cremation

Bhupen Hazarika: A funeral larger than Diana’s

9 November 2011
Charles
8 Comments
Categories: Attitudes to death, cremation, funeral pyres

Did you know that earlier today, in the Indian state of Assam, a funeral was held that was expected to be the one of the largest the world has seen in recent years?

Yesterday the Times of Assam reported that:

Unofficial sources have claimed that the number has already crossed the number of attendees who paid the last respect to Late Princess Diana, Pope John Paul II, US president John F Kennedy, etc.

The subject of this grief and devotion is Bhupen Hazarika, the bard of Brahmaputra, who died earlier this week at the age of 86. The service had already been delayed by a day because of the large numbers attending and the Times of India reports that today:

Heartrending scenes were witnessed at the Gauhati University campus, close to the banks of the great Asian river Brahmaputra. As the funeral pyre was lit at 10.26 a.m., chants of ‘Bhupen Hazarika amar raho’ rent the air and people broke down, with some crying loudly and others barely managing to hold back their tears.

An overwhelmed Tej pleaded with the surging crowd to control themselves and maintain calm even as Hazarika’s companion of 40 years, Kalpana Lajmi, cried inconsolably, unable to check her emotions.

“I am speechless with the overwhelming response and love for my father,” an emotional Tej told IANS after performing the last rites of the 85-year-old legend.

An estimated 100,000 people were present at the funeral site, some atop trees, and others trying witness the last rites from every possible vantage point available in the area.

A 21-gun salute was offered by the Assam Police with doctors and forensic experts taking the foot impressions of the man for posterity.

I was struck by the way in which the family were close to Dr Hazarika’s body thoughout. 

For the pyre enthusiasts amongst you the Assam tribune reports that:

The GU authorities too have arranged for about 60 to 70 kgs of sandal wood to prepare the pyre of the great artiste in keeping with his stature. The wood has been collected from the University Botanical Garden, said GU Vice Chancellor Prof Okhil Kumar Medhi.

A Catholic take on funeral diversity

1 August 2011
Charles
5 Comments
Categories: ceremony, cremation, death and funerals, funeral, funeral customs, Religious funerals, Requiem Mass

Posted by Richard Rawlinson

First, may I thank this blog’s host for encouraging me to think about my own expectations of funerals as a Catholic. One readily assumes theists and atheists approach funerals differently, just as we part ways on the subject of the soul’s life after the body’s death. Some non-believers might find following the (Requiem) Mass somewhat lacking in individuality, along with general obedience to rules/doctrine dictated by the traditions of organised religions. Conversely, some believers might look disapprovingly on the more unconventional civil funerals.

But there is consensus on either side of the faith fence that diversity is necessary to reflect the wishes of the deceased and their loved ones: angry atheists and theists who shout either ‘mumbo-jumbo’ or ‘sacrilege’ (Drs Richard Dawkins and Ian Paisley spring to mind) at their intellectual foe both border on fundamentalism of a kind, while the civilised approach is liberal in the true sense of the word – generous and broad-minded to others regardless of personal concepts of orthodoxy.

When such acceptance is a given in the context of funerals, we can dwell on the common ground of grieving for the deceased, and celebrating their life. However, just because one is not a meddler in the affairs of others doesn’t preclude holding firm views relating to oneself. When the Pope talks about ‘moral relativism’, he refers to the existential blurring of good and evil in society, not the fact that cultural differences result in a rich variety of beliefs and practices among decent, law-abiding folk.

What unites people of faith is the funeral as sacred rite, to be conducted with dignity because the body retains its sanctity as the holder of holy human life. For atheists, the profound significance of a life ending when a body ceases to function is keenly felt, too: they may not describe human life as ‘holy’ or believe in the eternity of the soul, but the physical and emotional loss remains, and the uniqueness of the deceased lives on in memory.

Divisions between devotees of civil and sacred funerals stem not from imposing their rules on others but the outmoded perception that this is the case. Hinduism, Sikhism and Buddhism mandate cremation, as destruction of the body is said to induce a feeling of detachment into the spirit, encouraging it to pass into the ‘other world’. Islam only allows burial. Burial is upheld by traditional Jews and Catholics, although the more modern members of these religions often choose cremation, with co-operation from their rabbis and priests – it’s not against the laws of church authorities.

