Posted by Richard Rawlinson
I’m posed with a dilemma here, a choice between topicality or taste.
Oh, publish and be damned. Forgive the timing in this, the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee year, to raise the subject of Her Majesty’s official undertakers, Leverton & Sons, a 200-year-old family firm of funeral directors that has served London for eight generations.
Posted by Juno Gatsby
Jack’s granddaughter called me and asked if I could recommend a venue for his funeral service. His family knew he didn’t want his last journey to be in a church or crematorium. He would be laid to rest in their local cemetery after his farewell ceremony. We talked about hotels and wedding venues but most hotels aren’t too keen on having a hearse parked outside the main entrance! They tried the local Register Office as a potential venue, they were very kind and helpful but…..there were just too many corners to be negotiated. It would be impossible to manoeuvre a coffin into the building with any dignity. Then we hit on the idea of wedding barn venues, and the family got busy on the phone and sorted it all out for themselves. The owners of a beautiful, mellow stone-walled, old oak-beamed barn conversion agreed in principle – as long as there were no legal restrictions. We reassured them that, unlike weddings, there are no legal restrictions on where and when you can hold a funeral ceremony.
“In numberless instances the interment of the dead is in the hands of miscreants, whom it is almost flattery to compare to the vulture, or the foulest carrion bird.”
Writer in Leisure Hour, 1862
Josh Slocum, Executive Director of the Funeral Consumers Alliance in the USA, is a major hero to all who toil at the GFG-Batesville Tower. Here he is talking on the telly about funeral pricing and home funerals.
It’s interesting to note the similarities with the British funeral industry, in particular consumers’ disapproval of the marking up of coffins. We unquestioningly accept mark-ups in all other commercial transactions, so why do we find the marking up of coffins so objectionable? Does it say something about our unease with a for-profit business model of funeral directing? If so, what can we do about it?
Josh talks about the Federal Trade Commission’s Funeral Rule, the sort of document we badly need in the UK. It’s very well written. What a pity the Office of Fair Trading has never written a version for British funeral consumers — or funeral shoppers, as Josh terms them.
Josh talks, too, about the emotional and spiritual value of a home funeral as ‘personal, family event’, an alternative to turning your loved one over to strangers. In the US, the home funeral movement is growing. In Britain it has most regrettably stalled.
Find the Federal Trade Commission Funeral Rule here. Hat tip to the Funeral Consumers Alliance to alerting us to this interview.
Posted by Rupert Callender, owner of The Green Funeral Company.
As human beings, we look for meaning everywhere, superimposing it over everything that comes into our lives. The Australian aborigines believe that the world was vocalised into existence, literally sung into creation, and that the song needs to be continued so that reality can flourish. We are no different, giving identities to our household objects, cursing our computer when it misbehaves or urging our spluttering car toward home. We see patterns where, without us, there are none. A world that responds to our awakening gaze, and freezes again as we look away.
As undertakers, we work in an area where meanings blur and identities become less certain. For us, a body is just that: a body. Something awkward and heavy to be treated practically between us, to be lifted and moved, dressed or washed. But when they are in the presence of those who loved them, they become people again, suffused with personality and history, mute vessels for love and longing, themselves but changed. It is to witness this change that we gently lead the living toward, no more certain as to what it means than they, only sure that it is as important as it is painful.
The picture above is of one of our lowering straps, part of our meagre collection of professional equipment. We have two of them, simple strips of furniture webbing to reinforce chairs that we bought thirteen years ago in a haberdashery shop in Cornwall. You can see the colouration of the soil on them, their history stained into the edge. The red thread marks the midpoint. It rests over the centre of the grave, a guide for when we stretch them over before the coffin is laid on top.
They are just material, yet for me they are one of the most powerfully resonant things I possess. They have lowered old men and children, people whose deaths were a longed for mercy and those ripped from their families. They have held mothers leaving shellshocked children, people who have had terrible things done to them, and those who have done terrible things. They have slipped through mine and Claire’s hands a thousand times, and the hand’s of grandmothers and fathers, lovers and friends. They are tinged with our blood cut by the edges of coffins, stained with soil and mud and grass and sweat, and of course, with tears. The tears of people doing the bravest, hardest, saddest thing of their lives, gently lowering their beloved down into a grave.
They fit into a spread hand, yet reach into eternity. Not just bits of woven cloth, but portals, ladders to another world, or at least to the end of this one. At times they appear like mandalas, or spiraling universes. They seem to possess a patient wisdom, to have personality. We certainly have shared history.
I wonder what part they will play in my own end, whether their frayed edges will still be strong enough by then. In my secret heart, I know they will, that they are an umbilical cord reaching out into the womb of my own death, ravelling me nearer.
