GFG hero Thomas Long questions the value of happy funerals.
“To start at the end – to start at the celebration … without processing the sadness, jumps over steps and in effect paralyses us … If one really wants to be sure that one will remain sadder for longer than necessary, then pretend to be too happy too soon.”
Posted by Richard Rawlinson
The picketing of military funerals in the US by the Westboro Baptist cult is well-documented.
Less so are increasing incidents in Holland of Muslim youths disrupting non-Muslim funerals. One undertaker says youths on bikes stop processions and bang on the roof of the hearse, shouting ‘One dog less’ or ‘Jews, Jews’.
The gangs are school age. The response of the police to complaints has been that the Islamic schools need protection, and that the yobs are too young to understand their behaviour is wrong. It makes you wonder what social responsibility they’re being taught in the classroom, and at home for that matter.
It also makes you wonder why liberal society is so tolerant when it comes to such disdain for our democratic values. Enter the British Muslims for Secular Democracy (BMSD). This courageous group of men and women have protested in London against a pro-Sharia march by fundamentalist group Islam4UK. To counter banners such as ‘Islam will dominate the world: Freedom can go to Hell’, the BMSD has retorted with slogans such as ‘Freedom of speech will rule the world’.
As Muslims condemning radical Islamist sexism, racism and homophobia, they risk becoming targets of violence but, unlike non-Muslim liberals, they are less concerned about being accused of ‘Islamophobia’ or some other form of political incorrectness.
And there lies the reason for our silence and hesitation to condemn extremism. Ironically, there was another group of protesters against the Islam4UK. A few members of the English Defence League were making their stand, too. When interviewed by a journalist, they leapt at the opportunity to claim they were not neo-Nazi football hooligans, that they supported women’s rights and gay rights, and that they just wanted to protest against radical Islamists whose supporters bombed London, and attacked the funeral processions of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.
It might be true that the EDL does not have its origins in the Hitler cults, but they are certainly not to be trusted as true allies of the good folk of the BMSD. EDL members have attacked Muslims because they are Muslims, and indeed anyone Muslim, Sikh, Hindu or atheist with a brown skin. They pick on anyone they see as being in the ‘wrong’ team.
It’s groups such as EDL that make non-racists reluctant to criticise Islamic hate. We should stand up to both by spporting the British Muslims for Secular Democracy (see here http://www.bmsd.org.uk/index.
Posted by Carole Renshaw, a civil celebrant
The market of Humanists and Celebrants seems to be growing!
I’m sure more are spilling out of the training programmes……….than they are withdrawing or giving up the cause! The plethora of new websites……new training provider logos………new leaflets………gives us some confidence that numbers in the profession are on the up!
Now if we take the economical and market driven debate – it would say that competition drives up service quality. I have no argument with that. But I do want to raise that thorny question – not what makes a good Funeral Celebrant………..there are plenty of books on that………….but What makes for a ‘bad’ Funeral Celebrant?
And my take on this is simple! I don’t believe that any Celebrant would be labelled as a ‘bad’ one in the eyes of mourners. That’s not to say they don’t exist. Funeral Directors will also have their own views on this. After all, they’re privileged to have that helicopter view of Celebrants as they sit and compare our styles, our words and our prices.
But so long as people leave their service feeling the send off was just what ‘Joan would have loved……’ then these same individuals who are at their lowest ebb and at one of the most vulnerable times of their lives, are happy – if happy is the right word!
I wonder if people who have lost someone special, really want to have to make that rational informed decision between good and bad. Don’t they just want someone to support them through it? It’s not until people have been to a few of these types of services, that they begin to make informed decisions of what’s available in the market. That leads to competition. And competition leads to better services.
I worked in health care for many years and I’ve seen people’s lives saved by poor and atrocious medical care. The very fact that lives had been saved was enough for the judgment call – not how they got there. That journey wasn’t relevant enough to be the point of discussion.
