burial at sea

As you get older your friends start to die.

14 August 2012
Charles
3 Comments
Categories: ashes, burial at sea, ceremony

Posted by Sue Gill

We’ve been to some truly awful funerals and I’m sure we’re not alone in that. Sometimes the ceremonies were healing, but more often they were formulaic and irrelevant, and we left feeling sometimes angry, sometimes guilty, frequently in despair.

That’s what compelled us to write the Dead Good Funerals Book, to offer a no-nonsense yet respectful view of what an inspiring funeral ceremony might be. A guide for someone faced with arranging a funeral for the first time. To start with we unpick a traditional funeral and show how it is stuck in the Victorian mode. We spell out how much we can do away with and still be legal and dignified, to leave space to create a funeral that is personal and distinctive.

I get asked, therefore, what plans do I have for my own funeral.

I don’t feel I am at the prescriptive stage yet, but now we live in the Beach House – a wooden house on stilts directly above the shoreline of Morecambe Bay – I have become increasingly aware of the weather and tides, the extensive horizon, and this has had a major effect on me. At the moment I feel I would like my ashes to be dispersed into the vast expanse of this bay, probably using an urn that dissolves in seawater, which could be placed way out on the bed of the sea at low tide.

I imagine people walking out at low tide and holding a service or ceremony of farewell out there. My grandkids would doubtless build something or make a garden from what they had picked up on the way out – shells, feathers, sticks and stones – to decorate the space for the urn to be placed in. Live music too from the Fox Family Band – that would be a last request Once they had walked back to shore and the tide had turned, within an hour the urn would have dissolved and off I would go.

A text that really resonates for me is from John F. Kennedy’s book The Sea which he wrote in 1962:  ‘ I really don’t know why it is that all of us are so committed to the sea. I think it’s because we all came from the sea. It is an extremely interesting biological fact that all of us have in our veins the exact same percentage of salt in our blood that exists in the ocean. And therefore we have salt in our blood, in our sweat, in our tears. We are tied to the ocean, and when we go back to the sea we are going back from whence we came.’

Sue Gill was born in Yorkshire and educated in Hull and Cambridge. After working as Head Teacher of the smallest village school in remote North Yorkshire and lecturing in Bradford Art College Sue evolved to be: an author, performer, secular celebrant, cook, saxophonist, truck driver, co founder of Welfare State International (1968-2006) and grandmother. After WSI was archived she was, for one year, Director of Ceremonies for Lanternhouse International. From 1998-2006 course leader for WSI’s groundbreaking MA in Cultural Performance created in partnership with Bristol University. Honorary Fellow of the University of Cumbria. Invited to be Celebrant for the Ceremony of Remembrance for Great Ormond Street Hospital (2001).  Co-author of the Dead Good Guides  – books on Funerals and Baby Namings. Presently leads Rites of Passage Summer Schools across the UK with Gilly Adams, and works as a secular celebrant for weddings and naming ceremonies and funeral officiant, particularly for woodland burials.

Find Sue’s website here.

Peaceful Pillow

13 May 2010
Charles
1 Comment
Categories: ashes, burial at sea, viking funeral

Why a pillow, I wonder? Especially a pillow that looks nothing like a pillow. I’m not at all sure that the feeding-duck look as it goes down is a good look. If you turn down the music this gets dull.

These guys have missed a trick, leaving a gap in the market for you. Stuff the pillow idea, develop a biodegradable Viking longship. With fireworks. People don’t want to go down with a glug, they want to go up in a blaze, right? You read it here first. If you make a few bob, remember me.

Human rites

18 December 2009
Charles
No comments
Categories: burial at sea, ceremony

They call it a rite of passage, a funeral, but I’m not so sure that that’s the right term for it. Is a funeral directly comparable with other rites of passage? We mark coming of age and matrimony with rituals which speak of transition—what scholastic folk call liminality. But, though we can push a young person across the threshold into adulthood, we cannot stop that young person from making a bolt for it and scampering back. And though we shower a connubial couple with hope as they vow to become one flesh, we know perfectly well that the rite is far from irreversible.

Unlike a funeral. What is missing from a funeral, for most people, is any sense of expectancy—of wonderful possibilities. All other rites register growth and progression. Not a funeral, not for most people. No life, no future. Dead. End.

You can look at it another way. All the other rites are social events which recognise a person’s social dynamic—an augmentation of their social role. But, interestingly, possibly regrettably, we have no rites of passage which recognise a person’s loss of social dynamic and tapering social role. The menopause, for example. Or the economic menopause, when a person retires. Or that day of dismay when a person becomes at best a tangential member of society by going to live in a carehome warehouse. If we are to set aside the Christmas spirit for a moment, we can perhaps acknowledge the bleak truth that, for most of us, social death precedes physical death, often by many years.

That there should be all sorts of confusion about exactly what sort of ceremony a funeral is, is not surprising in an age where most people disregard the ancient verities of faith and come to it more or less hope-less. So, what do we do? We dress it up somewhat like a rite of passage, a social event, and using that template we import some of the ingredients, even balloons.

But it’s an existential event, too, with much of the aspect of a black hole. Which is why we don’t take photographs of it. I don’t suppose many people think about that for a moment, don’t need to. You wouldn’t take your camera to a funeral, it would never occur to you to do that, it’s simply not done, perish the thought. At any other rite of passage the cameras and the phones blink away like crazy. Never at a funeral.

Yes, a funeral is different. All other rites of passage are reckoned memorable, deserving of documentation and preservation for future delectation. Photos make memories manifest. How we love to pore over the snaps. Ooh, look at her there!! Aaaaaah!!!

But a funeral is, for most people, a forgettable event. Ask them. They say their memory is a blur. This is not only because they were dazed at the time by grief, it is also because they have subsequently done what they can to consign it to oblivion, to wipe it. In family histories, death is either omitted or passed over quickly, extrinsic, dis-integrated. And that may well not be a good thing.

Real funerals are for emotional grown-ups. Not all are photogenic: the raw, the angry, the guilty, the messy, the tragic.

But some are. Here’s one, and a very sad one, too. It’s a burial at sea. Lots of cameras. See it here.