I don’t hold that cremation is somehow less respectful of the body’s sanctity as the vessel of the soul. I also understand the pragmatic reasons why many Christians and non-Christians prefer cremation — immediacy over slow decomposition, ecology, upkeep of graves, shortage of burial space, and especially cost.

However, it certainly appeals to a Catholic sense of harmony that any cremation follows the funeral mass, not the other way round, so the body, not the ashes, is present for blessing and prayers. The body that received the Holy Spirit through baptism far better symbolises the ‘sleeping’ person awaiting resurrection.

The Church also requests ashes be buried in an urn within a consecrated grave, although some modern Catholics, in line with their peers in secular society, might see the beauty of throwing cremains to the wind in a natural setting cherished by the deceased.

As with resistance to modern trends in other areas of life, the Church’s rules have been formed over centuries, which is not to say they don’t evolve. There have been times in history when the Church used power, as well as intellectual evangelisation, to convert pagans – who could have practised anything from cremation to mummification. And in more recent post-Enlightenment times the Church sometimes perceived cremation as a ‘masonic’ plot to deny bodily resurrection and defame Christian teaching.

Nowadays, few Catholics see funeral diversity as spiritually misguided or a personal threat. But, as a member of a church one listens to that church’s teaching. There’s certainly no harm in opting for burial in consecrated ground.

The Importance of Being Urnest

22 June 2011
Charles
10 Comments
Categories: ashes, cremation, funeral customs, Humour

That Brits are born with an acute and possibly pathological sensitivity to absurdity is well known. The Great American Funeral has engendered great and gloriously funny books by Jessica Mitford and Evelyn Waugh, neither of which had more than minimal success in laughing Americans out of their (perceived) absurdity.

There is method in the funerary lunacies of the GAF, of course: they come at a cost to the client. The recent rise in the cremation rate has filled most US undertakers with helpless economic terror, and it is interesting that they have taken no lessons in adapting to this from Brit undertakers, who have been making a tidy living out of burial deniers for as long as anyone can remember.

The GAF has, it seems, some capability to evolve. Burning necessity has begotten ingenious adaptation of the hearse, conserving it as the only fit and proper vehicle not only for the reverent transportation of cosmetised corpses but also the burned and reduced version, cremains. No glove compartment or passenger seat of the family car for them; only the full hush and awe will suffice. And it’s billable!

My thanks to Sarah Murray, author of Making an Exit, for bringing these hearses, more correctly termed urn enclaves, to my attention. She adds: ‘It was explained to me that urn enclaves have “adjustable bier pins” accommodating different sizes and shapes. They flip up from the floor of the hearse and are cleverly stowed again when the vehicle needs to carry a coffin. One brochure tells me that if you don’t want to buy a new hearse or go to the expense or trouble or getting yours refitted, “portable urn enclaves are also available for funeral directors who wish to extend the service of their existing coaches.”‘ Coaches, forsooth!!

Find another YouTube clip (unembeddable) here.

 

Give me champagne!

7 December 2010
Charles
3 Comments
Categories: cremation

William Price on his deathbed

Good piece here on William Price, the father of cremation. If ever there was a more colourful life… The title of this post quotes his last words

The sacred and the propane

24 November 2010
Charles
13 Comments
Categories: alternative funerals, Attitudes to dead bodies, Attitudes to death, burial, cremation, funeral customs, Religious funerals

It was a deepseated thing, this duty we felt we owed our dead. A sacred duty – literally. It goes back to the beginning of time. Throughout human history the dead body has always been treated in accordance with sacred diktat, its valedictory hullabaloos performed by shaman or sorcerer, soothsayer or priest. For the full extent of human memory the bodies of the dead have been disposed of in places held sacred – demarcated patches of ground, rivers.

We’re getting much too evolved for all that rannygazoo and mystery-making juju now. Too sensible, too pragmatic. Oh yes, we can see a dead body for what it is. A dead body. A waste disposal matter after it’s had its corneas and other useful stuff taken out. The growth of cremation may well have hastened this thinking. Brutal. Rapid. Get your head around that and you’ll get your head around anything.

