bereavement

What hospitals advise the bereaved

24 June 2011
Charles
8 Comments
Categories: bereavement, funeral directors

If dying really is “an awfully big adventure” an NHS hospital seems an unpropitious point of departure. Most of us don’t want to die in one; most of us (58 per cent) will. Most of us think home is the best place. What’s not so well known is that many of those who have cared for a dying person at home are not so sure. Dying sometimes needs expert and attentive supervision.

It is normally evident when a dying person reaches the home straight. Perhaps the great adventure can be said to begin here. Is it an occasion hospital staff rise to? Do they switch to event mode and mark the passage in any particular ritual (okay, procedural) way? You’ll have your own take on that. And let us concede that practicalities may not always permit a fitting playing out of this last momentous phase. Having said which, the abandonment in so many hospitals of last offices, the washing, laying out and shrouding of the dead person, betokens, does it, a regrettable perfunctoriness, a devaluation of the event?

If you’re interested to know what people think of how their dying person was looked after in hospital you’ll want to consider a satisfaction survey conducted by Barts this year. The meat starts at page 16.

What of the info booklet they give you when it’s all over and it’s time to leave? I’ve been having a look at a few. There’s a generic flavour to them, of course, but each hospital trust writes its own. Some sell adverts to undertakers to help foot the printing bill or even make a few bob. Whipp’s Cross does this. So does Croydon.

They like to begin by courteously telling you how sorry they are: “On behalf of the University Hospitals of Leicester NHS Trust (UHL) we extend our sincere sympathy to you and your family at this sad time.” This is known as the impersonal touch.

Inasmuch as the last thing most people plan, when they’re sitting with someone who’s dying, is what they’re going to do with them when they’re dead, they need these booklets. Their world is made new. It is important that the information in them is right (enough and no more) and the tone appropriate.

There are those matters over which the bereaved, at what can feel like a very disempowering time, can exercise no choice. The obligatory bureaucratic stuff – registration, in particular. And post-mortem procedures.The instructions need to be clear and accurate. Layout and vocabulary are key. The booklets I have seen do this pretty well, though not enough tell people that they can attend a post-mortem or appoint a representative.

Then there are those matters over which a bereaved person can exercise choice. The care of the body for example. The first right they should be made aware of is that their dead person belongs to them. So it is disappointing to see so many hospitals issuing this instruction: “Following the death of a relative or friend in hospital … You will need to contact a funeral director.” [Leicester] Oh no you won’t. You can lift Nan from her deathbed and take her home now, if you want. The booklet goes on: “If you have any difficulties, the National Association of Funeral Directors will be able to advise you.” As indeed it might if the NAFD represented all funeral directors.

No booklet I have seen tells you that you don’t have to have a farewell ceremony – a funeral. All suppose that funeral directors are the best people to advise about them. They’re not, of course, because the provision of a funeral is more often than not a separate, specialist service. None of these booklets serve secularists by listing secular celebrants.

But they customarily offer this comforting information: “The Hospital Chaplains are available to talk with you if required, and the Hospital Chapel is open at any hour.” [Plymouth]

The best booklet by far is by Marie Curie Cancer Care. It is clearly written, informative and above all empowering – a really fine piece of work. And then I got to the end and discovered that a significant input had been made by John Bradfield, pioneer natural burier and tenacious campaigner for consumer rights. No surprises, then. The only bone I’d pick is that it assumes that everyone wants to have a funeral. They don’t. I suspect that if more people knew they didn’t have to have one they’d say no.

Bereaved people are only well advised when they are told what their statutory obligations are and what their statutory rights are. It seems to me that the writers of these advice booklets are very much better informed about the former than the latter.

Any views?

The Dead – Billy Collins

3 February 2011
Charles
8 Comments
Categories: Art and death, Attitudes to death, bereavement, Grief, Immortality, Memorialising

The Dead

The dead are always looking down on us, they say,
while we are putting on our shoes or making a sandwich,
they are looking down through the glass-bottom boats of heaven
as they row themselves slowly through eternity.

