Author: Charles

Great myths of Funeralworld

7 February 2013
Charles
15 Comments
Categories: Re-use of graves

Posted by Richard Rawlinson

No. 1: If politicians stopped shirking the critical issue of grave space running out in urban churchyards and cemeteries, and instead hastened legislation to reuse graves after a period of 75 years, they would be hounded out of office by an outraged public, and tabloid headlines such as, ‘Government to dig up Grandma’.

When reuse has been piloted in London, far from a loud outcry, there’s been praise that traditional graveyards are no longer, er, dead space: lovely old headstones are engraved on both sides—recycling at its most creative. By digging deeper, old and new bodies can also cohabit. 

The Victorians had no qualms about this. And in Greece today, and some other Orthodox countries, a body is buried only for about six years, at which time the grave is reused. There’s no scandal when, in a religious ceremony, bodily remains are dug up, the bones cleaned and stored elsewhere.

When Cardinal Newman’s grave was opened nearly 120 years after his death nothing of his body or skeleton remained. How many prime sites are, in fact, vacant?   

Living dangerously

6 February 2013
Charles
2 Comments
Categories: Art and death, sex and death

No one here at the GFG-Batesville Shard volunteered to do this gig, so we’ve sent along the work experience lad. Probably the last we’ll see of him. The venue is the Royal College of Art. Coco de Mer stock a range of mischiefmaking Valentine’s Day gifts — if you’re just waking up to the imminence of the Great Day of Lurve. 

British flowers for British funerals

6 February 2013
Charles
6 Comments
Categories: Funeral flowers

At Lower Blakemere Farm in Herefordshire, Heather Gorringe has been growing British flowers for British funerals since just last year. She says: 

Most flowers for funerals are just too formal, too regimented, and often just too white. Our flowers will look as if they have been gathered from our garden (and many of them will have been). They’re a tiny bit wild: They’re natural, green, and they’re gorgeous, and they’re handpicked and prepared in our floristry.

All our flowers are proudly sown and grown on British Farms, and this means that very often our flowers are much, much, fresher than their foreign competitors.

Why ship flowers half way around the world when we can grow them here?

We asked Heather if she could supply flowers for a midwinter funeral and she told us she certainly can. Some of her flowers are grown in polytunnels, but “we compost our flower waste, we recycle our plastic and shred our cardboard.”

Strikes us as one of those ideas that set you wondering why no one else thought of it. Or did they?

Find out more about Heather’s enterprise by checking out the Great British Florist website. Find their funeral flowers here. 

‘This is the way it should be done’

6 February 2013
Charles
3 Comments
Categories: DIY funeral, home funerals

An account of a home funeral: 

This is the first time I am so close. There is a body bag on the table, waiting to be opened. Our best friends’ 22-year-old son’s body is inside. His mother and father are across from me, brothers beside, with several women gathered to form the circle around the table. These women will become my sisters in the next five hours, as we prepare the body together.

Read the whole article here. 

‘I want the world to see what they did to my baby’

5 February 2013
Charles
4 Comments
Categories: Uncategorised

From The Star, Toronto: 

If Americans knew what bullets did to human flesh, they’d support gun control. So perhaps they should be shown in living colour what bullets do to small bodies. A mere description is insufficient for the literal-minded.

Noah Pozner, 6, was one of the 20 child victims in the Sandy Hook shooting in Newtown, Conn., on Dec. 14. All the dead were shot between three and 11 times. Tiny Noah took 11 bullets. His mother, Veronique, insisted on an open coffin.

In his coffin, there was a cloth placed over the lower part of his face. 

“There was no mouth left,” his mother [said]. “His jaw was blown away.”

Full story here. 

Hat-tip: Tony Piper

A ceremony of ashes

5 February 2013
Charles
5 Comments
Categories: ashes

Posted by Vale

We could do with thinking more about what the scattering of ashes. A while ago Evelyn published a wonderful post on the blog (find it here) about scattering Muriel’s ashes in an ‘open, high place’,  and I came across this  poem recently by Edward Storey. It’s a record of a committal, a wonderful tribute and an exploration of what these scatterings can mean. O, and it’s a lovely poem too. Worth a read: 

A Ceremony of Ashes

(In memory of Drew)

The wind was blowing from north to south
To give your wings their eager lift
From man-made boundaries.

Clouds were the continents you crossed,
Hills the last buy cialis 5 mg uk frontier of a life
To reconcile histories.

What joy, what freed exuberance
Suddenly leapt from Offa’s
Creating stars from mortal ash.

You rode like a king on the ancient dyke
To be one with a day that soon unveiled
The landfall of your choice.

You became earth and fire and rain,
Tree-root and leaf, sun-shaft and frost,
Where miles can never pin you down.

Who ever walks this hallowed track
Will, without knowing, always have
Your wise and jovial company.
 

I came across it in a collection of poems called ‘Almost a Chime Child. It is out of print, but I did find a copy for sale here.

