone close; and I had no idea what to expect.

I guessed, though, that the experience would not differ from other violent emotional traumas: first the shock, then a blank aftershock; then busy-ness — displacement activity; then perhaps a relapsing into grief. And after that and over many years a slow but steady process of what sensitive people might call ‘healing’ and the rest of us would call getting over it.

The shock, it turned out, though expected, was the phone-call. At the bedside of a dying man I expected no theatre, and found none. Just as I’d supposed the immediate feeling was only bleak, banal — no trumpets or violins, no wailing or floods of tears, but a kind of bleakness, a grey hour in a grey dawn. And so it proved: the rain coming down softly (I remember) outside in Catalonia. Blank.

Then (I thought) might follow a few weeks’ false-normality: still numb, but with arrangements of a practical nature to busy myself with. One would have too much to do to mope.

And so this proved, too: there’s plenty to fill close relatives’ days when somebody dies, and hardly time to miss the deceased. And it rained at the funeral too, and there were hundreds of Catalan and Spanish mourners to air-kiss at the door of the little church before Dad’s coffin was borne away in the hearse: red tail-lights in the rain. And I still wasn’t feeling much.

But waiting, I suppose, for the lapse into grief: a month or two of wallowing.

This never came. I went back to England and back to work. Ordinary service was resumed. There was no time of quiet, after-the-event confrontation with what I had lost, no delayed grief once I had, as they say, ‘time to grieve’. There we are, then, I thought. One down — and how many more to go? The waters had closed over my father’s head and the ripples subsided. I missed him, of course, but from now on, with each month that passed, I would surely miss him a little less. Time heals all wounds, etc. So now, I thought, begins that famous healing process.

I thought wrong.

If that whets your appetite for the rest of this splendid piece, find it here.

Funeralcare screwupdate

21 August 2009
Charles
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Categories: Co-op

Margaret Miller, of Dundas Road, North Berwick, passed away last Monday, aged 88, having paid her local Co-operative Funeralcare branch two-and-half years ago to be buried in the same grave plot as her parents, Andrew and Margaret Miller, in council-owned North Berwick Cemetery.

However, following her death, her relatives were told by Co-op staff that East Lothian Council had ruled there was no space in the lair for a third burial and Margaret was allocated a new plot in the recently opened extension of the cemetery.

But her family were determined that the pensioner’s final resting place would not be in the new section of the cemetery, branded “inappropriate” by Margaret’s nephew Kenneth Miller, and took the last-minute decision last Thursday not to go ahead with her burial – scheduled to take place the next day.

Find out what happened next here.

The truth, the half-truth and nothing of the truth

19 August 2009
Charles
1 Comment
Categories: Embalming

Good word, embalm. Its vowels and its consonants are gentle, emollient, reposeful. Balm. Calm. Serene. Peace, perfect peace.

It definitely sounds like a nice thing to do to a dead body, yes?

Undertakers hold the view that there are things we don’t need to know and they may even have a point, if what they do is really necessary.

The jaw suture, for example, to close the mouth.

So if you go to Videojug, you will hear an undertaker, Mr Maguire of the NAFD, no less, tell you that embalming is but a simple injection which leaves a dead person looking lifelike.

Lifelike??!!

It takes two sides to have an argument, and I can take both at once. One of my best friends is an embalmer. Others of my best friends would say that embalming is a violation and a desecration.

If you don’t know what it looks like, watch the 11-minute video above. But before you click play, let me warn you: you need a very strong stomach.

If you can’t face it, have some fun at the freshly made-over Videojug site. It’ll tell you how to striptease, make your breasts look bigger, avoid a trapped arm when cuddling in bed—oh, all kinds of indispensable things.

Do tell Videojug what you think of Mr Maguire. Leave a comment. This is a public information site. In a free(ish) country like ours, people have a right to know.

My thanks to Bob Butz for putting me on to Thanatopraxie. More about his excellent new book, Going Out Green, another time.

That Tom Lynch libel case

17 August 2009
Charles
2 Comments
Categories: Uncategorised

There are times when we feel acutely that the UK and the US are ‘two countries separated by a common language’. When our common language is voiced by the monstrous Republican right, the gulf looks unbridgeable.

But where funerals are concerned we have much talk about and much to learn from each other. And there’s a healthy symbiosis going on: they like our natural burial; we like their home funerals. In almost every area of debate Americans are more passionate and dynamic than the Brits. The US has a far more powerful, predatory, scandal-ridden, eco-hostile funeral industry than ours, so they have more to react against, more to talk about, and more urgently. For all that, the issues are shared: the role and value of the funeral director; the rights and responsibilities of the bereaved; the purpose of a funeral; and environmentally responsible funerals. Elemental stuff.

In the matter of consumer protection, the US has its excellent Funeral Consumers Alliance (FCA), run by the acute and indefatigble Josh Slocum. Its website is a treasury of information. It also has the Funeral Ethics Organisation (FEO), run by the redoubtable and completely splendid Lisa Carlson. We have nothing like campaigners of this calibre here in the UK.

The US has the best writers, too. We have our Tony Walter, but no one has written more thoughtfully or brilliantly than Thomas Lynch, an undertaker and poet whose prose, arguably, is even better than his verse. His two books of essays, The Undertaking and Bodies in Rest and in Motion, condense thought, experience and wisdom, and express them through a high intelligence and a god-given, delicious prose style. His concerns are elemental ones: “funerals are the way we close the gap between the death that happens and the death that matters. It’s how we assign meaning to our little remarkable histories.”

He is critical of the way things are. He observes how the parlour, that room in old houses where babies were born and the dead laid out, has been converted to accommodate Mr Thomas Crapper’s invaluable invention, the toilet: “Since Crapper’s marvellous invention, we need only pull the lever behind us and the evidence disappears, a kind of rapture that removes the nuisance … having lost the regular necessity of dealing with unpleasantries, we have lost the ability to do so when need arises. And we have lost the community well versed in these calamities. In short, when shit happens, we feel alone. It is the same with our dead. We are embarrassed by them in the way that we are embarrassed by a toilet that overflows the night that company comes. It is an emergency. We call the plumber … And just as bringing the crapper indoors has made faeces an embarrassment, pushing the dead and dying out has made death one.”

This looks like a manifesto for home funerals. It is. One of Tom’s most-repeated dictums is this: “Ours is a species which deals with death by dealing with our dead.” He acknowledges that most people don’t want to be that involved, and that’s where the funeral director comes in. He says, “some want to be empowered, others to be served, others not to be bothered at all. Our job is to meet them where they are on this continuum and help where we can when we’re asked.”

For all that, Tom fell out with Lisa and the FCA over his defence of the right of the State of Michigan to appoint funeral directors to superintend the filing of paperwork pertaining to a funeral, even that of home funeralists. Interestingly, anomalously, the state does not pay these funeral directors for their supervision, the family does. And, as Lisa has it, “When a state requires a family to hire a funeral director, that body becomes a hostage of the funeral industry. The funeral director is suddenly in a position of authority with his meter running.”

The falling out was so acrimonious that Tom sued Lisa and the FCA for libel.

The news is that Tom’s suit has just been thrown out of court.

And the saddening pity is that all parties are high-minded, admirable people.

I don’t feel culturally qualified to have a view on all this, so I’m nailing my trousers to the fence. Sure, we share a common language…

Read the FCA response and the court ruling here.