They watch the tops of our heads moving below on earth,
and buy discount cialis when we lie down in a field or on a couch,
drugged perhaps by the hum of a warm afternoon,
they think we are looking back at them,

which makes them lift their oars and fall silent
and wait, like parents, for us to close our eyes.

DADBA

18 January 2011
Charles
9 Comments
Categories: bereavement, Books, funeral, Grief

There’s a nicely written piece over at Obit magazine, a review of a new book, The Truth About Grief: The Myth of Its Five Stages and the New Science of Loss (Simon & Schuster), by Ruth Davis Konigsberg. It’s probably worth reading.

It’s a demolition job on certain schools of bereavement counselling — those informed by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’s On Death and Dying. I don’t know how prevalent it is in the UK now, the orthodoxy that bereaved people must, under the supervision of a well-meaning person who’s been on a course, be taken on a journey through the Famous Five Stages — possibly stage by stage to a strict timetable. Denial. Anger. Depression. Bargaining. Acceptance.

With acceptance, of course, comes closure, as the bereaved person finally ejects the dead person, wiggles her tail and swims happily away to join all the other carefree fishes. Something like that. (How I wish we could put WTF in tiny caps after a word, as we put TM after a brand name. Closure WTF)

If it misses the point bigtime, why should we be surprised? Kubler Ross was writing about the emotions a dying person might go through, not a bereaved one. And I don’t remember her prescribing the full five in the right order.

“When 233 people were interviewed [by Yale University researchers] between one to 24 months after the death of a spouse, most respondents accepted the death of a loved one from the very beginning.” I seem to recall that studies of those bereaved by the 911 attacks revealed that counselling had prolonged the grief of many of those unlucky enough to receive it; those who had none did best.

While I was researching my book I spoke to someone at Cruse who fielded this question: Have you done any research to discover whether a good funeral can be transformative of grief? (Ans: We’ve never thought of that.)

I am sure there are good things going on in the bereavement sector and I hope someone will tell us what they are. Counsellors take a bit of a bashing from sceptics (until they themselves need counselling).

The aloneness of the bereaved

4 November 2010
Charles
No comments
Categories: bereavement, Grief

I was struck by this post by a blogger in Canada concerning the aloneness of the bereaved. In this case, it’s Helmut Schmidt, former Chancellor of Germany, at the funeral of his wife of 64 years, Loki. She died on 21 October aged 91. The funeral was on 1 November.

No going back

4 November 2010
Charles
4 Comments
Categories: Attitudes to death, bereavement, ceremony, funeral photography, memorialisation

That modern death has failed to find its place on the continuum of ordinary life events is something we all recognise and more or less vehemently deplore. For most a funeral is a hermetically sealed, isolated (or devastated) worst-day-of-my-life episode rarely to be recalled, and only then with a shudder. We quarantine the bereaved and shoo them into the care of weird race of cool-blooded expatriates from another planet. Truly, a funeral is a para-normal and intensely private event with more than a touch of the hugger-mugger about it.

Feelings like this are echoed by a recently widowed blogger in Wales: “I found myself standing on stage introducing the Master of Ceremonies for the event – who was none other than the funeral director who buried R.

This situation was made all the more weird by the fact that he was wearing jeans and T-shirt, rather than his sombre funeral garb, sang in a rather excellent tenor voice and told a lot of slightly risqué jokes over the course of the evening. I am not sure what I expected a funeral director to do in his spare time, but it certainly wasn’t this.

But it didn’t end there. The other team performing this evening was led by the couple who own R’s burial field. They are lovely people, and made sure I was OK, but it was all very peculiar, standing there having a post-performance glass of wine with them.”

This being how it is, it was no surprise that there was so much media excitement yesterday about a brand new funeral photography enterprise, Funeography. The sub-text was Why on EARTH would anybody want a funeral commemorated with weepy snaps?

It’s a reasonable position, things being as they are, to take. I’ve just spoken to David at In Our Hearts Images in Lincolnshire. He and his partner Esther have been going for six months now and they’ve not exactly had the world beating a path to their door. For Esther this has been an insight into the Brit way of death. In Holland, where she comes from, they do it all the time. Until yesterday they were one of only three businesses in the UK offering the service.

