coffins

Coffin and splutterin’

26 January 2012
Charles
27 Comments
Categories: coffins
In the correspondence columns of the Feb Funeral Service Journal we find this touching plaint. Dig the velveteen undertakerly verbals, especially in the first sentence: 

Dear Sirs Re: The missing link 

One of the fundamental items provided by a Funeral Director is the coffin used to contain the mortal remains of our clients’ loved ones. 

When we attend a restaurant we expect food and, in my case, a bottle of wine too. I recently arranged a funeral with a very creative family who had taken the opportunity to purchase a Bamboo Coffin directly from an associate member of a professional trade association. I was disappointed to learn of the ease they experienced in obtaining what would normally be a consumable product only supplied to the trade. 

Funeral Directors strive to deliver a complete comprehensive service meeting the needs of bereaved clients. We are here to support, offer choice and deliver a sympathetic service charging fairly for our service. When you take a bottle of wine with you to the Restaurant you expect to pay ‘Corkage’. As a Funeral Director I struggle to ask a grieving family to pay the ‘Coffinage’ on an item purchased privately from a trade supplier. The family I had the pleasure of helping challenged every element of the funeral costs and there was no way that we could sustain the regular average revenue with this particular funeral. 

The Funeral Directors’ add-on to the trade cost of the coffin covers the unplanned mortuary fridge breakdown and all the other little things that we, like any other business, wish didn’t crop up. By providing the families the opportunity to purchase items independently, thereby furnishing the funeral themselves, are we witnessing the beginning of the demise of the Funeral Directing business? 

As an independent, we strive towards offering excellent service with an underlying desire to thrive rather than just survive. It is unfortunately about money. Money pays for the sandwich I had for lunch today and hopefully the £10 meal for two tonight from M&S. It is what keeps the world spinning.  

I would be interested to learn of other Funeral Directors who have experienced associate trade members jumping the gap from ‘Trade Supplier’ to ‘Retailer’. Like every other Funeral Director I like to be included in every aspect of the funeral . Is it a case that our ‘Trade suppliers’ no longer supply direct to the customer, or more a case of me stepping sideways and swallowing my pride? 

I look forward to hearing your comments. We are all working hard to maintain our market share following a year when the death rate in most areas has been unexpectedly low. I hope in the true Christmas spirit we can come together and make sure we are not the missing link. 

Yours faithfully

Jason Maiden

Chelsea Funeral Directors

GFG comment: 

Beyond observing that Mr Maiden is probably wrong to stick with his fridge, sorry, we just can’t be bothered to rise to this. Don’t let that stop you. Does the analogy with a full-service meal apply? Where does this leave takeaways? What are we to take of Mr Maiden’s DIY approach to eating — that M & S meal?

Any food for comfort for him, anyone? 

Without knobs on

20 January 2012
Charles
3 Comments
Categories: coffins
From Richard Rawlinson, our religious correspondent, who is a Catholic. 
The campaign against ugly and extraneous coffin handles launched by aesthete and designer David Hicks, which the GFG ran a little while back – here – has support in high places. Pope John Paul II’s coffin was beautiful in its simplicity.
 

Second-hand coffin for sale

20 January 2012
Charles
5 Comments
Categories: coffins

A used casket went up for sale last month at a Los Angeles auction house with the estimate price of $1,000. The ‘one previous owner’ was Lee Harvey Oswald, President John F Kennedy’s suspected assassin. Shot dead by Jack Ruby just days after JFK’s murder in 1963, he was buried in Texas, but was unearthed after his widow sought an exhumation to test a conspiracy theory that a lookalike Russian agent had been buried in her husband’s place. A medical examination showed the decomposed body was indeed Oswald’s, and he was returned to his plot in a new casket. The original coffin had deteriorated, and was sold by Baumgardner Funeral Home, the local undertaker which handled the re-internment. It fetched $87,469. The owner is unknown.

Story here.

A bit more here http://www.upi.com/Odd_News/2010/12/17/Oswalds-coffin-auctioned-off-for-87469/UPI-94281292590123/

Ozzy Osbourne on coffin shopping

19 January 2012
Charles
3 Comments
Categories: coffins

Ozzy Osborne is an agony uncle at the Sunday Times. Here’s a recent interaction: 

Dear Dr Ozzy, is it bad form to shop for your own coffin? (I ask this as a cancer patient with very particular tastes.)
Anonymous 

Ozzy replies:

It ain’t bad form, but there’s gotta be something better to do with your time if you’re expecting the worse. I mean, it’s not like you’ll get much of an opportunity to admire your brass handles and velvet padding after the funeral. You’ll be a gonner! If you wanna go shopping, Dr Ozzy’s advice is to buy something you can enjoy while you’re still breathing.

