burial

A good funeral: part 1

22 September 2011
Charles
8 Comments
Categories: Attitudes to death, bereavement, burial, ceremony, death and funerals, DIY funeral, funeral

Posted by Sweetpea

In the light of our recent discussions about the merits of secular, civil and religious funerals, one interesting thread started to appear.  Namely, what should a funeral not fail to include?  Can a funeral ever really be meaningful to anyone?  Does any funeral do the things that people need it to do? Well, for the sake of clarity, I’d like to leave the actual ritual contents of a civil or secular funeral for another day.  For the moment, I think we should go one step further back, to examine how the foundations of a good funeral rite are laid. Cutting through all the arguments about the contents of a funeral, be it of whatever shade, I think the key to the success of a funeral rite (and I have no doubt that a successful funeral is possible) is one overarching thing:  Relevance.

And the mechanism for allowing the door to open to Relevance?  Well, that begins with well informed people who instinctively know what will be right for them, and just as importantly know where to find it.  Failing that, a knowledgeable and empathetic funeral director who can guide those people towards what is the best path for them.  And failing that, an experienced and skilful celebrant/member of the clergy/friend to offer advice and support to bring them to where they need to be.

The notion of Relevance should permeate the entire proceedings from beginning to end – from funeral preparations to the enactment of the rite itself.  It doesn’t happen by accident, and needs empathetic, practical and experienced people working together to make it happen.  As has been so wonderfully written elsewhere by Jonathan: ‘if you just listen to a family it brings it all down out of the whirlwind in the sky and settles it more easily on the ground.  Stop.  Do nothing.  Tell me how he died; how do you feel about his death; where does that leave you now; let’s look after him gently while we all decide what to do and, far more importantly, why we’re doing it and what we hope it will achieve. Does that involve some choices?  Okay, let’s deal with them in our own good time, it’s not the choices that matter anyway.’    

This simple, intuitive and effective process leads eventually to arrangements which, as Tom Lynch states ‘get the dead where they need to go and the living where they need to be’.  This might be a whole day spent on a hillside, with a grave dug and filled by friends on their own land, singing around a campfire until the early hours, it might be a requiem mass, it might be a twenty minute ceremony at a crematorium, followed by a celebratory knees-up at a favourite pub, it might be a C of E service followed by ham salad and scones in the village hall.  If it’s relevant to these people, then that’s the nearest we are going to get to achieving those aims.

But let’s be under no illusions.  Real emotional pain and damage is caused to grievers when a rite has no relevance to them – it’s traumatic and stays with them until their own dying day.  We are perhaps more familiar with stories of religious rites leaving people disorientated and even more bereft because of a mis-matching of their needs and its expression.  But this can be just as true for civil or secular funerals, something which I have observed when, say, a religiously inclined adult child has been painfully overruled or excluded from religious or spiritual expression by a surviving parent.  Which leads us to part 2 – what should or shouldn’t be included in a successful funeral rite?

Live burial – can you help?

21 July 2011
Charles
No comments
Categories: Art and death, burial, Living funerals

Posted by Charles

Once in a while we get a really interesting email here at the sweatshop we call GFG Central. The toiling minions are, as I write, clustering round the screen of the recipient. I’ll have to whip them back to their desks in a moment.

The point is, it’s not for them. It’s for you. Can you help?

I have been asked to coordinate a live burial ritual on Sat 24th September, and the venue we were going to use has fallen through. So I’m looking for a London location where we can carry this out.

Ideally we’d like to stage this in a house with a garden. It needs to be somewhere where it’s OK for about 30 people to be in the house all night, partying some. (I don’t think it’ll be wild, but 30 people do make some noise.) We have a small budget to pay for the right venue.

The ritual itself involves digging a shallow grave, putting the person in it, burying her (only shallow though, for safety reasons) and then tending her while her friends mourn her for the night. The wake will have the flavour of a party.

In the morning she will be ‘resurrected’ and carried through to a bath, where she will be lovingly washed and cleansed.

