A Musical Tribute & Dedication for ~ Mrs Emily H Levine~ July 13, 1924 – February 18, 2013
Gong & Original Music “Coming Sun” Performed and Composed by ~ David Leclerc
Location ~Myakka River Park~ Sarasota, Florida February 2013
Natural burial grounds: you need one of these.
The good people at the Memorial Awareness Board (MAB) have written to tell us all about their latest, very successful excursion. Here is their account:
The Memorial Awareness Board (MAB) campaigns for memorials in stone and is the voice for all UK Memorial Masons. Exhibiting for the first time this year at the Who Do You Think Are? Live event at Olympia, London (22nd – 24th Feb) the stand showcased using stone memorials as a very important part of tracing one’s roots.
The 3-day event was a great success with nearly 14,000 visitors attending. Many topics were covered such as stone memorials for genealogy, the different types of memorials, memorial options after cremation and advice on the different inscriptions on headstones. Up to 2000 visitors came to the MAB stand to talk to industry specialists and read through relevant literature.
A very popular attraction to the stand was a working stonemason who gave lessons in stone carving. There was the opportunity to have a go at stone rubbings and be in with the chance of winning a stone plaque!
The BIG Question proved very popular, we asked; “Would you prefer to be buried or cremated”? The results were most interesting with 39% saying buried and 61% saying cremated. These percentages contradict conventional wisdom on cremation versus burial rates in the UK and could suggest a swing back to burial.
Mike Dewar, MAB Campaign Director commented, “The crucial part played by memorialisation in genealogy was established at the show. The stand was permanently crowded with visitors showing interest and enthusiasm about memorials and memorialisation”.
To find out further information including the photo competition with a £1000 prize we are running this summer, please visit the website: www.rememberforever.org.uk
You can also view all the photos from the event plus listen to an industry blogger interviewing a Board member as well as keep up-to-date with all issues on stone memorialisation.
Follow us on Facebook: facebook.com/memorialawarenessboard
And Twitter: twitter.com/memorial_issues
ED’S NOTE: Does that photo competition competition appeal to you? You could win it.
Here’s an interesting claim from The Co-operative Group:
“The Co-operative has a long tradition of leading the way on fair trade and the launch of the first-ever Traidcraft endorsed fairly traded coffin range at our funeral homes is a natural, if unusual, progression.”
This first-ever status is endorsed by Traidcraft:
Larry Bush, Marketing Director, Traidcraft, said: “We are delighted to be working in partnership with The Co-operative in a brand new area of fair trade. We have a strong track record of working together with the Co-operative Group to launch fair trade firsts.’
The Co-op must have put out a press release about this (we can’t find it) because the story is everywhere. We pasted a sentence from the article into Google and it threw up 213 results, all of them, pretty much, newspapers. That’s a fantastic strike rate for a press release, a coup for the Co-op – and an insight into the quality of what we are urged to believe is bona fide news, not propaganda served up as news.
The Daily Telegraph version of the ‘story’ further tells us that:
‘Green funerals, where clients choose materials from sustainable sources and carbon emissions from the day are kept at a minimum, have grown by 20 per cent in recent years and are now worth more than £8 million.’
Goodness only knows where they sourced those figures. The article goes on to tell us that:
The bamboo and willow coffins are made in Bangladesh, where communities are given a fair price and money goes toward schools and health care.
Although wooden coffins approved as “rainforest friendly” have been fashionable for some time, these are the first coffins to be designated “fair trade” by official certifiers.
Traidcraft, a charity that promotes Fairtrade around the globe, said the coffins are the first to bring in money and fair working practices to a community in the developing world.
An early version of the story states that these coffins are being sold by the Co-operative Group ‘as part of its ethical strategy’. A more relevant and pressing ethical strategy, we’d suggest, would be a rededication to foundational values and the provision of affordable funerals to the poor and the disadvantaged.
Because we’ve been very busy here at the GFG Batesville-Shard we never got around to finding out what William Wainman at Ecoffins thinks about all this. After all, he has been selling fairtrade coffins for as long as anyone can remember. We assumed he might be cross. So we very grateful to those of you who sent in his riposte:
Ecoffins started manufacturing bamboo coffins in 1999 and is the only World Fair Trade Organisation (WFTO) manufacturer of coffins in the world. We were accredited as a member of the WFTO in 2007 following two rigorous independent assessments of our factory in China. This allows us to use the WFTO logo, providing a guarantee that we are Fair Trade suppliers. Additionally, all the companies which we buy products from outside the EU are also fully accredited members of the WFTO.
