Author: Charles

Thiel embalming, anyone?

9 January 2013
Charles
15 Comments
Categories: Embalming

Professor Walther Thiel, an Austrian, developed an embalming process for medical cadavers. His process requires much less formaldehyde than conventional embalming fluids and, also, produces a much more ‘lifelike’ body with none of the hardness and stiffness associated with conventional embalming. Medical people are very keen on it — those who know about it. It’s only been around since 1992 and, because the technique is described in German, it hasn’t made itself particularly well-known. 

Soft embalming is a technique which relies on a mixture of salt compounds and very low amounts of volatile formaldehyde and formalin to effect fixation of tissue with a number of unique properties. Cadavers preserved with the Thiel Method have no detectable odor, a lifelike flexibility of body parts, excellent color preservation of muscle, viscera, and vasculature, and superior antimicrobial preservation properties. [Source]

They’re using it at the University of Dundee, the first place in the UK to opt for it. They’re doing so in anticipation of EU laws restricting the use of formalin, which is reckoned a carcinogen. They are delighted by the results. 

We wonder how many embalmers are aware of Thiel embalming. In terms of presentation alone, it would seem to do a much better job than the conventional method. 

Do have a look at the video on the Univ Dundee site, which shows a Thiel-embalmed cadaver, and see for yourself how much better it is. 

If it’s safer, too, there would seem to be a strong argument for it.

But would it work as well if the embalming mixture is used in the far lower concentrations required by the funeral industry. 

What do we know? If you know anything, do tell us. 

(Apologies to born-again anti-embalmers.)

Approaching death

9 January 2013
Charles
2 Comments
Categories: Attitudes to death, dying

“You get nearer to the shore and you can actually, for the first time, not just make out this dim, insubstantial cliff, but you can see the little houses and cars moving.”

Jonathan Miller

Dead bowler takes three for 47

8 January 2013
Charles
6 Comments
Categories: Uncategorised

From a report by Andy Bull in The Spin:

Congratulations to Rangana Herath, the roly-poly Sri Lankan spinner whose 12 wickets at 33 each against Australia have bumped him up to fourth in the ICC’s Test bowling rankings. Herath took three for 47 in the fourth innings last Sunday, an exceptional feat for a dead man. 

Herath, according to those two impeccable news sources Twitter and Wikipedia, passed away in a car crash in Sydney on Friday night. Concern grew back in Colombo, and word of the tragedy spread so far and wide that Herath himself was woken at 2.30am by a phone call from his team-mate Tillakaratne Dilshan, asking him whether rumours of his demise had been exaggerated.

Herath’s was, undoubtedly, the best performance by an un-dead cricketer since Aubrey Smith made seven for Sussex against the MCC back in May 1890, shortly after the South African paper Graff-Reinet Advertiser had published “much regretted news of his decease” from “inflammation of the lungs”.

If music be the food of love, play on

8 January 2013
Charles
4 Comments
Categories: music

Posted by Richard Rawlinson

We sometimes differentiate between religious and secular music at funerals, hymns such as Abide with Me or popular hits such as Candle in the Wind. It was ever thus with music’s capacity to move, ranging, even in the Middle Ages, from sacred Gregorian Chant to itinerant troubadours with their songs about love in all its permutations of joy and pain.

Perhaps surprisingly, many early composers famous for sacred music also produced beautiful secular music. In the 14th century, Guillaume de Machaut, a priest at Rheims Cathedral, was perhaps the first pop star of the Western world, celebrated for both his religious compositions and secular ballads about courtly romance. The Dylan of his day, his poetry was known throughout Europe, attracting fans including Geoffrey Chaucer.

Machaut was the first composer to create a polyphonic setting of the Ordinary of the Catholic Mass (the Ordinary being those parts of the liturgy that don’t change, including the Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, and Agnus Dei). This new polyphonic style caught on, paving the way for the flowering of choral music in the Renaissance.

You can see (or hear) why. Compared with the earlier order cialis pills monophonic Gregorian Chant—which though sublime can get a bit samey with its single melody—polyphonic music offers multiple melodies and voices. They’re at odds and yet harmonious. The result is ego-free, the lack of standout solo adding to the celestial quality.

