ceremony

Fooneytunes

18 June 2010
Charles
4 Comments
Categories: ceremony, music

There are limitations to blogging. If a post looks overlong people won’t read it. So you need to stick to a single line of argument; you haven’t space to expand or balance. Once you’ve written it you must strip it down, starting with the best bits. As you contemplate clicking Publish, vanity warns you that carefully crafted incompleteness looks idiotically simplistic — sometimes offensively so.

There’s an upside. That which limits the blogger liberates the audience. Finely judged incompleteness excites responses which correct, balance and enrich the original post in ways far beyond the intellectual capability of the blogger. It’s the resulting collaborative debate which really amounts to something. As with yesterday’s post. I’m writing this on the back of that.

Funeral ceremonies which address death as a universal event are in bad odour. We all know the diss-words. Cookie-cutter. One-size-fits-all. Same-old-same-old. Ceremonies like this don’t sufficiently address the individuality of the person who has died.

But funeral ceremonies which focus on the uniqueness of the dead person mostly overlook the universality of death and present it as an isolated individual misfortune. I’m not sure that celebration-of-lifers see a funeral as an opportunity to get their heads around their own and everyone else’s mortality, nor do they ever express a wish to spend time doing so. ‘The bell tolls for him, not me.’

The present day obsession with funeral tunes is interesting. Often, it’s the only thing secular folk know they want. The tunes they choose were not created to be played at funerals. They’re anything but unique to the individual.  The emotions they arouse are arguably a distraction from the business in hand.

All people know is that they must dutifully fill a 20-minute void with noise. Not glum noise, nice noise. Words don’t come easy. Thank heaven, then, for the secular celebrant with her cabinet of emotional emollients and her smiley, kind delivery.

Tunes come off the peg, easily lifted. Ready-made blather.

The difference between you and it

10 June 2010
Charles
3 Comments
Categories: bereavement, ceremony, funeral customs

I think we’ve all done some good hard thinking, over the last few months, about the value and role of the dead body at a funeral. The discussion of this, and other matters, has elicited some extremely interesting ideas and some statements which, to my eyes, look likely to become axioms. I’m thinking of Gloria Mundi’s “A funeral is not an artefact.”

And I think there’s a sentence in a comment Jonathan left on a recent post which will go the same way. The entire comment deserves another outing. If you missed it, enjoy and marvel. If you didn’t, well, it bears any amount of re-reading.

It is interesting to reflect that, while the comments columns of so much online content attract all manner of beastliness sheltering behind anonymity, the comments column of the GFG is of no interest to such. Long may it remain so. I’m sorry that so many comments from previous blogs were lost in the translation from Blogger to WordPress. But the blog is extant in Blogger and can be reached through your Blogger account.

When I allowed myself to love you, and you me, we entered into an unspoken pact: that one of us would come to grieve the other, that it would be the worst possible experience to put a loved one through, yet we willingly agreed to do it to each other and to ourselves for the sake of our love. We may not have given it a moment’s thought, but we both knew, and we didn’t shy away from our inevitable pain then. So why do it now?

Can you remember howling for lost love? Of course you can. So if someone offered you a painkiller, would you have taken it? I wouldn’t, because although grief hurts me worse than any physical pain it’s a pain I want. If I’m really honest with myself, I actually enjoy crying for the loss of someone whom I can’t bear the thought of living without. It’s the nearest thing to the comfort of physical contact with them I can find at that time. Don’t ask me why; it’s an animal thing as much as anything. But it’s your body I’m grieving for, as much as grieving for you. When I think of you, I see you still in it; all your dear characteristics expressed in its movements and gestures and sounds and appearances and and and… It’s how I came to even know of your existence, and how I came to love you. I still love you in your body – your dead body, yes, aren’t I foolish! – and now I’m going to have to love you out of it, and that’s a transition that doesn’t happen straight away. So I want your useless, dead husk here with me when I put you – yes, you, even though I know it’s not you, it’s it – into a cremator or a hole so that I can begin to make sense of the difference between you and it. That’s why I put on this funeral for you.

