Posted by Charles
These last outfits were chosen by some of the 23 people taking part in a photo project initiated by The Straits Times, the leading Singapore daily, in partnership with Lien Foundation, a Singapore philanthropic house. Entitled “The Last Outfit”, the project showcases individuals in the clothes they wish to wear for their own funeral.
The Last Outfit seeks to remove the taboo of death and enthuse people to view life and death differently.
Full text here.
First published in the New York Times by SIDDHARTHA MUKHERJEE
It had rained heavily the night before. The steep stone steps of the ghat are slick and slippery, and when my father pulls me onto the boat, the water feels more stable than the ground. The boatman rows out toward the open river, and the city of Varanasi swings into full view.
On the bank, wrestlers are performing calisthenics; a vendor is selling marigolds; a man is throwing birdseed at pigeons. The river moves sluggishly at first — but then a current forces the boat around the bend, and we are floating silently by the Manikarnika ghat, where the dead are burned.
I am 8 or 9 years old. Save a distant uncle who has died of renal failure, I have had no personal experience of death. I imagine it as little more than a corporeal exit from the world.
It is an unforgettable sight: row upon row of burning bodies on wooden pyres by the river’s edge. There are dozens of pyres lighted at the ghat, like lanterns along the river. Around them, a circus of death unfolds. There are sons waiting for a professional barber to shave their heads. Men carry the bodies down to the water.
The bodies, swathed in white cloth and strewn with flowers, are bathed, washed and then taken onto a bedlike pile of wood and set alight. The fires burn sometimes for hours. When the flames begin to sputter, the priest shovels the ashes, still smoldering, into the river. The melodrama of the scene is nearly perfectly offset by the glum, mechanical matter-of-factness of its participants. Mounds of ash and marigold and wood chips are floating all around the boat.
There is a man standing by one of the fires and facing the boat, with his arms still taut, as if holding the body — except he is holding air. I bury my face in my father’s lap, but curiosity, literally morbid, forces me to look and to look again, as we drift past. The scene on the bank is mesmerizing. Then the boat rounds another bend, the haunted tableau vanishes, and we debark at another ghat.
Decades later, having trained as an oncologist in Boston, I attend the funeral service of a woman who has died after a long battle with cancer. I remember approaching the coffin, and then registering something odd: the woman has been coiffed and dressed up, and there is the faintest blush of lipstick — lipstick? — on her mouth.
The eulogies at the service are moving and emotional. But the funeral itself seems cleansed and sanitized into a clinical, nearly forensic, ethereality. There are children in dark suits sitting on the aisles looking like miniature adults. I wonder if any of them will be haunted by this funeral, or dream often about it, as I did after that disorienting vision decades ago.
At medical rounds a few days later, I ask some residents and interns about death: how many have carried the body of a parent? What does the weight feel like? And what about the ritual of bathing and cleansing?
In the United States, most terminally ill men and women die in hospitals or nursing homes. The death is typically “pronounced” by an intern on call. The body is lifted out of its bed by an attendant and wheeled to a morgue by another shift worker in scrubs. Undertakers clean and dress it.
Before a cadre of professionals took over the job, people of many faiths took part in the care of the bodies of the dead. Early Christians typically prepared their dead for burial themselves. The novelist Catherine Madsen writes about the Tahara, a Judaic rite in which bathing the body in warm water is accompanied by the reading of ecstatic love poetry to the dead man or woman. If the ritual were revived today, Madsen predicted that “there would be nervous giggling about . . . necrophilia; the plan would be . . . declared inappropriate and quietly dropped.”
Indeed, when I recount Madsen’s description to the residents, it makes them nervous. Our experience of death has become disembodied. The corpus has vanished from the most corporeal of our rituals — and we are left standing with our hands outstretched and taut but with no counterweight to bear, like the man on the riverbank holding air.
Siddhartha Mukherjee is an assistant professor of medicine in the division of medical oncology at Columbia University. He is the author of “The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer.”
Hat-tip to Beth Knox of Crossings
Beyond the unappetising business of flogging pre-need plans to the tottering classes, undertakers do next to nothing to educate the public about funerals. They seek to be seen as public-spirited. They do good stunts, raise money for the hospice here, the air ambulance there. But how many stage events to raise awareness of the immense emotional and spiritual power of a funeral to transform grief?
