Author: Charles

There but for the grace…

23 July 2012
Charles
2 Comments
Categories: Co-operative Funeralcare

From the Sun, 18 July:

An undertaker with Britain’s biggest funeral firm has been arrested on suspicion of snatching a dead gran’s savings.

Former Co-operative Funeralcare worker Grahame Lawler, 37, is suspected of rifling through the pensioner’s household belongings less than an hour after she died.

Could happen to any funeral director?

The Sun understands the woman, in her 70s, was “still warm” when her possessions were taken from the home.

What’s that got to do with it?!

Sun story here.

Daily Mail version here

Thoughts of a funeral-goer

20 July 2012
Charles
7 Comments
Categories: Thoughts of a funeralgoer

Posted by Lyra Mollington

It turns out that I am a terrible patient. My sister Myra used to be a nurse so this wasn’t a winning combination. Mr M collected me on Saturday and I’m recuperating at home.

Thankfully I’m no longer confined to my bed although walks on the common are out of the question for at least another week. Barry has kindly offered to type for me again. I wasn’t well enough to proof-read the last one and it was only on Tuesday that I discovered he had been a little mischievous with those brackets.

(Yes Barry – they were quite funny.)

Having almost died, I expected never to take anything for granted again. Sadly, life isn’t as straightforward as that. I was home for barely five minutes when I noticed dust on a side table. I could see that Mr M was disappointed – perhaps he was hoping for a new devil-may-care wife. If anything I’m even more irritated by the little things because I have nothing to do. Mr M can’t understand why I’m still getting upset if Colin doesn’t have fresh water in his bowl each day.

(Yes Barry, I know that dogs drink out of puddles.)

By Wednesday, I was feeling much stronger which was perfect timing – Daisy and Lilian had arranged for all our friends to come round for afternoon tea to celebrate my 75th birthday. I’ve never received so many interesting presents. They included: a CD from Rosie with the warning that, although the music is beautiful, it may take a ‘bit of effort’; the complete DVD box set of Inspector Morse from Lilian; a teapot with a union jack design to commemorate the 2012 Games (I had completely forgotten about the Olympics – Mr M and I have tickets for the Greco-Roman wrestling and I very much hope I will be well enough to go); exotic hand-cream from Daisy; and (to Sue’s slight embarrassment because she had clearly chosen this gift well before my illness) the latest Peter James crime thriller. They all have ‘Dead’ in the title.

We had a lovely time. But we all ignored the elephant in the room: my near-death experience. Was it only a year ago that Rosie had nearly choked on her cup-cake when Lilian brightly announced, ‘Let’s make a list of what we want to do before we die!’? There was no stopping us then, happily deciding on our bucket lists. I think it was Lilian and Kathleen who began shouting out as many adventurous and dangerous activities as they could think of: jump out of an aeroplane (one of them added, ‘With a parachute!’); fly in a helicopter; ski down a glacier; scuba dive; ride a camel… I never did tell them that I had done everything on their list – except for the camel. However, I had learned to ride on the most enormous horse I’d ever seen.

(Yes Barry, I can see that you’re impressed.)

Needless to say, on this my birthday afternoon, no mention was made of bucket lists. As Daisy poured another cup of tea (not too strong; a DROP of milk and no sugar) I decided to stop feeling sorry for myself. As one of my favourite funeral poems says, ‘Matters it now if time began, if time will ever cease? I was here, I used it all, and now I am at peace.’

So I started planning a few activities suitable for my recuperation.

I am going to read the latest Peter James book (with the gloriously apt title – Not Dead Yet). I am going to listen to the ‘difficult’ CD Rosie gave me, even though I have never even heard of Pergolesi or his sacred Stabat Mater. And I am going to listen to it properly – not have it as background music whilst doing the housework. Also, I’m going to start sorting out all those photographs that are in envelopes in a drawer – maybe even scan them. At the weekend, I’m going to watch Bruce Willis in all his Die Hard films.

(Yes Barry, you and Daisy can come round and watch them with me.)

And I’m going to draw up plans for my next funeral – as a spectator I hasten to add. Incredibly, I have never been to a woodland burial.

