Books

Funnybones

28 October 2011
Charles
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Categories: Art and death, Attitudes to dead bodies, Books, Ossuary

Posted by Vale

What is it with this fascination with bones and skeletons?

Faced with a pile of them and one man plasters into the walls and cornices, another creates chandeliers and shields while elsewhere anonymous skulls are given names, cleaned, polished and even appealed to for information.

Bones seem to be the acceptable face of death. Tangible reminders of course; a frisson of the macabre certainly, but once the Yorick lesson has been learned –  you might think there would be little more to add.

Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow
of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy: he hath
borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how
abhorred in my imagination it is! my gorge rims at
it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know
not how oft. Where be your gibes now? your
gambols? your songs? your flashes of merriment,
that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one
now, to mock your own grinning? quite chap-fallen?
Now get you to my lady’s chamber, and tell her, let
her paint an inch thick, to this favour she must
come; make her laugh at that.

Except that there always is. Faye Dowling has published a wonderful Book of Skulls that, through images, explores our continuing fascination:

And, for the ossuary lovers, Thames and Hudson are publishing Empire of Death.

It brings together the world’s most important charnel sites, ranging from the crypts of the Capuchin monasteries in Italy and the skull-encrusted columns of the ossuary in Évora in Portugal, to the strange tomb of a 1960s wealthy Peruvian nobleman decorated with the exhumed skeletons of his Spanish ancestors.

And our old friend St Pancras is on the cover too.

Square Pegs in Round Holes

4 October 2011
Charles
8 Comments
Categories: Books, funeral directors

 

Posted by Charles

Love him or hate him, Barry Albin-Dyer is Britain’s only celebrity undertaker. Love it or hate it, he’s written another book.

It’s called Square Pegs in Round Holes. It’ll appeal to fellow undertakers up and down the country because it promises to reveal the secrets of his enviable business success. But its lessons are not exclusive to Dismal Traders. Barry’s Way may (or may not) be appealing to all manner of entrepreneurial people.

He’s nothing if not ambitious: “From the outset, my goal was to make Albin’s the best funeral business in the world. I’d like to think I’ve done that.” Undertakers hoping to pick up a trick or two are likely to be disappointed. Albin-Dyer does not go into operational detail. But two essential characteristics of a successful undertaker which are abundantly personified by Albin-Dyer were accurately detected when he was at school. His headmaster observed: “He undoubtedly possesses considerable aplomb and a great capacity for organisation.” Spot on. He’s a high-functioning showman. All the best undertakers are.

Much of Albin-Dyer’s recipe for success is orthodox enough – homespun, even. He’s a down-to-earth man, rooted in his beloved Bermondsey. He loves to make a difference and he loves to put something back. I don’t doubt for a moment that he is one of life’s nice guys. For him, there is a high moral value in honest, hard work. He believes that a business must have an ethos; he calls this ‘the goodness’.

As a boss he comes across as a hands-on benevolent despot. Each day begins with a staff breakfast for information sharing and team building. There’s even a 5-a-side football team. Everyone’s bonded and very disciplined. And you never know where Barry’s going to pop up next. There’s nothing radical about the way he does things, but there’s plenty of thoroughness. And buzz, too. His would seem to be a small business of the very best and most vibrant sort.

He is aware of the importance of embracing change – and of putting the business into the hands of his two sons before he gets too old to change. Well, nothing changes all that fast in the funeral industry, so there’s little challenge here; the changes he identifies in the course of his working life hardly made the earth move. He can’t see a future for an online planning service. He may be wrong about that. I’m not sure that his use of a call centre serves the cause of personal service.

Albin-Dyer has lived through interesting times which must have exposed him to temptations to go really big. The conclusion he has drawn from the activities of the consolidators, from Howard Hodgson and SCI through to present day operations like Dignity, Co-op, Laurel Management, Funeral Services partnership et al, is that they don’t work: “Large funeral companies spread themselves too thinly and aren’t able to provide the kind of personal service that small companies like us can.” He doesn’t want to lose ‘the goodness’. I wonder if he’s right about this. Sure, the present crop of consolidators gets things serially wrong. Dignity is the brand that dare not speak its name, and the others are little better. Funeralcare’s trying a little harder. But our shopping malls are full of admired brands. There’s no reason why funeral directing should be any different. There remains much opportunity for a successful operator, in my view. I mean, if John Lewis did funerals…

Albin-Dyer steers clear of philosophy. He doesn’t talk about how funerals can be experiences which are transformative of grief. No Thomas Lynch, he; if he broods on these things, he doesn’t brood on them in this book. Not only does he exemplify the near-universal separation between undertaker and ceremony maker, he asserts that the two have nothing to say to each other: “I know that there are clearly defined boundaries between my role and the role of the priest or vicar. And I make sure that neither I nor any of my staff ever step across it.”

