funeral customs

Fusion funerals: Cockneys, immigrants and Hackney hipsters

16 January 2014
Charles
2 Comments
Categories: family funeral directors, funeral cost, funeral customs, funerals in other cultures, Good Funeral Awards, traditional funerals

Posted by Richard Rawlinson

The story of T. Cribb & Sons is one of business resilience in the cultural quicksand of London’s East End. A family-run firm of undertakers since 1881, its heritage is Cockney: close-knit, white, working class communities celebratory of both their roots and the material trappings of wealth: pie and mash and the dogs coupled with a taste for pin-sharp schmutter. Their funerals have been summarised as Victorian music hall meets Catholic High Mass: undertakers with toppers and canes, horse-drawn carriages and extravagant floral wreaths.

With its vicinity to London’s docks, the East End has for centuries attracted immigrants, from the French Huguenots to Polish Jews, the Irish to the Chinese. More recently came the Bangladeshis, Africans and eastern Europeans.

Meanwhile, true Cockneys have upped sticks to Essex. Many a London cabbie will tell you how they cashed in the terraced house in Bow for an all-mod-cons Barratt home in Brentwood while opining ‘the East End ain’t what it was’. And you only have to watch TOWIE to see former Cockneys splurging their cash on smart clobber and wheels, along with Sex on the Beach cocktails and cosmetic dentistry.

T. Cribb & Sons, which started with a single parlour in Canning Town, has also branched out into Essex, buying up undertakers in Loughton, Debden, Benfleet and Pitsea. However, of its 1,800 funerals a year, half are now for non-whites, especially Africans and Asians in east London.

It’s introduced a repatriation service for west African immigrants who prefer to be buried back home in Nigeria or Uganda. It’s also attracted the British Ghanaian community, increasingly content to be buried in England and who, like Cockneys, have a taste for flamboyant funerals, sometimes beyond their means.

Attention to the needs of a broad demographic can also be seen in details such as a Hindu/Sikh washroom at Cribb’s Beckton branch, and the way it’s mindful to bring Chinese mourners home from a funeral by a different route, in order to ward off evil spirits. It even provides limos with the lucky eight in the number plate. Again for the Chinese, it offers a wall of small vaults for votive offerings such as sticks of incense. At £750 for a five-year lease on a vault, this service is being adopted by white Brits, too, showing how cultural influences go both ways.

T. Cribb & Sons is now courting the Muslim market, currently served by a few Bangladeshi undertakers attached to mosques. The showy traits of the Cockney funeral are theologically out of step with Islam in which dead people are swiftly washed, prayed over and buried. But as with most cultural melting pots, people draw on outside influences, whether integration is approved of or not.

For more on this subject, see The Economist here.  It’s a good read, rich in colour gleened from firsthand research. What it doesn’t address is the colonisation of former Cockney turf by middle class West Enders who have headed east for more affordable housing in areas from Stratford to now-trendy Hackney and Shoreditch. As these right-on Guardianistas grow older, might we see less emphasis on Cribb’s website on black-plumed Friesans, bling limos and lavish floral tributes, and more on wicker coffins, woodland burial grounds, ethnic-chic joss sticks and vegetarian catering services at the wake?

As The Economist writer says, ‘Undertakers thrive on the loss of their clients—not on the loss of their client base’. Meeting evolving demand is key. But you can see why some undertakers favour the big spenders. Flowers spelling GRANDAD: A PROPER DIAMOND GEEZER destroy the ozone layer? Gimme a break. Next you’ll be saying wreaths depicting the St George flag might upset the neighbours.

Each to their own

10 December 2013
Charles
1 Comment
Categories: funeral customs, funeral pyres, open-air cremation

Darius, a king of ancient Persia, was intrigued by the variety of cultures he met in his travels.

He had found, for example, that the Callatians, who lived in India, ate the bodies of their dead fathers.

The Greeks, of course, did not do that – the Greeks practised cremation and regarded the funeral pyre as the natural and fitting way to dispose of the dead.