I’m wondering if you might know someone who would be able / willing to host this at their place? 

If you can, send us an email and we’ll pass it on to the event organiser: charles@goodfuneralguide.co.uk

For those of you with long memories, this is not the first time that the minions have been excited by this sort of proposal. remember this?

https://www.goodfuneralguide.co.uk/2010/10/going-down/

It was a full week before I had any decent work from them.

Dissolution

27 June 2011
Charles
7 Comments
Categories: alternative funerals, burial, burial depth, funeral reformers, natural burial

 

Bill Jordan is on a  quest to have (when the time comes) his corpse laid out on the surface where it will be able to give most back to the ecosystem. He wants “to know I’ll be going back into the air, the soil, the rain, the mist, the snow–back to the ecstasy I feel while walking–these experiences are so comforting that I almost look forward to being laid out on the festive table of a Sierra Nevada meadow, or the large rocks in the Australian Alice, or the sagebrush scrub of the Great Basin.”

 

Bill has featured before on this blog. If you missed his extended rationale, read this and this.

Here is Bill’s latest update of his pursuit of his goal. He has been working with down-t0-earth idealist and natural burier Cynthia Beal. Bill says:

Cynthia and I are agreed to proceed, in principle as well as spirit, on the assumption that it’s always later than you think. The strategy includes several plans, based on practical reality, and one of these involves planting on Bernd Heinrich’s property in Maine. Bernd is an old friend–I met him while in graduate school at UC Berkeley in the late ’60s and early 70s–and we have discussed permanent parking on his mountain. He is, by the way, publishing a new book on decomposition in nature and I am mentioned in it–also mentioned in Summer World. Slowly, insidiously, we are infiltrating the modern mind.

Bill also sent me more photos of his duck, Jacqui. He says: “Note the red caruncle around her eye in the last picture–let your mind flip and suddenly you see it as a small, red creature–some primitive, amphibious ancestor, pointing backwards”.

Tell them fully and tell them clearly

27 April 2011
Charles
16 Comments
Categories: bureaucracy, burial, death and funerals, DIY funeral, funeral cost, funeral reformers

Regular readers of this blog will know of Teresa Evans and her campaigning work. If you don’t know Teresa, have a look at her website.

I’ve always admired Teresa. She is an ordinary person possessed of extraordinary singlemindedness, tenacity and passion. She is also very nice.

Teresa campaigns for better, fuller, clearer information for the newly bereaved. Had she known what she knows now, she would have done things differently when her son Boyd was killed in a car accident.

Teresa has dogged various ministry officials with probing questions and demands for years – often fruitlessly. Now she has just chalked up a great victory. Working with her local MP she won, last night, an adjournment debate in the House of Commons.

One part of this debate in particular interested me. I had always supposed that beneficiaries of a Social Fund funeral payment had no exclusive rights to a grave – that the grave they were given was a pauper’s grave, and anyone else could be buried on top. It turns out this is not the case at all. The Social Fund can be called on to pay for exclusive rights, it’s just that no one has ever been made aware of this. Teresa has secured a pledge that, in future, all applicants will be told.

Another conspicuous feature of this debate is the courtesy accorded to Teresa. A great many in the funeral industry regard her as vexatious and tiresome. It is good to see her accorded respect and gratitude.

Here are some extracts from the debate. The bold is mine.

Iain Stewart (Milton Keynes South) (Con): I sought this debate following a direct request from a constituent of mine, Ms Teresa Evans, who contends that she was not given good advice following the tragic death of her 20-year-old son, Boyd Evans. I have raised the issues with the Minister via correspondence and written parliamentary questions, but they have not been dealt with to my constituent’s satisfaction, which is why I wish to raise them on the Floor of the House.

I should say at the outset that my constituent is not seeking personal recompense for her situation, but rather wishing to prevent similar problems being encountered by others. Newly bereaved people can be responsible and in control only when they are afforded sound information to make well-informed decisions.

