Author: Charles

Death in the community

16 October 2013
Charles
7 Comments
Categories: Marketing

East Midlands funeral director, A. W. Lymn The Family Funeral Service, has become the first funeral directors in England to advertise on a billboard. The poster is the first of a series of 9 which will appear over the course of the next year

The billboard is situated at the bottom of Greenhill Rise in Carlton, Nottingham. 

Nigel Lymn Rose, managing director, said: “Our office in Carlton is situated on a side road called Church Street. As it is not on the main road a number of clients had been unaware of its existence and I was wondering how to improve its profile. On looking through my great-grandfather’s photograph collection I came across a picture from the 1920s of a hoarding advertising his funeral business and I immediately thought that would be an appropriate way to once again advertise our business in a prominent position in Carlton”

Be smart – follow the money

16 October 2013
Charles
4 Comments
Categories: cremation, crematoria, funeral cost

In all so-called advanced cultures, funeral practices are becoming less elaborate. All this talk of baby boomers reinventing funerals as bespoke, themed, accessorised, more or less lavish performance events can seem to make good sense — but baby boomers, who by now have buried and cremated many thousands of parents, ain’t, experience now tells us, buying in to all that. Recession or no recession, the dying express the wish to keep it cheap and simple; and those left behind seem content to fall in with that. When people fall into conversations about funerals, the proudest boasts are made by those who spent least. 

Where a funeral dwindles to its essentials — the body of a dead person and the body of people who cared about him/her —  there’s not much margin for an undertaker. But where the expanding market is the one for cheap funerals, that’s where an undertaker needs to hang out. You need to do more funerals for less to make your business pay, of course – if you can get em in the first place. 

So the earnings ceiling for an undertaker is getting lower and lower. This is especially evident in the US, where once comfortably-off morticians have been banjaxed by the rush to cremation. Growing impoverishment ought to act as a disincentive to new entrants. But the market in Britain remains saturated with undertakers because they are motivated by vocation rather than acquisitiveness. Altruistic people thrive on adversity; it strengthens their humanitarian resolve and enhances their sense sainthood.

Which is why the smart money is now increasingly going into crematoria and natural burial grounds of 20 acres+. Here profits remain fattening. Dignity and the Co-op are moving in bigtime. Bibby, the corp behind GreenAcres, is showing no interest in buying out undertakers. 

There’s a race on to buy out council-owned crematoria and build new ones – they’re going up everywhere. Here’s a bubble that’s going to end in rubble. Where low cost scores highest with consumers, and at a time when funeral poverty is stalking the land, it won’t be long before people wise up to the fact that the cheapest cremation provider is the one who cremates most economically by blazing round the clock 365 days a year (not 250 as at present) in a standalone plant with a viewing gallery set in a very few nicely appointed acres. There’s nothing to stop anyone from building one of these now. In the US they’re called crematories. That’s what we need: crematories, not more crematoria. 

By how much would efficient cremation bring down funeral costs? The US gives us some idea. You can arrange a direct cremation in New York for £860 including all undertaker’s fees. The cremation part of that comes to just £265. In Florida you can buy the complete direct cremation package for £525. In Maryland, using a particularly nice-looking crematory, you can buy the complete package for £618. And in San Diego you can do the whole thing for just £416 all in. 

Go figure, Bibby. You read it here first. Send us a bung when it all comes good. 

Up and coming

16 October 2013
Charles
No comments
Categories: Uncategorised

In Glasgow, Barbara Chalmers of Final Fling is organising a Day of the Dead festival which Barbara describes as ‘A small but perfectly formed celebration of life and death with art, chat and a bit of pop-up drumming.’ Dates are Sat 26 Oct and Sat 2 Nov. Sounds good to us; we are big fans of Barbara. 

At Leela Osho in Dorset, Archa Robinson and team are holding one of their regular Living and Dying Consciously weekends on 8, 9, 10 November. 

Leela Osho2

An essay in melancholy

14 October 2013
Charles
3 Comments
Categories: funeral, funeral customs, funeral trends

Last week I passed an empty hearse going the other way. It set me musing.

Freed from its solemn duties, no longer slowed by a weighty coffin and all the gravitas attendant upon such a thing, emptied of flowers and no longer the misty-eyed focus of profoundly sad people, it had about it none of the majesty and decorum,  the grandeur and grace, that properly wreath a hearse.  It looked inessential, superfluous, dispensable. Gawky. Going too fast. 

You think I’m banging on a bit. You’re right. 

I then fell to musing on the way people in cars treat hearses these days. They buzz and harry them, cut in and chop up processions. It’s like watching a kestrel mobbed by crows. People these days have no manners, no solicitude. They’re in a hurry, they’ve got places to go. 

But it’s not just a manners thing, is it? Or a hurry thing? There’s more to it than that. 