Well, that’s one way of looking at it. It’s the way of unemployed librarian and blogger Amy Campbell in the US.

It set me thinking. We don’t yet dispose of our dead by direct cremation as they increasingly do in the States. But what of our secular rituals, the ones performed by those possessed of no shamanic attributes – everyday unsanctified civvies like our own dear Gloriamundi? Are these ceremonies mere sentimental vestiges ripe for replacement by less formal, body-free celebrations of memory in restaurants, at tea parties, on picnics, over a couple of beers?

I wonder where we’re going. Take away the sacred and… Does that make all the difference?

Zombie journalism

2 November 2010
Charles
5 Comments
Categories: cremation, crematoria

Here’s some nasty journalistic furystirring from the Daily Mail under the headline Councils to stockpile bodies to cut the costs of cremation

Bodies will be stockpiled for cremation under new rules to cut costs and carbon emissions.

Rather than being cremated straight after a funeral, corpses will be stored for days in coffins or body bags in local authority buildings so they can be incinerated in one go.

Council bosses claim the decision to use cremators during one period rather than after every service will cut down on energy bills and reduce their carbon footprint.

This is a reference to the practice of holding over, discussed in this blog in September. The Mail wails on:

The policy will leave families having to return up to a week later to the crematorium to collect the ashes, causing unnecessary additional stress … It is not the first time that councils have been accused of trying to profit from funeral services.

You get the picture? Stockpiles of corpses, like at Buchenwald. In back rooms at the town hall. Held there for a week.

A Conservative MP called Philip Davies has obliged with a ludicrous quote: ‘Councils have lost sight of what they were set up to do in the first place – serve the people and not obsess about climate change.’

A serious subject turned into horror fodder. Read the whole story here. Read as many of the comments you can bear.

Promession and cryomation go head-to-head at the ICCM

28 September 2010
Charles
3 Comments
Categories: Attitudes to dead bodies, cremation, Cryomation

The prospect of Promession, the brainchild of Susanne Wiighe-Masak, has been around for a few years now. It offers an extremely attractive alternative to cremation. It is clean. It is gentle. Above all, it enables us to return to the earth in an environmentally useful way. If you want to remind yourself how it works, go here.

The method of preparing a body for disposal by freeze drying it was invented in the US by Philip Backman. He patented it in 1978, and that patent has now expired. Backman’s proposed method of reducing the body to particles left a little to be desired (I have emphasised the key passage in bold):

“A further step entails subjecting the intact, frozen body to fractionalizing means reducing same to a particulate state. This step may be termed surface enhancement i.e., an increase in surface area of the remains is provided. Existing mechanical means such as that used in the reduction of organic or inorganic substances may be utilized in this step. By way of example, a hammer mill may be utilized.”

Promessa’s breakthrough was to develop a process whereby the body can be reduced to particles by means not of  hammer mill but vibration.

At the end of last year or the beginning of this (I can’t remember) I cast doubt on whether Promessa had, actually, managed to perfect this most important stage of the process. This earned me a letter from Promessa’s lawyers. I withdrew the blog post and stood back.

Yesterday I was able to go and hear Susanne Wiighe-Masak speak at the Institute of Cemetery and Crematorium Management (ICCM) annual conference. For this I am indebted to the kindness of Julie Dunk, Technical Services and Events Manager at the ICCM. It was my chance to apologise to Susanne in person, and also to listen also to the presentation by Richard Maclean, Business Development Director of Cryomation Ltd, a UK firm which has developed its own, rival freeze-drying technology.

Susanne spoke with a passion born of idealism and showed us a short film describing the promession process. Richard Maclean spoke with the detachment of a technocrat. He outlined the development history of the Cryomation process and described briefly how it reduces the body to a ‘safe and sterile powder’ using heat and compression. He told us that Cryomation Ltd had tried to reduce a frozen body to particles by means of vibration but had failed.

Both processes have attracted interest in countries around the world. Each developer will bring their Promator and Cryomator, respectively, to market imminently.

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.

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!

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

13 April 2010
Charles
1 Comment
Categories: burial, cremation

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

Here are some extracts to whet your appetite:

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

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