funeral directors

Death in the community

30 August 2011
Charles
1 Comment
Categories: alternative funerals, Art and death, Attitudes to death, celebrants, ceremony, coffins, End-of-life issues, funeral customs, funeral directors, funeral reformers, funeral trends

 

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.

ARKA funeral day this Saturday in Lewes

25 August 2011
Charles
3 Comments
Categories: funeral directors, funeral reformers, funeral trends, green funeral, natural burial

 

Bringing Death to Life – 27th August 2011

All Saints Arts and Youth Centre, Friars Walk, Lewes.

Free Entry

ARKA Original Funerals of Brighton opened its new office in Lansdown Place Lewes, in July this year, with the ceremonies and celebrant company, Light on Life. 

ARKA Original Funerals and Light on Life are recognised leading experts in natural death and green funerals and between them have many years of experience and insight. 

Bringing Death to Life is being held at All Saints Arts and Youth Centre, Friars Walk on the 27th August. 

Their joint event – is a stimulating and vibrant look at death and dying, how it is an integral part of our community and how we all can manage the process with dignity for the families and friends involved and respect to our environment at the same time. 

ARKA Original Funeralsand Light on Life want to open up the mysterious world of funerals and give people the opportunity to get information, advice and, from this day in particular, take a look at how we can celebrate someone’s life through the empowerment of the friends and family who may be left behind. 

On the day we will be running workshops on: 

Enhancing your experience of living and dying – Hermoine Elliott – Living Well Dying Well

2.30pm (1.5 hours approximately)

How can we maintain our wellbeing and quality of life, up until the end of life? What’s important to us? So few of us take the time to be clear, make choices or be pro-active about our wishes. We will create a safe and supportive environment, working alongside you to show how to create the conditions that would best support you and your loved ones through the journey of life and death. 

Celebrating the person who has died – Peter Murphy – Light on Life

4pm (1 hour approximately)

The conversation will cover Preparation for a Ceremony; Decorating a beautiful ceremony space ; Words, choosing poetry and prose and ways of writing the Eulogy;  Music, for reflection, the songs we sing. Ritual.

Peter will encourage you to follow your heart to create a ceremony full of meaning for you and your loved one. With the right help and support it can be a wonderful thing to do. 

‘A ritual is a journey of the heart, which should lead us into the inner realm of the psyche and ultimately, into that of the soul, the ground of our being. Rituals, if performed with respect passion and devotion, will enhance our desire and strengthen our capacity to live. New rituals will evolve but the ancient rituals and liturgies are also capable of rediscovery as we learn to make them our own…… James- Roose Evans. 

Planning a funeral – taking control – Julie Gill – ARKA Original Funerals

1.30pm (1 hour approximately)

Your Perfect Funeral 

What would you want?

To be buried under an oak tree?

Have your ashes scattered in your garden?

A string quartet?

Six white horses pulling your coffin in a glass coach? 

Take some time to imagine your perfect funeral. There are so many ways to create the funeral that suits you, and more options than you probably ever knew. You can have fun thinking about transport, coffins, your favouite music and your final resting place, and hear about some of the amazing choices other people have made too. 

Julie from Arka Original Funerals will be encouraging you to let your imagination flow and to follow your heart in this honest, adventurous and playful session. 

What is a ‘green funeral’? – Cara Mair – Director of ARKA Original Funerals

12.30pm (1 hour approximately)

Cara will be leading a discussion about her work in the alternative / green funeral world. She will be discussing how ARKA developed, the work that it does and most importantly answering any questions about the funeral ‘industry’ that you may have. 

Please email info@arkafunerals.co.uk to book and guarantee your place on any the above workshops. For further details please visit the ARKA Original Funerals website, www.arkafunerals.co.uk 

Alternatively turn up as early as you can on the day to book your place and meet experts from the green funeral world who will be on hand to give information and advice. 

We will have demonstrations from a leading willow coffin manufacturer and we will also have lovely food and refreshments to buy. 