So what’s wrong with a celebration of your life? Nothing. In fact it’s essential, unless it takes the place of mourning for your death. I’m celebrating even my pain of your loss because if it hadn’t been for you I’d have had nothing to lose, and no pain to tell me how fortunate I was to have had you in my life for the precious time we had together. I’m celebrating you to prolong the agony in a way, to be completely and unbearably aware of just what, just how much, I have lost because that’s all that makes sense of my grief.

So yes, Charles, anything that trivializes or masks the agony of grief in the name of ‘celebration of life’ should be shot down in flames. It is a betrayal to celebrate you without railing against the dying of your light, or without shouting my anger at you for bloody well dying on me.

And if I go first, I want it to hurt you just as much.

Here’s an extract from another blog entitled “No funeral service, no headstone … can these be good things?”

A friend died recently. At his request, there were no services of any kind. Since he left his body to a medical school, there is no gravesite to visit … I always found him to be an interesting person, but the details in the obituary made him even more interesting than I had imagined. I looked forward to learning more about him when friends and family would gather to celebrate his life. Sadly, I never had that opportunity … and I feel cheated. While I totally respect his right to leave this planet in any way he chose, I wish he had chosen another path … No services, no headstones. How do you suppose either of these affects a person’s long-term legacy?

Find the entire post here.

Maggie Brinklow on what makes a good funeral

9 June 2010
Charles
5 Comments
Categories: alternative funerals, ceremony, DIY funeral, Formality vs informality, funeral cost, funeral customs, funeral trends, home funerals

Everyone agrees that choice in funeral arrangements is a good thing. Even the UK’s most Jurassic undertakers are nodding their heads fervently on this one. They’ve come round at last (sort of). It’s the mantra in Funeralland: Personalisation x 3 (I can’t be bothered to type it).

There’s money in it, of course. Because personalisation (x3) can merely = accessorisation (x3). Instead of a bog standard box, why not this lovely one here, look, emblazoned with bluebells and kingfishers and a steam locomotive at 3x the price? There are lots of ways to personalise. We know what they are. They overlook making your own box, a very useful exercise in grief therapy. They overlook picking flowers from your own garden, not even tying them at the stems, and taking them home after, if it was a cremation.

There’s pressure in personalisation. The media love to pick up on wacky funerals, outrageous dress codes, iconoclastic songs. Trad is so last century, so gloomy, so boring.

This exerts an expectation. “So what are we going to do? He loved his veg, especially his leeks, so, er, let’s tell everyone to dress up as a leek??” There’s a tyranny taking hold.

There’s personalisation (x3) and there’s costly and unnecessary distraction (x3).

So it’s really good, this morning, to publish this post (the first of many, I hope) by Maggie Brinklow, a celebrant, member of the Association of Independent Celebrants (AOIC), who is keen to broaden her skills to include body preparation. She hopes shortly to do a course with the distinguished Mark Elliott, one of the best in his field, and I hope she’ll tell us all about that. Maggie says “I am passionate about putting the funeral back in the hands of the family.” She reminds us that trad has legs.

What makes a good funeral?

I’ve just got back home from a funeral.  Nothing unusual in that – I’ve been to so many family funerals that I’ve lost count.  I’ve also acted as a celebrant at quite a few as well, so what made this one any different?  Well, this is the first funeral where I acted as the Funeral Arranger, working on behalf of a small independent company.  It wasn’t anything special, a church service followed by interment in the local cemetery – a hearse and limo, the usual flowers and mourning dress and then back to the house for the ‘do’.

So, why am I writing about it?  Well, it got me thinking.  What makes a good funeral?  Is it the gold coffin with stretch hummers and 300 mourners or, is it the small intimate gathering, the cardboard coffin pulled on a hand bier while the children sing, before being laid to rest at a woodland site?  For me, it’s both and neither of these options – personally I’d like people to take up the alternative ideas, but it’s not my decision.  I offered the family the different venue, transport, coffin etc etc but, in the end, the traditional route was the right one for them.

Like I said, today’s funeral was nothing unusual, but it was what the family wanted, and really, isn’t that what it’s all about?