No mention of secular celebrants and the changes they are bringing to the way we do funerals. No thoughts about the opportunities for creative collaboration with ceremony makers of all stripes, and joining up this great disconnect between the cortege and the ceremony. That’s an eyebrow-raising oversight. Don’t get left behind, Barry.

Buy Square Pegs in Round Holes here. 

Sob stories

25 August 2011
Charles
4 Comments
Categories: Art and death, bereavement, Books, Grief

Posted by Charles

The misery memoir – awful childhood, frightful beatings, Oliver Twist never had it so good, that sort of stuff, ooh – has, it seems run its course. The torment vultures have flown the well-picked corpse and are now feasting on bereavement. 

I’ve been aware of growth of this new genre and largely ignored it, mostly, I expect, because I am not presently freshly bereaved.  I think I feel very much as Bill Morris does in this very good article: “Is it mere voyeurism, or schadenfreude?  Or is something closer to empathy – a way of preparing ourselves for the unthinkable by witnessing the suffering of another?” I think he might have added that it can be very useful to hang out with others who are going through the same as you.  I’ve nothing against the genre in principle.  The biggest sob-buster out there now, in case you’re interested, is Joan Didion’s Year of Magical Thinking.  Everybody wants to be the next Joan Didion. 

Then I read an article about the grief memoir in the Guardian. It’s written by Frances Stonor Saunders. Ever come across her? Let me tell you, she’s seriously brilliant. Here are some of the things she says: 

“We know that extreme physical pain drives out language,” Julian Barnes writes in Nothing to be Frightened Of, but “it’s dispiriting to learn that mental pain does the same.”  … If grief drives out language, how can language be pressed into its service? How can the writer orient disorientation?  

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, founder of the modern grief movement (she gave us the “Five Stages of Grief” theory), insisted that “Telling your story often and in detail is primal to the grieving process. You must get it out. Grief must be witnessed to be healed.” This instruction comes straight out of the principle of catharsis, but there is little evidence to support its efficacy over other, possibly more reticent, ways of grieving. Barnes calls it the “therapeuto-autobiographical fallacy” – writing doesn’t help, he testifies gloomily, your suffering is not alleviated. 

Saunders surveys the field with a scholarly, wry eye. You have read it all. 

She also bequeaths us an excellent anecdote. Kerry Packer, recovering from a near-fatal heart attack, whispered to his sons: “I’ve been to the other side, and there’s fuck all there.” 

Read the entire Saunders article here. 

A Good Goodbye

26 January 2011
Charles
15 Comments
Categories: Books

“Sometimes the best way to move recalcitrant parents or spouses along on preplanning [for death and its aftermath] is to make your own arrangements first. That’s what my husband and I did, telling his parents we were going cemetery plot shopping and asking if they wanted to come along. They came, they saw, they bought, and it was easy.”

That’s a taster from Gail Rubin’s book A Good Goodbye, which she subtitles Funeral Planning for Those Who Don’t Plan to Die. Gail is an event planner, breast cancer survivor and onetime journalist – three great qualifications for writing a guidebook to end of life issues. Add a fourth. Gail is Jewish. We have a lot to learn from Jewish funeral customs [more here]. Jews espouse simplicity. They take responsibility for preparing the body. They are better at commemoration.

Much of Gail’s book, sad to say, is not relevant to British funeral consumers because our funerary traditions are so dissimilar. Much of what she has to say about aftermath management, working with a funeral home and dealing with a cemetery simply don’t apply to us. It’s a sadness I had to share with my own publisher a while back, anxious as they were to pitch for sales of the GFG in the US. Sorry, we do things differently. In addition to all the obvious differences there’s the matter of time. Gail warns her readers that they will have between 24 and 72 hours to arrange a funeral. Here in the UK we give it much longer – 10 days, a fortnight; at this time of the year even three weeks, so busy are our crems. It makes all the difference.