Sharp rise in Pauper’s funerals

19 July 2012
Charles
13 Comments
Categories: funeral plans, Social Fund Funeral Payment

Posted by Vale

You’d be forgiven for thinking that Oliver Twist is in a workhouse somewhere asking for more. It seems extraordinary in 2012 that there are headlines like this in the Daily Telegraph this week, followed by the stark (and slightly ludicrous) quote from Kate Woodthorpe of the University of Bath that it is:

“becoming too expensive for poor people to die”.

The article is based on a joint report between the university and Sun Life Direct and notes that the number of applications rejected for a funeral payment increased by 6.9% and is likely to jump again in the future. Put bluntly funerals are becoming unaffordable for more and more people.

There are issues with the report of course. Sun Life’s interest in shepherding people towards its end of life plans is one. It also includes a great deal of information that deserves more detailed consideration. For the moment though our concern here at GFG has a narrower focus. Let’s go back to the news that, in an age where benefits claimants are routinely stigmatised and welfare support is harder to access, state support for the costs of funerals is shrinking; that the funeral as it is designed, sold and delivered is becoming too expensive for too many; that we are pauperisng people.

As a service (that likes to puff its chest out and call itself an industry) does this news make you feel good about the drive to upsell? Are you comfortable with a lack of transparency about pricing? Do the packages you offer, the lack of flexibility, the way that basic or simple is designed to look mean and cheap fill you with pride?

Are you filled with a drive to change, to build new and more responsive businesses where trustworthy services and products are offered in a culture of respect and openness?

Or do you dust off the top hat and smile to yourselves at the prospect of this new Victorian age?

The Deciphering

19 July 2012
Charles
1 Comment
Categories: Poetry

Posted by Vale

The Deciphering

How busy we are with the dead in their infancy,
who are still damp with the sweat of their passing,
whose hair falls back to reveal a scar.

We think of wiping their skin, attending them
in the old way, but are timid, ignorant.
We walk from the high table where they are laid

leaving their flesh royally mounded
just as they have left it
for the undertakers to cherish.

We consider the last kiss,
the taste and grain of it.
The lift door squeezes open, then shut.

All days we think we have lost our car keys.
There is a feeling in the back of the mind
as we eat a meal out on the balcony

but the door refuses to open
and although my sisters have prepared food elaborately
you do not advance to us, smiling.

The children have put sauce on the side of their plates
thinking you will come and swipe a chip,
thinking this meal is one you cooked

as always, humming to yourself in the kitchen,
breaking off to tap the barometer
and watch starlings roost on the pier.

How long it takes to stop being busy with that day,
each second of it like the shard
of a pot which someone laboured to dig up

and piece together without knowledge
of language or context.
Slow, slow the deciphering.

This marvelous poem is taken from Helen Dunmore’s new collection The Malarkey.

Library of dust

19 July 2012
Charles
5 Comments
Categories: ashes, cremation

Posted by Vale

Oregon State Insane Asylum closed in the 1970s after operating for nearly a hundred years. Over that time inmates died, were cremated and their remains, stored in copper canisters, were stored uncollected.

The photographer David Maisel has made a photographic record of them. He writes:

The approximately 3,500 copper canisters have a handmade quality; they are at turns burnished or dull; corrosion blooms wildly from the leaden seams and across the surfaces of many of the cans. Numbers are stamped into each lid; the lowest number is 01, and the highest is 5,118. The vestiges of paper labels with the names of the dead, the etching of the copper, and the intensely hued colors of the blooming minerals combine to individuate the canisters. These deformations sometimes evoke the celestial – the northern lights, the moons of some alien planet, or constellations in the night sky. Sublimely beautiful, yet disquieting, the enigmatic photographs in Library of Dust are meditations on issues of matter and spirit. 

A book of the project can be found here.

No stripping of the altars here

19 July 2012
Charles
3 Comments
Categories: crematoria, Religious funerals

By Richard Rawlinson

The row at Haycombe crematorium in Bath over the replacement of the cross-etched 1960s window with a clear pane – offering a neutral blank canvas for visitors of different faiths and none – is contextualised by this example of tolerance and diversity.

The pictures here are of North London’s New Southgate Cemetery and Crematorium, which probably reflects the capital’s multicultural diversity more than any other, catering for religions and traditions including Catholic, CofE, non-religious, Bahai, Jehovah’s Witness, Jewish burials and many more besides.

With its cemetery established in 1860 and its crematorium opened in 1957, New Southgate offers dedicated burial areas for Greek Orthodox, Caribbean and Catholic communities, plus wooded areas for people who wish to have more natural surroundings. Wander round and contemplate the statue of Our Lady one minute, and peaceful green havens the next.

