cemeteries

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.

 

 

Better dead than alive

16 September 2010
Charles
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Categories: Attitudes to dead bodies, Attitudes to death, cemeteries, Embalming, funerals in other cultures, Post mortem photos

Going through my stats, researching for a blog post, I saw that someone had clicked through a link I did not recognise. So I clicked through myself and found this wonderful account of embalming excellence at Harlem-based Owens Funeral Home “where beauty softens grief” . I used it in a blog post so long ago I’d forgotten. If you didn’t see it way back then, enjoy it now. If you recall it, I’m sure you’ll enjoy it again. The quality’s good enough to go full screen.

What a wonderful selling point this funeral home has: “I’m the guy who puts the smile on your face. Other places you just look dead.”

On a related theme, I’ve just stumbled on another article describing cosmetic treatments for the dead. While a certain amount of beautification goes on in UK funeral homes (it reflects well on an undertaker’s standards of care), we do not have over here the ritual (ordeal if you like) of the open casket visitation. So while, when thinking forward to our own funeral, we customarily conclude with the reflection that we won’t be there, Americans don’t. Because they will. And, of course, they want to look good and they’re bound to worry that they mightn’t. “People used to say, just throw me in a pine box and bury me in the back yard,” says Mark Duffey, president and CEO of Everest Funeral, a national funeral planning and concierge service. “But that’s all changing. Now people want to be remembered. A funeral is their last major event and they want to look good for it. I’ve even had people say, ‘I want you to get rid of my wrinkles and make me look younger’.”

“I’ve had people mention that they want their breasts to look perky when they’re dead,” says David Temrowski, funeral director of Temrowski & Sons Funeral Home in Warren, Mich. “Or they’ll say, ‘Can you get these wrinkles out?’ It’s all in humor, but I think people do think [more] about what they’re going to look like when they’re dead and lying in a casket.”

“My brother’s a plastic surgeon and I joke with him all the time that funeral directors were doing Botox long before any doctor thought of using it,” says John Vigliante, owner and manager of the Branch Funeral Home in Smithtown, N.Y. “Or at least we use a material that’s similar. We‘ll inject tissue fillers into the lips, the nose, the cheeks, above the eyebrows, the chin, and the hands. It’s the same concept as Botox and dermal filler.” … Lips are plumped, cheeks are filled and contoured, and hollowed hands are injected with filler to give them what Vigliante calls “a nice fuller appearance.”

Read the full article at newsvine.com here.

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Cross patch

26 June 2010
Charles
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Categories: cemeteries, memorialisation

We must hope that spending cuts will result in the excision of not just waste but also the sort of local authority insensitivity which manifests as brainless heartlessness.

Here’s an example from Somerset as told by the Daily Mail:

Liz Maggs placed a 26-inch high wooden cross bearing a personal inscription on Rosemary Maggs’ burial plot at the Ebdon Road cemetery in Weston-super-Mare, while the family waited for a headstone to be made. But when Mrs Maggs, 43, returned to visit the grave … just a few days later she found the cross had disappeared … The authority said that because the cross stood about 2ft up from the ground it was a health and safety risk.

But it turns out that, though this was the pretext the council used, this wasn’t what they actually meant. It didn’t mean they they thought the cross presented a hazard to life, limb and the pursuit of happiness. No, what they were trying to get across was that this is a lawn cemetery; everything must be laid flat.

Ms Maggs was poorly advised by those with a duty to advise her. And by the example of many other wooden crosses in the same cemetery. Perhaps an example of belated, retrospective enforcement of regulations?

Whatever, a sorry mess. If you haven’t heard enough, find the whole sorry story here.

Hat-tip to Tony Piper for this.