But I hope nonetheless that people over here will consider buying this book because it contains inspiring and instructive elements – many of them, yes, Jewish. I hope, too, that anyone considering writing a guide book to end of life terrain will use it as a model. My own guide to the terrain was fairly described by the Church Times as “not for the faint-hearted”. It needs to be joined by others whose tone is better suited to those many who don’t like the way I do it. Gail is a very humane and companionable writer, she has a deceptively light touch, a gentle sense of humour, and she shares a lot of her own experience with us. For people who contemplate death from behind the sofa, she’s a great fear disperser.

Let me share just three highlights of Gail’s book.

The first is the ethical will. This is a tradition “fostered in Judaism. When adults reach the age of fifty, they are considered elders of the congregation who have enough life experiences to be able to dispense words of wisdom.” Gail suggests writing down what you think important – everything from a statement of values to family stories and your favourite joke. Its value will be lasting – and it will be useful to quote from at your funeral.

The second and third concern commemoration. This is something we do incredibly badly in Britain. Typically, a family group will go down to the crem on the anniversary of a death and contemplate the little plaque (on a plaque-filled wall) which bears the name of their dead person. Or they might go and gaze at their rosebush. Or sit on their bench. Gail proposes lighting a 24-hour remembrance candle. “I put a picture on my kitchen table, and light a twenty-four-hour candle next to it the evening before. For that day, I imagine that particular grandparent sitting in with my husband and me as we go about our day.”

Gail’s third great commemoration suggestion is a shrine. Something we just don’t do over here. Or do we? We do shrines out of doors, when we come to think of it, at places where young men drive very fast into trees. Yes, we do shrines, we just don’t do them indoors, and the reason why we don’t is because we have a huge cultural hangup about doing grief privately and undemonstratively. It’s all part of the Protestant death ethic, which we are vigorously shaking off. If we now find no difficulty in creating shrines to people who die tragically out of doors, and don’t find them mawkish (maybe you do), I see no reason why a great many people should not find consolation in having one indoors for anyone, no matter how they died. Gail suggests: “Elements of a personal family shrine can include cremated remains, photos of the deceased, and objects associated with those who have died. The placement of the shrine can be on a shelf, a tabletop, a mantle, a niche, or any place that can serve as a visual focus.”

Gail Rubin blogs at The Family Plot. She recently attended and reported on 30 funerals in 30 days. You can buy her book at Amazon.

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).

Wish me luck as you wave me goodbye

5 January 2011
Charles
8 Comments
Categories: Books, celebrants, ceremony, Dead people's rights, End-of-life issues, Formality vs informality, funeral plans, Good books, Plan your own funeral

Me and the missus are getting down to some serious death planning. There’s no best time of life for doing this, of course, so long as you get it done afore ye croak. And the more I think about it, the more clearly I can see that it’s not an activity whose end result is, phew, done it. No, I think that once you start you need to, want to, keep at it, continuously revising, adding, elaborating. Which is why I’d now have all children start making death plans at the age of 8, and do something useful in their PSHE lessons. When’s too soon to introduce Mortality to the curriculum?

The process is going to be interesting and tedious. We are impelled by necessity mostly, of course, or thoughtfulness to put a positive spin on it: we don’t want to be remembered by higgledepiggledness and fly-blown filing systems. So there are the who-gets-what decisions to make, the legal stuff, and also the horrible physical phase towards the end to strategise – the advance decision to refuse treatment, powers of attorney, then, when we’re done, organs, tissues and carcass disposal. And that’s not all.

Our relicts will want to commemorate us, we reckon, in their own way, and we shall encourage them to think about the myriad ways they can do that, giving not a fig for convention. I really don’t know that any of those ‘what he/she would have wanted’ considerations apply when you’re dead, bar the religious/superstitious ones, and we don’t have any of those.

So we’ll leave it to our relicts to decide if they want or need to have funerals for us. That’ll probably depend a lot on the nature and duration of our separate demises and how they feel about us after we’ve been wheeled away with a sheet over our heads – a matter, for us, of just deserts.

What, after all, is the value of a formal secular funeral shorn of all theological rationale? It is but a symbolic farewell event and also a commemorative event. Well, there are lots of ways of saying a one-off last goodbye, just as there are uncountable ways of commemorating someone. In any case, commemoration is ongoing, lifelong, both solitary and communal. It is about contemplation and recollection with added celebration or denunciation. We start doing that when people who mean something to us are still alive. When they’re dead it’s the type and degree of missing that makes all the difference – or the type and degree of animosity.