Coherence vs incoherence

8 June 2010
Charles
7 Comments
Categories: ceremony, Formality vs informality

More resonances with Rupert Callender’s post in the latest Chester diocesan newsletter. In it, Bishop Peter Forster talks about funerals:

I have been thinking recently about funerals – not my own, particularly, although having just obtained my bus pass (and other welcome perks) in idle moments that has crossed my thoughts.

My mind has been concentrated by another experience, which is becoming more common: to go to a funeral, only to find that the cremation or burial has taken place earlier in the day, and the funeral has become a celebration of the deceased’s life.

Why does this jar with me so much?

He goes on to give his reasons, which, because they are consistent with Christian theology, would seem to me to be blameless

Firstly, it easily gives the impression that our bodies don’t matter much, that the essential ‘me’ is a disembodied soul or spirit … We are not spiritual chips off some cosmic block longing to return home: we are sacred individuals, made in God’s image, body, soul and spirit.

Secondly, these new funeral practices can seem to put death to one side, to ignore or even deny its reality. Some poems read at funerals give the same impression: ‘I have only slipped into the next room’, etc. Some music chosen at funerals likewise seems out of place, missing the proper solemnity which should mark the death of a child of God.

He concludes:

For Christians, death is an intrinsic part of life itself. We are baptised into the death of Christ, that we might live his risen life … so we should not evade the central place our death has in our journey to God … When we organise a funeral we set out liturgically to accompany the deceased on his or her journey to God. That’s why funerals are so important, and why the person, in the form of their body, should be part of the ritual itself. Only then will a funeral also become a witness to the resurrection.

Over at the Times a Christian journalist who is also an idiot has this to say in response:

The bishop can’t seriously be saying that a funeral without a body in the middle of it isn’t valid … What business is it of his as to how family and friends deal with their grief?

She concludes: The loss of a loved one is hard enough to bear without the Church chuntering about how you say your farewells.

Amazing. Perhaps the C of E has only itself to blame for this cake-and-eat-it sort of member. I don’t subscribe to the Bishop’s theology, but I am always ready to deplore any trend which seeks to make death bearable by trivialising it and turning it into a bit of a laugh.

Formality vs informality

8 June 2010
Charles
No comments
Categories: ceremony, Formality vs informality

Here’s an interesting blog post from a US preacher called Dave. Well, judge for yourself from these extracts. There is much in what he says which resonates with what Rupert Callender wrote yesterday.

This past Saturday I had the privilege of conducting a funeral service for a 21-year-old who died the week before in a motorcycle accident.

As the funeral crowd consisted mostly of self-titled, “motor heads,” it was definitely an audience that I didn’t quite connect with when it came to a passion for vehicles.  For me, I ride a minivan and never really think a thing of it.

The most appropriate part of the funeral is what some would find the most inappropriate. I was done with my message the pianist began playing the last song.  However, before the soloist had the opportunity to begin, a self-proclaimed “motor head” walked up to the front, grabbed the mic, and said, “I have something I want to say.”

His conclusion:

Formality can sometimes cut off the most divine moments of clarity.  I was glad for this young man’s courage to walk up to the mic and ignore “order of service” protocol, making an unforgettable mark on us all.

Read the whole post here.

Real funeral

20 March 2010
Charles
No comments
Categories: ceremony

I like this. It’s a report of a funeral in Arkansas:

Friends bid farewell to Jim Powell at a memorial service this afternoon at Second Baptist Church. The retired Gazette editorial page editor died Wednesday at 90.

Glenn Beck would have hated it.

Ray Higgins and Matt Cook eulogized Jim in a manner keeping with the history of the downtown church Jim had attended for 50 years. They preached some mighty social justice, thundering just as Jim had in behalf of the poor, the oppressed and the immigrant.

Carolyn Y. Staley knocked her solo of “Amazing Grace” out of the park. She’s running for state representative as a Democrat, by the way. Keep her in mind.