This is absolutely not the case with those coffins Co-operative Funeralcare will now be selling. Their manufacturers are not WFTO accredited and therefore will not be able to claim Fair Trade status for their bamboo or willow coffins. They should also not make claims that imply that they are the first to do this in the UK.
Copies of the WFTO assessors’ report on our own factory can be viewed at www.ecoffins.co.uk/fairtrade.
Are we to suppose that Co-op Funeralcare was ignorant of the Ecoffins accreditation? Or that they simply didn’t let it get in the way of a good story?
As for those who credulously published the story, shame on your fact-checking.
Hat-tip to MJ, DB and JU
You want a physicist to speak at your funeral. You want the physicist to talk to your grieving family about the conservation of energy, so they will understand that your energy has not died. You want the physicist to remind your sobbing mother about the first law of thermodynamics; that no energy gets created in the universe, and none is destroyed. You want your mother to know that all your energy, every vibration, every Btu of heat, every wave of every particle that was her beloved child remains with her in this world. You want the physicist to tell your weeping father that amid energies of the cosmos, you gave as good as you got.
And at one point you’d hope that the physicist would step down from the pulpit and walk to your brokenhearted spouse there in the pew and tell him that all the photons that ever bounced off your face, all the particles whose paths were interrupted by your smile, by the touch of your hair, hundreds of trillions of particles, have raced off like children, their ways forever changed by you. And as your widow rocks in the arms of a loving family, may the physicist let her know that all the photons that bounced from you were gathered in the particle detectors that are her eyes, that those photons created within her constellations of electromagnetically charged neurons whose energy will go on forever.
And the physicist will remind the congregation of how much of all our energy is given off as heat. There may be a few fanning themselves with their programs as he says it. And he will tell them that the warmth that flowed through you in life is still here, still part of all that we are, even as we who mourn continue the heat of our own lives.
And you’ll want the physicist to explain to those who loved you that they need not have faith; indeed, they should not have faith. Let them know that they can measure, that scientists have measured precisely the conservation of energy and found it accurate, verifiable and consistent across space and time. You can hope your family will examine the evidence and satisfy themselves that the science is sound and that they’ll be comforted to know your energy’s still around. According to the law of the conservation of energy, not a bit of you is gone; you’re just less orderly. Amen.
— Aaron Freeman “You Want A Physicist To Speak at your Funeral” Source
“Oscar Wilde’s grave vies with that of Jim Morrison as the biggest tourist attraction in this graveyard of the great and good (Balzac, Chopin, Delacroix, Ingres, Molière, Piaf, and the lovers Abélard and Héloïse among others). It is regularly covered in red lipstick kisses and is both a lovers’ rendezvous and a rallying point against homophobia. The memorial – a naked birdman made by the sculptor, Jacob Epstein – has proved controversial. Unveiled in 1914, it had to be covered up because of complaints about the figure’s exposed genitals. A fig leaf was added but in the 1920s a group of anti-censorship protestors tried to chisel it off and ended up inadvertently carrying out a castration. The detached lump of stone was said to have ended up as a paperweight on the cemetery superintendent’s desk.”
How to Read a Graveyard: Journeys in the Company of the Dead by Peter Stanford — author of Heaven: A Traveller’s Guide — is published by Bloomsbury on 28 March at £16.99
Find Peter Stanford’s ten best here.
To state the obvious: 1) most advanced cancer patients have pain, and 2) we have excellent pain medications which can effectively treat more than 90% of cancer pain. Therefore, most patients with cancer receive proper prescriptions for pain. Obvious, yes? True? No.
In Europe, Australia and North America narcotic analgesics are widely available, and frequently prescribed. While there is access, many patients, particularly those in certain groups such as seniors and those with limited financial means, often receive insufficient doses and amounts, which only superficially address pain needs. Nonetheless, this partial success means that high income Countries use up to 95% of the world supply of morphine.
Tragically, the remaining world population has its pain treated with the remaining 5%.
India is the world’s largest manufacturer of morphine, but the drug is almost unavailable in that country. In much of the world archaic poorly designed laws designed to limit abuse fail to achieve that goal but instead limit access for patients in critical need.
