Attitudes to dead bodies

Bringing death to life

15 December 2010
Charles
6 Comments
Categories: Attitudes to dead bodies, Attitudes to death, crematoria

Like you, I haven’t a clue what this ‘ere Big Society is all about. They say, I think, that it’s all about empowerment. It sounds more like the government walking off the job. It certainly means less of everything and of course it’s entirely like politicians to try and kid us that less = more.

Wha’ever. If there’s an upside it is that publicly funded outfits are being creative, looking for new revenue streams. And it seems that, according to blogger Dizzy, Canon’s High School in Edgware is hiring out its hall at weekends for funerals. I can’t find any corroboration of this. According to Dizzy “This has meant some kids have witnessed the coffin, people in black and all that goes with funerals.” He concludes: “Not an image that many parents may want their kids witnessing you’d think.”

It’s a customary and not unboring response. The presence of a corpse in a room has been shown to lower air temperature by ten degrees centigrade for at least six months; to induce poltergeist activity; to infect children with melancholia, nightmares and religious mania; and, worst of all, to impact on teaching and learning, causing a school to miss its targets by miles.

If these cuts can break down the barriers between the bereaved and the ungriefed that will be a beneficial if entirely unplanned spinoff. We need more mortality in the community and less of the prevailing apartheid.

So we may take heart from the prevailing financial plight of our crems, I think, as many of them wonder where the heck they’re going to find the money for new filters or even a fresh coat of paint.

There’s no way they can turn a profit operating as they do, five short days a week (around 40 hours out of a possible 168). They need to up their occupancy. There aren’t enough dead people to do that so they must set out their stall for the living. And what a great venue a crem would be for all sorts of things – lectures, recitals, taiko drumming, ballet classes, birthday parties…

Of course, they’d have to tear up the fixed seating. Hey, and that’s only the start!

Two o’clock in the morning

13 December 2010
Charles
5 Comments
Categories: Attitudes to dead bodies

Seventy per cent of us want to die at home, surveys tell us.

Probably ninety-eight percent of us, having cared like mad for a dying person, want the corpse out of the house as soon as possible no matter what time of day or night.

I don’t get it. Why the hurry?

Endgame

9 December 2010
Charles
6 Comments
Categories: Attitudes to dead bodies, Attitudes to death, funeral plans, Plan your own funeral, pre-need plans, Secular approaches to death

Interesting, isn’t it, how myopically self-absorbed people become when glancing forward to their demise. “Stick me in a binbag and put me out with the rubbish,” they say, men mostly. It’s right up there now in the top ten death clichés alongside “He’s gone to a better place,” “It’s only a shell,” and “She will be missed” – that passive verb really bugs me. (Do people really say to the parents of a dead child “You can always have another one”?)

Ask people who want to be bagged and binned if that would be good enough for their closest family members and the tune changes bigtime. But it doesn’t change the way they feel about themselves. “Nope, stick me in a binbag,” they conclude with ne’er a thought for the feelings of those charged with the bagging and binning.

Some of these people have made wills. It’s not as if they’ve completely suspended all consideration for others. And you can see why they might feel this way. It’s an existential chess move. Reaper G negates you: you negate him. Neat. Where grave thy victory?

Except that it’s not actually a plan, it’s just braggadocio. Hot air.

You could argue that we’ve become so individualistic, so narcissistic, that we have no interest in making plans for any party we shan’t be able to attend, but I think that’s wide of the mark.

The point is that this zero sum approach to corpse disposal is stupidly unhelpful. This is something you can only plan in collaboration with, and in deference to, those closest to you because, dammit, they’re the ones who are going to be lumbered with your deadweight. If ever there’s an event which requires us urgently and sensitively to give precedence to the feelings of others, this is it.

Why do our funeral plan designers not stress this? Well, it would complicate things, wouldn’t it? It would mean that people would have to talk about it, which they wouldn’t, the plan would never get written, nor (here’s the point) the accompanying cheque.

Over in the US, where they’re ahead of us in funeral trends, Funeralwise.com, a funeral planning website, has just published a survey which reveals that a startling 31 per cent of Americans don’t want a funeral (a figure that rises to 37 per cent for the over 75s). Bad news for undertakers, perhaps. Far worse news for families. As Funeralwise.com co-founder Larry Anspach rightly points out: “At the very least, families need to discuss their funeral preferences. Its okay to not want a funeral, but have you considered the impact on family and friends?”

See the full results of the Funeralwise.com survey here.

The sacred and the propane

24 November 2010
Charles
13 Comments
Categories: alternative funerals, Attitudes to dead bodies, Attitudes to death, burial, cremation, funeral customs, Religious funerals

It was a deepseated thing, this duty we felt we owed our dead. A sacred duty – literally. It goes back to the beginning of time. Throughout human history the dead body has always been treated in accordance with sacred diktat, its valedictory hullabaloos performed by shaman or sorcerer, soothsayer or priest. For the full extent of human memory the bodies of the dead have been disposed of in places held sacred – demarcated patches of ground, rivers.