Faces in the crowd included: Judges current and former Bill Wilson, Bob Brown, John I. Purtle, Buzz Arnold and Wendell Griffen. Political figures included Dale Bumpers, Ray Thornton and state Rep. John Edwards. John Walker was among those in the crowd who had been key figures in the dramas Jim chronicled. Former Gazette colleagues included Jerry Dhonau, Ernie Dumas, Doug Smith, Bob McCord, Pat Patterson, Bill Lewis, Brenda Tirey and Chuck Heinbockel.

Jim’s loves were much discussed. They included bream fishing, pink tomatoes and his family — Ruth, his wife of 58 years, and sons Lee and the late James O. Powell Jr. Lee read one of his father’s favorite poems, Tennyson’s “Crossing the Bar.”

Good funeral for a good man.

Here’s where I found it.

A party for a parting

19 March 2010
Charles
No comments
Categories: ceremony, dying

Jonathan posted an interesting thought the other day: “if no-one had portrayed the pseudovictoriana we associate with funerals, can you think of anyone who would have invented it for themselves?.” It raises the question: if we were to start again with a clean sheet, how would we do them?

It’s a big question. Do funerals need to be reformed or re-visioned? Do we go on trying to make a bad thing better, or do we break the mould?

Or has the mould been broken? The so-called celebration of life led by a secular celebrant has, for those who reject organised religion, turned the tables on the well-meaningless utterances of a mumbling minister – if that’s the attitude you take to a ceremony whose ritual is the same for everyone. Modern secular funerals pride themselves on being unique ceremonies for unique people. They reject the one-size-fits-all (even though, in practice, there’s very little difference between most of them). In doing so, they overlook the great and enviable strength and comfort of the one-size-fits-all ritual, best explained by Thomas Long: “Someone we love has died, and so once again we get out our old scripts, assemble on the stage, and act out one more time the great and hopeful drama of how the Christian life moves from death to life … We do this again and again, every time someone dies, because it is important for our bodies to know the way home.” If this results in the depersonalisation of the dead person, I mean the deceased, this is not the fault of the ritual: “Jane Doe’s funeral will inevitably be Jane Doe’s funeral, and who she actually was will make a difference in the sounds and rhythms of the ritual.” All religious rituals have been refined over hundreds of years. Where they have retained their theological confidence they have evolved, as the result of tens of thousands of tweaks, into stunning theatre – as any Catholic requiem mass will testify. The religious funeral in this country is reckoned to have been discredited by timeserving duty ministers and crem cowboys: the ones who didn’t give a damn. Sure, they helped it on its primrose path. But what actually did for it was loss of ritual nerve, the desire to make the most of a pastoral opportunity, the timid wish not to give offence to non-believers: the adulteration of the ritual. For all that a fullblooded requiem mass may be, for some, an alien rite in the House of Rimmon, none but the most bilious atheist would deny that it’s a heck of a fine affair. The truth is that the Church can do a bloody good funeral – as Brother Felix will testify.

Where there’s no familiar ritual to enact you’ve to start from scratch, hurry up, make it up, improvise. Hope it turns out okay, not an incoherent flim-flam of ill-assorted elements. But risk missing the point or getting the emphases wrong or ending up with nobbut an entertainment, the triumph of the trivial over the profound. It takes a great deal more intelligence of both mind and heart to create a ceremony which effects the transformation of mourning than we see in so many of today’s so-much-better secular ceremonies. It takes rigour.

There’s a link at the bottom video to a video which illustrates much of the poverty of the modern funeral. It’s called A Party for Kath. A party for a parting, geddit? It’s a product of Dying Matters Awareness Week (don’t you dare tell me it passed you by), itself the product of the Dying Matters Coalition, which started life as a gaggle of quangos and now incorporates thousands of associated rag-tag bodies. There is much about this Coalitition that makes me uncomfortable. The way it talks down. The way it supposes talking about death to be a conversation made necessary by a life-limiting event, not by birth. The way it asserts that talking about your ‘preferences’ will make your death good. The way it implicitly advocates dying at home without acknowledging that a hospital is actually custom built to look after very ill people, and without acknowledging either that, though most people say they’d like to die at home, they tend not to if they have been involved in a home death. Frankly, the statement, “Dying Matters hopes to help make ‘a good death’ the norm for the more than 500,000 people who die in England each year” seems to me as well-meaningly fatuous as a C of E funeral.