Expectations of funerals are so low that most people are just relieved to get the whole horrible business behind them. They are so low that they bitterly resent the cost. So there have to be very sound commercial reasons for all undertakers to get out there and talk up their product.
Two recent events have brought death into the community in original and effective ways. Both were, for the apprehensive, welcoming in their informality; both set out to inform rather than sell.
The first was the Six Feet Under Convention held in Bournemouth on 12-14 August. It was a brave venture, which attracted 20 or so delegates to a series of talks by eminent funeralists and others. Alongside it was an open-air coffin display organised by the Natural Death Centre, complete with a coffin to paint and another to pose dead in. There were sporadic outbreaks of musical performance. It was reckoned to be the first-ever public display of coffins. So wary was Bournemouth Borough Council that it insisted on warning signs. It was notable that some foreign visitors were discombobulated. Brits loved it.
The second was ARKA’s Bringing Death to Life show in Lewes. An atmosphere of cheerful informality was inviting to the casual visitor, and a good number of people in the locality had made a very deliberate bee-line. They weren’t disappointed. There was an afternoon of excellent talks from Cara herself; from Julie Gill, who’ll be running the new ARKA branch in Lewes; from Hermione Elliott, a doula from Living Well Dying Well; and from Peter Murphy of Light on Life Ceremonies. Peter and his wife Belinda have a ceremony shop in Brighton, and work very closely with ARKA. How good to see a funeral director with an understanding of the vital importance of collaborating with ritualists. Cara certainly knows how to surround herself with brilliant people. A highlight of the day was hanging out with Jean Francis, author of the excellent Time to Go.
Posted by Vale
But, I hear you say, we do already. All the time. Interminably.
And, of course, we do.
This website springs from the Good Funeral Guide and the blog is full of discussions about new ways to dispose of bodies, about wild and wonderful flights of imagination in the services that are being created and lots of talk about the funeral industry itself. There is even room for philosophising in the many posts that consider what funerals are for (click on the category Ceremonies at the bottom of this post for a full listing).
But it struck me recently that, interesting and important as this talk is, most of our posts are about what happens in and after the service. We talk much more rarely about what happens before, even though this is where, for the people involved, all the important decisions are taken. It is also where funeral directors have an opportunity to make a real difference to the quality of the service provided. To understand how, you first have to recognise what is happening.
Think about the traditional way that funerals were commissioned (and allow me to exaggerate and oversimplify for a moment). In a religious context it is the priest/ rabbi/ immam or whoever that acts as the guardian of the process. They may well be involved before death. After they act both as guardian and guide to what is to be done, in what timescale and with what rites. Funeral director, the family themselves, every player in the funeral process submits to this approach.
For the people involved in – and who are happy to identify themselves with – the process there is a great deal of comfort in this. It is often rooted in community. It will express contains both tradition and continuity, and it satisfies the requirements of faith. There is the added satisfaction of knowing that all that is right and proper has been done.
Of course the direct link between family and faith – even as a cultural association) has been weakening for a long time now. In this census year a UK survey by the British Humanist Association suggested that two thirds of us do not regard ourselves as religious. While, internationally, another study claimed that data collected over a number of censuses (censi?) showed that in nine countries there was a trend that would lead in the end to the extinction of religion.
In these circumstances what should families do? The GFG is unequivocal. People should be given the information, advice, time and support they need to work out what sort of funeral service they want.
But, without access to another wise guide, funeral directors have, by default, acquired a huge new responsibility. More often than not they are the ones that families turn to as they begin to face up to the question of what sort of service it is that they need to commission. It has to be a real concern that – with some notable, brilliant and inspiring exceptions – too many still feel that the old process is the best – even where it lacks all legitimacy or meaning in the lives of the people affected.
This is why we need to talk about funerals. Meaning, spirituality, grieving, the comfort of community are all possible outside of religion, but only if the right questions are asked at the start. What needs to happen to make sure that more funeral directors are willing to ask them?
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.
Posted by Sweetpea
Am I alone in sensing a nasty niff? The vague whiff, perhaps, of a fashionable diktat in the air? I know it’s not really the done thing, but I have to confess to feeling a little oppressed by the phrase ‘celebration of life’.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m a celebratory kinda gal. Some of the ‘best’ funerals in which I’ve happily taken part have been wonderful, sometimes exuberant, expressions of love and gratitude to the deceased. Great, and if there’s much to celebrate it gladdens my heart to be involved.