We’re getting much too evolved for all that rannygazoo and mystery-making juju now. Too sensible, too pragmatic. Oh yes, we can see a dead body for what it is. A dead body. A waste disposal matter after it’s had its corneas and other useful stuff taken out. The growth of cremation may well have hastened this thinking. Brutal. Rapid. Get your head around that and you’ll get your head around anything.

Well, that’s one way of looking at it. It’s the way of unemployed librarian and blogger Amy Campbell in the US.

It set me thinking. We don’t yet dispose of our dead by direct cremation as they increasingly do in the States. But what of our secular rituals, the ones performed by those possessed of no shamanic attributes – everyday unsanctified civvies like our own dear Gloriamundi? Are these ceremonies mere sentimental vestiges ripe for replacement by less formal, body-free celebrations of memory in restaurants, at tea parties, on picnics, over a couple of beers?

I wonder where we’re going. Take away the sacred and… Does that make all the difference?

If only they knew…

17 November 2010
Charles
5 Comments
Categories: Attitudes to dead bodies, Embalming, funeral directors

There’s a new blog over in the US which describes itself as “a revealing look from beneath the veil of silence. The purpose of this blog is to bring truth to funeral consumers, which is often masked by an industry driven by profits. What makes this site different? The creator is a licensed funeral director & embalmer who, after many years in the profession, became disenchanted with many of the tactics and unethical practices of the industry.”

It probably doesn’t tell any readers of this blog anything they didn’t already know. It’s revealing all the same.

The practice of embalming polarises opinions like nothing else. For all its ungentleness its best practitioners are some of the gentlest and most caring people in the deathcare industry.

In his latest post, the blog’s author, Mark DeSteffan, discusses embalming with the aid of video clips. Well worth reading. But here’s a caution: don’t watch the clips unless you’ve got an especially strong stomach.

How much should funeral consumers know about what goes on in a funeral director’s mortuary? For those who reject embalming, how much do they need to know about how the mouth is closed?

What constitutes informed consent?

Find the Business of Death blog here.

Death is cruel and death is ugly

12 November 2010
Charles
2 Comments
Categories: Art and death, Attitudes to dead bodies, funeral

What happens to the human body when the last spark of life has gone? Most people would probably answer: it is cremated or laid in a coffin to decompose under the ground. However, a closer look reveals this to be a very limited view. For there is in fact a wide range of possibilities between the moment of death and existence as a human skeleton, or a pile of ash.

The Austrian director Andrea Morgenthaler has researched some of these possibilities for her first film made for the cinema, Rest in Peace, and captured them on celluloid together with her cinematographer Enzo Brandner. The result is a highly gripping, entertaining, and sometimes hard-to-bear, documentary about what remains of a human being. [Source]

Check out the film’s website where you’ll find a marvellous slideshow of still images from the film. Here.

Monday shorts

8 November 2010
Charles
2 Comments
Categories: Art and death, Attitudes to dead bodies, Attitudes to death, cemeteries, ceremony, funerals in other cultures, Pauper funerals

Death Ref got there first

Time was when I could tuck a story away for a slow news day and not give a thought to any other death blogger getting there first. Can’t do that any more. The story I had been saving up for today has, I see, already been aired on the excellent Death Reference Desk blog, so I suggest you pop over and read it. It’s a very good blog, DRD, run by brainy people.

Find it here.

Having found it and enjoyed it, test your powers of enjoyment by reading their latest post. Here.

Time to remember

Yup, it’s a mixed bag today. You might like to go over to Dying Matters now and see what they’re saying about Brits and remembrancing:

A survey released today has revealed that three out of four (75%) people in England do not set aside time with friends and family around this time of year to remember loved ones who have died.

Commenting on this Professor Mayur Lakhani, GP, Chair of the Dying Matters Coalition and the National Council for Palliative Care (NCPC), said:

“It is shocking that the vast majority of people in England don’t take time to remember dead loved ones. This is further compelling evidence of the wall of silence our society’s built around dying and death.”

It’s an interesting point, if not well made. Of course Brits set time aside to remember their dead, they just don’t have rituals to accompany their remembrancing, that’s the point. Actually, I’m amazed that as many as one in four do something with friends and family. What do they do, I wonder? They can’t all be grave tenders.

Full survey results here.

Gail’s marathon

I hope you’re keeping up with Gail Rubin over at her blog as she covers 31 funerals in 31 days. I thought at the outset that it would amount to a fascinating and valuable social document and that’s just how it’s panning out. She’s on #10 already.

Start here.

Bear necessities

Here’s a story I’ve been sitting on for far too long. The aftermath of Russia’s long, hot summer has left bears very hungry, it seems. So hungry that they have started wandering into graveyards and eating the tenants. “In Karelia one bear learned how to do it [open a coffin]. He then taught the others,” she added, suggesting: “They are pretty quick learners.”