Let me start by providing the background to the case. Teresa Evans’s son, Boyd, was killed as a result of passenger injuries sustained in a car crash in Staffordshire-some distance from his home in Milton Keynes-in 2006. Quite apart from having to deal with the emotional trauma of losing her son, my constituent also had to deal on her own with the practicalities of the funeral arrangements. She is a lady of very modest means. She had no money when she lost her son, so applied for a funeral payment and overdrew at the bank to provide a funeral. In her own words:

“It wasn’t a lavish funeral but a dignified one. In terms of distance and the cost per mile allowed from the social fund payment, I could not claim a total refund for the fee to return my son back to Milton Keynes from where he died in Staffordshire. The inescapable charge was £220, but despite an appeal to the DWP I was only paid £170. This left a shortfall of £50”.

However, she later found out that despite her son undergoing a post-mortem, she was within her legal rights to collect her son in her own vehicle and would have done so had she been aware of this at the time.

My constituent was also informed by the undertakers that the cheapest coffin available cost £680. Subsequently, she found that she could have bought the same coffin online for considerably less or buried her son in a shroud, which she had the legal right to do. In addition, had someone told her that she could still claim a funeral payment without using an undertaker, she would have done this, especially because she claims that the undertaker misled her with false information resulting in her not being able to return her son to his home to lie in wait for his burial. She would have done all these things had she been aware of her legal rights. This has led to her creating a campaign for the rights of newly bereaved people to be made known to them in sudden and unexpected circumstances.

Four years after her son was buried, my constituent discovered that no one had informed her that she could have recovered the fees for the burial rights to her son’s grave within three months of the funeral. If the system had worked properly, she would have received an additional £304 for the burial rights. Consequently, she was forced to surrender her life insurance policies to buy the burial rights, and she feels aggrieved that no one is held accountable for this action. She believes that the Department for Work and Pensions is overly reliant on the funeral industry to provide guidance to the relatives of a person who has died, specifically on what fees can be recovered. She claims to have evidence that proves that undertakers point applicants of a funeral payment to Jobcentre Plus for guidance. In addition, she claims that the National Association of Funeral Directors had no knowledge of the most technical information in existence-the DWP booklet SB16, which the Minister has stated is the most comprehensive guide. That this piece of literature is known only to some professionals would suggest that the bereaved may often not be aware of the full extent of their rights.

My constituent has also commented to me that a bereavement charity, the Alice Barker Trust, identified the same problem a long time ago. She is calling for much clearer guidance to be made available on the options open to relatives, particularly given that they will be in a highly emotional state. As the literature for the applicant may only be understood by those with technical knowledge, it needs to be written in plain language more readily intelligible to anyone. At present, the DWP relies upon undertakers to explain the rules to eligible claimants, resulting in the sort of problems experienced by my constituent. This generates unnecessary mystery and dependency, when we should be promoting education, self-help and self-reliance. A very simple and no-cost solution would be to amend the available literature in both print and online formats, making obvious what fees can be paid by the DWP in relation to the funeral, costs for opening the grave and burial rights for a fixed number of years.

I have already raised Teresa Evans’s case and her request for action with the Minister, but she has been dissatisfied with the response and with what she claims to be a lack of urgency in addressing the situation. She has therefore asked me to pose the following questions to the Minister. First, can he state, from records for the last financial year, how many claimants received payments for burials and what proportion of that number also received payments for what are technically known as burial rights, so they did not use what are known as pauper graves? Secondly, will the Minister consult the Alice Barker Trust to revise the wording of the advice that the DWP produces for printed, internet and other information? Thirdly, does the Minister agree that had the wording suggested by the charity been used before Boyd Evans was killed in 2006, his mother would have received her full entitlement to a funeral payment and would not have had to cash in her life insurance policies to cover the burial rights to her son’s grave? Fourthly, when it comes to the big society and developing strong communities, does the Minister agree that it is essential to empower all claimants in order to help them act independently and responsibly?

Nothing can bring Boyd Evans back, but his mother is hoping that her experience will result in the Department for Work and Pensions learning lessons, so that others do not encounter unnecessary emotional turmoil and financial hardship.

The Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Steve Webb): In response to this debate being called, I have looked at my hon. Friend’s constituent’s website. As he well knows, her tragic circumstances and the death of her son five years ago led her to campaign on these issues. She has her own website, which I have looked at today. I pay tribute to her for the way in which she has sought to turn her tragic circumstances into something more positive, so that others do not have the same difficult experiences that she did in dealing, as I understand it, not just with funeral grants and the DWP, but with a range of other public bodies and organisations. The way Ms Evans has pursued the issues over the following years is enormously to her credit. I hope that I can offer my hon. Friend some reassurance this evening that that campaigning has led to changes, and that the situation that someone who has been bereaved now encounters is a good deal better than it was five years ago. Clearly there is always room for improvement-we will continue to look at that-but we have made changes even this month in response to the points that his constituent has raised with us, which I will set out more in due course.

… … …

We, the DWP, will pay in full the costs of a cremation or burial, including the purchase of a grave with exclusive burial rights. That is a point to which I will return, because I know that it was important in Ms Evans’s son’s case, and it is something that might not have occurred to any of us unless we were faced with that situation. I can well imagine that it must have been very difficult to discover some time after she had buried her son that she did not have exclusive burial rights. I fully accept that we must ensure that that situation does not arise again.

… … …

The information and guidance that goes to relatives is at the heart of the issues that my hon. Friend has raised. In Ms Evans’s case, the information that came to her from the funeral director was incomplete, for whatever reason, and led to her making choices that, had she been fully informed, she would have made differently. I have made some inquiries into where the right information should come from, and the key is the fact that, on becoming bereaved, the family or its representatives will register the death. That is the point at which we aim to ensure that people get the relevant information. We will not have to rely on funeral directors to provide it. Indeed, there might not be a funeral director involved. The Government as a whole want to ensure that the information gets through to people at the point at which they register the death.

This is already being rolled out more or less nationwide, and we will continue to develop this “tell us once” service. The idea is to allow customers to report a birth or a death to multiple central and local government departments, agencies and services just once.

My hon. Friend raised the issue of forms and paperwork. I can tell him that this month, in response to some of the points that his constituent raised with us, we have made a number of changes to the claim form for the funeral grant. Let me briefly run through them, as she would be interested to know what those changes are.

There are two documents. The first is a note sheet that accompanies the funeral payment application, and we have made three changes to it. On page 6 of the form, we have added a bullet point that says people can send “evidence of the costs incurred if the funeral arrangements were made without using a funeral director“.

That is one of Ms Evans’s points – that people do not always realise that they do not have to use one and do not always realise that they can get their costs reimbursed if they have not used one. We have made it explicit that evidence of costs can be provided if a funeral director has not been used.

The third change we made to the explanatory notes is in the bullet point list of what can be included in the funeral payment. The second bullet point refers to “the cost of opening a new grave and burial costs”, and we have now added “including any exclusive right of burial fee“.

… … …

Ms Evans faced a very difficult and tragic situation five years ago, which was not helped by her dealings with the Department for Work and Pensions or other Government bodies. I pay tribute to her for taking the issues forward in such a constructive way, and I hope I have reassured my hon. Friend that we have listened and responded.

Read the entire debate here. Watch the debate 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?

Not so first as he thinks

14 October 2010
Charles
2 Comments
Categories: alternative funerals, Attitudes to dead bodies, burial, burial depth, funeral cost; richard sage, funeral customs, memorialisation, natural burial

From Australia’s Herald Sun:

A CANCER victim yesterday became the first person to be buried upright at Australia’s only vertical cemetery.

Allan Heywood lost his battle with cancer last Tuesday and was buried in the unusual, space-saving grave in the new vertical cemetery outside Camperdown in western Victoria.

“It’s nice to be first at something. Everybody wants their little place in history,” the Skipton man said with the hint of a laugh.

“I’ve attended a lot of funerals over the years and I’ve never attended one that I’ve enjoyed … I’m an atheist as well,” he said.