But I’m increasingly uncomfortable with the idea of a ‘celebration of life’ becoming a lazy by-line for secular or civil funerals. I see the phrase bandied about – sometimes in print and sometimes without much thought or insight – by funeral directors, celebrants and elsewhere. But we don’t do lazy by-lines, do we? We have a much more interesting role. We meet people where they are, and much more importantly we make no assumptions about where that may lead us.
Have you examined some of the publicity material/information leaflets to which the bereaved are exposed? Confident statements such as ‘I will help you create a ceremony which will celebrate your loved one’s life…..’ Isn’t that rather prescriptive? And aren’t prescriptive notions what civil funerals, in particular, were conceived to counteract? If we are going to put people in a box (literally and metaphorically) then let’s at least allow them to choose their own box and help to fashion it into something which actually suits them.
I’ve worked with nearly 700 families, and occasionally someone might say ‘we want a real celebration of mum’s life’. They’ve heard the phrase, thought about it and mean what they say – and usually with good, sound reasons. Sometimes, however, I get the sneaking feeling that they’ve heard that phrase and almost feel they should be saying it to me. That’s the modern way, after all – we’ve chucked the vicar overboard, and this is what this civil malarkey is all about. Celebration.
Well, no. Not necessarily. What about the many bereaved who have ambivalent or hateful feelings towards the deceased? I went to visit a family a while ago, and the son’s opening words to me were ‘well, you might as well know the only reason we’re going to the funeral is to make sure that the old bastard’s dead.’ As I worked with the family over the next week or so, I could see he might have a point. Their stated aim when I first met them was to pour their father’s ashes down the nearest drain. I’m no magician. We talked. They were given a safe space to express themselves. We fashioned a ceremony which even managed to acknowledge the one or two kinder moments that any of them could remember. I hope that in 10, 20 years time, when they re-read the ceremony, they at least won’t be ashamed of what was enacted. And possibly could even be proud of what they did.
To have gone into that family’s front room with any preconceptions would have done them a grave disservice. And how must such a family feel when they pick up an information leaflet, only to be told that a eulogy is central to a funeral, and that eulogy is a ‘celebration’? Neither of which has to be true.
The reason I love my job so much is precisely this kind of variation in experience. We help people find their way to saying whatever it is that needs expressing at THAT funeral. It may be celebratory to the point that ideas for poetry, words of gratitude, story-telling, prayer and praise, dancing, singing, eating and drinking come pouring out. It may be that only the hard-won clipped phrases, which feel like they’ve been chipped out of granite, can be elicited. And anything in between, of course. But, find the words we do, and it’s precisely that challenge which makes our job so interesting.
So, a plea to fellow celebrants in particular. Free yourself to the real purpose of what you do, and please shed the prescriptive wording and thinking. You might surprise yourself.
PS they didn’t pour him down the drain.
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.
You may have missed the comment below by Cynthia Beal on Bill Jordan’s piece about how he wants to be buried on the surface (when he dies) where he can be of most use. Read it here.
Cynthia is formidably bright and enterprising, not to mention generous and kind. She lives in Oregon. At a time when greener than green burialists over there are vying with each other in matters of purity of vision and impeccability of practice, Cynthia’s focus is sustainability and choice for all. She’s got a very exciting project under way at the moment, and I hope I’ll soon be able to tell you about it – or that Cynthia will tell us in her own words.
Here’s what Cynthia wrote:
Bill and I are going to have a go at seeing what we can come up with to accommodate his very natural wishes. We hope to cover all the bases and find some way to achieve his goals without creating any public health and safety issues in excess of those caused by conventional burials, nor caring over-much for what people think. Personally, I’ve got in mind an ornamental wrought-iron grill work to set on top of him as a sort of cage with some way to address the dirt-on-top legality. It would secure his body from large predators and let the insects he likes so well have full access. We’re going to arrange for him to have DNA tests on file in the county of his disposition, as I suggested that a drifting femur or metatarsul might give the local sheriff a headache. I’ll keep you posted!
Back to Bill, now. He wrote after his piece was published to express his appreciation of your comments. He added this:
I once wrote a piece for a now-defunct magazine called National Gardening about the compost heap in my back yard. I likened it to an altar of energy on which the dead vegetation was piled, and the process of decomposition was pyre of renewed life. I concluded that the process of life and death could not be separated, in contrast to the prevailing spiritualities of Western Civilization, which cling desperately to a separation of mind and body; and the attempt to propagate this belief revealed a deep, delusional denial.