A Good Send Off

21 June 2010
Charles
3 Comments
Categories: alternative funerals, celebrants, cemeteries, ceremony, cremation, funeral cost, funeral customs, funeral reformers, green funeral, natural burial

A Good Send Off was the title of this year’s Centre for Death and Society (CDAS) annual conference. Well, part of the title – the snappy part. In full it read: A Good Send Off: Local, Regional & National Variations in how the British Dispose of their Dead. It took place last Saturday in Bath.

For the GFG this was a great day out. For £25 we got a full day of talks about all things funereal with a very good lunch thrown in. The turnout will have been gratifying for the organisers, I hope. Their warm welcome, typical of CDAS events, was appreciated. If you’re not an academic, and you know you do not have the cranial contents to be one, it’s reassuring to be put at your ease.

Academics sometimes speak a variant or dialect of English which makes them incomprehensible to ornery folk. There was little of that. Cleverness levels at these things can sometimes climb so steeply that we ornery folk fall off the back of what they’re talking about. There was little of that, either, but you’ve got to expect a bit; these are mental weightlifters after all. As for the papers, there are normally a few which unpack research into fields so rarefied that you can only wonder what on earth led the researcher there. A sprightly 20 mins on, say, the iconography stamped into funeral biscuits in a remote Yorkshire village, 1807-1809. Not the sort of stuff us non-acs can take away and use. There was none such. I regretted that.

There were too many highlights to describe in a blog post and too many talks to attend: so many that they ran alongside each other (in different rooms, of course). Let’s just focus on the groundbreakers: the natural buriers and the forward-looking undertakers.

Simon Smith and Jane Morrell from green fuse contemporary funerals do things differently from most funeral directors and they get different results. Okay, so they work out of Totnes; they wouldn’t be doing quite so many funerals like this in a working class industrial town like Redditch. But they offered persuasive evidence that their way of working has broad appeal to the sort of people – hands-on, self-reliant, not deferential to convention, not necessarily educated middle-class – who do not want to be relieved of the duty of caring for their dead and creating their farewell ceremony; rather, they want to play whatever part they feel they can. Inasmuch as they have little idea what they can do and whether they’ll be up to it, their exploration of the options under the guidance of the funeral director is vitally important. In the words of Simon and Jane, “This demands the funeral director actively listen to the client in order to understand the values and reality of the family and the community, to pick up on their needs and desires.”

Together with their clients, Simon and Jane collaboratively create send-offs which are demonstrably transformative of grief; send-offs which yield some truly remarkable statistics:

  • Of funerals arranged for people over 70 years old, 69% are cremations compared with a national average of 72%. But for those under 70, the figure drops (alarmingly if you are a cremationist) to just 35%
  • Most green fuse funerals are conventionally religious or broadly spiritual, and here comes the next astonishing statistic: of the over-70s, 28% opt for a non-religious or atheist ceremony but in the under-70s that figure plummets to just 9%.
  • In both groups only 7% opted for professional bearers.
  • Among under-70s, 42% opt for a trad hearse and among over-70s, 55% opt for a trad hearse. I thought the figures would have been lower.

For me, Simon and Jane made their case: if funeral directors interview their clients carefully and collaboratively and have a discussion with them which is values-based, not merchandise-based, they find themselves not only doing things markedly differently but also in a way which produces far higher levels of satisfaction. These are real funerals which make a real difference to people. But they take much, much longer to arrange and to perform. Can they pay for themselves?

There were two excellent papers on natural burial. One was given by Melissa Stewart of Native Woodland (featuring James Leedam on slide projector). She took us through the many sorts of natural burial ground we now find in different parts of the country according to topography and population density. We tend to think of natural burial as generic, but it most certainly is not. Some of these grounds are surrounded by miles and miles of open country; others by housing estates and busy roads. In aspect, they span the sublime and the _______________ (use whichever word you think applies.) Thank you, Melissa, for a brilliant neologism: treestone, n — a tree planted at the head of a grave.