Darius thought that a sophisticated outlook should appreciate the differences between cultures. One day, to teach this lesson, he summoned some Greeks who happened to be at his court and asked what it would take for them to eat the bodies of their dead fathers. They were shocked, as Darius knew they would be, and replied that no amount of money could persuade them to do such a thing.

Then Darius called in some Callatians and, while the Greeks listened, asked them what it would take for them to burn their dead fathers’ bodies. The Callatians were horrified and told Darius not to speak of such things.

The Elements of Moral Philosophy, 6th Edition (Rachels & Rachels, 2010)

Corpse roads – then and now

20 October 2013
Charles
1 Comment
Categories: Attitudes to dead bodies, burial, coffins, funeral customs, Ghosts

Back in the middle ages, established churches hung on to their right to bury the dead when new churches were built nearby to serve a growing population. Burial rights brought in revenue.

This meant that parishioners of churches without a right to bury their dead were compelled to take them to a church which did using designated corpse roads. Some were just a few miles in length, others much longer. 

These medieval corpse roads, so called, were pre-dated by long, straight tracks found all over the world along which the dead were carried and which were reckoned to channel the spirits of the dead.

All manner of superstitions attach to corpse roads, and if you want to find out lots more, quickly, you can’t do better than turn to Wikipedia, which has an excellent entry on the phenomenon. The tradition of toting a corpse feet first derives from these superstitions. It was supposed the prevent the spirit of the dead person from legging it back home. It would be interesting to conduct a poll of undertakers to discover how many actually know this. 

A quick google reveals just some of the corpse roads — also called coffin roads, lych ways, etc — which remain walkable: 

The Lych Way in Devon

Hindon to Enford (Wilts)

Teffont to Dinton (Wilts)

Bohenie to Achluachrach

Pass of Glencoe to Dalness

Ulverston to Coniston

Wasdale Head to Eskdale via Burnmoor

Mardale (Haweswater) to Shap via the Goggleby Stone

Rydal to Grasmere via Rydal Water and Dove Cottage

Arnside to Beetham via the Fairy Steps

Johnby to Greystoke

Garrigill to Kirkland

Borrowdale to Brigham

Bellever to Lydford (Devon)

Zennor St Ives (Cornwall)

Aston to Blockley and Stretton to Blockley (Warks, Gloucs)

We still have working corpse roads, of course; we just don’t call them that. We call them the ring road or the bypass. 

One of you dyed-in-the-wool deathies out there ought to compile a gazetteer of corpse roads so that fellow-deathies everywhere can catch some fresh air and keep the memory alive. 

An essay in melancholy

14 October 2013
Charles
3 Comments
Categories: funeral, funeral customs, funeral trends

Last week I passed an empty hearse going the other way. It set me musing.

Freed from its solemn duties, no longer slowed by a weighty coffin and all the gravitas attendant upon such a thing, emptied of flowers and no longer the misty-eyed focus of profoundly sad people, it had about it none of the majesty and decorum,  the grandeur and grace, that properly wreath a hearse.  It looked inessential, superfluous, dispensable. Gawky. Going too fast. 

You think I’m banging on a bit. You’re right. 

I then fell to musing on the way people in cars treat hearses these days. They buzz and harry them, cut in and chop up processions. It’s like watching a kestrel mobbed by crows. People these days have no manners, no solicitude. They’re in a hurry, they’ve got places to go. 

But it’s not just a manners thing, is it? Or a hurry thing? There’s more to it than that. 

Once upon a time (not so long ago) the death of someone touched everyone. It evoked the mystery of existence. In everyone’s mind a funeral procession awoke questions: how long have I got? What does it feel like? What comes after? It spoke of the universal human drama of those born to die. It inspired awe and the doffing of hats. 

It’s not a manners thing. No, it’s a universality thing. In place of a general drama of life and death and the mystery of existence played out in our midst, for us, disconnected from matters elemental, there are one-off sketches in which unknown unfortunates die — bad luck. Seek not to know for whom the bell tolls, it ain’t tolling for me, mate. 

And so a funeral procession, instead of speaking to and for the human condition, is seen as descriptive of no more than a little local difficulty afflicting someone else. 

