ceremony

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!

Thirty funerals in thirty days

1 November 2010
Charles
No comments
Categories: Attitudes to death, celebrants, ceremony, funeral directors, funeral trends, funerals in other cultures, Grief, Memorial service, Plan your own funeral, Secular approaches to death

Over in Albuquerque, Gail Rubin has set herself the task of attending and writing up thirty funerals in thirty days. She got under way on Saturday. It’s going to make for a very interesting social document.

At this stage, of course, many of those whose funerals she will describe are as yet still alive…

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

Generalising from the particular

14 October 2010
Charles
5 Comments
Categories: Attitudes to death, ceremony, Formality vs informality

I enjoyed this article from the Catholic Herald by Francis Phillips:

I was at a Requiem Mass this morning; nothing unusual in that, of course. Yet this Mass was highly unusual in this respect: there was no panegyric of the dead. The deceased man had made it clear to his widow before he died that he wanted the homily to focus on the faith – specifically the theology of death and resurrection, with accompanying prayers for the dead – and not on him.

This must be the first funeral I have attended since the death of my father more than 30 years ago when a “celebration of the life” has not been a central feature of the service. How and when did it creep in that a funeral has to concentrate on a deceased person’s achievements, foibles and lovable frailties – indeed, on his or her imminent canonisation – to the exclusion of almost everything else?

…

There you have it: no mournful pop songs, no tributes to the deceased’s love of a pint at his local pub, his efforts on behalf of mankind; just natural grief at the loss and hope in the mercy of God. I left this morning’s funeral more comforted and consoled than at many a funeral I have attended in recent years.

Splendid spiritual confidence and theological integrity!

Read the whole piece here.

Rite and trite

14 September 2010
Charles
3 Comments
Categories: Attitudes to dead bodies, Attitudes to death, ceremony, funeral customs, funeral trends, funerals in other cultures

There’s an interesting article in yesterday’s Guardian about funeral rites in the Church of England Book of Common Prayer (BCP). Here are some tasters:

Life expectancy in Tudor England was mid thirties, and about a third of children died before attaining the age of ten. Mortality was very much in the air and on the streets, what the Book of Common Prayer described as “divers diseases and sundry kinds of death.” … Before modern times the unjust and random nature of fate was inescapable. Death was no stranger, and contemplating your end was not an exercise for a retreat, but the inevitable consequence, half the time, of going out in the streets. In the midst of life you were in death … Death’s carriage delivered us, in the end, to the public crematorium of the 1970’s, with its Terylene curtains, cheesy music, elaborate floral tributes, and shuffling, embarrassed mourners. Death still comes to us all, but now as a sanitised stranger.

Most interesting, though, are some of the comments left by readers. Here’s a sample:

This summer I visited the convent chapel in the aragonese castle on Ischia.
What I thought at first to be toilets, were in fact the penultimate resting places of deceased nuns, whose corpses were seated on these bowls as corruption removed the flesh slowly from the bones and the fluids drained away. To be constantly reminded of their mortality, the other nuns would visit this apalling spectacle daily, many of them sickening and dying themselves as a result of the germ-laden atmosphere.

Give me sanitation and terylene curtains any day.

Existences of null consequence seems to be the modus operandi of modernity. Organs in bodily transition – no future / no past a linear journey from birth to death with no stops and seeming little point.

This seems to that ino our “yoof” obssessed culture we journey into invisibility and then pass away pointlessly. The links to the past and the future give us meaning in the present.

I’m fascinated how you could write a fairly extended piece on the BCP Funeral Service without mentioning the Funeral Sentences ?.

So I will.

Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery. He cometh up, and is cut down, like a flower; he fleeth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay.

What language. If I don’t have these words said at my funeral, I shall return to haunt CiF [Comment is Free]  belief !

Read the entire piece here.

No way

13 September 2010
Charles
2 Comments
Categories: ceremony, funeral customs, funeral trends

Have you been following the hullabaloo which greeted the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Melbourne, Denis Hart, when he restated Church rules on funerals and reiterated the ban on ‘secular items’ at funerals – romantic ballads, pop or rock music, political songs, football club songs, that sort of stuff? He said: “At the funerals of children … nursery rhymes and sentimental secular songs are inappropriate because these may intensify grief.” He said the funeral was a requiem mass for the repose of the soul, not a celebration of life or memorial service. If families wanted the latter, it should take place at a social occasion before or after the funeral.

This is the selfsame Denis Hart who, in 2004, told a female victim of priestly sexual abuse, “Go to hell, bitch.”