Sunday Times 8 Jan 2012

Buried in greenery

19 January 2012
Charles
No comments
Categories: alternative funerals, coffins, natural burial

When the GFG went to the London Funeral Exhibition last summer at Epping Woodland Burial Park we met Angie Whitaker, who works at a sister burial ground, Chiltern.  Her husband is buried in the woods there. Angie gave a talk to visitors about her experience of natural burial. I asked her to write it up for the blog, and here it is:

There is an element in all of us that likes to be in control. We work, we plan our birthdays, our holidays, our weddings; it all has to be perfect. Very few of us think of our death, we put it to one side, hope it will go away.

That was me.

Then the worst possible thing happens. My husband is diagnosed with Motor Neurone Disease. Both of us become very quickly aware that this part of our story will not have a happy ending.

It doesn’t.

It is December 2009, and I have the local doctor talking to me about funerals. Through the haze of unreality I hear him mention a local funeral director, and know this is not what I want. The thought of waiting in a conveyor belt at the local crematorium fills me with dread.

Fortunately I found an advert in the local directory for a Green Funeral Director, rang them, they came to see me. Please tell me I can have a funeral with a difference? I said Keith, my husband, was an artist, a woodsman. At this, a brochure was presented to me. Chiltern Woodland Burial Park. Great, let’s go see it. But I need an unusual coffin. A brochure appears. Brilliant. Cardboard coffins with pictures on.

On a bleak, wet, icy, windy January day I go to the Burial Park. We are met by Peter Taylor, given coffee, kindness and a woodland tour. A tree is chosen, the date confirmed.

The weather worsens. It snows like it never has before. The Woodland Burial Park somehow manages the whole event. A hundred and twenty-five people have battled their way through blizzards and closed roads to stand in awe at our very own Narnia. They gather together, drink wine and talk about Keith, then walk through the trees to find the turquoise-blue coffin with images of a sparrowhawk flying a Sparrowhawk aeroplane, one of Keith’s mad ‘Animals That Travel’ pictures. Keith was a graphic artist and was working on illustrations of animals that travel. He had an idea to put together a little book for Motor Neurone Disease. The pictures included a hippo in a hot air balloon, a jaguar driving a Jaguar car, a freisian cow driving a milk float, and a sparrowhawk bird flying a Sparrowhawk plane.

So many people said to me we had a great day, it was the best funeral we have ever been to. So many people did not know that there is a choice, you can have the exactly the kind of funeral that is right for you, and right for the environment.

I knew that I had got it right.

And afterwards, when we go back to visit, we are always met with kindness.

Our woodland is exactly what the brochure says: a place to celebrate life.

Remembering Josh

13 November 2011
Charles
2 Comments
Categories: Art and death, ceremony, coffins, funeral directors, funeral music, funeral photography, Grief

“REMEMBERING JOSH” is a film that records the life of our son Josh, as it was remembered at his funeral early in 2011. Josh Edmonds died in a road accident in while traveling South East Asia in January 2011. He was 22 years old. Our film is both a tribute to him, with many wonderful musical contributions and anecdotes, as well as a reflection on what it has meant to us to organize a fairly ambitious event in such a short space of time. Over 300 people attended, many of who were meeting for the first time having come buy generic cialis from different parts of Josh’s life. We found that organising the funeral ourselves without recourse to a traditional funeral director, was of immense value as we struggled to come to terms with our loss. We’d like to thank all those who helped and supported us, and without whom this event would not have been possible.

Here’s the full film of Josh’s funeral made by his parents, Jimmy and Jane. James Showers characterises a good funeral as “a collision of grief and beauty”.  No one has ever expressed it better. James is the ‘non traditional’ funeral director in this film. 

Brutally creative chaos

10 November 2011
Charles
1 Comment
Categories: alternative funerals, Art and death, ashes, Attitudes to death, ceremony, coffins, Formality vs informality, funeral directors, Good books, Grief

You may remember this post, The Chaos of Meaning, about the photographic essay which Jimmy Edmonds created in commemoration of his son Josh. If you missed it, click the link and go see it; it’s rare that we are lucky enough to post anything so extraordinary and beautiful.

Above is a trailer for a film Jimmy has made about Josh’s funeral. I went to see it earlier this week with; it really is marvellous.