And the funerals of these incogniti address the particular and the personal, the private hurt, the here and the now, in crematoria which divert those who cared for them briefly from life’s mainstream (where death belongs) before setting them on their way again. 

Moral: it’s much easier to write prettily about mortality and funerals wearing a reactionary hat. 

In the borderlands

4 October 2013
Charles
22 Comments
Categories: Art and death, Attitudes to dead bodies, funeral, funeral customs, funerals in other cultures

 Posted by Jenny Uzzell

There is a very useful word frequently used by anthropologists and students of religion and mythology to describe something that is neither one thing nor the other; something that is ‘in between’. The word is ‘liminal’.

Classic examples of things that are ‘liminal’ are marshes or other places at the water’s edge, crossroads, twilight and, interestingly, people who are in any way trans-gender. Liminal things are very powerful and very dangerous. They create ‘thin’ places where the ‘Otherworld’ can bleed into this. This is, unless your shaman has deliberately created the situation and is very much ‘In Control’, generally considered to be a Bad Thing. 

Dead bodies are most definitely ‘liminal’. A dead body hanging around in the community belongs neither to the world of the living nor to the world of the dead. It is, both practically and ‘magically’ a very dangerous thing. It both is and is not your husband, mother, son, friend… Dead bodies, by their mere presence blur the boundaries between life and death and this is definitely a Bad Thing… things can become confused. Things can cross over. On a purely practical level there is disintegration and a very real risk of disease as time goes on. 

It is little wonder then that our ancestors sought to neutralise the risk of a dead body by rendering it, practically and ritually, into something that is stable and does not present a threat to the living. Before burial the body was treated with great care. In some cultures the body could not be left unattended between death and burial. Sometimes all mirrors in the house were covered. The shoes of the dead person removed. Doors opened. Always the purpose is to ensure that the dead remain dead, the living remain living and nothing leaves its appointed place. We saw a good example of this in the Vedic funeral mentioned last time in which Death is ritually restricted to the burial mound and a boundary drawn which it cannot cross. 

Whilst this may be very interesting to an archaeologist or an anthropologist, you could be forgiven for asking what it has to do with modern funerals. The answer, as it happens, is ‘quite a lot’. One of the major purposes of a funeral, ancient or modern, is to move the person who has died from ‘here’ to ‘there’. The body itself is removed from the community through burial, cremation, mummification or some other means. The ‘person’ is removed from the realm of the living to the realm of the dead. What this means will depend on the beliefs of the community which is carrying out the ritual. Where there is a clear belief in life after death in some form then the purpose is clear and I talked about this at length in the previous two articles here and here. Where there is a hope rather than a belief, then this will be expressed and affirmed by the community. Even where there is no hope at all of an afterlife, and the understanding is that the dead person has truly ceased to exist, there will still be a transition from the living person who was a part of the fabric of society and of the community to one who lives in the memory and imagination of those left behind and who will be different to each person who remembers.

This is one reason why for many people, myself included, it is so vital to have the body present at the funeral. The community gathers together to acknowledge and bear witness to the appalling fact of death in general and this death in particular. They stand with the body, accompanying it as far as the living are able on its journey from ‘this’ to ‘that; from; ‘here’ to ‘there’ and then they acknowledge not only that someone has gone from their midst, but also that they are still alive and can start the long and painful task of re-constructing the community without the missing member. 

Many people feel that the real journey of grief and healing cannot begin until after the funeral because it not until then that the person is really ‘gone’. 

It is in the case of secular, materialist funerals in particular that there is, perhaps, a need for new rituals and new ‘liturgy’ that effects and bears witness to this transition from one state of being to another. We do not do badly with the words, but the ritual, the ‘acting out’ of this transformation is still not fully recognised and acknowledged in many non-religious funerals and I suspect that over the next hundred years or so this will change. Humans are ritual animals, and where no ritual or tradition exists that fully expresses what we need to say or need to feel we will continue to use the old ones, even if they are irrelevant, for a very long time. Eventually, however, we will create new ones that reflect our own reality. 