If you’ve created something wonderful, that you’re proud of, you want to revisit it and share it. The only way to do that is to document it.

Laurel Catts in Sydney, Australia, is extremely proud of the send-off she gave for her son David. The funeral was filmed and posted on Vimeo. I posted it on this blog. Laurel emailed me this morning:  “David was the most incredible person and we wanted the funeral to reflect his wonderful personality and generosity of spirit.  Hence, I am so pleased that you thought the funeral service was a great and very moving send-off.” It was wonderful, wasn’t it? We wouldn’t have missed it for anything. Thank you, Laurel, for sharing it. You show us the way.

WARNING! This blog is about to transmigrate and inhabit a new server. The process of reincarnation may take a couple of days of suspended animation, but reborn we shall be. I can’t guarantee that the new flesh we put on will be incorruptible; indeed, it will probably look dispiritingly like the old. See you after the resurrection!

Eulogy rides again!

1 November 2010
Charles
6 Comments
Categories: bereavement, eulogy

Reports of the death of Eulogy magazine are exaggerated. A little while ago I was rung by its genial editor, Alfred Tong, and informed that the second issue would be available online only. It’s out now, and includes among all sorts of things a sprightly piece by Julian Litten on his preference for burial.

Find it 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

The only way round is through

6 October 2010
Charles
10 Comments
Categories: Attitudes to death, bereavement, Co-operative Funeralcare, Dead people's rights, Death; Good death, funeral directors, Plan your own funeral

Once upon a time people dreaded dying. They couldn’t be sure it would be painless. They dreaded being dead, too. Some feared the unknown. Others lamented the end of their existence.

A very few people had no fear whatever of being dead because they trusted in a joy-drenched afterlife. But even these people dreaded dying.

Death was a big deal.

In those days, people affected by the death of someone were called ‘the bereaved’. They experienced grief. Even people who were certain that their dead person had gone to paradise were sad because they missed them. So funerals were sad occasions. There was no way round this. It was because everyone was sad.

Because dying could be such a horrible thing, people didn’t talk about it. When they were dead, this made life difficult for everyone. The undertaker would gently say to the bereaved, “What do you want to do?” and the bereaved would reply, “What she would have wanted.” The undertaker would gently ask, “What was it she wanted?” and the bereaved would reply, “We don’t know.”

The pre-need funeral plan people gazed sadly at their unsold pre-need funeral plans and said, “What hope for us when everyone’s in denial?”

People who know what’s best for people saw that what death needed was an image makeover. “It’s not so bad when you talk about it,” they said. And they had a point – up to a point. “It has been said,” they said, “that what we fear most about dying is the associated loss of control. By empowering patients to express their wishes, that control can be restored.” “Does it bollocks,” said the people with neurodegenerative diseases.

The pre-need funeral plan people proved, with smoke and mirrors, that grief can be bypassed by partying. And because no one wants anyone to be sad when they die, everyone flocked to buy their very own pre-need, knees-up party plan.

So now when relicts go to the undertaker, the undertaker says, “Hello.” And the relicts say, “What’s next?” And the undertaker says, “This, this is what’s next. This is what you’ll do, this is what you’ll wear, this is what you’ll listen to, this is how you’ll feel. It’s all laid down and it’s all paid up.”

And the relicts say, “Sorry, we feel too sad, we miss her.” Or, “Are you joking, mate? We couldn’t stand him.”

And Death says, “Right. You’ll do it my way.”

Site I like

21 September 2010
Charles
No comments
Categories: alternative funerals, Attitudes to death, bereavement, DIY funeral, funeral cost, funeral customs, funeral trends, memorialisation

There’s interesting work going on over in Boston, Massachusetts. Two women, Ruth Faas and Sue Cross, offer a range of services to the bereaved. They have a reading room where people can sit in comfort and find out about death and dying. They offer advice and contacts to those wanting a green or self-managed funeral. And they have  an art studio where people can come and make something commemorative, or simply work through their emotions.

Have a look for yourself here.

(Hat-tip to The Modern Mourner for this link)