funeral directors

We know best

28 June 2012
Charles
14 Comments
Categories: celebrants, funeral directors

The funeral industry commissions very few surveys. When it does, they are about what bereaved people are doing, not what bereaved people want. These surveys are almost always self-serving and, if spun well, appeal to lazy journalists. Result: free advertising. This is something the GFG has taken up with broadsheet journalists to no effect.

Why no surveys about what bereaved people want? Why so little market research? Is it because funeral directors aren’t interested in what people want?

Or because they think they know best?

I don’t think there are any easy answers here. Let me throw in just two more observations.  First, a funeral director’s relationship with his/her clients is potentially corrupting of the funeral director. Very. Grief-stricken people are easily bossed about – many develop a version of Stockholm syndrome, a psychological condition where hostages develop gratitude towards, and admiration of, their captors. If a funeral director role-plays it right, their clients can easily mistake manipulation for kindness.

What’s more, the likelihood of any client asking to ‘look under the bonnet’ is negligible, and that’s potentially corrupting, too. Unexamined mortuary practice can lead to de-sensitisation and, from there, to very bad habits.

So we can see why funeral directors are prey to self-importance (the not very bright) or paternalism (the brighter ones). All intelligent, thinking funeral directors acknowledge this – as do the better celebrants, whose power relationship with their clients is similar.

Is there any other service industry in which it is reckoned okay not to tell people certain things? There is a high degree of consensus in the funeral industry that empowering clients to make informed choices has its appointed limits. You have to use your discretion. Did you ask that couple if they would like to come in and wash and dress their dead person? I thought about and decided not to. Aren’t they entitled to consider it? Look, it would only have upset them.

It’s a fair point.

Where does ‘we know best’ begin and end?

We’d know more if the industry conducted more surveys asking people what they want, what they need to know, and is it okay if…? Is it okay if we store your dad with his face uncovered on racking with loads of other dead people? No? Thanks, in that case we won’t. Anybody outside the industry, and a great many in it, wouldn’t need to ask such a dumbass question.

But what about the mouth suture? (If you don’t know what the mouth suture is, it is a way of closing the mouth of a dead person. A gaping jaw can look pretty horrifying.) The mouth suture is standard practice. The funeral directors who don’t do it can be counted on the fingers of one hand. And it’s not the sort of procedure you’d ever, ever want to ask a bereaved person to make an informed decision about in the first flush of grief. (If you need to read a description – be warned, it’s not for the fainthearted – you can one here.

If you were to conduct a survey of, say, a thousand ordinary people and asked them what they think about the mouth suture, the result would be, we can only say, interesting – because we don’t know. And of course it would depend on how you presented the information and asked the question.

But to do it as a matter of routine without permission? Is that really okay? To withhold information like that?

I know so many superb and humane funeral directors who earnestly believe that it’s just something you cannot do, ask permission about the mouth suture, that, frankly, I’m torn. It’s all too easy for a scribbler to adopt a holier-than-thou opinion about this and say If you can’t bear to ask, don’t do it. It’s different when you’re on the ground, doing things for the best.

But once you decide to withhold information, well, it’s potentially a slippery slope you’re on, isn’t it?

And in any case, isn’t there a principle here? 


Ed’s note: It’s been a busy week for the blog, which has seen many new visitors and commenters. You are all welcome. If you have left a comment using a cybermoniker that’s fine, that’s the way of it, and you probably feel you want to keep your personal opinions separate from your professional practice. This blog has always been remarkably free of trolls and vandals and, even when passions were high, recent discourse has more or less respected common courtesy. It’s not often that anything happens in funeralworld, but that Dispatches programme really got bloodboiling. 

Tomorrow is Friday and, as ever, the main event will be Lyra Mollington’s reflections of a funeralgoer. A feeling of business as normal will descend once more, and we hope to return to our ‘magazine’ format, a daily mix of news, opinion, curiosities, music and, if you’re really lucky (we’re not promising anything) something deliciously oblique from Vale. 

The order is rapidly fadin’

21 June 2012
Charles
4 Comments
Categories: alternative funerals, ashes, Attitudes to death, Body donation, ceremony, cremation, Formality vs informality, funeral customs, funeral directors, Religious funerals

Blog reader Kathryn Edwards has drawn our attention to an interesting article in the Guardian. Thanks, Kathryn. 