Free Entry and Doors are open from 12 noon until 6pm

We need to talk about funerals

24 August 2011
Charles
8 Comments
Categories: alternative funerals, ceremony, death and funerals, funeral customs, funeral directors, Reasons to go to a funeral, Secular approaches to death, traditional funerals

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?

What hospitals advise the bereaved

24 June 2011
Charles
8 Comments
Categories: bereavement, funeral directors

If dying really is “an awfully big adventure” an NHS hospital seems an unpropitious point of departure. Most of us don’t want to die in one; most of us (58 per cent) will. Most of us think home is the best place. What’s not so well known is that many of those who have cared for a dying person at home are not so sure. Dying sometimes needs expert and attentive supervision.

It is normally evident when a dying person reaches the home straight. Perhaps the great adventure can be said to begin here. Is it an occasion hospital staff rise to? Do they switch to event mode and mark the passage in any particular ritual (okay, procedural) way? You’ll have your own take on that. And let us concede that practicalities may not always permit a fitting playing out of this last momentous phase. Having said which, the abandonment in so many hospitals of last offices, the washing, laying out and shrouding of the dead person, betokens, does it, a regrettable perfunctoriness, a devaluation of the event?

If you’re interested to know what people think of how their dying person was looked after in hospital you’ll want to consider a satisfaction survey conducted by Barts this year. The meat starts at page 16.

What of the info booklet they give you when it’s all over and it’s time to leave? I’ve been having a look at a few. There’s a generic flavour to them, of course, but each hospital trust writes its own. Some sell adverts to undertakers to help foot the printing bill or even make a few bob. Whipp’s Cross does this. So does Croydon.

They like to begin by courteously telling you how sorry they are: “On behalf of the University Hospitals of Leicester NHS Trust (UHL) we extend our sincere sympathy to you and your family at this sad time.” This is known as the impersonal touch.

Inasmuch as the last thing most people plan, when they’re sitting with someone who’s dying, is what they’re going to do with them when they’re dead, they need these booklets. Their world is made new. It is important that the information in them is right (enough and no more) and the tone appropriate.

There are those matters over which the bereaved, at what can feel like a very disempowering time, can exercise no choice. The obligatory bureaucratic stuff – registration, in particular. And post-mortem procedures.The instructions need to be clear and accurate. Layout and vocabulary are key. The booklets I have seen do this pretty well, though not enough tell people that they can attend a post-mortem or appoint a representative.

Then there are those matters over which a bereaved person can exercise choice. The care of the body for example. The first right they should be made aware of is that their dead person belongs to them. So it is disappointing to see so many hospitals issuing this instruction: “Following the death of a relative or friend in hospital … You will need to contact a funeral director.” [Leicester] Oh no you won’t. You can lift Nan from her deathbed and take her home now, if you want. The booklet goes on: “If you have any difficulties, the National Association of Funeral Directors will be able to advise you.” As indeed it might if the NAFD represented all funeral directors.

No booklet I have seen tells you that you don’t have to have a farewell ceremony – a funeral. All suppose that funeral directors are the best people to advise about them. They’re not, of course, because the provision of a funeral is more often than not a separate, specialist service. None of these booklets serve secularists by listing secular celebrants.

But they customarily offer this comforting information: “The Hospital Chaplains are available to talk with you if required, and the Hospital Chapel is open at any hour.” [Plymouth]

The best booklet by far is by Marie Curie Cancer Care. It is clearly written, informative and above all empowering – a really fine piece of work. And then I got to the end and discovered that a significant input had been made by John Bradfield, pioneer natural burier and tenacious campaigner for consumer rights. No surprises, then. The only bone I’d pick is that it assumes that everyone wants to have a funeral. They don’t. I suspect that if more people knew they didn’t have to have one they’d say no.

Bereaved people are only well advised when they are told what their statutory obligations are and what their statutory rights are. It seems to me that the writers of these advice booklets are very much better informed about the former than the latter.

Any views?