Funerals are no different. If Celebrants can help mourners to leave a service happy, comfortable and contented that their loved ones had a good send off ……then they’ve hit the right button! A fellow Celebrant once asked me if I sent out questionnaires for feedback after a service. My answer was short and sweet – No! And when I asked them if they had ever received poor feedback – their answer was short and sweet – No! I rest my case.
I was guided by a family member recently who very clearly told me that ‘….it has to be a good funeral…’. It wasn’t until I delved further and asked him ‘…what does a good funeral look like?’ that I got to the heart of the debate. Good……Bad……….we use these words too freely for them to have any real meaning.
I think it’s far easier to ask ‘What makes a good Celebrant’ from the mourners perspective. But what makes for a bad Funeral Celebrant – well that has far more reaching consequences for the profession and the funeral industry.
But the industry is informed enough to know the answer. And as competition increases, that answer will keep changing!
“Families that live and purchased their homes there never once thought there would be a funeral home and the reminder of death on a daily basis.”
Mayor Dennis Michael speaks for the townspeople of Rancho Cucamonga, California, in opposition to plans to open a funeral home.
Plans for the Joy of Death Festival 2013 are cooking.
Of course, we want it to be even braver, bigger, brighter and more brilliant than last year’s, where we staged talks by leading lights of Funeralworld, held the funeral industry’s first-ever Oscars, the Good Funeral Awards, hosted a Sky TV documentary film crew dedicated to the event (it’s out in the spring, btw), attracted publicity worldwide, supplied two speakers for BBC Radio 4’s Saturday programme with the Rev Richard Cole — and enjoyed a weekend by the sea in Bournemouth, Britain’s closest rival to Copacabana.
If you have any brilliant ideas to throw into the ring, now is the time to do it. Please, please do. This event is massively collaborative.
If you would like to be kept in touch with developments, sign up to Brian Jenner’s e-newsletter.
Contact Brian: serenity@joyofdeath.co.uk
See you there!!
“The end of life can be big drama, that’s for sure. In nearly a decade of doing this work, I’ve witnessed momentous final decisions; conversations carried on with mysterious, unseen figures; visions of the afterlife; and eleventh-hour forgiveness. We release each other–one back to the seen, known world and one into the unseen, unknown–and are ourselves released.”
Dying got so protracted and difficult it became necessary to invent the living will — a list of opt-ins and opt-outs during the last days/weeks/months. If you haven’t made one, you know you should.
What a living will does not record, because it doesn’t need to, is something we also all need to decide for ourselves, preferably as far in advance as possible. It is: what will we do if the prognosis is terminal, but we are offered chemotherapy?
It’ll mean balancing side-effects against time bought. It’ll mean a very down-to-earth discussion with the doctor. And it’ll be vitally important that we don’t kid ourselves, the side-effects may not be worth it.
Most people, according to this article, do kid themselves. In a survey, over 1,100 patients with a recent diagnosis of stage IV lung or colon cancer who had opted to receive chemotherapy were asked what their expectations of their treatment were. 69% of patients with lung cancer and 81% of colon cancer patients reckoned that a cure was “very likely,” “somewhat likely” or “a little likely”.
In other words, they misunderstood why they were receiving chemotherapy. And they’re all dead.
Doctors know that people can be unrealistically optimistic in the face of an insuperable tumour. There’s this idiotic notion that cancer is a test of character, it can be defeated by willpower (and only losers surrender, presumably). Yes, we can easily delude ourselves.
The survey also reveals that patients who awarded their doctors best scores for communication were the ones with the most wildly optimistic expectations of their chemotherapy.
If you’ve never seen this little booklet you’ve missed something. It’s a brilliant, brief, warm, intelligent and helpful guide for anyone looking after a dying person — the sorts of things they might expect to have to cope with.
The contents contain insights into how a dying person may be feeling; how to talk about what’s happening with the dying person and how to listen to them; what the dying process looks like; end of life experiences…
You can download and read it for yourself free, online, here.
You can buy the just-out Kindle version here.
Highly recommended.
In an article in Saturday’s Times Nick Jowett, Vicar and Minister of St Andrew’s Psalter Lane Anglican-Methodist Church, Sheffield, proposes ways in which the Church might recover some of its lost share of the funeral market, in particular what he terms the ‘nominal Christian’ sector.