In it, Rosanna Greenstreet tells how her aunt Molly donated her body for medical education or research, thereby denying everyone the benefit of a funeral. Greenstreet tells us what family and friends did instead:

Molly didn’t believe in God and hated funerals, but she loved a party. So on Saturday 12 May, on what would have been her 94th birthday weekend, Stephen and Prudence held one for her. The celebration lunch was in a private room at the Michelin-starred restaurant, Chez Bruce, in south London. All Molly’s nearest and dearest came. There were photos of her through the ages and letters of condolence from her friends. It was a lovely occasion: we drank champagne as we shared our memories of Molly, and there were no tears.

Greenstreet’s father also wants to donate his bodyto Cambridge university, both for the benefit that will confer and also because it will enable him to evade a funeral. He’s written down seven reasons: 

1. Hopefully, to make some contribution to medical training

2. To spare relatives the trouble of organising a funeral.

3. To spare my estate the cost of a funeral (a “cheap” one might cost £3,000).

4. To spare possible “mourners” the trouble of attending a funeral. 

5. To avoid the hypocrisy of troubling the Anglican church to participate in a service when I have attended so few other services since I left school.

6. There is nothing that could be said or sung at a church funeral service that would reflect my views (such as they are) on life, death and fate. Anyone curious about my life can be sufficiently informed by my detailed and intimate diaries (currently 76 volumes).

7. To avoid anyone having to trouble to say anything interesting or pleasant about a life distinguished only by its lack of significant distinction – or disgrace.

Typically self-deprecating and, perhaps, peculiarly British. Anthony Greenstreet may be 83 but he’s in tune with the zeitgeist. Like an ever-increasing number of people, he can’t see the point of a conventional funeral, and his daughter is catching on to the attractions of a funeral without a body. 

Greenstreet concludes:

It’s hard to think about what we will do to remember my father when he has gone up to Cambridge for the last time. Fancy restaurants have never been his thing – he has always preferred home-cooking. Nor does he drink much – his preferred tipple is tea, taken without milk, harking back to the days when he started his career as a “humble clerk” in India. So, perhaps, when the time comes, we will sit around the kitchen table with a cuppa, make a start on those 76 diaries, and really find out what made the old man tick!

The comments under the article are worth reading. Here are some:

Mrs PunkAs

When my father in law passed away recently we respected his wishes not to have a funeral – he was non religious and wanted no public gathering so instead we hired a room at the crematorium and gave the four grandchildren an assortment of multi coloured vivid markers each. They spent a lovely half an hour drawing all sorts of stuff all over his coffin, pictures, words, memories etc. It was really good for them. It was the best send-off I’ve been to.

 Mykeff

I’d like to be stripped of all useable parts and then squashed into an old cardboard receptacle and ploughed under at a random beauty spot.
Reduce. Reuse. Recycle.

Sandyr9 (whose father donated his body)

For my father, we reserved a chapel, placed an obituary with time and location of service, called distant friends and relatives, and had a lovely service: A minister friend presided, biblical passages were preached and discussed, and traditional hymns were played. After the service, there was a reception wherein attendees met and conversed with family. To my thinking, we had a funeral for my father.

 These sentiments are as common among Guardian readers as they are among the readers of any other paper. Each inspires the others to do something minimal or creative or alternative or all of the above. And of course, the more people exchange these sorts of views, the more they empower themselves, so that when the time comes, the more likely they are to have the clarity of mind to reject a funeral director’s conventional  offer. 

The message to funeral directors is one that Bob Dylan set to music all those years ago: better start swimming. 

Full Guardian article here. 

 

Channel 4’s Dispatches set to rumble the undertakers

18 June 2012
Charles
90 Comments
Categories: funeral directors, scandals

“Dispatches lifts the lid on the funeral industry. Using undercover filming, Jackie Long investigates what really happens to our loved ones when they die.”

Monday June 25 at 8.00pm. Channel 4. 

In certain districts of Funeralworld, fear stalks the streets.

Cancel all other appointments.

 

Panning for gold

24 May 2012
Charles
8 Comments
Categories: funeral directors

We have a list of good funeral directors on the GFG website. It’s got stagnant. We’ve not added to it for a while, nor have we maintained a relationship with some of the funeral directors we recommend. Most of our recommended funeral directors are as good as it gets; some need to be weeded out. The upshot, though, is that, for want of vitality, the listing has begun to lose credibility. We’ve spent too much time on the blog, simple as that. 

We were scratching our heads here, trying to work out how best to revive our list and make it sustainable when one of our recommended funeral directors emailed this enquiry: 

What weight does your recommendation / listing carry? Would premises / facilities be inspected?  Is there a code of practice, or a means to deal with any FD that does not meet expectations?  

All good questions. 