Funeral for a peacock

5 February 2013
Charles
7 Comments
Categories: Pet funerals

Carmella B’Hahn, of Bowden House Community, near Totnes, has allowed us to share here her letter to friends about the death and funeral of her significant companion-animal. 

I feel compelled to write about a happening here that has touched me to the core. Many visitors to Bowden House will have encountered an iridescent display of blue beauty and a shimmering show of an intricate, many-eyed tail as you passed by our beloved peacock on your visits. Peaky, our ‘Lord of the Manor’ flew in, of his own volition, to join us in June 2009, just after we completed the leases that said that no one was to ‘own’ a peacock. No one owned him and he chose to stay. We found his body on January 3rd (with a bite mark on his neck) lying in the orchard as if he had lain down to sleep. And so the actual cause of death will remain a mystery. 

My wolf-like howls that echoed across the estate probably spoke for the hearts of many of us. We gave him a full burial ceremony to be proud of, with songs and memories and farewell strokings, followed by a ‘Peaky Wake’ at my house, where a challenging peacock jigsaw was completed so that we were left with a whole peacock image in the middle of the floor. 

I have had some of the most buy cialis and viagra profound moments of my life with our ‘Peaky’. We used to eye-gaze by my Buddha in the awning when I lived in a caravan, and then for the last two years at my new house he joined me when I was writing. He would sit opposite me, peering through the glass doors of my deck for hours on end, and I felt his magical influence. But the most astounding memory I have is of the first time I completed the aforementioned jigsaw. Immediately afterwards, I went to pick a couple of apples and was gone for about four minutes. Peaky was nowhere in sight. When I returned, I found him in my lounge standing on the jigsaw. How? God knows! 

Each of us has our own memories and stories and will integrate his death in different ways. What I am left with is a desire to imbue the qualities that were displayed before us so often. I want to expand my vision to see with many eyes and to express iridescent beauty in a shameless display of confidence that uplifts spirits. Well, I always have aimed high! 

Carmella’s longstanding interest in the transitions that include death were reinforced after her firstborn son drowned at the age of five. She describes his living and dying in her book, Benjaya’s Gifts.

Great myths of Funeralworld

4 February 2013
Charles
26 Comments
Categories: Uncategorised

Posted by Richard Rawlinson 

No. 1: The committal is when the curtains of the crematorium’s catafalque close.

 The final committal is when the ashes from a cremated body are buried in an urn, or perhaps ceremoniously scattered to the wind. Or, of course, when the body is buried intact in a coffin, cutting out the crem altogether with its recorded music, ‘in and out’ process, and general lack of spiritual warmth.  

Crematoria, although they have ‘chapels’, are not consecrated churches but more a hybrid of secular theatre and factory. They’re useful and, sometimes, attractive venues for ceremonial respect-paying for the many with no allegiance to a church, but not a substitute for a church for those who belong to one.

But whether theist or atheist, surely any disposal of ashes by crem staff who have no link with the dead person is an unsatisfactory disposal. Crems may work as a venue for a memorial service, and as a process to prepare the body for the final committal, but that’s it.

For Christians, the two-centre ritual is often a farce with the first part in church and second part consisting of a few minutes in a crem, often after a tedious road journey. Everything that needed to be said has been said in the church and the crem service’s extra prayers and hymn can seem like extraneous padding.

But because people confuse the crem with the committal they go along with the two services, and then overlook the final committal of ashes. This is also why some Christians avoid the hassle of two-centre ritual and head, along with their priest, straight to the crem, cutting out the church which may have played a significant part in their family’s spiritual and social life.

A while back, I attended the funeral of Lady Quennell, wife of the late Sir Peter Quennell, founder of History Today magazine (she was the dear friend I had in mind when I posted this link.

Anyway, we waved her off in the hearse outside a central London church as it headed to a crem in the distant suburbs. We then walked round the corner for a boozy restaurant lunch of sad and amused reminiscences, leaving her in the care of the undertakers. It was not abandonment because the final burial of her ashes took place a biblical 40 days later, a pastorally significant end to an initial period of mourning. There was no need to hallow a factory process.

The price of a good pic

1 February 2013
Charles
No comments
Categories: Grief

The subject of this photo, taken after the shootings in Newtown, Conn, says: 

“I sat there in a moment of devastation with my hands in prayer pose asking for peace and healing in the hearts of men. I was having such a strong moment and my heart was open, and I started to cry.

“All of a sudden I hear order brand cialis online ‘clickclickclickclickclick’ all over the place. And there are people in the bushes, all around me, and they are photographing me, and now I’m pissed. I felt like a zoo animal.”

Full story here.

What we learn

1 February 2013
Charles
3 Comments
Categories: dying

“We quit this life without fanfare or flourish. We die as we live: simply, unadorned, and unknowing with little more true understanding of deeper meanings than that with which we entered this world.”

Source