Fast forward to the 16th century and the Renaissance genius who more than anyone established polyphonic choral music as fine art at its most glorious and spiritually inspiring: Giovanni Pierluigi de Palestrina, musical director at the Vatican who also leant his talent to secular madrigals.

Palestrina’s Pope Marcellus Mass continues to inspire divine worship all around the world today. It irks me that so many music lovers talk as if polyphony began with 18th century Baroque. Even if Bach is among my personal favourites, he’s certainly inspired by Palestrina, the Prince of Music.

Listen below to how different melodies and voices swirl around each other like playful-yet-pure angels before soaring heavenwards. Volume up, eyes closed, a trance-like state as close as it gets to any mortal’s understanding of being with God:

The unintended consequence of promoting longevity

8 January 2013
Charles
14 Comments
Categories: Assisted dying, Attitudes to death, Attitudes to older people, Death; Good death, End-of-life issues

Michael Wolff describes caring for his eldery, dementing mother in New York magazine. It’s a long piece and it will concentrate your mind. You’ll brood on it.  Warning: once you start, you won’t be able to put it down. 

…what I feel most intensely when I sit by my mother’s bed is a crushing sense of guilt for keeping her alive. Who can accept such suffering—who can so conscientiously facilitate it? 

“Why do we want to cure cancer? Why do we want everybody to stop smoking? For this?” wailed a friend of mine with two long-ailing and yet tenacious in-laws. 

Age is one of the great modern adventures, a technological marvel—we’re given several more youthful-ish decades if we take care of ourselves. Almost nobody, at least openly, sees this for its ultimate, dismaying, unintended consequence: By promoting longevity and technologically inhibiting death, we have created a new biological status held by an ever-growing part of the nation, a no-exit state that persists longer and longer, one that is nearly as remote from life as death, but which, unlike death, requires vast service, indentured servitude really, and resources. 

This is not anomalous; this is the norm. 

The traditional exits, of a sudden heart attack, of dying in one’s sleep, of unreasonably dropping dead in the street, of even a terminal illness, are now exotic ways of going. The longer you live the longer it will take to die. The better you have lived the worse you may die. The healthier you are—through careful diet, diligent exercise, and attentive medical scrutiny—the harder it is to die. Part of the advance in life expectancy is that we have technologically inhibited the ultimate event. We have fought natural causes to almost a draw. If you eliminate smokers, drinkers, other substance abusers, the obese, and the fatally ill, you are left with a rapidly growing demographic segment peculiarly resistant to death’s appointment—though far, far, far from healthy.

Read it all here. 

You say coffin, I say casket

7 January 2013
Charles
12 Comments
Categories: coffins

By Guy Keleny in the Independent here.

“…this column does not wish to sound like a choleric pedant holding forth in about the year 1950, so we do not go on about ‘Americanisms’.

“The simple truth is that there is more commerce of words eastward across the Atlantic than westward because American power, wealth and culture loom larger in the world than British. There is no point in resenting it. So the following, from a news story last Saturday, cannot be called an error, though it still strikes the ear as odd: “Sales of ‘green funerals’ – where the casket is made of cardboard, wicker or bamboo – spiked from £7m to £8m.” According to the Oxford Dictionary, the word “casket”, meaning a small box or chest for jewels or suchlike, dates back to the 15th century. Its use as a synonym for “coffin” is first observed in the US in 1870. But here’s the interesting bit. The word “coffin” itself has undergone a similar shift of meaning. It once meant a chest, case or casket; that obsolete meaning is last recorded in 1677. The modern meaning, a box for a corpse, dates from 1525. We may imagine choleric pedants about the year 1550 lamenting this corruption of the language.”

ED’S NOTE – Xenophobes will have observed with patriotic disdain and chauvinistic alarm recent deep incursions into Brit Eng by the ‘casket’ word, which looks likely, now, to displace our homely indigenous ‘coffin’. Is this something that irks you?  