To begin at the beginning. The rationale behind the project is easy to define. Because there is all the difference in the world – for some bereaved people it can be a life-changing difference – between a brilliant funeral director and a merely ordinary one, not to mention a bad one, it is a service to the bereaved to list those who will look after them best. Do that effectively, accentuating the positive, and you can stimulate market forces to eliminate the negative. Far more useful to build a bypass to the Co-op and Dignity than spend energy destroying them. It’s also a lot more fun. To sing the praises of unsung heroes makes the world a more beautiful place. 

A listing of this sort is a service to listed funeral directors, too, of potentially significant commercial value. Third-party endorsement by an org which has no business connections with the funeral industry, and is therefore wholly independent, really is worth something in a market where most people can’t tell the difference between one funeral director and another. 

The idea was that the listing would be of most value if it was based on subjective criteria consistent with the personality of the website so that people would be able judge its value according to their own values.  By and large we don’t do bland, we do like Marmite and we don’t try to be all things to all people. We reckon that the distinguishing characteristic of a good funeral director is that he or she is an outstanding human being, simple as that. We only want to list outstanding funeral directors. 

Funeralworld is another country: they do things differently there. For this reason, consumer advocates have to do things differently, too. It’s all very straightforward for the Good Food Guide, which can depend for recommendations and reviews on expert consumers. We found that out to our cost. We sought to establish a nationwide network of funeral consumer champions who would identify, review and re-inspect funeral directors in their area. We advertised and got lots of eager volunteers. But they simply didn’t measure up. They couldn’t differentiate between the best, the good ordinary and sometimes the markedly indifferent. They didn’t know enough. 

The same is continually true of a lot of consumer responses that come directly to us, though from time to time somebody does email in with a recommendation of outstanding value. In the same way, a lot of funeral directors who self-refer turn out to be excellent. Easily the best source of referrals is celebrants, but here we have to be careful to establish that their endorsement is not just an ingratiation exercise. Where we do get a good lead from a celebrant we have to be careful to protect their confidentiality. 

The alternative to applying subjective criteria is to apply objective criteria. We could develop an accreditation scheme on the lines of Charter Mark, now called the Customer Service Excellence standard, together with an inspection regime — a sort of Ofdeath. But it would cost a lot to administer, which would make it impossible for new businesses to afford. It would also mean accrediting blameless but dull funeral directors. As I say, we’re only interested in outstanding, and we very much like being able to get behind a really good funeral director who’s just starting out. We want to enjoy the freedom to recommend whoever we like, including funeral directors who don’t want to be recommended. And we want to enjoy the freedom to de-list anyone at the click of a mouse. Our recommendation is for one year at a time. 

That’s not to say that formal accreditation by an independent organisation is not a good and desirable thing. It is. But that’s for someone else to do. We seek no monopoly. 

We’re not interested in making money from the listing. Our credibility resides in our poverty.  But we do need to make our listing sustainable. We do need to re-inspect funeral directors. We do want to feature good long reviews and we need to pay for them to be written. We could paywall our listing, but we don’t want to. We could solicit donations from funeral directors, and we’ve tried that with conspicuous unsuccess, probably due to our inability to prove its value to them. We could probably do something about that. 

So, where do we go from here? We probably need to develop a GFG Secret Service of trusted agents operating under a cloak of secrecy. Call it benevolent deceit, if you like. Actually, it’s already begun working encouragingly well. 

We’re determined to make our listing work because the cause is a good one. 

We’re very open-source, here. Do tell us what you think. 

Habeas corpse

17 May 2012
Charles
6 Comments
Categories: Art and death, Dead people's rights, Embalming, funeral directors, Legal rights

An email flies in from a consumer advocacy org in the US. It’s about a British funeral consumer, let’s call him Jim, who has asked them for help. Jim has been told by his funeral director that there will be no funeral until he pays most of the bill upfront. Jim can manage much of the bill now, and can pay the balance very soon, but his funeral director won’t budge and the funeral is just days away. So Jim appoints another, more reasonable, funeral director, who rings up FD1 and says he’s coming to collect the body. FD1 refuses to release it.

What, the consumer advocacy org wanted to know, is Jim’s legal position?

I responded with the standard spiel. The executor/administrator is the legal ‘possessor’ and ‘controller’ of the body and it is an offence for anyone except the coroner to withhold the body from that person. Further, there being no property in a corpse, it is illegal to arrest one for debt. What’s more, it is almost certainly lawful to exercise reasonable force to gain (or regain) lawful possession of the corpse.

This applies, of course, whether or not the consumer has entered into a contract with the funeral home. A dead person cannot be used as a bargaining chip, and the executor can take their dead person home whenever, within reason, and as often as they want. I’m almost certain that’s right. 