Picking up the patriarch’s ashes

15 April 2011
Charles
1 Comment
Categories: ashes, funeral directors, funerals in other cultures

James Showers, sole proprietor of the Family Tree Funeral Company, undertaker to the discerning decendents of Gloucestershire, has been badgering me to rediscover something he lost on his computer. He thought it might be on mine, since I once sent it to him. It’s not. But by dint of indefatigable googling I have unearthed it. It’s far too good to keep between me and James. Here are some extracts which will send you galloping in a jostling, whooping horde to the blog whence it came. By jingo it’s wonderfully well written.

…perhaps you won’t mind if I recount the Funeral Parlor Affair … For lo, and it did come to pass that the sibling and I were obliged to saunter along to the Sparkman/Hillcrest Funeral Home, Mausoleum, and Memorial Park to pick up the patriarch’s ashes. For some reason — maybe because we’re not a couple of swooning Victorians — we’d expected to stroll in, palm the urn, and buzz along home.

…

But no. The consummate weirdness with which modern American death-angst imbues the mortuary biz turned what should have been a 5-minute transaction into a Gothic theatrical production that dragged on for half an hour.

…

I dare anybody to keep a straight face who darkens the stoop of the Sparkman/Hillcrest Funeral Home, Mausoleum, and Memorial Park. You wouldn’t believe this joint. It was like the set designers from Twin Peaks and Napoleon Dynamite had fused with Elvis Presley’s interior decorator and been reborn as Liberace’s angst-ridden evil twin, who then suffered a psychotic break, and bought up the world’s supply of harvest gold flocked wallpaper, brass upholstery tacks, and fake oak paneling, and ate it all with fava beans and a nice Chianti, and then puked it up all over the living room from Sartre’s No Exit.

…

But nothing in my education or upbringing could have prepared me for our encounter with the Funeral Director. I almost spontaneously combusted when this specimen materialized out of the Stygian mist. The dude was the ne plus ultra, the transcendental essence, the Platonic ideal of funeral directors. He was still. He was shadowy. He was bloodless. He was creepy. He wore an ill-fitting suit made of larceny and doom.

Here it is.

 

Storm in a teacup

14 April 2011
Charles
16 Comments
Categories: Attitudes to dead bodies, Attitudes to death, funeral directors

You may have seen the story in the papers. Briefly, a Salisbury undertaker (1 hearse, 1 other vehicle, a Rover estate) arrives at his funeral venue in Tamworth, 150 miles away, and looks about for somewhere for his staff and himself to take a break. He tries the church. Locked. He tries the cemetery. No luck. By this time they are all probably crossing their legs and whimpering. They are in a strange town. So they drive to a supermarket. The staff go in and pee and buy tea. The undertaker sits in the second vehicle, two cars away from the hearse, and makes a call on his phone. He feels it would be disrespectful to make a call from within the hearse.

As he does so, inside the supermarket cafe, two women storm over to the table where the staff are sitting. They have seen the hearse in the car park. They are outraged by the apparent abandonment of its occupant. Their outrage is exacerbated by the fact that the staff are drinking tea and eating cake. They feel this makes the abandonment even more disrespectful.

I don’t know about you, but I feel for the undertaker. This sorry tale has gone round the world.

There’s almost enough in this one story alone to enable a clever academic to write a doctoral thesis about British attitudes to death. The dead, the bereaved and those who care for the dead are firmly expected to inhabit peripheries. We don’t want them in the community, do we?

But to go to the heart of this: what’s respectful and what isn’t? Dammit, it’s an elaborate etiquette that takes in phone calls and cake. What about the jaw suture?

Read two versions of the story here and here.

I’d love to know what you think.

Meet Angeline Gragasin and Caitlin Doughty

5 April 2011
Charles
3 Comments
Categories: Attitudes to dead bodies, Attitudes to death, crematoria, Death; Good death, direct cremation, Embalming, funeral directors

I know a number of you drop in around this time (10.30 am) hoping there may be a new post because you need a little light displacement activity. Well, I’ve got you something that’s anything but little and light. Two short films here by Angeline Gragasin starring/narrated by Caitlin Doughty “documenting the life of a mortuary professional as she sets out to revolutionize the death industry one corpse at a time.”