Adventures in Funeralworld

7 January 2013
Charles
5 Comments
Categories: coffins

1. The late night shopping experience

Posted by Andy Clarke 

ED’S NOTE — We have featured Andy’s adventures with his innovative Curve coffin from the very beginning. Here, he describes the experience of exhibiting at a Christmas shopping event organised by his local Chamber of Commerce in Tenterden, Kent. 

And so it came to pass, on a cold winter’s evening in deepest darkest Kent, that I found myself ferrying freshly made and painted Curve coffins back and forth between my small farm-based workshop and the 8 by 8 high street plot that was to be my pitch for the evening. 

Now, I wholeheartedly agree that, perhaps, coffins are possibly not everyone’s obvious first choice as a stocking filler, but as newly signed up members of the local Chamber of Commerce, Wealden Coffins were invited to attend the Christmas late night shopping event alongside other local businesses and organisations. We were positioned in a prime position alongside a local scout group and the Kent Air Ambulance and opposite a local hostelry from whence came an abundance of festive entertainment. A good pitch I thought although without any of the usual mod cons – gazebo, outside lighting, thermal underwear etc. 

I say ferrying (above) since at this moment in time we are not in possession of a sensible vehicle for the carriage of coffins and so they sit proudly on the roof bars of my resourceful Renault Clio. As you can imagine, this spectacle alone has raised many an eye in the Kent countryside and further afield as we transport our coffins around the country. However, we’ve used this tried and tested method on several occasions to deliver our beautiful coffins to funeral directors as far afield as Brighton (around 30 miles) and Central London (around 50 miles – which included a fair jog around the M25 en route). 

Whilst delivering a sample to ARKA in Brighton last year, at one point we found ourselves in a funeral convoy, with a traditional hearse up front, a funeral limousine and then our little Clio with one of our coffins aloft. Fortunately, in many ways, the Curve doesn’t really look like a traditional coffin and so I think many people assume we are just transporting a painted ottoman. 

Anyway, eventually I was all set up and raring to go in the high street with three of our Curve coffins on trestles (2 of which were hand painted and a third which was plain timber), a stack of marketing literature and details of our exciting “Design a coffin” competition! First prize a £20 Amazon voucher! 

Despite the cold – and blimey it was cold! – quite a few people had braved the weather to enjoy the festivities, take in the sights and fill themselves on free mince pies and mulled wine from the various stalls and shops that were open. And very soon I started to get people stopping and looking and pointing and even a few people who wanted to chat. 

I always knew that it could be quite controversial to have a coffin stall at a Christmas late night shopping event – well, it’s not normal is it? – and I think the Chamber of Commerce were quite brave in their decision to invite us but I was quite surprised at the level of interest we received. We had a very mixed reaction from people as they passed but reaction we did get as well as some interesting follow-up PR from the local press. 

Interestingly, the majority of people didn’t seem to realise that I was promoting coffins. I had many people rush up to me asking, “What are they?” and swiftly followed up with an “I knew they were” or an “I told you so” or even an “that’s five quid you owe me” when I confirmed that they were indeed coffins. 

I must admit I did get a few people who suggested that it wasn’t particularly festive and even one gentleman who muttered under his breath, but loud enough to make his feelings heard, that it was “bloody outrageous”. But at the same time I received a lot of very positive feedback from people who wanted to talk about the interesting new look of our coffins, were pleased that we had brought a “taboo” and hidden away subject out into the open, who were interested in the construction of the strange curved coffins or who were just interested in having a chat. 

Extraordinarily, following a conversation with the event organiser, we may also have the potential of exhibiting one of our coffins at Godington House, during their annual “sculpture in the gardens” exhibition! 

So, all in all, a pretty good evening I thought, despite eventually losing the feeling in both my feet and my fingers, and definitely something that I would do again. It was a real eye-opener to see how the public reacted to our presence and yet the praise we received far outweighed any negative sentiment. I think it is time that we brought our industry out into the open and let people see some of the options available to them before they have to make a purchase!

Bad death, bad memory

4 January 2013
Charles
1 Comment
Categories: Good death

Pain that is not relieved in a person’s life continues after they are gone, held as a sordid memory by loved ones.  Just as we retain treasured thoughts of joy, wisdom and warmth, we preserve images of pain.  Unrequited suffering contaminates memory, preventing healing, healthy grieving and closure. This pain in turn flows across our communities, touching many who may never have met the patient.