Of course, the process of moving through and out of the liminal state does not entirely end with the funeral. Memories are still fresh and immediate; sometimes it is difficult to accept, even to remember that the person has gone. For this reason many religions and cultures have a second ritual about a year after the death that effectively moves the dead person into an ‘ancestral realm’. Regardless of whether this is seen as an actual thing which happens to the ‘soul’ or not, this is, I think, a healthy thing which could, usefully, be incorporated into modern funeral tradition. 

One modern development is likely to have a far reaching impact on this whole idea of the realms of life and death which as yet we cannot even begin to grasp. Online ‘personas’ on Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites, to say nothing of virtual worlds such as Second Life, may continue beyond physical death so that the ‘person’ remains in the virtual community in some form or other. This is an eventuality for which our ancestors could not prepare us, and it remains to be seen what its impact on the way we approach death will be in the coming centuries.

The presence of the dead is essential

28 September 2013
Charles
11 Comments
Categories: Attitudes to dead bodies, funeral, funeral customs, Good books, open-air cremation

We bear mortality by bearing mortals — the living and the dead — to the brink of a uniquely changed reality: Heaven or Valhalla or Whatever Is Next. We commit and commend them into the nothingness or somethingness, into the presence of God or God’s absence. Whatever afterlife there is or isn’t, human beings have marked their ceasing to be by going the distance with their dead — to the tomb or the fire or the grave, the holy tree or deep sea, whatever sacred space of oblivion we consign them to. And we’ve been doing this since the beginning. 

The formula for our funerals was fairly simple for most of our history: by getting the dead where they needed to go, the living got where they needed to be. 

Ours is the species that deals with death (the idea of the thing) by dealing with our dead (the physical fact of the thing itself). 

The presence of the dead is an essential, definitive element of a funeral. 

These four essential, definitive elements, then: the corpse, the caring survivors, some brokered change of status between them, and the disposition of the dead make a human funeral what it is. 

Stements extracted from an essay by Thomas Lynch here. 

If Mr Lynch is right, how much more essential and elemental to bring the dead to their funeral for all to see and mourn, as in the case of of Mitul Shah, killed by terrorists in the Westgate mall in Kenya. 

The Protestant death ethic

26 September 2013
Charles
5 Comments
Categories: Attitudes to death, funeral customs

WHEN any person departeth this life, let the dead body, upon the day of burial, be decently attended from the house to the place appointed for publick burial, and there immediately interred, without any ceremony.

And because the custom of kneeling down, and praying by or towards the dead corpse, and other such usages, in the place where it lies before it be carried to burial, are superstitious; and for that praying, reading, and singing, both in going to and at the grave, have been grossly abused, are no way beneficial to the dead, and have proved many ways hurtful to the living; therefore let all such things be laid aside.

Howbeit, we judge it very convenient, that the Christian friends, which accompany the dead body to the place appointed for publick burial, do apply themselves to meditations and conferences suitable to the occasion; and that the minister, as upon other occasions, so at this time, if he be present, may put them in remembrance of their duty.

Requiem for the topper and the silver-knobbed cane?

24 September 2013
Charles
14 Comments
Categories: Dress codes, funeral customs, funeral directors

Writing in the spring 2013 issue of the Institute of Cemetery and Crematorium Management Journal, the editor, Bob Coates, writes:

What was once the abnormal is now the normal with respect to funeral ceremonies on our premises …

Less enamoured, however, may be the funeral director. Some may find the frankness of discussion, particularly over the internet, uncomfortable. Some, traditionalists, may not welcome what they regard as avant garde, wacky, eccentric or irreverent sendoffs. Perhaps there will be a dwindling demand for their opulent vehicles and, dare we say it, even their services? For them it certainly means previous attitudes and customs will be routinely challenged and that they will need to adapt to their clients’ wishes, even if this means, on occasion, leaving the cravat, top-hat and silver-knobbed cane in the wardrobe.

This set me thinking some more about Richard Rawlinson’s post about what we wear to funerals these days. Because, whatever dress code is specified, a lot of families still seem to want their undertaker to look like a proper trad hush-and-awe undertaker, however anomalous and anachronistic s/he may look amid a sea of red or pink or onesies. So it’ll be a while before the toppers and wagglers are consigned to the wardrobe. Is this how you see it?