The Ecstasy of Decay is a series of original videos produced by The Universal Order of the Good Death. The title comes from the concept that there is beauty in the human corpse doing what it is meant to: decompose, rot, decay, etc. Caitlin and Angeline will continue to create these videos throughout 2011 with the help of members of the funeral industry and other dedicated members of the Order.

Wonderful work here. I hope you will enjoy and admire them as much as I did. Find more of Angeline Gragasin’s work here.

ECSTASY OF DECAY №1: Your Mortician from Angeline Gragasin on Vimeo.

ECSTASY OF DECAY №2: The American Corpse from Angeline Gragasin on Vimeo.

On whose authority (2)

4 April 2011
Charles
2 Comments
Categories: funeral directors

Back on 1 Feb 2010 I wrote a post which began: It’s an interesting fact that a funeral director can go to a hospital mortuary and collect a dead person to bring back to their funeral home on the verbal instruction of that dead person’s executor. It attracted a lively discussion. You can read it all here.

I have just had an email which sets things out according to the understanding of someone who works in a mortuary. I am very grateful to this person for taking so much time to do this for us. It is so cogent I decided at once to post it. The writer of what follows did not see the comments on the original post because when this blog was transmigrated from Blogger the comments did not come with it. I have just copied and pasted the comments from Blogger.  Here goes:

I came across your page while doing a work-related search.  In the first article on page https://www.goodfuneralguide.co.uk/category/funeral-directors/page/4/ there are a number of incorrect facts.  I’m aware this page is a year old, but as it is still appearing in search results, I thought it might be helpful if I highlighted them for you.

First, it is not true now, nor was it when you posted that blog entry that a funeral director can turn up at any mortuary to collect a deceased body without written authorisation.  There have, in the past, been a few exceptions to this, and on the request of some families there may still be exceptions, but the vast majority of NHS hospitals and public mortuaries will require sight of a copy of the registrar’s “green” certificate (which has to be provided to the FD by the person who has registered the death), or a copy of the CR6 (issued by the coroner to the FD as instructed by the NOK), and in addition most require a release form or (as they’ve now been renamed) a Transfer of Care form, signed by the person making the funeral arrangements (normally the executor or NOK.  Any mortuary which does not ask for such forms is working outside the code of practice issued by the AAPT(uk) – the professional body for mortuary workers.

Your other contributor on that page refers to a “NHS Mortician”.  Mortician is an American term which usually refers to a funeral director, and most mortuary workers see this as a derogatory term.  People working in the NHS mortuaries are generally known as Anatomical Pathology Technologists, Mortuary Technicians, Mortuary Porters, Pathology Technicians or other derivative of these terms, depending on their trust’s policy.  Reputable mortuary workers will be known as APTs, and will be registered with the AAPT to ensure good practice and common standards of conduct.  The AAPT are normally very willing to answer questions of professional conduct when contacted.

In the case of your contributors comment, which is unfortunate to say the least, there is a problem for us all which is not highlighted.

The clothing which was removed with the deceased in a plastic bag, and was retained with the deceased for burial would – if it had been removed from the deceased – be classed as clinical waste.  Any sheet, shroud, clothing, or property which is soiled from having been in contact with the body is classed as such, and is therefore subject to certain restrictions.  Any such waste we dispose of from our premises, has to be collected by a licensed contractor and disposed of appropriately.  We are not licensed, and therefore not permitted to move clinical waste, even between our own branches!  In the case of soiled clothing, there is a grey area.  On the one hand, it is always preferable to return property to the deceased’s family.  On the other, removing it from the deceased makes it clinical waste, and we may be committing an offence simply by allowing that family to transport those possessions home.  In doing so may inadvertently cause a health hazard to them and others, which nobody would want.

Hospitals will normally discus the property they hold with the deceased when the executor/NOK comes to obtain the medical certificate, and most FDs (well the good ones anyway) will ask when the funeral arrangements are made.  Where clothing is concerned, if we get any from the mortuary, we ask the family what they want done with it, and we advise them of its condition so that they can make an informed decision. Other FDs may take the view that it is safer and better practice simply to dispose of the clothing to avoid the potential problems and possible distress caused to family.