But mind arose from stuff and stuff lived on in the eternal processes of life. There was no such thing as birth I death, I concluded, only molecular assembly and disassembly, and so long at the earth lived, so live us all. To which the editor, who was an old friend, replied in the author’s byline: “William Jordan is a collection of molecules ordering cialis online safe currently living and writing in Culver City, California” I never have been skewered before or since with such gleeful appreciation.
One thing I forgot to mention; I hope this is appropriate on another man’s blog–but could you mention that I am the author of the books, Divorce Among the Gulls and A Cat Named Darwin?
I am currently working on what I hope will become the culmination of my life’s work–what the writer, Edward Abbey referred to as his Fat Masterpiece–a fat masterpiece with the working title of The Book of Jake. It is built on the true story of a duck I rescued from what is known in LA as a “flood control channel”–flood control channels are almost invariably former streams, creaks and their tributaries which have been paved with concrete. Their purpose is to lead away the lakes of water heavy rains leave behind, and they work with spectacular efficiency. They are also a sentence of death for the stream. Or so it might seem. The stream bed is now a street bed, a flat plane without any impediments to obstruct the flow of water. When the weather is sunny, as it usually is in southern California, the flood control channels serve to lead the runnoff from yards and streets, with their toxic loads of pesticides, oils, heavy metals, and whatever else our civilization bleeds into water. Yet it’s remarkable how life rises up in these polluted channels, with algae growing into great, streaming mats of life, which support midges and other aquatic insects, which support swallows and ducks and all sorts of migratory wading birds.
It was from this foul sump of life that I rescued Jake. It turns out, however, that Jake is no mere duck. He is the voice of nature–an oracle duck–and he allows me to say things about our species that could not be said without some sort of literary shape shifting. This is crucially important, because I contend that in order to understand the ecological mess we humans have made of the world—to understand the human being in proper context with nature–any meaningful assessment must begin in misanthropy. This is necessary to disable the innate species narcissism that wells up from the human genome, along with an obsessive-compulsive species allegiance. If you cannot get beyond these traits, you can do little except praise and admire us and spin our transgressions as some form of good, usually with the help of God.
You can buy Divorce Among the Gulls here
You can buy A Cat Named Darwin here
Here’s a fascinating tsunami-aftermath story in the Los Angeles Times. It examines this predicament: how do you mark a death in tradition-bound Japan with no body to cremate?
One survivor, Shoichi Nakamura, has lost her brother. The lack of a body makes it difficult to have a proper osoushiki, or funeral ceremony, Nakamura said. Instead of using the remains of her brother and his family, she may have to use another family’s bone chips or ashes as a stand-in. The Buddhist priests have declared that an acceptable alternative, she said.
“I hear city hall may give them out,” she said.
Other options include collective ceremonies known as godousou, or cremation of the clothes, photographs or personal items of the deceased in lieu of a body. Even a pinch of dirt from the spot the dead were last seen may have to do.
“Many people will have to do this,” said Souichiro Tachibana, 50, a teacher at an evacuation center in Miyako. “Even though it may not be your exact relation, what’s important is to believe it is, for peace of mind. This is the last choice, but what can you do?”
Japan did something similar during World War II when large numbers of Japanese troops died overseas. The government would distribute sticks to the grieving families, saying they were from the war zone, said Shinya Yamada, assistant professor at Tokyo’s National Museum of Japanese History. “But who knows if it’s true?” he said.
Read the entire article here.
And there’s a good post on the same subject over at the excellent Death Reference Desk, here.
There’s a fine row brewing in Cork. The County Council has forbidden the public to dig graves themselves, something they have been doing since the dawn of time.
Yes, it’s a health and safety thing. From now on graves may only be dug by those who have done the course. They must be equipped with approved equipment including ear defenders, mobile phones and underground cable detection tools. They must even have had the right jabs. It’s going to add around 500 euros to the cost of a funeral.
A local funeral director points out that “We have lots of old customs and old traditions and it is going to be very difficult to stop people doing what they always did.”
Yes indeed. The people of Myross have already struck back. They have posted a notice at their cemetery which reads:
In Myross, we dig for our own,
we shoulder our own
and we inter our own.
Our traditions and customs.
Your respect required.
Isn’t that great?
Whole story here.