There’s a good, balanced discussion of the matter in The Age. Here are some extracts:

“I COME to bury Caesar, not to praise him,” Mark Antony tells the Romans, according to Shakespeare. Today it would probably be the other way round: stacks of eulogies and anecdotes and Caesar’s favourite songs – Sinatra’s My Way, probably – followed by a cremation.

Clearly, the role of a funeral has become blurred in this more secular age. Most Australians are no longer regulars at church, and increasing numbers see the main point of a funeral service as commemorating a life rather than commending it to God. Also, what used to be separated – the service and the wake, with eulogies and memories – have become increasingly conflated into the funeral itself.

The Catholic guidelines basically highlight that a church funeral service is still a church service. Its purpose is to commend the deceased to God and proclaim the Christian hope; it is explicitly not a secular celebration of a completed life. Such a celebration is a natural, proper and desirable thing, but the occasion for it, according to the church, is a separate gathering.

According to traditional Catholic thinking, the main priority at a church funeral is prayer for the deceased, and nourishing the grieving with the word of God and the Eucharist. In the 1662 Anglican Book of Common Prayer, the deceased was not even named during the service.

But families who resent the church limiting what they can do during a service should ask themselves why it is that they want a church funeral. Surely it is the solemnity and dignity of such an occasion, placing the person’s life in a broader – even eternal – narrative, the ritual marking an important passage, that draws them.

The church has long experience at such ritual, and is pretty good at it, and Queen’s Another One Bites the Dust (which has been requested) doesn’t really fit. The step from personal to trivial can be a short one. If none of this matters, then a secular celebrant at a funeral parlour will fulfil almost any request.

Read the entire article here.

They think it’s all over…

6 September 2010
Charles
6 Comments
Categories: alternative funerals, ceremony, cremation, crematoria, funeral customs, funeral trends, home funerals, natural burial

It’s interesting to note that two of the most important drivers for change in modern funerals have come, not from pro-active consumers or wild-eyed visionaries,  but from urgent if mundane economic and environmental needs. They are, famously, natural burial and’ less famously, the held-over cremation.

Ken West, for all that he is a visionary, made the case for natural burial at Carlisle by adducing United Nations Agenda 21 and, most persuasively, showing his local authority how it could check ever-rising cemetery maintenance costs. There were those who said at the time that natural burial would never work—consumers would spurn it. They should have asked those consumers first. The rest is history. Natural burial has established itself, for those who are environmentally concerned, as the alternative to cremation, and they are unlikely, Ken plausibly argues, to be seduced by green alternatives like resomation, promession or cryomation. Why would they be?

Crematoria want to reduce emissions and operate more efficiently. Because there are lulls (summer’s less busy than winter; Mondays less busy than Fridays), it makes sense when things are quiet to hold bodies over until there are enough of them to make the firing up of the cremator economic. Chilterns crematorium now holds over bodies for up to 72 hours (in practice rarely for more than 48) and, combined with a restructuring of its workforce, is now saving 30% on its fuel cost. The ICCM is keen that all crematoria should follow suit:

It is current practice to pre-heat cremators at the start of each day and cool them down after the last cremation of the day and repeat this process throughout the week. Apart from the excessive use of fossil fuel for daily pre-heating, the risk of emissions of pollutants from the first cremations of each day is increased.

Holding cremations over for a limited period will allow continuity of use with resultant reductions in fuel consumption. Industry codes of practice have attempted to address this situation with the Federation of British Cremation Authorities code stating that the cremation should take place within 24 hours of the funeral service whilst the Institute of Cemetery & Crematorium Management’s Guiding Principles for the Charter for the Bereaved states 72 hours. Despite these codes of practice being in existence very few crematoria hold cremations over for any period. This lack of action by authorities is perpetuating the impact on the environment. Source.

It’s remarkable how commonsensical consumers can be. They need to be handled with care, for sure, but it’s always a mistake to make over-careful assumptions about them. Do they mind having metal hip joints recycled? Not a bit. Until they were asked, the assumption was that they would, and expensive metals were reverently, absurdly disposed of by burial. Do consumers mind if graves are re-used as they are on the Continent, and remaining remains reburied beneath the new burial (the lift-and-deepen method)? Increasingly they don’t.

The holding over of cremations is of high psychological significance. Probably most people at a funeral suppose that, when the curtains glide shut, the coffin straightway lurches into the blazing, fiery furnace—which can give them a funny feeling afterwards if they think about it when they’re eating their sausage roll. The fact that they are not bothered when they find out that, actually, their dead person is still waiting to go in is significant. Let’s take it one step further: If the bereaved do not mind their dead waiting up to 72 hours to be burnt, how much longer would they find tolerable? More research is needed. Even so, 72 hours is three days. It’s plenty.