Once upon a time (not so long ago) the death of someone touched everyone. It evoked the mystery of existence. In everyone’s mind a funeral procession awoke questions: how long have I got? What does it feel like? What comes after? It spoke of the universal human drama of those born to die. It inspired awe and the doffing of hats. 

It’s not a manners thing. No, it’s a universality thing. In place of a general drama of life and death and the mystery of existence played out in our midst, for us, disconnected from matters elemental, there are one-off sketches in which unknown unfortunates die — bad luck. Seek not to know for whom the bell tolls, it ain’t tolling for me, mate. 

And so a funeral procession, instead of speaking to and for the human condition, is seen as descriptive of no more than a little local difficulty afflicting someone else. 

And the funerals of these incogniti address the particular and the personal, the private hurt, the here and the now, in crematoria which divert those who cared for them briefly from life’s mainstream (where death belongs) before setting them on their way again. 

Moral: it’s much easier to write prettily about mortality and funerals wearing a reactionary hat. 

Cash for crash

14 October 2013
Charles
8 Comments
Categories: funeral directors

Suffolk police have come under fire for their practice of awarding cash payments to officers who have to deal with exceptionally difficult or distressing incidents — a particularly horrible road crash, for example or, in the words of the Police and Crime Commissioner, “picking up charred remains of bodies from house fires and picking up decomposed bodies out of rivers with their own hands.” Traumatic circumstances like these may qualify a policeman for a cash payment of £50-£500. “These are over-and-above, additional tasks that no amount of training can prepare officers for.”

The Taxpayers’ Alliance describes the payments as “macabre” and says: “it is vital that the right support is in place, but throwing bonuses at the problem is not the solution.”

The Ipswich Star records that ambulance staff and firefighters are not eligible for such payments. 

The bonuses are, of course, a charge on the taxpayer. The process whereby trauma is mitigated by a wodge of cash is not explained.

How would it be if funeral directors were to start charging extra for ‘distressing’ removals, and adding the charges to their clients’ bills? 

Story in the Ipswich Star here. Hat-tip to GMT

The beauty of the vigil

14 October 2013
Charles
4 Comments
Categories: Vigil, visiting

Posted by Richard Rawlinson

When Charles Darwin died in 1882, he was brought to Westminster Abbey the evening before his huge funeral. His coffin was borne through the cloisters, his five sons following, into a small, bare vaulted side chapel (St Faith), which had until recently been used as a storeroom.

Architect Sir George Gilbert Scott, involved in the restoration of the Abbey, described this overnight resting place as a picturesque and beautiful room. Seen by the dim light from lanterns, it seemed tomb-like in contrast with the lofty interior of the Abbey. It was an intimate, contemplative place, different in mood to the public ceremony the next day, when the building was peopled with the living, when Darwin’s friends served as pallbearers in the procession to the Abbey’s communion rails.

A friend’s husband died suddenly a couple of years ago. The night before the requiem mass, he was removed to the Lady Chapel of Westminster Cathedral, the Catholic one just down Victoria Street from the Abbey. This Lady Chapel had been the scene of the couple’s wedding several years before. My friend recalls how special (painful and soothing) it was for her to sit there with him through the evening in silent, solitary vigil before funeral the next day.

I’m told the removal to the church the night before is becoming less common, even in Ireland. How common are such removals and vigils in hospital chapels or at home?  

Kemnal Park

11 October 2013
Charles
11 Comments
Categories: cemeteries

We were unable to attend the opening of the new cemetery at Kemnal Park, and were sad about that. We’ve heard good things. Anyone been there? This is from their press release: 

London’s largest and most important burial development in the last 100 years officially opened its gates last week.  Having successfully completed a pilot phase, The Mayor of Bromley, Counsellor Ernest Noad was in attendance to cut the ceremonial ribbon.  With over 30,000 plots accompanied by memorial gardens for ashes, Kemnal Park is providing much needed burial space for Bromley and the surrounding boroughs.  

Michael Burke, Operations Director comments ‘For too long have we accepted that cemeteries are a place to be tolerated – that average standards are just what they are.  At Kemnal Park, we will go a long way to resolve the inner and outer city challenge of lack of burial space AND we will set new levels of expectations while doing so.  Aiming to focus on the celebration of life as much as the mourning of death and maintaining an environment to which families and friends look forward to returning to reflect on their loved ones.’

Historical perceptions of a disreputable trade

11 October 2013
Charles
6 Comments
Categories: Academia and death, Attitudes to dead bodies, celebrants, funeral directors, funerals in other cultures, History, perceptions of funeral directors

The following is extracted by a PhD thesis by Sarah E Bond. It describes the social status of funeral workers in earlier times, particularly in ancient Rome where, we discover, FSOs were often employed, also, as executioners. 