Another paper, by Jenny Hockey and Trish Green of Sheffield University, looked at, among other things, how some people who opt for natural burial do so out of sense of rootedness in the place they have chosen to live, and as a demonstration of that. Out of this impulse, and because their identification with a particular place is such a strong descriptor of their identity, comes a sense of continuing existence after death, a sort of immortality, as if the self remained embodied, sleeping on in the evergreen, forever a part of the place. Thus is a natural burial ground a sort of dormitory of the dead: “He’s here.” This is in complete contrast with a local authority cemetery, where the dead go to be just that: dead. Any sense of their continuing existence always locates them somewhere else.

Now, I’m not at all sure that that is what they were saying, but it’s the idea I came away with. And it’s easily tested. I would hazard a guess that when the living talk to the dead in a conventional cemetery, their words fly up. But when they talk to their dead in a natural burial ground their words fly down. Anything in it? I really don’t know. Probably complete nonsense.

At the plenary session at the end there was a lively discussion of taste in memorialisation items and the legitimacy of grave visitors imposing their own taste by clearing away stuff left by others. The natural buriers came in for some unmerited stick here (and I apologise for the way I fluffed my own response). The whole point about true natural burial is that there is consensus about how the ground should look: people have made an informed choice and bought into the unspoilt, ground-zero concept. Grave visitors have both a right and a duty to keep it looking as it ought.

It was great fun, at Bath, to meet so many friends and to make new ones, and to come away with one’s head a-buzz with ideas. This was a typically inclusive event, and I would urge anyone with an interest in funerals, especially funeral directors and celebrants, to go to the next one. There weren’t nearly enough of you. I can understand any misgivings you may have. Well, these academics may be terrifically brainy, but they’re also very kind, human, hospitable and even interested in what we have to say.

Why, when the day was over and I discovered to my dismay that I had left my bank card at home, who was it who galloped to my rescue with a pound coin for the parking meter? None other than Professor Walter himself. Thank you, Tony. It was a lifesaver!

In the midst of death, let there be life

23 March 2010
Charles
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Categories: cemeteries

When someone asks, “Read any good books recently?” I often reply, “Yes. Read any good graveyards?” Graveyards comprise a compelling variety of distilled biography. The lives they describe may be humdrum, but that only makes them easier to relate to. Just to read the names on the headstones and monuments is, I feel, an act of commemoration. For that reason always make a point of reading every name on a war memorial.

I don’t feel drawn to graveyards in the way some people are. But they are interesting in all sorts of ways, from the different feelings they inspire in people, to their location, to the ways they are used. In the UK they tend to be silent and drear. Visitors busy themselves with with tending. They tend not to talk. They sit or stand contemplatively. It all happens in the open air whatever the weather. There’s never anywhere to go for a nice hot drink and a biscuit and a bit of a chat with other visitors.

We want our dead to be part of us, yet we set them apart from us. I don’t know that we’ve made the relationship an easy one.

Over in the US, you can’t keep the irrepressible Ruth Coker Burks out of graveyards. She collects them. A taphophile, she calls herself. Here’s a typically exuberant account:

Look at this cemetery that I found today!!…My neighbor, Cheryl, Mitch and I decided to take a long drive today to the southern part of the state that we don’t normally go to…as we were driving south, I spotted a tiny cemetery with Ivy covered trees and a hand laid stone wall…it only had about 12 graves in it and no room for more…I made Mitch turn around and let me out…As I walked up to the cemetery I found that it had a beautiful gate that was wide open...

Ruth writes in an engagingly breathless style and rejoices in her choicest finds – for example, two stones commemorating buried amputated legs (13 December 2009). She is well worth reading and you’ll find her blog here.

Over at The Daily Undertaker, Patrick McNally, that wise and humane thinker about all things funereal, wrote recently about graveyards: what may we do in them, what should we absolutely not do? How about cycling? Or having a picnic?

Over at Full Life, Good Death, Nancy Manahan and Becky Bohan’s blog, Nancy tells this story from her childhood:

“Kids, look, there’s the cemetery where we would stop when I was a girl.”