He concedes that the Church bears some responsibility for the way things are: “Some vicars today seem to regard funerals as unavoidable drudgery and one hears too many stories of funerals taken in an impersonal, routine manner.”
Increasingly taking the place of stipendiary clergy are “easily available freelance funeral celebrants or retired ministers boosting their income, who can offer customised services ranging from liturgical solemnity to chatty humanistic “celebrations” and every shade in between.”
Mr Jowett exhibits especial animus towards funeral directors: “These days, when you go to the funeral director about your dear departed’s exequies, it seems that almost the last thing you will be offered is the local vicar to take your service. There is a growing feeling that if the deceased were only a nominal Christian, a ceremony with the local minister would not be appropriate. It’s also because the overworked parish priest is often not available at the time desired by the family, if the undertaker can even get him or her on the phone soon enough.”
That’s not all that’s wrong with funeral directors. He thinks that there’s so much wrong with them that “there needs to be a movement to take back death from the funeral directors. Yes, they make things easy for families, but they are too powerful, managing every stage from hospital mortuary to casket of ashes; their charges are too little questioned; and the full range of options for a bereaved family are often not made clear.”
In order to fix this state of affairs, Jowett believes, that “every local authority should provide an independent one-stop funeral advisory service. This would be genuinely independent, offering the latest assessments of local undertakers and telling people the advantages — and pitfalls — of humanist funerals, woodland burials, church versus crematorium services, and all the rest.”
That word ‘independent’ gets bandied about a lot. Here at the GFG we describe ourselves as independent because we have no financial interests in the funeral industry. I can see now just how a hollow and meaningless a term it is, and we should renounce it. We view the industry through the lens of our values — as, inevitably, would any local authority advisor. There’ll be no disinterested advice available to anyone so long as human beings are the dispensers. Sorry, Mr Jowett, your idea is cuckoo.
As for funeral directors, it is true to say that many profess a startling contempt for C of E clergy based not on their own faith position but on their experience of how badly ministers can let bereaved people down. Their contempt is not indiscriminate. They reserve especial admiration for those who do a good job.
In addition to local authority advisors, Mr Jowett believes that the C of E’s offer to the bereaved can be improved in two ways.
First, “the training of clergy should encourage them to prioritise funerals and help them to understand how much a sensitively conducted preparation and ceremony can help even a not particularly religious family at a time of loss.”
Second, “the Church’s website needs to do much more to emphasise the ways in which, within the shape of the funeral liturgy, the service can be made personal with tributes, poetry, music and symbolic actions.”
Mr Jowett rejects the idea of providing “an illustrative breakdown of church fees … showing that they are an almost infinitesimally small part of the whole cost of a funeral.” I’d have thought, given that the combined work of funeral director and minister/celebrant crystallises in the funeral ceremony, there’s some mileage in highlighting the bargain-basement price of a good ceremony-maker. Dammit, ceremony-makers normally come in way under the cost of the flowers left abandoned when it’s all over.
Full article here (£)
The British are some of the most charitable people on Earth — if you measure their charitableness according to how much money they fork out for good causes.
Today marks BBC Children in Need Day. There will be the customary telethon, razzmatazz, fevered fundraising, spinning figures and, if all goes to carefully-laid plan, ta-da, a record sum of money amassed.
Children in Need is the perfect good cause. It has all the attributes. Brits are sentimental — they can’t resist a tug at the heartstrings. They’re suckers for sensation (expect lots of oohs and aahs). They buy cialis germany succumb to celebrity endorsement. They are bedazzled by glamour. It’s actually not all that difficult to whip up a lot of heightened emotion where sick children are concerned. Who could possibly doubt that this is an excellent cause?
Fundraising is a highly professionalised business. But fundraisers can only work their magic if a cause has all the magic ingredients: sentiment, sensation, celebrity and star quality. Compassion has its no-go areas. Where cancer is concerned, boobs will always trump balls.
What price, then, Oldies in Need Day?