Hopefully, when my time has come I will be burnt on a hill. If I am, them perhaps one should be wrapped around me, the other to journey with Claire to who knows where.
These decisions are not ours to make, and maybe they will slip through the hands of my family as they lower me down into the ground. Where ever I am going, I have confidence that the straps will see me safely to the end. They always have.
The Undertaker
This is for the Undertaker
Who’s story is sad to tell,
For what he does is never mentioned,
And often overlooked as well.
He’s not at all what you might picture,
He’s not wrinkled, old and grey,
His face is not pasty white,
Like storybooks portray.
Some people laugh and make their jokes,
And some turn up their nose,
And many think that he is strange,
For the life that he had chose.
But there are many things that they don’t see,
And even more that they don’t know.
Like all the nights he gets no rest,
But never lets it show.
I have seen him work both day and night,
With no time to eat or sleep.
To care for those in mourning,
And comfort those who weep.
The load he carries on his shoulders,
Is more than you or I could bear.
But he always seems to find the time,
To show you that he cares.
So when you see the undertaker,
Make sure you see the man,
That does the job that no one wants
And that no one understands.
Take the time to shake his hand,
And a moment to just say “hi”,
I think you’ll find the undertaker,
Is just an ordinary guy.
“It is curious that long association with the sadness of death seems to have deprived an occasional funeral director of all sense of moderation. Whether the temptation of “good business” gradually undermines his character—knowing as he does that bereaved families ask no questions—or whether his profession is merely devoid of taste, he will, if not checked, bring the most ornate and expensive casket in his establishment; he will perform every rite that his professional ingenuity for expenditure can devise; he will employ every attendant he has; he will order vehicles numerous enough for the cortège of a president; he will even, if thrown in contact with a bewildered chief-mourner, secure a pledge for the erection of an elaborate mausoleum.
Some one, therefore, who has the family’s interest at heart and knows their taste and purse, should go personally to the establishment of the undertaker, and not only select the coffin, but go carefully into the specification of all other details, so that everything necessary may be arranged for, and unnecessary items omitted.”
Emily Post on funeral directors, 1928, here. Hat tip to Kathryn Edwards.
Here’s an extraordinary thing.
A funeral director brings the wrong coffin to the crematorium. The crematorium staff spot that it’s the wrong coffin on arrival, and inform the funeral director.
So far, so banal.
What happens next? The service goes ahead with the wrong coffin. At the conclusion thereof the coffin is not burnt but, presumably, taken home by the funeral director.
So she/he’s now got two dead people, one of whom ought to be ashes. What did she/he do next?
The Belfast Telegraph does not tell us here. The crematorium was Loughborough (Dignity plc) and the undertaker has yet to be named.
Have you recently lost a loved one?
How was the funeral?
Did it go well as could be expected or were there problems you felt you shouldn’t have had to deal with?
I’m a journalist working for a small independent television production company. We are currently looking into funerals and we want to hear about your experiences. Were you shocked by the cost or was it reasonable? How were you treated by the Funeral Director and the other staff? Did your relative have a funeral plan? If so, do you think that helped make their funeral go more smoothly? Please get in touch by emailing me (tom@hardcashproductions.com) or calling me (07921 69 35 97 or 02072 53 27 82) and mentioning that you have a funeral story to tell.
Guest post by Rupert Callender, owner of The Green Funeral Company.
Often this blog can trot nicely along with the usual suspects commenting dryly from the sidelines, a good natured conversation amongst friends. It’s easy to forget it has a wide, international readership, easy that is, until a seemingly innocuous post unleashes a Bay of Pigs crisis, as it was with the recent posting about a rise in Church fees. Suddenly, we were neck deep in a debate about the merits of secular celebrants, and the rise of budget ‘disposals’.
Unlike Charles, I didn’t think that the to and fro was particularly unpleasant, but it certainly was enlightening. There is still a large cultural chasm between most funeral directors and the people who increasingly take the ceremonies, and the way down is littered with jagged outcrops of things like class and money and religion.
We, and by that I mean all of us who make our livings from what happens next when someone dies, live in interesting times, as the Chinese and Scots curse has it. Our industry is in the tightening grip of big business, our economy is in meltdown, and most unpredictable of all, an unexpected blip in the death rate has meant that funerals are scarce. People will go to the wall, and often not those that Darwin would hope would.
The debate about budget funerals has been the most interesting. Anyone who offers a funeral service will have been asked to quote for one. The generous transparency of people like Nick Gandon has explained to me exactly how they can offer such an astonishingly cheap funeral. The combination of mortuary facilities in the crematorium, and a flexible realistic approach from those who run them mean that Mr Gandon can offer people a seriously cheap, no service body disposal. More power to him for being able to react to the market.