According to an inscription from Puteoli dated to the first century BCE: 

“The operae (workers) who shall be provided for this undertaking are not to live on this side of the tower where the grove of Libitina stands today. They are to take their bath after the first hour of the night. They are to enter the town only for the purpose of collecting or disposing of corpses, or inflicting punishments, and on condition that whenever any of them enters or is in the town, then he is to wear a distinctive hat on his head.”

The disrepute that surrounded funeral workers in Roman society is evident within numerous other premodern societies and no doubt stemmed from the precarious position of these professionals within societies as a mediator between the living and the dead.

In Achaemenian Persia, a Zoroastrian text called the Videvdat (law against the demons) lists the sixteen lands created by the god Ahura Mazda.  The text’s instructions on how to cleanse a corpse-bearer indicate the pollution that those in contact with the dead were perceived to have contracted:

 What is to be done with a corpse bearer? He is to be taken to a dry, desolate place without vegetation and put in a walled enclosure. Since he has had prolonged exposure to pollutants, people must bring him clothing and food but stay at least 30 paces away. They then pray “May he renounce every evil thought, evil word, and evil deed!” then he will be clean.

As in Puteoli and ancient Persia, the separation of those dealing with the dead from the public is seen in numerous other cultures, as is the use of special clothing or insignia to warn others.  Yet funeral workers were not the only professional class outcast by the societies they served; they were often part of a larger, yet still marginal, community.

 In medieval Japan, there was ostracism of ‘impure’ tradesmen—tanners, floor-mat weavers, undertakers, tomb buy cialis brand online caretakers, and executioners—who populated a caste. In early modern Germany, undertakers and gravediggers were among the professions of unehrlichen Leuten (dishonorable people) who were often denied membership in journeymen guilds and who could be denied the power to serve as guardian or heir, take an oath, prosecute another in court, or even prove their innocence. The rejection of gravediggers by the journeyman guilds illustrates the struggle waged by early modern guilds to establish a clear demarcation between moral and immoral trades, much in the manner that Rome did during the Republic. The development of this “guild morality” among German cities’ journeymen associations—themselves civic symbols that marched in processions, held religious services, and established contracts with the local councils—placed gravediggers outside the civic sphere.

The marginalization of groups of funeral workers from reputable society is then common throughout history.

[In Rome] lower level workers such as lecticarii (bier carriers) and pollinctores (morticians) appear to have incurred the most disrepute from their polluting contact with the dead and to have incurred infamia. Moreover, the disrepute surrounding funeral workers can be further envisaged by examining the use of servile workers in particular as the preferred laborers that came into direct contact with the deceased and prepared them for burial. Slaves could perform various jobs within the funeral association and were used as musicians, bier-carriers, executioners, and morticians. It is likely that in Rome and other urban centers in Italy and the empire, slaves did predominate as lower-level funeral workers and executioners within many societates. Slave labor was essential to both the urban economy and the mortuary trade of many Roman cities.

The financial success of a collegium of Libitina (roughly, funeral home) depended on the number of burials that it undertook, and literary sources, such as Seneca, indicate a suspicion that funeral workers may have hoped for death. Thus there was an added stigma attached to funeral workers as profit seekers. Whereas familial burials were an act of piety, these professionals—as Valerius observed—were perceived to value quaestus rather than pietas. The contempt for profit-based services within Roman society certainly added to the disrepute of funeral professionals.

Why scientists dismiss NDEs as psychedelic trips

8 October 2013
Charles
3 Comments
Categories: Continuing consciousness

Posted by Richard Rawlinson

Scientists have observed that when Near Death Experiences (NDEs) are occurring the pineal gland releases DMT, a powerful hallucinogen. DMT is produced at night and small amounts are secreted as you dream. When you die, a large amount is secreted. Many say this is the cause for these NDEs, mere hallucinations and nothing more. But why is DMT produced, and why at the time of death? Could it be acting as a bridge between our physical existence and other dimensions of the spiritual world?

Scientists are dragging their heels on clinically testing this phenomena, even though we have the technology to invent machines sensitive enough to register consciousness outside matter. If governments fund scientists with billions of pounds to devise the Hadron Collider to discover how matter forms at a subatomic level, they can surely help investigate life after death, too? If astrophysicists and nuclear physicists invent devices that can ‘see’ the invisible, why not try harder to prove life after death?

Could atheism a reason? A Gallup poll on immortality found only 16% of scientists believed in life after death as opposed over 60% of the general population. Infinite parallel universes, fine. Afterlife, too crazy.