The traditional chapel, which offers an organ as well as a CD system, appeals to everyone from Hindus and Sikhs to secularists. Peace and common sense prevail. Crosses and other religious symbols can be changed or removed to create the right setting for each individual service, but the point is that it remains the spitting image of a handsome Victorian church. In other words, it reflects our Christian heritage, an unpopular phrase, but one that is simply accurate.

No-one is lobbying to knock down its steeple, like poor relations of Reformation icon-smashers or the cultural cleansers of the Chinese Revolution. Far from demanding it resembles an industrial incinerator devoid of any ‘offensive’ character, all faiths and none are sharing this beautiful inside and outside space for their funerals.  

Diss-ceased

18 July 2012
Charles
10 Comments
Categories: Uncategorised

No sooner had we berated George Tinning, the beleaguered Nick Buckles figure who totters atop Co-op Funeralcare, for his use of the word ‘deceased’ accompanied by the indefinite article, than a commenter, commenting on this post, asked Jonathan, a human cat among pigeons of the very liveliest sort, “How many Deceaseds have you handled?”

Perhaps this is, in Nick Gandon’s immortal words, qwerty stuff for the qwerty-minded. But I don’t know. If ‘carcass’ is no substitute for ‘deceased’, then there are wrong words. The GFG team thinks ‘deceased’ is a bad word.  It doesn’t work in the plural. We think there are better words.

Once upon a time, the c-word (and not in a John Terry sense) was perfectly acceptable. It derives from the Latin. There is no surviving Old English word for corpse, which was lic — though we do see it survive in lych-gate, http://www.health-canada-pharmacy.com/symbicort.html literally, corpse gate. So corpse is the oldest word still in use, and it was perfectly acceptable in 1662, when the Book of Common Prayer prescribed:

When they come to the Grave, while the Corpse is made ready to be laid into the earth, the Priest shall say, or the Priest and Clerks shall sing:

Corpse was softened in 1928:

When they come to the Grave, while the Body is made ready to be laid into the earth, shall be sung or said:

Well, what’s wrong with body, eh?

This, perhaps. It fails to take into account that that’s not a body, that’s Granddad, still a person til we’ve got our heads around his disembodiment.

So what’s the best word for the modern age?

Open letter to George Tinning, Managing Director, Co-operative Funeralcare #3

18 July 2012
Charles
8 Comments
Categories: Co-operative Funeralcare

Dear Mr Tinning,

I found myself, this morning, entertaining one of those whimsical thoughts that pops into our heads when we’re showering. Have you noticed how people tend to say ‘He’s been dead for 30 years, now’ instead of, ‘He died 30 years ago’? It’s as if they regard death as something akin to a state of being. I wonder if there’s an insight there into subconscious existential belief in a secular age? What do you think?

Look, I mustn’t distract you when you have obviously got a lot on your plate. How do I know you have? Because this is the third letter I have written to you, and you haven’t replied to the first yet.

How’s it going with the re-think? Are we any closer to founding principles? Am I getting ahead of myself? Have you picked yourselves up yet?

I ask because your website still carries a video clip of you giving your reaction to that Dispatches programme before the programme went out. Mr Tinning, you cannot respond to something before it has happened! You urgently need to speak to those many people who are still in shock as a result of what they saw. Please, break the silence.

While you’re about it, you might like to have a word with the person who worded the answers to the FAQs on that same webpage. There is one question:

Are deceased stored naked in mortuary facilities?

to which the answer is:

No, a deceased should not be stored naked the modesty of the deceased is maintained at all times and in addition the deceased will always be covered with a clean white sheet.

Let’s agree to draw a veil over the missing full stop after ‘naked’. Let’s talk instead about the word ‘deceased’. It’s used a lot by the funeral industry but, like the term ‘hygienic treatment’, it’s not much used by anyone else except, perhaps, as a dainty euphemism by the genteel. It’s jargon, George. If you insist on using it, understand that it is most commonly used as an adjective but, when used as a noun, can only be accompanied by the definite article. You can no more talk about ‘a deceased’ than you can talk about ‘deceaseds’.

Listen to it. ‘Deceased’ is sibilant. It gives off a double hiss like escaping gas. Not euphonious, George. It sounds neuter. It’s a horrible word. Divorce it.