We can’t, even though our overheads are much cheaper than most. We are really not a product driven company. We don’t have a hearse as standard, or a vast range of coffins. The product you get is my wife and I. Our professional fee is honest and clear and rarely varies, and never more than a couple of hundred pounds either way, though I would hasten to add we are still considerably cheaper than most of our competitors for all of our funerals. But our market share is small, so when someone comes and asks for a no service funeral we quote as best we can, but it rarely can compete with the budget service.
And this is what the customer wants, isn’t it? Times are hard and the days of religious certainty are long gone. If people want things to be taken care of quickly and efficiently without their presence then they have that right, don’t they?
When we have helped people to have this kind of non funeral, there have often been rumblings in the wider family and community. The impulse to mark and record this event cannot be fully sublimated by economic concerns. We have experienced what we can only describe as “pop up” funerals, taking place alongside the simple practicalities, friends and family gathering in our premises for what seems like a chance to see the person and say goodbye unmistakably crystalising into a spontaneous ceremony. Unless the person who has died was particularly disliked, people want to gather with their body one last time. A ceremony without the presence of the body is a vastly different beast from one with, and to throw away this chance for a few hundred quid seems to me the opposite of a bargain.
I don’t blame funeral directors for trying to accommodate these wishes. Despite the deeply entrenched hostility towards funeral directors that surfaces even on the pages of this enlightened blog, it is a bloody difficult world in which to make a living, and whatever they need to do to carry on is understandable, and don’t they say that the customer is always right? We live in fear of being seen as exploitative and paternalistic, a stereotype which unfairly haunts us in this age of unscrupulous life insurance companies, bonused bankers and intrusive government, it is hardly surprising that some funeral directors are betting that the next big thing will be no thing, literally nothing, and have decided to make a virtue of necessity, and become, in essence low key removal men.
But in my heart of hearts, I know this is wrong, that we are colluding with a public who, in the face of spiritual uncertainty and the opportunity to avoid something so painful are choosing the easiest option, and that in doing so we are doing them and us a huge disfavour.
I became an undertaker and a celebrant because the grief I had avoided turned toxic. The funerals I didn’t go to had much more power over me than the funerals I did and had influenced my life in ways it took years to fully understand. I honestly believe, and I am sure most funeral directors agree with me, that there is no way around grief. It can be displaced for years, decades even, but sooner or later, and of course it is usually sooner another significant death in your life forces you to go back to the beginning and face your original wound. So what happens to these people we are excusing from the difficult task of saying goodbye to those they love? I believe that more often than not, they will come to regret their brisk efficiency, or worse, never realise the impact and influence it has had on their grief.
We are into an area that most funeral directors will think this isn’t their territory. Words like ritual and ceremony make them uncomfortable, and traditionally have been the preserve of the priest but the truth is that the pulpit has been empty for a while now, and secular celebrants, good or bad have moved in to occupy it. The withdrawing of conventional religion does not mean that ritual becomes less important, quite the opposite, and funeral directors, marked and lined by our awareness of mourning and bereavement are exactly the people to be helping to create something new.
Perhaps another strand of what is happening is people’s increasing dislike of crematoriums, and avoiding them and the funeral is a two bird one stone offer that is just too tempting.
We did a funeral last week in the function room of a bustling drinker’s pub in Plymouth, much to the relief of the deceased’s family, who wanted to honour his wishes to be cremated, but were dreading visiting the place. The actual cremation happened the next morning. The funeral wasn’t expensive, but it was deeply satisfying for all who attended, filled with spontaneous gestures like everybody forming two columns in the narrow downstairs room to pass the coffin along between them. This meant more to everyone there than a recitation of the Lord’s Prayer. Working out that this was a good thing to do wasn’t difficult, but neatly highlights the benefits of being both undertaker and celebrant.
Perhaps this is why we embrace the idea of natural cremation or funeral pyres with such enthusiasm. Here is a chance to strip things back, both in terms of technology and ritual. When faced with something so profoundly simple and elemental as a huge fire in a field, then the lines that seperate celebrant and undertaker, mourner and professional may well blur, and we may find that the doing has become the meaning. Won’t cost much either.
So I urge you undertakers to stand up and enter the debate, to argue your merits and put your case forward. If you believe that you make a difference to the bewilderment of a family, if you have ever made a suggestion which has transformed a funeral and helped people move successfully beyond this most traumatic of human events then now is the time to speak, before we find ourselves in a place devoid of meaning and participation, squeezed between the pre-paid homogenised ‘personalised’ funeral of the big boys and the budget operators, where the only measure of a funeral is how little it cost. That would be a tragedy.