Find the full story here.

Dark art

Finally, over in Dublin the painter known as Rasher is holding an exhibition entitled Womb to Tomb.

Womb to Tomb shows his darker side, which emerged when his mother Sheila was diagnosed with cancer. She died two years ago at the age of 62. Watching his mother’s health deteriorate caused a shift in his world view. “It made me think about life in a way I hadn’t before. I remember saying to myself, before this, I can’t be a controversial painter because I don’t think that’s who I am but in some ways I’ve been pushed into this.”

The first painting visible in the cramped studio is a huge work called Dead Man’s Bells . The colours, brilliant blues and pinks, and the swirling endless sky is pure Rasher. The skeleton curled in a foetal position underneath the soaring foxglove or Dead Man’s Bells as they are known in America, is something of a departure. “I like the idea that when we go to our tomb we go back into the earth and when we decompose we feed new life, flowers bloom and then bees feed off the pollen and repollinate,” he says. “I find that cycle of life very comforting.”

Just to the right of this is an alarmingly authentic pig’s head with a bunch of flowers in a glass box, a work called Embalm and Calm . Another painting on the wall is a picture of his mother who used to tell him that self-praise was no praise, all the while quietly supporting her son’s dreams. “I probably wouldn’t have had the courage to do it if it wasn’t for my mother’s death because I’d have been afraid what people would think. I don’t care any more, it’s about expressing how I feel.”

Since she died, Rasher has been preoccupied with the ephemeral, the quicksand of life, the “here today, gone tomorrow” of existence. In this exhibition, the beautiful and the rancid sit side by side, like a disgusting perfume presented in exquisite packaging. “I just see beauty and tragedy hand in hand in everything I look at,” he says. “I see flowers and I just think in the next couple of weeks they are going to die. Everything I do now seems to be a reflection of that.”

Full story in the Irish Times here.

 

 

Shovel-and-shoulder work

21 October 2010
Charles
3 Comments
Categories: alternative funerals, Art and death, Attitudes to dead bodies, Attitudes to death, bereavement, ceremony, Children and funerals, DIY funeral, funeral customs, funeral directors, funeral poetry, Good books, green funeral, home funerals, natural burial, shroud

The words that follow are by Thomas Lynch, a hero to so many of us in the UK. (In the US there are those who reckon him paternalistic, but we don’t need to go into that. It’s complicated.)

Funerals are about the living and the dead — the talk and the traffic between them … in the face of mortality we need to stand and look, watch and wonder, listen and remember … This is what we do funerals for — not only to dispose of our dead, but to bear witness to their lives and times among us, to affirm the difference their living and dying makes among kin and community, and to provide a vehicle for the healthy expression of grief and faith, hope and wonder. The value of a funeral proceeds neither from how much we spend nor from how little. A death in the family is an existential event, not only or entirely a medical, emotional, religious or retail one.

“An act of sacred community theater,” Thomas Long calls the funeral — this “transporting” of the dead from this life to the next. “We move them to a further shore. Everyone has a part in this drama.” Long — theologian, writer, thinker and minister — speaks about the need for “a sacred text, sacred community and sacred space,” to process the deaths of “sacred persons.” The dead get to the grave or fire or tomb while the living get to the edge of a life they must learn to live without those loved ones. The transport is ritual, ceremonial, an amalgam of metaphor and reality, image and imagination, process and procession, text and scene set, script and silence, witness and participation — theater, “sacred theater,” indeed.

“Once you put a dead body in the room, you can talk about anything,” Alan Ball [creator of the HBO show Six Feet Under] wrote to me once in a note.

Source

Ghoul, calm and collected

20 October 2010
Charles
3 Comments
Categories: Attitudes to dead bodies, Attitudes to death, Ghosts

For a death-averse people who shut their eyes tight to mortality, the Halloween look is not a good look. But children thrill to it; caring parents wickedly, gigglingly co-conspire.  Much of the imagery is so graphically horrifying I’d have thought it would reduce children (and some adults) to lasting gibbering mental breakdown. But it doesn’t. May we infer that most people do actually have a far more sophisticated and fully assimilated comprehension of death than  they are customarily credited with? And that Halloween teaches children more about death than we think?

If so, you will enjoy this delicious recipe for sugar skulls from the excellent Skull-A-Day.

Really getting real

18 October 2010
Charles
5 Comments
Categories: alternative funerals, Art and death, Attitudes to dead bodies, Attitudes to death, burial depth, funeral reformers, funerals in other cultures, home funerals, natural burial

When Americans decide to do things differently, it seems to me, they make a clean break. Brits, on the other hand, carry over a lot of familiar stuff from the past. I mean, how often does a natural burial ground witness a scene like this?

And which has the courage of its environmental convictions and buries at three feet?

Read the story in the Washington Post.

(Beautiful shrouds available from the UK here.)