And then there’s the music that people like to play at funerals. Very often there’ll be an Always Look On The Bright Side sort of song, especially at the end, an anarchic song which seems to raise a single digit towards… who or what? Death? Convention? The digit is identifiably irreverent and humorous. But also defiant. How much anger does it also convey?

Is it that people feel that the individuality of their funeral is more effectively and more mischievously/iconoclastically expressed in the context of a conventional funeral? A trad FD benchmarks the departure from the norm?

Is it that people feel that their FD would be reluctant to participate? We note that a FD like Linda Blakelock of Divine Departures customarily enters into the spirit, and that her clients like it.

It’s not as if undertakers who decline to wear Liverpool shirts poop the party. But perhaps they might consider parking the cod-Victorian fancy dress when they see what course a funeral is taking at the planning stage without waiting to be asked?

There may be an issue around relevance here. If so, it trumps tender and protective feelings towards the dignity-drenched, po-faced traditions of the Ancient Order of Funeral Undertakers & Upholders. If your Goth fancy-dress sets you apart, it may not be long before it casts you adrift.

Thoughts?

 

A eulogy sandwich is not enough to nourish grief

26 August 2013
Charles
13 Comments
Categories: celebrants, ceremony, Featured, Formality vs informality, funeral, funeral customs, funerals in other cultures, Grief, Personalisation, Ritual

As Jenny Uzell embarks on a series of posts which will consider the knotty question, What Is A Funeral For? it’s worth reflecting on what has been a game of two halves, funeralwise, in the last fortnight. Two people have expressed contrasting approaches to a funeral.

First, there was Dave Smith, who arranged the funeral of his daughter, Hannah, the 14-year-old who committed suicide after being bullied online. Desperately sad though this was, Dave wanted the funeral to celebrate Hannah’s life, and he asked mourners and relatives to wear colourful clothes, onesies, her favourite garment, in particular,  to reflect Hannah’s joie de vivre.

The church was decorated with purple and white balloons, photographs of Hannah, and a poster that read “Be Happy for Hannah”. Purple was Hannah’s favourite colour. Her coffin was purple. Her father did not want her to travel in a hearse, so he brought her himself in a blue Audi 4×4. The coffin was carried into church to In The Air Tonight by Phil Collins. The service was conducted by the Church of England vicar, the Rev Charlie Styles, who described the proceedings as informal and relaxed. Four hundred people came.

Hannah’s was a very zeitgeisty funeral, highly personal, focussed on positives. There were tears, yes, and there was also laughter.

At the other end of the scale, over in Ireland, the bishop of Meath, Dr Michael Smith, courted howling and outrage when he restated the Catholic church’s doctrinal ban on the personalisation of funerals. He outlawed eulogies. This embargo seems to be restated in a newsworthy way in a more or less five-yearly cycle. Since compromise is impossible, it is one that looks set to keep on coming round.

The good bishop’s rationale for resisting what he calls the dumbing down of funerals accords with Catholic dogma. In his words:

“The context of the funeral Mass in the church should be focused entirely on the celebration of the Eucharist. What we’re trying to do is focus on the essence of the Christian funeral rite. The essence is, of course, two things. One is to support the family, through prayer and the community, but also the other function of it is that we support the person on their journey to salvation. What we are trying to do then is maintain the integrity of the Eucharist.”

Can’t argue with that, can you? If you want to belong to the club, them’s the rules.

Both Dave Smith and the Bishop of Meath have very clear ideas about what they think a funeral should aim to accomplish, and how it should achieve it.

But the good bishop has other things to say about funerals that may be relevant to all of us. He says:

“I suppose that people’s understanding when they hear about a funeral is that they focus entirely on the funeral Mass but the rites of Christian funerals begin long before that. You have the vigil for the deceased, the wake house and the removal and, of course, the prayers of commendation at the graveside. So we’re saying look, there are opportunities for family members who want to pay a personal tribute to the deceased.”