A poorly managed end-of-life experience can transform families for generations.

Source

RIP CMJ

3 January 2013
Charles
2 Comments
Categories: celebrants, eulogy, obituary; epitaph

“Tony Greig died of a heart attack on Saturday. It was probably for him a merciful release because the late stage of any cancer is often hell on earth.”

So wrote Christopher Martin-Jenkins in The Times on 31 December. He knew what he was writing about. He died of cancer himself on New Year’s Day.

Cricket has attracted more intelligent commentators and inspired more good writing than any other sport. Compare the panel of experts on Match of the Day with that on Test Match Special. CMJ was a paragon of his trade and a great character, too.

So it is entirely worthy of him that there should have been such a rich outpouring of obituaries to mark his passing. Only a sport as literate as cricket could have achieved this. His obits reward study, too, even for those who give not a jot for the deeds of flanneled fools. They are models of their kind. 

CMJ was a character in ways obituarists dream of. His scattiness was productive of myriad anecdotes, all of them brilliant. He was also an advanced technophobe whose mishaps with his laptop were legion.

Richard Hobson in The Times recalls: 

In Lahore once, he could barely disguise his pride as he handed over a piece of paper with what he said was a wi-fi code, having managed to explain how to log on to the hotel’s internet. I lacked the heart to tell him it was nothing more than a receipt for a coffee. 

The pick of the crop of obits for CMJ is that by Simon Barnes in The Times. It really is as good as it gets: 

That voice, brimming with love, the lightest possible top-dressing of irony, flowing with easy precision from a million radios. So that wherever you happened to be, in a stuffy flat, lying in the garden, cruising the motorway, in bed in a different time zone, doing the washing-up, you were there too, the swallows skimming low across the fielder-crisscrossed grass, the sun still warm, the shouts of the players, the sigh of disappointment from the crowd, the solid smack of one that comes clean off the middle.

Life ought to be like this: always an hour after tea, England always 300 for two, the sun shining, the world untroubled and Christopher Martin-Jenkins at the microphone.

He told us about cover drives and yorkers and legside nurdles and the one that goes on with the arm. He told of a game played on six continents of the world. And always, his voice sang of his love for all this. It was a voice that seemed to call the swallows themselves into being.

AFTERTHOUGHT – Cricket commentators are famous for the way that, when rain interrupts play and there’s nothing happening, they carry right on chatting animatedly for as long as the downpour lasts. Such is their love of the minutiae game that they always have plenty to say.

There may be food for thought here for funeral celebrants. From time to time you travel back from visiting a family and you reflect that there’s very little, almost nothing, to say about the person who’s died. A blameless life, wholly uneventful. Aaaargh. (I’ve done it myself.)

This isn’t meant as a criticism. But if it’s cricket commentators’ love of the sport that gives them plenty to say about an uneventful game, perhaps the lesson is that it’s a simple love of human nature rather than any higher cleverness that can transform the minutiae of an uneventful life into something compellingly interesting. 

Nobody knows anything

3 January 2013
Charles
No comments
Categories: Uncategorised

The old year is dead and buried (thank you, gentlemen). The lights are on once more in the GFG-Batesville Shard. We’re back at our desks. And we’re full of zest and zing.

We hope you are, too. You have our best wishes for success, happiness in 2013 and the survival of your new year resolutions for, well, at least another week.

We’re in for a spellbinding twelve months.  We look forward to what’s going to happen. We don’t pretend for a minute to know what that’s going to be – predicting commercial and cultural trends in Funeralworld is a mug’s game. Nobody knows anything.

But it’s likely that it’s cultural trends which are going to define the direction. That’s our hunch. Societal attitudes to old age as longevity prolongs the twilight years. Re-modelled responses to death in an increasingly secular, material society.

We look forward to debating what we observe. We hope you’ll join in.

We hope you’ll want to spark debate, too. This blog is open house to everyone with something to say. The only thing we stand for here is openmindedness.

Do get in touch.