The vast majority of narcotics prescribed to treat pain are not diverted from their therapeutic goal and do not contribute to dependence or addiction. On the other hand, ineffective, poorly designed efforts in global drug trafficking wars markedly reduce access for most patients, with cancer patients collateral victims of friendly fire. This is a global problem and will require a world effort to stop the agony.
Read the whole article here.
In case you missed it, there was one of those stunning, magical moments on the radio on Sunday.
On Broadcasting House, Emilie Blachère, a reporter for Paris Match, read a love letter/poem to her partner Rémi Ochlik, who died in Syria alongside Marie Colvin last year.
Hear her read it on the BBC iPlayer. Go to 54 mins 20 secs… and then listen to the response of the presenter, Paddy O’Connell. Click here.
The poem begins:
Ochlik,
I’ve never found it so difficult to write. My dictionaries are useless. I can already hear you saying, “Sweet Blachère.” So instead I made a list of everything I loved about you.
My angel, my love:
I loved it when you made lists of things you wanted, and you wanted a Harley Davidson, a loft, a 22,000-euro titanium Leica, and you would say to me, “What? You work at Paris Match, don’t you?”
I loved it when you called me Blachère, or Blacherounette, when you had something you wanted to ask me.
I loved it that you wanted to find a country just for the two of us where we could go every year together on assignment.
Read the rest of it here.
A number of popular sayings derive from death and funerals.
One such is the saying ‘Everyone wants a piece of him’.
This is a surprisingly ancient saying dating back 800 years. Here’s how it happened.
When Richard I (Lionheart) died, his entrails were interred in the central French town of Chalus, where he died in a skirmish with a rebellious baron; his body reposes at the Fontevraud Abbey, beside his father Henry II and later his mother Eleanor of Aquitaine; and his heart, wrapped in linen, pickled for posterity and placed in a lead box, was sent on to the Cathedral of Rouen.
When one of the king’s senior barons enquired whether this was really necessary, he was told that Richard was so celebrated and widely loved that ‘everyone wants a piece of him’.
The practice endured into the early part of the twentieth century. The body of Thomas Hardy was buried in Westminster Abbey, but his heart was buried in Stinsford churchyard in his beloved Casterbridge. You may have heard the story that a cat spotted his heart awaiting casketising on a table, and ate it. No truth in that at all.
And no call these days for dismemberment of the eminent dead, it seems.
Next: ‘the final nail in the coffin.’
NOTE TO EMBALMERS: You may be interested to read the just-published scientific analysis of the substances used to embalm King Richard I’s heart here.
Posted by John Bradfield
ED’s note: John Bradfield, founder of the Alice Barker Trust and author of the groundbreaking Green Burial, the DIY Guide, campaigns, together with Teresa Evans, for the legal rights of the bereaved. Here he argues that Richard III was illegally exhumed. He presents this argument in the context of his and Teresa’s wider campaign against the destruction of countless graves permitted by the granting of what they argue are legally invalid exhumation licences.
Response to information displayed on the Law & Religion website here.
…or are these ones true?
Posted by Richard Rawlinson
No. 3: A company offering the expensive service of deep freezing and preserving corpses of wealthy folk who hoped that future generations would be able to revive them back to life, went in liquidation. Because of unpaid bills the electricity supply was cut off and the bodies went into a similar state to that of the company.
No. 4: A woodland burial site, which banned metal-lined coffins and embalmed bodies for ecological reasons, was confronted with the dilemma of a man, already buried there, being joined by his wife, who died while holidaying abroad. Air safety regulations require a sealed coffin and embalmed body.
No 5: A crematorium which linked up a CCTV camera to the internet so services could be watched by those mourners unable to attend, charged a family £75 for the password that enabled friends to log on. The local paper ran the headline, ‘Funeral pay-per-view storm’.
No 6: Church of England officials are in talks with the Ministry of Justice about relaxing regulations placed on memorial design in churchyards to move in line with secular cemeteries. Torn between modernisation and heritage, they can’t make up their mind if it’s the decent thing to do to allow teddy bears, toy cars, kerb stones, chippings, wind chimes, battery-operated lanterns, memorial photos contained in cartouches, and multicoloured plastic gravestones emblazoned with the word, ‘Mum’.