Mr Heywood paid $2750 – about half the cost of a basic conventional burial – to be buried upright in a biodegradable shroud, conveyed to his final resting place on a steel trolley which is angled vertically to lower the body into a tubular grave.

He said the lower cost and that there was no graveside service, headstone, casket or grave marker meant his children wouldn’t face any financial burden and could arrange their own memorial service at the local pub or footy club.

Mr Heywood’s body was lowered feet first into its hole by cemetery officials. When his body has been joined by 39, 999 other bodies, the space-saving cemetery will be grassed over and grazed.

Vertical burial is approved in some Asian countries and also Holland – but I don’t think any have been carried out there.

Fact: The world’s first-ever vertical burial took place in England (or, as they say in the US, England, England). It was one of two last wishes of the delightfully bonkers Major Peter Billiere who died precisely nine months to the day after predicting he would.

His funeral was held on 11 June 1800 at Box Hill in Surrey in a hole reputedly 100 feet deep. Into this, Major Billiere was lowered head first, according to his instructions, and there he will remain, according to his philosophy, until the Day of Judgement when he will be resurrected right way up in a world turned upside down. The headstone reads: “Here lies Major Peter Labilliere, with his head in the ground and his feet in the air.”

Major Peter Labilliere’s headstone

The good major was an early adopter of the celebration of life style of funeral, so his other final wish was that the youngest son and daughter of his landlady should dance on his coffin. Apparently the lass demurred; the lad larged it.

This is all true, by the way. If you don’t believe me, go google.

Hollowing out hallowed ground

22 June 2010
Charles
No comments
Categories: Attitudes to dead bodies, burial, Dead people's rights

Some interesting reflections here on humankind’s relationship with the dead human body and the forces of nature. I especially enjoyed the observation that the prairie dogs happily digging in this cemetery are no respecters of social status: they have even dug up a state governor. What deplorable absence of deference so far down the food chain!

Hat-tip to the FCA for this.

Cremation: an alternative to burial or an alternative to bother?

13 April 2010
Charles
1 Comment
Categories: burial, cremation

There’s a fine new essay by Thomas Lynch in the The Christian Century. It’s as wonderfully well written as you’d expect – seductively so. Much of what he says about the modern funeral he has said before: that it “too often replaces theology with therapy, conviction with convenience.”

Here are some extracts to whet your appetite:

“When I’m gone just cremate me,” Hughey MacSwiggan told his third and final wife as she stood at his bedside while the hospice nurse fiddled with the morphine drip that hadn’t kept his pain at bay. The operative word in his directive was just.

…

And Hughey was just cremated, which is to say his body was placed on a plywood pallet, covered with a cardboard carapace and, after the paperwork and permits were secured, loaded into the hearse and driven to a site toward the back of an industrial park where a company that makes burial vaults operates a crematory on the side.

…

Of course, the problem is not with cremation, which is an ancient and honorable, efficient and effective means of disposing of our dead. Nor is the fire to burn our dead any less an elemental gift of God than is the ground to bury them in. The problem is not that we cremate our dead, but how ritually denatured, spiritually vacant, religiously timid and impoverished we have allowed the practice to become. It is not that we do it, but how we do it that must be reconsidered.

…

In cultures where cremation is practiced in public, among Hindus and Buddhists in India and Japan, its powerful metaphoric values—purification, release, elemental beauty and unity—add to the religious narratives the bereaved embrace. The public pyres of Bali and Calcutta, where the first-born brings fire from the home fire to kindle the fire that will consume a parent’s body, are surrounded by liturgical and civic traditions. Elsewhere, however, cremation is practiced in private, the fire kept purposefully behind closed doors. Whereas the traditional funeral transports the corpse and mourners from parlor to altar, then to place of disposition, cremation, as it is practiced in the U.S., often routes around, not through, such stations in the pilgrimage. We miss most if not all of the journey, the drama and metaphor.

There’s a good, clear-eyed critique of Lynch’s essay at Fr Jonathan’s blog here.