Above all, to promote the notion that funerals should be directed by the dead seems to me to be wrongheadedness bordering on wickedness – and music to the ears of the funeral plan salespeople. The dying want their funerals to be cheap, cheerful, fuss free, not upsetting and garnished with finger food. Well, here’s a message to the dying (ie, all of us): that recipe doesn’t work if they hated you, it doesn’t work if they loved you and it doesn’t work if they were mostly indifferent to you. It doesn’t work whatever they felt about you. Say what you’d like, by all means, just as you always do before your birthday. Then butt out and leave it to them.

Only when the living engage with their duty to shoulder responsibility, to hurt and think and work, will they know what needs to be done and what needs to be said. It’s a regret to me that the Dying Matters Coalition hasn’t got the emotional and intellectual rigour to talk tough and get that message out.

Watch A Party for Kath here.

A bit discursive, this post. It needs editing. I’m not out of rigour, but I am out of time. Sorry! As for the choice of Rod Stewart – well, yes, a bit gratuitous.

No service by request

5 March 2010
Charles
No comments
Categories: ceremony, direct cremation

One more go at Canada’s Times Colonist. A rich seam, this.

There are 13 obits in the paper. Of those, 3 opt for no service; 3 opt for a celebration of life (I’m not sure exactly what that is, but at least one of them’s not a funeral); 4 opt for a memorial service; and just 3 opt for a funeral (all burials by the look of them). That means 8 out of 13 of these dead people will duck out of/be spared a conventional funeral. By UK standards, unthinkable.

There seem to be three reasons for the decline of the Canadian funeral.

First, older people (okay, seniors if you insist) move to retirement places and, uprooted from the place where, all their lives, they have done what was expected of them, feel disconnected from social conventions – fancy-free and free for anything.

Second, having moved to a retirement centre, these people suppose that there’ll be no one to come to their funeral.

Third, having been to awful funerals in the past, these (liberated, it has to be said) people reckon a funeral is not for them, so they specify: no service by request.

The local funeral director, McCall’s, is clearly so concerned by this that they have put a half-hour discussion of the no-funeral option on their website in the hope that people will reconsider.

In the UK we have retirement centres and more than enough experience of bleak and meaningless funerals.

So, why is it taking us so long to catch up?

Listen to the discussion on the McCalls site here: No Service By Request

The great reveller

4 March 2010
Charles
No comments
Categories: ceremony, direct cremation

A Christian funeral proclaims the fierce, happy truth that ‘Death is swallowed up in victory’. As Christians see it, Sin corrupts and depraves, Death annihilates and nullifies. Both are the spawn of Satan, who is Evil, the mortal (lit) enemy of God who is Good and, the theology goes, the victor in the end. It’s pure Star Wars. Nice idea, good plot, great movie, but, for so many people, no more than that. To believe, for them, requires an impossible feat of suspended disbelief resulting in that narked, defiant expression non-believers wear at religious funerals. There’s a good example of this over at Carla’s blog, where she reflects feistily and funnily on resurrection: “my caregiver Alexa wanted to know if my new perfect body would have red hair and great tits because otherwise it would be a downgrade.”

Once you’ve established the certainty of rising in glory you can look death coolly in the eyes and see it clearly for the howling, sneering, brutal, destructive hooligan it is. If you can beat this mindless yob up, you’re obviously going to whoop a bit. Thus, St John Chrysostom:

Let no one fear death, for the Death of our Saviour has set us free. He has destroyed it by enduring it.

He destroyed Hades when He descended into it. He put it into an uproar even as it tasted of His flesh. Isaiah foretold this when he said, “You, O Hell, have been troubled by encountering Him below.”

Hell was in an uproar because it was done away with.
It was in an uproar because it is mocked.
It was in an uproar, for it is destroyed.
It is in an uproar, for it is annihilated.
It is in an uproar, for it is now made captive.
Hell took a body, and discovered God.
It took earth, and encountered Heaven.
It took what it saw, and was overcome by what it did not see.
O death, where is thy sting?
O Hades, where is thy victory?