And it complements what Rachel Wallace says in the previous post about the importance of making a record of a funeral.

The coffin, in case you wonder, was handmade by Jimmy with expert help. 

At the weekend we’ll post another film made by Jimmy about life, death, ageing and more. He’s a Bafta winner, is Jimmy. It shows. 

Below is some text from the BeyondGoodbye.co.uk website.

Joshua Harris-Edmonds 
23 May 1988 — 16 January 2011
Forever in our hearts and minds

On 16th January 2011 Joshua Amos Harris Edmonds was tragically killed in a road traffic accident in Vietnam. Joshua was 3 months into a trip of a lifetime travelling across South East Asia. 

He was 22 years of age.  

A life cut short, but a life lived well.

In honour of our Josh and as a memorial to his life, Beyond Goodybe, the website, will continue Josh’s inspiration on others and offer a place to remember, to pay tribute and share their love for Josh with others. 

This site also houses the book ‘Released’ and the film ‘Beyond Goodbye’, family tributes to our Josh and also perspectives on death and the grieving process. 

If you’d like to get in touch, please do: info@beyondgoodbye.co.uk

Frightfully common

8 November 2011
Charles
2 Comments
Categories: Art and death, coffins

The English interior designer David Hicks created the signature look of the Swinging Sixties. Those strong colours and geometrical designs — they’re his. 

He seems to have been a man at ease with his mortality, a mindset informed, perhaps, by his daily ritual of chain-smoking cigarettes. At his flat in Albany he “created a crimson drawing room and bedroom with a bed lavishly draped in red damask, which he described as ‘a bed to receive one’s doctors from, a bed to die in.’ 

“Hicks did not die in that bed but rather in his bed at the Grove, surrounded by beloved objects and gazing at the landscape. He orchestrated his own funeral, spelling out the arrangements in a book that he made called “The Demise of David Hicks.” His coffin was carried to its final resting place on an ivy-covered trailer attached to Hicks’s Range Rover. He was wearing a David Hicks tie, and his pockets were stuffed with his obituaries and press clippings.” [Source] 

Hicks designed his own coffin, of course. When lung cancer claimed him at the age of 69 he lay in state in it, at his own instructions, in his garden pavilion. Made of sycamore, it was, at his command, handle-less.

Coffin handles, he said, are “frightfully common”. 

Death in the community

30 August 2011
Charles
1 Comment
Categories: alternative funerals, Art and death, Attitudes to death, celebrants, ceremony, coffins, End-of-life issues, funeral customs, funeral directors, funeral reformers, funeral trends

 

Beyond the unappetising business of flogging pre-need plans to the tottering classes, undertakers do next to nothing to educate the public about funerals. They seek to be seen as public-spirited. They do good stunts, raise money for the hospice here, the air ambulance there. But how many stage events to raise awareness of the immense emotional and spiritual power of a funeral to transform grief?

Expectations of funerals are so low that most people are just relieved to get the whole horrible business behind them. They are so low that they bitterly resent the cost. So there have to be very sound commercial reasons for all undertakers to get out there and talk up their product.

Two recent events have brought death into the community in original and effective ways. Both were, for the apprehensive, welcoming in their informality; both set out to inform rather than sell.

The first was the Six Feet Under Convention held in Bournemouth on 12-14 August. It was a brave venture, which attracted 20 or so delegates to a series of talks by eminent funeralists and others. Alongside it was an open-air coffin display organised by the Natural Death Centre, complete with a coffin to paint and another to pose dead in. There were sporadic outbreaks of musical performance. It was reckoned to be the first-ever public display of coffins. So wary was Bournemouth Borough Council that it insisted on warning signs. It was notable that some foreign visitors were discombobulated. Brits loved it.

The second was ARKA’s Bringing Death to Life show in Lewes. An atmosphere of cheerful informality was inviting to the casual visitor, and a good number of people in the locality had made a very deliberate bee-line. They weren’t disappointed. There was an afternoon of excellent talks from Cara herself; from Julie Gill, who’ll be running the new ARKA branch in Lewes; from Hermione Elliott, a doula from Living Well Dying Well; and from Peter Murphy of Light on Life Ceremonies. Peter and his wife Belinda have a ceremony shop in Brighton, and work very closely with ARKA. How good to see a funeral director with an understanding of the vital importance of collaborating with ritualists. Cara certainly knows how to surround herself with brilliant people. A highlight of the day was hanging out with Jean Francis, author of the excellent Time to Go.