Any NDE research is invariably modestly funded by the private sector and conducted by medical professors and the softer science practitioners such as psychologists. Yet a crucial point for any argument for a non-material dimension of the dead is the astrophysics claims that 95.4% of the universe is made up of mysterious dark matter and dark energy, not the matter and energy we call ‘real.’ Our bodies are barely physical at all when the ratio of the amount of matter in an atom to the total size of an atom is roughly that of a pea to a football field. The rest is energy in the form of forces.

Even among physicists, there’s rarely true objectivity. They invariably deal in a set of effects rather than fact. If this and that are observed to happen, why they happen is deduced. They don’t really know for sure, for instance, if there was ever a Big Bang. That’s why the Hadron Collider was built, to attempt reproduction of how matter was born.

So why not rely on soft-science clinical tests on the continuation of organised consciousness outside of matter? An intriguing thing about NDEs is the similarity of recorded accounts among people of different religious backgrounds and cultures: a strong feeling of oneness; not wanting to come back; being able to see their dead/dying body; brilliant white lights; glimpses of life flashing before their eyes. If people with different minds are having a hallucinatory experience, why so similar?

Then there’s the NDE of a woman, born blind. After a car crash, she reported being able to see herself lying in hospital, and was inexplicably able to describe specific details about the people who attended to her. She found herself seeing light, colours and shapes, even though these concepts are impossible to describe to a blind person. She ‘woke up’ with knowledge that she could not possibly possess. 

 

Atheist funerals mark the end

8 October 2013
Charles
9 Comments
Categories: Humanists

Posted by Richard Rawlinson

Coming to adulthood in the 1980s, there seemed to be less anger surrounding religious beliefs. Before sex abuse scandals, suicide bombers and militant atheism hit the headlines, debate seemed more liberal, tolerant and respectful of differences. Ironically, there seemed to be less apathy, too. You could search freely across boundaries that seemed less rigidly defined.

As a token Christian adolescent trying to get to grips with existentialism, I recall some angst-ridden questioning of the meaning of life and death. When our brain dies, does our consciousness cease to exist, too? What if our minds just create meaning to stop us from despairing? Are religions mere comfort blankets for the deluded?

In time, I concluded that, if the hope inspired by faith turned out to be groundless, I’d rather be a cripple with a crutch than without. Later still, my faith was restored more fully.

Sartre recognised the problem of Nietzsche’s nihilism with an existentialism replacing cultural illusions with enthusiastic commitment to our personal choices. A definition of existentialism is ‘in and of itself’. If we freely give food to the hungry, the act has value in and of itself.

Many humanists believe life has meaning in and of itself. They’re sons and daughters, parents and grandparents. They create things and contribute to society. They seek creature comforts for themselves, their loved ones and those they do not know.

They accept we can also be cruel to ourselves, our loved ones and those we do not know. We can chase pleasure from a bottle, and abuse power on a domestic and global scale.

Most humanists aim to curb destructive traits via a code of ethics forged through a reason that’s not beholden to consciousness beyond death. They believe in objective good and bad, unencumbered by aspirations to merit heaven or avoid hell in any afterlife. They believe in love and beauty in and of itself, and, presumably, hatred and ugliness in and of itself, but try to be committed to the former.

Most would agree that those with and without faith both succeed and fail in varying degrees. There are saintly and wicked things done in the name of religion, and outside of religion.

I’ve been reminded of existentialism both by funeral talk here and by a recent sad encounter. Walking home from work I pass a mental asylum. One day, I bumped into a friend outside who, it transpired, had been sectioned. Surprised, concerned and sympathetic, I asked him to a nearby café to talk. With an hour before his curfew, he told me about triggers for his mental state. At some point, I alluded to prayer. He politely said he’d stick with lithium for now.

Many funerals offer practical, psychological and spiritual succour. Just occasionally, people politely say they’ll accept all the physical and psychological help available, but would rather leave God and the eternal soul out of it.

As this is the last wish of the dead person, it’s fulfilled with due respect and diligence. The life is celebrated and eulogised without prayers (public prayers anyway). Bereaved guests benefit. ‘The final send-off did him/her proud, and witnessing it helped us let go’.

However, I’m interested why so few opt for an exclusively atheist funeral, according to several civil celebrants and undertakers here. Could it be that, while we’re comfortable with the idea that we didn’t exist before conception, we remain troubled by the idea of perpetual annihilation of consciousness after physical death follows life?   

A humanist funeral is for the living as an atheist believes there’s nothing positive to look forward to after death, and nothing negative to fear. Death may be a blessed relief from physical pain but that’s now for those left behind to contemplate. The person is not in a new realm of peace outside his body, he has ceased to exist. He is not in a void, an empty space. He is simply no more.

If this finite history of a life is dwelt upon, it can lead to unsettling thoughts among those left behind. If a comet collides with Earth and all life is annihilated, the destruction of humankind has no meaning, in and of itself, as humankind no longer exists to be affected.