Resounding stuff. Intriguing tense change. And at least Christians implicitly recognise that the death of the body is potentially catastrophic, rendering living pointless.

What, then of those who cannot assure themselves of victory despite the knockdown on the deathbed? Is death, for them, defeat? Is having your body brought to a funeral like being paraded, accompanied by your shamed family and friends, as a vanquished captive at an emperor’s triumph? Can you make of this catastrophe something at least acceptable? Can you make it all right by calling death your friend? Well, we try, don’t we, with all that stuff about circles of life and leaves falling off an oak tree and death is nothing at all and I am not there I did not die and death is only an old door set in a garden wall; on quiet hinges it gives at dusk when thrushes call? Secular celebrants have gallons of this emollient balm to slap on.

For all these brave, naff words, twenty minutes at the crem looks to an observer like sullen surrender, a huddled duty-shuffle past the Old Enemy.

You can at least deny the Old Enemy this public humiliation by not having a funeral at all. I’m surprised more people don’t.

Click the pic to make it huge.

Ambivalence 1

25 February 2010
Charles
No comments
Categories: ceremony, funeral customs, funeral directors

Interesting, isn’t it, how two contrary opinions need not be mutually exclusive? When one opinion does not displace the other you’re left either tonguetied with indecision or, if they merge, ambivalent. Ambivalence may be seen as fence-sitting, but I think that’s simplistic. To honour two opposed points of view equally seems to me to be a perfectly grown-up way of resolving a problem.

That’s the way my mind was working as I drove home yesterday after seeing Andrew Smith, a funeral director in Macclesfield with a two year-old but already booming business. Andrew does old-school bigtime. It’s what his clients want. And, here’s the point, he does it not for cosmetic reasons, nor to make himself feel important, but in order to create and serve (these are my words, not his) the particular sort and sense of occasion that his clients want. A funeral is something we rise to. And, yes, it is a performance, it is theatre, and any funeral director worth their salt needs to have thought about this, about how the parts are to be played. Any performer who betrays the least self-consciousness or disengagement is fatally flawed. If you can’t lose yourself in the part, all anyone else can see is someone failing to be something they’re not. That’s why costume or uniform is so important. Anything less than perfection begets inauthenticity; it corrupts performance, relegates it to tawdry playacting and renders it meaningless. What goes for the funeral director goes, too, for the spear-carriers – in the case of funerals, the bearers. They need to rehearse. They need to be filled with a sense of occasion – to get into role. And they need to be dressed right. In the bearers’ changing room at Andrew’s funeral home you’ll see a row of immaculately polished oxfords. Not Clarks oxfords, Loake oxfords. The best it gets. Fantastic.

Andrew supposed me to be anti top hat, but I’m not. I’m anti prat in a hat. He also supposed me to be anti-embalming. I am. I am also for it. I can see both sides and I take neither: I am serenely ambivalent. It all depends on how it’s done, why it’s done and the code of conduct in the mortuary. Andrew has a strong feeling about how the dead should be looked after, and he reminded me of something Sean Lynch says in the PBS documentary about Tom Lynch’s funeral home in Michigan: “I have memories as a very young boy of being brought over here with my father as he was working, and watching him and his colleagues dressing and casketing bodies, you know, very quietly, very reverently, doing something for someone that can no longer do anything for themselves, and even at a young age, before I could articulate the importance of that kind of work, I recognised it as something very significant and essential.” If you watch Parts 3 and 4 of the documentary you can see what he means. It’s why Andrew is pro-embalming. He wants people to have the best possible memory of their dead person. Echoes here of Tom: “Watching my parents, I watched the meaning change of what it is that undertakers do, from something done to the dead to something done for the living, to something done by the living, every one of us. Thus, undertakings are the things we do to vest the lives we lead against the cold, the meaningless, the void, the noisy blather and the blinding dark.”

I admire Andrew enormously. I liked the look of Macclesfield, too. Nice place to live, I should think. Certainly a good place to die.