We would look out the backseat car window to the grassy graveyard where Mom was pointing.

“The trip to Rochester used to take so long that when the weather was nice, we would rest here and have a picnic.”

My mother said this every time my father drove us past the roadside cemetery on the two-hour drive to see our Rochester, Minnesota, relatives or visit the Mayo Clinic.
As little girl, I was horrified. Eating among the gravestones seemed like a creepy custom from another country and another century.

“Mom, how could you eat on top of all those dead people?!”

“Oh, it was lovely!” she would reply. “The cemetery was halfway between Madelia and Rochester, so sometimes Aunt Daisy and Uncle Louie would meet us here. We’d put a blanket on the grass, and after sandwiches and lemonade, Uncle Louie and Papa would smoke and take a nap. Later Mama and I would go back to Rochester for a few days’ visit, and Papa would return home alone.”

Now that they have a home in Mexico, and have witnessed the annual Día de los Muertos, Day of the Dead ceremonies, Nancy has entirely changed her views about eating on top of the dead:

Rather than seeming quaint or creepy, this custom now feels admirable. Breaking bread among the graves is a way to normalize death, to nourish the connections between the living and our loved ones who have passed before us, and to enjoy the bounty of life in a beautiful and sacred setting.

Over at the Daily Undertaker once more, Patrick McNally’s most recent post is a description of the Chinese festival of Ching Ming, or Tomb Sweeping Day. A must-read.

If we had set days here in the UK when everyone gathered in a spirited and gregarious way, what a difference that would make.

Everything is only for a day

11 June 2009
Charles
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Categories: cemeteries, Memorialising

Immortality and eternity have meaning as concepts but they don’t translate into reality, not here on transient Earth. If you don’t believe that, go and visit a mature cemetery – or ask Ozymandias, poor, baffled chap. Time teaches us this lesson every fleeting minute, but we set our faces against it—heroically or idiotically, it’s sometimes difficult to tell the difference. In the words of Marcus Aurelius:

Everything is only for a day, both that which remembers and that which is remembered.

Yesterday, I went to look around Brookwood cemetery in the elite company of two pioneers: Ken West, who sparked the natural burial movement here and, subsequently, worldwide; and Cynthia Beal, a natural burialist from the US. Ken is gentle and principled. He’s all for stripped-down simplicity. Cynthia is questing, questioning. She’s an environmentalist who makes things happen. Both are highly intelligent, so there were times when I fell off the back of their conversation bigtime. But if you look at a cemetery through the eyes of people with their combined knowledge of ecology, soil science, the law, lobbying and actually running cemeteries, you pick up a lot, even me. It was a privilege, let me tell you.

It’s a dreadful place of untended graves and collapsing monuments. It is the antithesis of all that it aspires to be, utterly incoherent. Especially consonant was the spectacle of an obelisk perhaps twenty-five feet high which, weary of pointing to Eternity, had just flung itself down.

Ken and Cynthia debated memorialisation. People want, need, to mark the spot. They must have somewhere to go and something to do. Problem is, most people stop doing that after around ten years, that’s when the rack and ruin set in. Cynthia is all for enabling people to mark the spot in ways which are not ecologically hostile. Ken is for anonymity and subsumation (a new word. I like it.)

It’s a complex matter, this business of memorialisation. Very complex. People tend graves to show they care. “Vanity!” said Ken. “Can they not show they care by allowing nature to receive them back, by permitting them to create habitats?”

My feelings exactly. But we don’t feel for all.

For all that, Brookwood is an object lesson in the vanity of human wishes. Its 500 acres are an ecological and memorial near-waste of space. Dire to think that it’s got around 250 years to go before it’ll be full.

On the journey back I overtook a catering caravan travelling to Glorious Goodwood. I passed signs to Royal Ascot. I reflected that I had spent the day at Buggered Brookwood.