And then my mind wandered sideways. For a long time I have wondered what it is legal and what it is illegal to do to a dead body. What constitutes what Americans classify ‘abuse of a corpse’?

And I wondered also about something else that’s been bugging me for a while: what status does routine embalming confer upon a body?

Having more pressing, urgent and duller things to do, I went a-googling. This time, I put in my thumb and pulled out a plum. Actually, two plums.

Plum One

The law case that altered the legal maxim that ‘the only lawful possessor of a corpse is the earth’ was the Anthony-Noel Kelly case. He is an artist. In 1998 he exhibited casts of body parts which had been smuggled out to him by lab technician Niel Lyndsay from the Royal College of Surgeons. Both were arrested and charged with stealing human body parts.  At the trial, the defence submitted at the close of the prosecution case that (i) parts of bodies were not in law capable of being property and therefore could not be stolen, and (ii) that the specimens were not in the lawful possession of the college at the time they were taken because they had been retained beyond the period of two years before burial stipulated in the Anatomy Act 1832, and so did not belong to it. The trial judge rejected those submissions, ruling that there was an exception to the traditional common law rule that there was no property in a corpse, namely that once a human body or body part had undergone a process of skill by a person authorised to perform it, with the object of preserving it for the purpose of medical or scientific examination, or for the benefit of medical science, it became something quite different from an interred corpse and it thereby acquired a usefulness or value and it was capable of becoming property in the usual way, and could be stolen. The same applies to body parts “if they have acquired different attributes by virtue of the application of skill of dissection and preservation techniques for exhibition and teaching purposes“.

There we have it. “Preservation techniques for exhibition … purposes.” Does this apply to bodies embalmed for viewing? After all, they have undergone a process of skill.  If Jim’s detained dead person has been embalmed, can his dead person now be classed as property?

Plum Two

The second discovery comes from a case before the European Court of Human Rights in 2007. Briefly, two men were killed in a firefight with Turkish security forces. When things had died down, members of the security forces cut the ears off the corpses.  The applicants complained of violations under Article 3 of the Convention on Human Rights, which prohibits torture, and “inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment”. The court’s judgement was that it appeared that the deceased’s ears had been cut off after they had died. Article 3 had never been applied in the context of respect for a dead body. Human quality was extinguished on death and, therefore, the prohibition on ill-treatment was no longer applicable to corpses; notwithstanding the cruelty of the acts concerned in the instant case. It followed that there had been no violation of art 3 on that account.

I don’t want to speculate on the implications of that.

Information source here.

Norfolk Funerals

11 May 2012
Charles
37 Comments
Categories: funeral directors

Norfolk Funerals, which opened recently, is the UK’s first and only not-for-profit funeral director. It is a charity, based in Norwich, and it offers funerals at cost price for all merchandise plus a fee to cover overheads, running costs and the wages of its employees. 

Eyebrows have been raised. What’s going on here? Why would they want to do this? What’s the real story? Is this some kind of money laundering operation? 

Here at the GFG we’ve had a great many emails and phone calls enquiring about Norfolk Funerals. Misgivings have been voiced, some of them mundane, some exotic. At the same time, we’ve been doing our own due diligence.

With the agreement of Norfolk Funerals, we are offering this page as a place where you can ask questions and have them answered by Norfolk Funerals. 

We hope that this will enable everyone to see NF for what it is. 

Please, ask your question in a comments box below, and Norfolk Funerals will respond directly to it. 

Politics and funerals

6 May 2012
Charles
7 Comments
Categories: Attitudes to death, bureaucracy, cemeteries, End-of-life issues, funeral directors, Processions

A topical post from our religious correspondent, Richard Rawlinson

Timed to counter the low turnout of voters at the mayoral and local council elections last week, did you catch the BBC advertisement challenging political apathy by chronicling how so many everyday activities–from the fat count in our sausages to the safety of cyclists on the road–are politicised?

Despite the mid-term anti-Government vote that brought some good news for Labour and disappointment for the Tories, and especially the Lib-Dems, Londoners of my acquaintance are relieved to see Boris returned, and the defeat of tax-avoiding, gaff-prone has-been Red Ken.

But how does politics–local and national–impact on the funeral business? Healthcare clearly affects death tolls, and the economy the lot of small businesses such as independent undertakers. Here are five more, big and small, issues with which local councillors might perhaps busy themselves:

How shall we avoid traffic disruption by town centre funeral processions?

Can we empower the police to hose down those awful ‘God Hate Fags’ protesters who upset the bereaved at private funerals?

How can we secure more land for cemeteries?

How can we placate believers in man-made global warming by making cremation more eco-friendly?

