funeral customs

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

Not so first as he thinks

14 October 2010
Charles
2 Comments
Categories: alternative funerals, Attitudes to dead bodies, burial, burial depth, funeral cost; richard sage, funeral customs, memorialisation, natural burial

From Australia’s Herald Sun:

A CANCER victim yesterday became the first person to be buried upright at Australia’s only vertical cemetery.

Allan Heywood lost his battle with cancer last Tuesday and was buried in the unusual, space-saving grave in the new vertical cemetery outside Camperdown in western Victoria.

“It’s nice to be first at something. Everybody wants their little place in history,” the Skipton man said with the hint of a laugh.

“I’ve attended a lot of funerals over the years and I’ve never attended one that I’ve enjoyed … I’m an atheist as well,” he said.

Mr Heywood paid $2750 – about half the cost of a basic conventional burial – to be buried upright in a biodegradable shroud, conveyed to his final resting place on a steel trolley which is angled vertically to lower the body into a tubular grave.

He said the lower cost and that there was no graveside service, headstone, casket or grave marker meant his children wouldn’t face any financial burden and could arrange their own memorial service at the local pub or footy club.

Mr Heywood’s body was lowered feet first into its hole by cemetery officials. When his body has been joined by 39, 999 other bodies, the space-saving cemetery will be grassed over and grazed.

Vertical burial is approved in some Asian countries and also Holland – but I don’t think any have been carried out there.

Fact: The world’s first-ever vertical burial took place in England (or, as they say in the US, England, England). It was one of two last wishes of the delightfully bonkers Major Peter Billiere who died precisely nine months to the day after predicting he would.

His funeral was held on 11 June 1800 at Box Hill in Surrey in a hole reputedly 100 feet deep. Into this, Major Billiere was lowered head first, according to his instructions, and there he will remain, according to his philosophy, until the Day of Judgement when he will be resurrected right way up in a world turned upside down. The headstone reads: “Here lies Major Peter Labilliere, with his head in the ground and his feet in the air.”

Major Peter Labilliere’s headstone

The good major was an early adopter of the celebration of life style of funeral, so his other final wish was that the youngest son and daughter of his landlady should dance on his coffin. Apparently the lass demurred; the lad larged it.

This is all true, by the way. If you don’t believe me, go google.

It won’t make you dead

1 October 2010
Charles
1 Comment
Categories: funeral customs, Good books, Humour, onlime memorial sites, pre-need plans

Gail Rubin is a writer and blogger in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I’ve just looked up Albuquerque on google maps. It’s a long way from a decent beach.

Gail has written a book, A Good Goodbye: Funeral Planning for Those Who Don’t Plan to Die, which will be published at the end of this month. She also does some outreach work for an excellent funeral planning website, Funeralwise.com. It’s full of good advice; it’s well written and intelligent.

I’ve ordered her book already, and I urge you to do the same. Here’s what Gail says about it:

“Just as talking about sex won’t make you pregnant, talking about funerals won’t make you dead – and your family will benefit from the conversation. A Good Goodbye provides the information, inspiration and tools to plan and implement creative, meaningful and memorable end-of-life rituals for people, and their pets, too.”

Joe Sehee, executive director of the Green Burial Council, says: “Gail Rubin takes on society’s last taboo in a readable, practical manner with a light touch. It’s a great read for anyone who isn’t sure about this ‘death thing’ and how to best prepare for it.”

I’m looking forward to getting my copy. You can order yours here.

When Gail was in college thirty years ago, in an enterprise which prefigured her later immersion in the logistics of mortality, she made the short spoof  (above) of gloomy old Ingmar Bergman’s Seventh Seal. It made me chuckle and I hope it has the same effect on you.

Site I like

21 September 2010
Charles
No comments
Categories: alternative funerals, Attitudes to death, bereavement, DIY funeral, funeral cost, funeral customs, funeral trends, memorialisation

There’s interesting work going on over in Boston, Massachusetts. Two women, Ruth Faas and Sue Cross, offer a range of services to the bereaved. They have a reading room where people can sit in comfort and find out about death and dying. They offer advice and contacts to those wanting a green or self-managed funeral. And they have  an art studio where people can come and make something commemorative, or simply work through their emotions.

Have a look for yourself here.

(Hat-tip to The Modern Mourner for this link)

Better read than dead

15 September 2010
Charles
3 Comments
Categories: Attitudes to death, funeral customs, funeral trends, Grief, Immortality, memorialisation

When Eulogy magazine came out in June there was excitement and chatter and speculation. Would it catch on? How long would it last? The lowest estimate I was aware of was a curmudgeonly six issues, volunteered by a funeral director in the west country.

In the event, it seems to have underperformed more grievously. There has been nothing since. I had £250 riding on it for an article I was commissioned to write about… I’ve forgotten. Ah well, where Eulogy has gone we shall surely follow. Ink to ink, ashes to ashes.

Over in the New World, Funerals Today goes from strength to strength, it seems (I’ve never read it).

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.

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!