The holding over of cremations has an even higher ceremonial significance. If incineration does not follow hard on the heels of the funeral ceremony there is no need for the incinerator to occupy the same building as the ceremony space or ‘chapel’. Hardly anyone goes to see their dead person loaded into to the incinerator, anyway. Would mourners mind if that incinerator was a few miles away? Again, more research needed. I’d confidently hazard a guess that they wouldn’t. If that is so, their opinion would render conventional crematoria redundant. Hurrah.

A funeral needs a going-going-gone moment (the committal or some form of farewell) because a funeral is a journey (continuum, if you prefer) ending in the obliteration of the body. At a cremation funeral the ‘gone’ moment is effectively and satisfyingly achieved by the closing of the curtains, for all that this is an illusion. This being so, it is not the act of disposal which people need to tell them that here is The End but the provision of what Tony Piper brilliantly terms a vanishing point.

That vanishing point can be achieved in other ways. Rupert Callender shows us how in this example: “We are doing a home funeral next Wednesday for a family who felt they didn’t know what to do having had two dreadful family services at crems, one of them ruined by the awful ubiquitous sound system, but wanted to honour their dead mum’s wish to be cremated. The answer seemed obvious. We are taking her coffin around to their house at midday, and collecting her at four. We go to the crem alone.” Presumably for these mourners the vanishing point was effectively and satisfyingly provided by the sight of Rupert’s venerable but immaculate Volvo disappearing round a bend in the road. Jonathan Taylor tells the story of a funeral for a local woman to which he appends: “Oh yes, and the cremation – it happened the next day, incidentally.” He doesn’t say what the vanishing point was, but I guess it was something similar.

The possibilities offered by held-over cremation are, well, revolutionary. Crems now need to follow the logic and take things a step further: they need to form clusters and outsource their cremating, preferably to a dedicated plant that cremates around the clock. As for the bereaved, if it’s not the act of disposal that matters but, instead, the provision of an emotionally satisfying vanishing point, what impediment is there to evening funerals and weekend funerals held at venues of all sorts?

It’s not the future we’re talking about here, it’s the present. Funeral consumers are being slow to catch on and funeral directors aren’t exactly falling over themselves to explore the options with their clients. It’s time they did.

There’s nowt so crap as a crem

25 August 2010
Charles
18 Comments
Categories: celebrants, ceremony, crematoria, funeral directors, funeral trends, home funerals

Over in Lufkin, Texas, a new funeral home has opened. What’s different about it? It offers one of those familiar back-to-the-past initiatives which mark progress in funeral service: it’s owner is making his clients aware that they can have the funeral at home – if they want.

“It used to be that before there were funeral homes, the funerals were held at home,” said Philip Snead, CEO and Funeral Director of Snead Linton Funeral Home. “We’re just going back to the way that people used to do business. We do in-home visitations too, and we’re always mindful of health issues.”

I like it. So much better to hold a funeral on familiar ground than up at t’crem. So much better to hold a funeral on your own terms, in your own way. Best of all, it gives families so much more to do (decorating the venue, bringing the food…), and makes it so much easier for them to  run the show, buy tadalafil australia stand up and speak, do away with professional strangers. You don’t have to have the funeral at home, of course. There are community centres, hotels, cricket pavilions…

So forbidding is a crematorium, so alien, so marginalised, so exclusive of everything but death and deathmongers and the grieving bereaved, it is little wonder that people outsource the terrifying ordeal of running the show to someone they’ve briefed.

Says Mr Snead: “Since we’ve been offering the at-home services, people have responded favorably. The older generation grew up seeing their grandparents brought back to the home instead of being taken to a funeral home.”

How many UK funeral directors explore alternative venues with their clients, I wonder?

We will know, as a society, that we are getting funerals right when every crematorium ‘chapel’ in the country stands roofless, derelict and hooted at by owls. Of one thing we may be certain: there’s nowt so crap as a crem.

A real funeral

23 July 2010
Charles
10 Comments
Categories: ceremony

Requiem Video for David J Catts, Dead Mate from Kim Reddin on Vimeo.

David Catts, a man much given to tomfoolery, embodied all manner of beautiful imperfections. Aged 41, married for just eight months, he fell in July 2009 from a 17th storey balcony in what his father described as “skylarking gone tragically wrong.” He’d had a few drinks. His funeral addressed his beautiful imperfections with rare honesty and love. People said what needed to be said.

This blog is on holiday for the next week, after which it will be moving house. Posts will be sporadic. Happy days, all of you. And thank you for following. I really appreciate it.

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!