It’s a tendency of secular funerals to try to get too much done. Done, I suspect, and dusted. Some funerals resemble holiday suitcases, bulging, straining at the zip, bursting with biography and favourite tunes. Secular funerals are best when they’re not busy, when they’re not trying to get everything tidily, comprehensively bundled; when they’re reflective and contemplative and touch on the essence of somebody. Most of them need to leave more out.

Having in mind that when the history of the world is written neither my wife nor I will get a mention, not even in a footnote, we don’t feel a great debt to posterity. It’ll be nice, though, to leave behind letters to people. Nice and necessary.

Where my two nieces are concerned my exemplar is going to be Richard Hoggart’s Memoir for our Grandchildren, published in Between Two Worlds. It’s not a grandiloquent memoir. Far from it. It is an account by a working class orphan of those members of his family that he knew in childhood. It’s family history. It tells his grandchildren where and who they came from – it’s genetic geography. And it’s important, because what we learn about blood relatives tells us a lot about ourselves and it’s necessary knowledge, as any adopted person will attest. Hoggart writes beautifully in a plain, objective style and I recommend this book to you.

Hoggart writes formally and chronologically. This morning I stumbled on a less formal sort of memoir, the nang seu ngam sop. Nang seu ngam sop? The traditional Thai funeral ceremony book. In the words of the Wall Street Journal:

In Thai funeral tradition, books about the deceased are printed and distributed to people who come to pay their respects. Some are thin pamphlets, others, large volumes. The practice, mostly for those in the middle or upper classes, gained popularity in the 1880s and reached its peak in the mid 1900s. Within its pages are poems, personal writings — and recipes.

I really like the idea of this sort of ragbag miscellany. A fine commemorative and biographical item easily bashed out on a home printer. Greatly to be preferred to the sound of a celebrant revving up to 180 words a minute then blurting “XXXX was born on…”

Parish notices

11 October 2010
Charles
3 Comments
Categories: alternative funerals, Art and death, Attitudes to death, Books, green funeral, natural burial, Plan your own funeral

First, an event, Dying to Live.

It is organised by Archa Robinson at Living and Dying Consciously and is billed as: Suitable for anyone facing death in the next 90 yrs… a reflective, meditative, poignant, life changing and fun weekend !

Here’s more:

We live in a society conditioned to deny death. It’s a taboo subject and is often seen as a failure or at best ‘unfortunate’. We live as if we live forever, ignoring the truth of change and impermanence. Yet the acknowledgement of them holds the key to life itself. To be truly

conscious in our lives and present to each moment means to ‘let-go’—to die to the last moment and open to the next—to live and die consciously, moment to moment. Death is the ultimate ‘let-go’. From the moment of our birth our bodies are dying, so the more we face the fears of our own death the more we are able to love and celebrate our lives now.

We will use image-making, meditation, writing and other experiential ways  of exploring these themes   To support participants on their own inner journey they  will be asked to stay in silence during the workshop.

Venue: Boswedden House, Cornwall.

Dates: 12, 13 & 14 November.

Cost: £125, with an early bird fee of just £95 if you book before 22 Oct. B & B available at £96 for 3 nighsts; £70 for two. Sounds like terrific value!

Further information and booking here.

Boswedden House

Second, a survey conducted by Jean Francis, author of Time to Go and one of the team at ARKA Original Funerals.

Jean conducts workshops on funeral planning and would love you to respond to a survey she is conducting into the importance people place on environmental considerations when planning a funeral. It’ll take you less than five minutes (I know, I’ve done it myself). You’ll find it here.

Holiday reading

15 February 2010
Charles
No comments
Categories: Books

This blog is going on holiday for a week to enjoy fresh sea breezes, long walks and real beers in real pubs. Pubs! The highest proof of the existence of God!

I shall of course be packing some holiday reading, none of it death related though, as we know, Reaper G does have an importunate way of pooping most everything.

I shall also be asking Amazon to send me two books and, were I you (I know, I know, the record shows clearly that I am not), I’d be seriously considering doing the same.

What are they?

First up, Thomas Lynch’s latest. Apparitions and Late Fiction. Read a review here and another here. Now buy it.

Second up: How the World is Made by John Michell. This is the work he was desperate to finish before the cancer did for him last year. Beautiful man, beautiful mind. Buy, buy, buy!

Bye. See you all next Monday.