Who needs ’em?

8 March 2011
Charles
6 Comments
Categories: funeral directors

In their new book, Final Rights (they gave me a sneak preview), Joshua Slocum, Executive Director of the Funeral Consumers Alliance, and Lisa Carlson, Executive Director of the Funeral Ethics Organisation, will publish state by state tables demonstrating how many excess funeral directors there are in the US. They base their calculation on the head of population it takes to keep an undertaker busy. Too many undertakers means too few funerals. The consequent cost of wages plus maintenance of premises and vehicles drives the cost of funerals up. Two a week’s not enough.

It’s an interesting exercise, and I was for a while tempted to suppose that the same ratio applies in this country. We have too many undertakers, that’s for sure. How many fewer ought there to be?

And then I reflected that we have three sorts of undertaker in Britain: the old school dinosaurs, businesses which have moved with the times; and the bright young things – the new start-ups. We are in the middle of an important and dynamic evolutionary phase. We don’t need to kill any off, there’s going to be a Darwinian dying off, and my money’s on the up-to-date and the bright young things surviving: those who are genuinely fresh or renewed in their outlook – the idealistic ones – and most certainly not the replica dinosaurs who are inspired by vanity merely (and there are a few of those).

Today I went to visit a new start-up, Bespoke Funerals. I always enjoy calling in at this poignant phase of business development and drinking in the heady mixture of excitement and terror. They’re ready to go – but the phone hasn’t rung yet. WILL IT??!! It’s a desperately slow and uncertain business, getting off the ground.

The business belongs to Maggie Brinklow, sometime guest poster on this blog. She is working in conjunction with Mark Elliott, who will be using her premises and recruiting clients further north. Together, they make a great team – independent of each other and also collaborative.

Both, of course, have had experiences in the funeral industry which make them determined to do things differently, as they think they ought to be done. They are part of an emerging orthodoxy of gloom-free premises, a front window you can see through, an open-ended arrangements meeting and the creation of, well, as they themselves put it, bespoke funerals.

I think they’re going to be great. They come to it with experience as well as idealism. Mark is a wonderfully gifted embalmer; Maggie is a civil celebrant. Above all, they are incredibly nice people. The only anxiety which declared itself, as we chatted, was what people would think if they looked into an undertaker’s window and saw people laughing. They do it all the time.

Do we need yet another undertaker? No! Do we need these undertakers? YES! It’s up to them to create an awareness of that need – that’s business – and I very much hope they will. Good luck!

 

Exclusive! Dover undertaker achieves UK first.

27 January 2011
Charles
6 Comments
Categories: crematoria, funeral cost, funeral directors

I was going to blog today about the public meeting at Redditch town hall to debate the contentious matter of whether or not the crem should be used to heat a nearby swimming pool. I wanted to give you a blow-by-blow account. But in the event it was a non-event. There were perhaps thirty people there. We listened to cogent presentations. We heard how the council has received messages of support from all over the world and even been approved by 90 per cent of Daily Mail readers. A ‘Christian’ stood up to protest, but he wasn’t a representative Christian, he was an oddball. And that was that, really. The peaceable, pragmatic and eminently sensible citizenry of this lovely Worcestershire market town were unanimously in agreement. A most satisfactory anticlimax.

Instead, let me tell you about something else.

Paul Sullivan recently set up on his own in Dover. Always a brave thing to do, open for business with all the established undertakers glaring at you — or worse, chuckling. Business is notoriously slow to begin with (“Forty in the first year would be nice,” they all say) but Paul has bucked that by offering a low cost funeral, keeping his prices transparent and generally being an exceedingly nice fellow.

He has now achieved a UK first. Using his website you can price your funeral before you even go to see him. You can spend time doing it, think about the sums, change your mind and try again. You simply go down the list checking the items you want, and it adds it all up as you go — a bit like being in a taxi only more alarming.

I think it’s brilliant. And I can think of reasons why other funeral directors wouldn’t dream of having one of these on theirs (if they’ve got one)(a website, that is).

Have a play with it. Find it here.

What do you think?