He’s got a point, hasn’t he? Why do we feel that farewelling and remembrancing have to be packed into brief, bulging crem slot, leaving so much to be said in short order that, in order to get the biography recited and the grandchildren named, a celebrant must, with one eye fixed on the clock,  zoom through a script at 360 words per minute, ruthlessly fading the music for prayer and/or reflection on the way?

Why do we place so much of a burden on the single event of the funeral ceremony? After all, there’s the time before it, as the bishop says. And there’s time afterwards — oh god, all that time afterwards.

That’s the time we need to focus on.

Secularists are neglecting to develop a case for the introduction of practices and rituals either side of the ceremony which might promote both good remembrancing and, also, the emotional health of bereaved people. This is probably why no celebrant association has made a public statement in support of the e-petition calling for statutory bereavement leave. That they haven’t is nothing short of astounding.

The Jewish practice of sitting shiva is a brilliant example of the sort of practice I’m talking about. For seven days following the funeral, the close family take a complete time out — stop the world, I want to get off: “The mourners experience a week of intense grief, and the community is there to love and comfort and provide for their needs.” Find more here.

Jews mourn in a structured way for a year. Shiva is followed by three weeks of schloshim, a less intense mourning period, followed by further regulated re-entry into the world. 

Like all rituals rooted in belief systems that have developed over hundreds of years, Jewish mourning is characterised by a thicket of impedimental ordinances, many of which strike outsiders as completely bonkers or, where gender equality is concerned, utterly unacceptable. For all that, the degree of difficulty they present is at the heart of the solace they offer. My friend Graham is presently saying the mourning kaddish daily for his father. It’s a short enough prayer. Translated, it reads:

Magnified and sanctified be God’s great name in the world which He created according to His will. May he establish His kingdom during our lifetime and during the lifetime of Israel. Let us say, Amen.

May God’s great name be blessed forever and ever.

Blessed, glorified, honored and extolled, adored and acclaimed be the name of the Holy One, though God is beyond all praises and songs of adoration which can be uttered. Let us say, Amen.

May there be peace and life for all of us and for all Israel. Let us say, Amen.

Let He who makes peace in the heavens, grant peace to all of us and to all Israel. Let us say, Amen.

Graham could mutter this while he waits for his kettle to boil or just think it as he brushes his teeth. But he’s not allowed to do that. No, he’s got to leg it down to the synagogue and recite it every day without fail at teatime in the presence of a minyan, a quorum of ten adult males. As a result, it rules his day. Everything is built around it. If he’s away on business he has to contact a synagogue before he’s even booked his flight in order to assure himself that there’ll be a minyan ready and waiting for him. Graham’s a man who has not been as observant as he might have been, in the past, but he’s doing his bit for his Dad, whom he loved. It’s hard work, he says, and it’s doing him a surprising amount of good.

Unglamorous work, isn’t it? Saying kaddish doesn’t fit with all those culturally untranslatable fun customs Brits get so bedazzled by, like the Dia de los Muertos (nobbut a lot of facepainting and larking about over here). Kaddish reminds us that mourning is a matter of hard yards.

The eulogy sandwich served up by celebrants is all very well in its way, but it’s not enough to nourish grief.

POSTSCRIPT: Jews are pro-eulogy. Here’s the halakhic ordinance:
Delivering a proper eulogy (hesped) is a major mitzvah. The mitzvah is to raise one’s voice and to speak heartrending words about the deceased in order to arouse the weeping of the audience, and to mention his praises … If one is negligent about the eulogy of an upright Jew one does not live long and is worthy of being buried alive.

It is forbidden to exaggerate excessively in praising the deceased. However, one is permitted to exaggerate slightly, as long as one does not go too far. If the deceased had no good qualities, one should not mention his character … If one attributes good qualities to someone who did not possess them at all, or excessively exaggerates the good qualities he had, this causes evil to the speaker and to the deceased.
Source

Validating the unverifiable

31 July 2013
Charles
7 Comments
Categories: Dead people's rights, funeral customs, funeral directors, Tahara

Last year’s TV documentaries revealed shocking scenes in funeral home mortuaries which horrified undertakers as much as they did the public. But just as the documentaries did not rouse the public to descend in angry mobs on their nearest funeral home, so they failed, also, to rouse good undertakers to fight back by demonstrating convincingly to their clients that Mum will be safe with us, we’ll treat her as if she were one of ours.