How can we tackle the class war issue of inheritance tax and death duties?

Please add some meat to the bone of this shamefully skeletal list.   

Quote of the day

27 April 2012
Charles
2 Comments
Categories: funeral directors

For many, working with corpses is a job reserved for the very brave, or very desperate, as a last resort when there are no other jobs available.

Source

Free, easy, devastating

19 April 2012
Charles
6 Comments
Categories: funeral directors, perceptions of funeral directors, scandals

Posted by Charles

Funeral shoppers are nervous shoppers. They are in unknown territory, they’ve got nothing to go by. Of all shoppers, funeral shoppers are the most likely, if they catch a glint or a whiff of anything negative about a funeral director, to rear up, eyes rolling, and gallop away as fast as they can. 

That is the power of Qype and all those other review websites. We know we can’t trust everything we read on Amazon and Tripadvisor, but we can bring some experience to bear and come to a considered judgement. Funeral shoppers don’t have that sort of savvy to guide them. 

Here at the GFG we list funeral directors we like (not nearly enough; it’s a work in progress) and we post reviews from consumers. We have enough nous to sort them at source. Almost all negative reviews come from, surprise surprise, rival funeral directors. These reviews are easy to spot and delete because they usually employ undertakerly jargon. “The causal way he paiged the hearse was a discrace” is a dead giveaway. But some feedback, though sincerely meant, may be wide of the mark. A recent poor review of a GFG funeral director was sent in by an ex-wife whose children had arranged the funeral with an ‘alternative’ funeral director. The children had no complaint, but the complainant hadn’t liked the non-traditional style of the funeral. The funeral director was blameless and the complaint was a matter between herself and her children. I didn’t post it. 

But Qype might have — almost certainly would have. It would have been enough to frighten a lot of horses. 

In the case of malicious complaints, the potential for damage is enormous. Did you read about the recent experience of Damian Melville of Melville and Daughters, Tottenham?

The owner of a Tottenham funeral firm claims his business has fallen victim to a cyber bully leaving “fake” feedback on a review website.

Damian Melville, 33, opened Melville and Daughters funeral directors in West Green Road two years ago to ensure future job security for his children, aged five and 12.

Mr Melville, who lives in Enfield Chase, first started noticing the less than favourable reviews on the popular business review website, Qype, in December, but is now seeking criminal action against the internet user.

The claims, which show up as the first result on search engine Google, include information about how the supposed customer was “hounded” by the firm four days after the funeral to pay for overdue payments.

The Qype user also complained about the late arrival of the horse-drawn hearse and the use of an ill-fitting wig on the body of a deceased person. [Source]

Mr Melville has had to resort to expensive litigation to get the reviews removed — but not after they’d done incalculable reputational damage. 

It is unlikely that Mr Melville is the first to have suffered in this way. He certainly won’t be the last. For both funeral shoppers and funeral directors these online review sites are a serious matter. 

What price value?

26 March 2012
Charles
9 Comments
Categories: ceremony, direct cremation, funeral directors

Over at the Connnecting Directors website here there’s a rant by a funeral home consultant, Alan Creedy. In it, we see amusing similarities between the US funeral industry and our own:

Why do funeral professionals spend so much time fighting among themselves and never fighting for themselves? … Why is so much emotional energy spent on not-losing-a-call and none spent on getting 5 more calls?

Mr Creedy berates US undertakers for their passivity in hard times:

We are so addicted to our “Mr. Nice Guy” image and so afraid of offending just one person that we allow people like Jessica Mitford and Lisa Carlson and a plethora of ill informed journalists to tell our story for us. In fact, I have come to believe we no longer know what our story is.

Worse, it seems US funeral home profits have halved in the last 30 years. Mr Creedy wants undertakers to stand up for themselves:

WAKE UP! If you think people will like you because you are their doormat (which they don’t) they will like you a whole lot less when you are a public failure. Your livelihood is in jeopardy. Your wife and your family’s livelihood is in jeopardy…

…and so on. You can read it for yourself here.

Over here in the UK, times are also hard for undertakers. There are too many of them competing in a market where the death rate has never been so low.

Worse, there’s a recession on.

And to top it all, demand has never been higher for cut-price funerals. The undertakers who are doing best are the £995, bargain basement, pile em high and burn em cheap brigade. The number of people looking for direct cremation is becoming astonishing.

It is not all economic necessity which is driving this. Arguably, the significant factor is the failure of our undertakers, collectively, to make a case for the emotional and spiritual value of a funeral ceremony.

A funeral is, for many, no more than an invidious social ordeal.

And the trend is that it is becoming increasingly okay to opt out.