And remember: so far as most people are concerned, a deceased, inanimate as it may be, is still a person, whose care is a sacred task.

That’s all I’ve time for. Before I go, a quick reminder. When you’ve got positive and reassuring messages you’d like to pass on to funeral shoppers, do let us know. We really want to get behind you.

With all best wishes,

Charles

PS You’ll have picked up that there is a great deal of talk these days about funeral poverty, and you know that more and more people are finding it difficult to pay for a funeral. I’m sure you will have been inspired by the example of your sister Canadian funeral co-ops: ‘the average cost of a funeral in Canada in 2004 was CAD$6,325, while the average cost of a cooperative funeral was $3,677.’ It puts one in mind of one of the core principles of the Rochdale Pioneers: to enable working people to buy that which they would not otherwise be able to afford.

Dark ops or what?

17 July 2012
Charles
33 Comments
Categories: Coroners, funeral directors

We’ve had a lot of correspondence here at the GFG since Dispatches flung that stuff about Co-operative Funeralcare in our eye (5 mins of telly souffléd into half an hour with a dollop of unleavened ombudsman).

It’s been complaints, mostly, and of course I can’t go into detail about any of them. But almost all of them  illustrate systemic problems in the funeral industry.

One of those problem areas is the conduct of funeral directors who hold a local authority contract for coroners’ removals.

The specific problem here is the way these contracts work. They are often awarded to a funeral director who pitches below the viable commercial rate for the job. The protocol that contracted funeral directors must observe, often, is that they must not solicit for business but they may leave a business card with the family.

Which looks a bit like soliciting for business, yes?

More important, how do councils suppose that undertakers carrying out removals at a loss are going to make it pay? Isn’t there only one way they can make it pay?

How much oversight is there? Do procurement officers ever get out to check up on their contracted undertakers?

Does a failure to find out how contracted undertakers make it pay amount to tacit collusion in questionable practice? We’re not suggesting that council officers are getting backhanders.

How could an undertaker who keeps to the rules hope to win one of these contracts, and why would she want to?

We don’t know the answers to any of these questions, nor do we want to jump to conclusions before getting all the facts. We rely on you to fill us in, if you would be so kind.

What’s it all about?

The changing face of Irish funerals

17 July 2012
Charles
3 Comments
Categories: funeral directors, funerals in other cultures, Religious funerals

By Richard Rawlinson

Dublin undertaker Massey Brothers is responding to the changing attitude to religion in Ireland by offering families non-denominational funerals, online advice and motorbike hearses.

While these initiatives may no longer be especially novel in Britain, they’re causing a bit of a stir in Ireland’s conservative, competitive and often quite unsophisticated funeral industry. There are 600 funeral directors in the country serving some 28,000 bereaved families a year, 84% of whom called themselves Catholic in the 2012 census. The industry remains unregulated, most businesses are part-time, and fewer than 200 are members of the IAFD. There are also reports of some undertakers bribing hospital and hospice staff to recommend their services.

Massey Brothers is introducing bespoke funerals after observing that even the nature of church funerals has changed, with evening removals (the deceased’s overnight stay in the church) becoming far less common.

With more undertakers now having websites, competition over price, service and transparency is hotting up. Undertakers can visit rip.ie each week and see how many funerals were organised by rival firms. Then there’s legacy.ie, a website offering non-religious funerals where packages (limo, coffin, notice in the newspaper etc) can be booked entirely online. Its Direct Funeral package (removal straight to the cemetery/crematorium) starts at €890.

Meanwhile, the healing process in the Church following the abuse scandals remains slow and painful. The mood has often changed from sycophancy to hatred, and some worried faithful express concern that the crisis is choking the life out of their parish life because the many good priests are now hiding for fear of an abuse claim.

While lamenting the vile predilections of abuser priests and the cover-ups, many faithful are offering priests encouragement by saying how inappropriate it is for the innocent to be constantly saying sorry for heinous crimes that they personally did not commit.

Ireland has experienced two extremes: fawning over priests and now the acceptable abuse of priests. The answer is in the middle: the rediscovery that the highest role of the priest is not to be a status symbol for an Irish family (‘the parish priest sat with me during morning tea, so I’m the more important person in the village’). But the priest is the person who goes into Persona Christi, standing in the place of Christ so he may offer the Eucharist.