On the contrary, there was even a fair amount of defence of Co-op hub practice on the grounds that it was very similar to the way hospitals store their dead patients. All well and good – but sorry, if the punters don’t like it, don’t do it, end of.

People who make telly-shockers haven’t time to explore the nuanced complexities of truth; what they want is dirt and viewing figures. There is value in this work. It does no harm to unmask villains. 

Would that the programme makers had instead smuggled a hidden camera into the mortuary of C Waterhouse & Sons, in Sussex. There, everything is spotless and the dead are cared for with immense care and respect by incredibly nice people. They needn’t have stopped there. They could have gone on and fearlessly exposed and held up to public scrutiny wonderfully good practice in a great many funeral homes throughout the country. Great stories, never told. Their clients, with their eyes tight shut to the care of their dead, never get to know how wonderfully well served they are.  

Why on earth did the good undertakers not fight back by showing the word how different they are from the sleazebags?

I suppose they would shrug and say yes, nice idea, but how are you to do that if your clients refuse all invitations to visit your mortuary or play any part in caring for their dead? It’s a good point. People today are as conflicted about their dead as they have been throughout human history. On the one hand, they recoil from them; on the other, they require them to be cared for with reverence — by other people.

If blind trust is to be the basis for a family’s faith in the good offices of a funeral home, it is hardly surprising if mortuary practice sometimes falls short of the highest standards. The professionalization of ‘death care’ can have a distancing and even a de-sensitising effect on an undertaker, however dedicated. Is it okay to play Radio 2 while laying someone out? Never really thought about it, mate. Was it appropriate that you took that call on your phone, swapped that joke with the delivery person? Given the unexamined nature of mortuary routines, it is staggering how much excellent practice goes on.

How, then, is an undertaker to show the world what the world averts its gaze from?

One way might be to establish the care of the body as a ritual – as the Jews do with their tahara, the ritual cleansing and dressing of the dead. You can see how they do it in the video clip above. Respect for the dead is demonstrated by a chevra kadisha in a number of ways, for example, by never passing anything over a dead person but always walking round them. There’s some very fussy water-pouring and knot-tying. At the end of the process, all present ask forgiveness for any offence they might have caused.

A ritual institutionalises respect and is a constant reminder of the importance of the task. A ritual does not, of course, need a spiritual or religious rationale as its basis; it is simply a customary, heightened, elaborate and excellent way of doing something; it’s a five-star, gold-plated routine — it’s a good habit. 

Up in Macclesfield, undertaker Andrew Smith believes that the ethos of a funeral home is established in the mortuary and pervades everything everyone does. A lot of undertakers would agree with this, and there is much power in the idea.

But to get back to the big question: how can good undertakers demonstrate the high standards of their mortuary practice?

One way might be to describe and embed it in their contract. Think how reassuring that would be to clients. You could start with something like this:

During the laying out and dressing of (name of the person who has died) the mood in the mortuary will be one of serenity, reverence and deep concentration. You have asked for silence/you have asked for the following music to be played: _________________ and/or the following text to be read: __________________________

No one present will engage in any activity (such as eating, drinking or answering the telephone) which would constitute a distraction from the task.

There will be no talk except that which is necessary for the accomplishment of the task. No voice will be raised, there will be no levity, nor the expression of any strong emotion.

No interruption of the laying out and dressing of the body will be permitted unless personal safety is at risk.

When ______________________ lays out and dresses the body of (name of the person who has died) he/she may talk to him/her. You, the client, assent to this on the understanding that their tone will always be respectful.

Now, there’s every possibility that if people could see that this is the way things are going to be done for their Mum… they’ll want to be there, too. Not everyone, of course. But a lot more than now. How very empowering that would be.

And, as we never tire of saying, no undertaker ever went wrong who sought to empower the bereaved.