funeral directors

What’s the youth of them?

5 October 2010
Charles
7 Comments
Categories: funeral directors

First it was young women in the dismal trade who grabbed the prurient gaze of the media — that intriguing juxtaposition of beauty and beastliness, fragrance and foetor; the tantalising question: What makes a nice girl want to hang out with corpses? It makes for good photos. Slim young black-clad cane-wielding lovelies can induce a certain frisson in men who have been naughty boys. Silly stuff.

Now, any young deathworker is good for a few column inches, even plain males, and the hunt is on for the youngest. “Is,” asks This Is Leicestershire, “this Leicestershire teenager UK’s youngest undertaker?” At but seventeen, and only just out of short trousers,  George Simnett (above) is their challenger for the title.  Why does George want to be an undertaker? “‘Even when I went to family funerals as a little boy, I used to see undertakers looking so smart and dignified and think to myself “I’d like to do that. That could be me.”‘ He adds: ‘”A lot of the job is about being caring and understanding with people who are in a very difficult emotional place. That’s the part I love because it’s so satisfying when you get it right.”‘ He seems to have what it takes. His heart is clearly in the right place.

Does it matter what his age is?

Talking of juxtapositions, The Daily Mail reports the funeral of Des Young, legendary JCB operator, who was carried to his funeral on the forks of a JCB. There’s a photo (copyrighted so I daren’t pinch it) showing the funeral director ‘paging’ the JCB. Delightfully anomalous to my eye. To yours, quite possibly, smart and dignified.

Happy tail

1 October 2010
Charles
No comments
Categories: funeral directors, Humour

Charming story here from Australia about funeral director John Hopkins who brings his dog Finbarr to work every day.

“He’s a great icebreaker,” John said. “Families come in here not knowing what to expect.

“They often haven’t dealt with a funeral home before and they’re apprehensive.

“He gives them a lick and will lie at their feet and start snoring – it makes them feel more relaxed.”

John enjoys telling the story of the time ‘Fin’ was asked to lead a funeral procession and ride in the hearse to a funeral by a family.

And where do you suppose the good Mr Hopkins was born? Why, Wagga Wagga!

Cheap boos

13 September 2010
Charles
No comments
Categories: Co-operative Funeralcare, coffins, Dignity, family funeral directors, funeral directors, funeral trends

Real ale made by boutique brewers has at last begun to drive down sales of lager for the first time in half a century reports yesterday’s Observer.

Intriguingly, the Society of Independent Brewers (Siba) reports that while its 420 members enjoyed a combined sales rise of 4 per cent last year, its smallest and boutique-iest brewers saw sales rise by 8.5 per cent. Small is good, smallest is best.

More good news. More young people are supping the Right Stuff. Of 25-34 year olds, the number of those who have tasted real ale rose from 28 per cent to 50 per cent in the period 2008-10. What’s more, the number of women rose from 16 per cent to 32 per cent in the same period.

Says Julian Grocock of Siba: “A lot of our members are professional brewers who have worked for the big brewers and have now set up their own business. They are brewing all sorts of beers … There’s now a huge variety out there.”

You see where I’m coming from?

If the little guys can turn the tables on the big beasts in the brewing trade it gives us hope that the same thing can happen in the funeral industry. (I understand that for the word ‘beasts’ you might like to substitute something stronger.)

Speaking of whom, the Scottish Environment Protection Agency (Sepa) has named the Co-op Funeralcare coffin factory in Scotland as one of that country’s 99 dirtiest polluters. The story comes from the Sunday Herald, which describes the Co-op as “ethically conscious.” Hmph.

There’s nowt so crap as a crem

25 August 2010
Charles
18 Comments
Categories: celebrants, ceremony, crematoria, funeral directors, funeral trends, home funerals

Over in Lufkin, Texas, a new funeral home has opened. What’s different about it? It offers one of those familiar back-to-the-past initiatives which mark progress in funeral service: it’s owner is making his clients aware that they can have the funeral at home – if they want.

“It used to be that before there were funeral homes, the funerals were held at home,” said Philip Snead, CEO and Funeral Director of Snead Linton Funeral Home. “We’re just going back to the way that people used to do business. We do in-home visitations too, and we’re always mindful of health issues.”

I like it. So much better to hold a funeral on familiar ground than up at t’crem. So much better to hold a funeral on your own terms, in your own way. Best of all, it gives families so much more to do (decorating the venue, bringing the food…), and makes it so much easier for them to  run the show, buy tadalafil australia stand up and speak, do away with professional strangers. You don’t have to have the funeral at home, of course. There are community centres, hotels, cricket pavilions…

So forbidding is a crematorium, so alien, so marginalised, so exclusive of everything but death and deathmongers and the grieving bereaved, it is little wonder that people outsource the terrifying ordeal of running the show to someone they’ve briefed.

Says Mr Snead: “Since we’ve been offering the at-home services, people have responded favorably. The older generation grew up seeing their grandparents brought back to the home instead of being taken to a funeral home.”

How many UK funeral directors explore alternative venues with their clients, I wonder?

We will know, as a society, that we are getting funerals right when every crematorium ‘chapel’ in the country stands roofless, derelict and hooted at by owls. Of one thing we may be certain: there’s nowt so crap as a crem.

Habeas corpus

23 August 2010
Charles
4 Comments
Categories: funeral directors, independent funeral directors

I was emailed last night by someone who wants to visit their dead parent at the undertaker’s. The undertaker won’t make an appointment. The client thinks the undertaker is prevaricating. The undertaker tells the client that the customary time to visit a dead person is the day before the funeral. This is not soon enough for the client. The email concludes with the client asking me what their rights are.

Leaving aside the matter of rights (it’s quite clear what they are), anyone who knows how the funeral industry works will know what’s probably going on here. Let’s hazard a guess.

The undertaker is part of a chain operating out of a satellite branch. The dead parent is not, as the client may fondly suppose, at that branch. No, the parent is in a central mortuary some distance away with, perhaps, a hundred other bodies from other satellite branches. It’s difficult for the undertaker to arrange for the body to be brought to the satellite branch because businesses of this size operate on the fewest staff they can. At this busy time of the year it is impossible to find spare manpower to bring the parent out to the satellite.

Perhaps

The bigger the business, the more incapable it becomes of flexibility and, therefore, of personal service. There ought to be a trade-off here. The big businesses, with their car pools and central mortuaries and staffing rotas to keep everyone frantically busy, enjoy economies of scale which ought to enable them to undercut their competitors. But that’s not the way it works. Economies of scale are not passed on to the consumer. In the case of, say, Dignity that’s not surprising. They’re in it for the money. Their shareholders expect. In the case of Co-operative funeral homes, however, there’s a case to answer.

Let us not deplore this state of affairs too loudly. It is because the big beasts, the Dignitys and Co-ops, charge so much that the little independent businesses are able to thrive despite their higher overheads. Not only are they able to thrive, they are even able to undercut the big beasts. The law of the jungle is not working here. Long may it not.

I decided to find out how widespread is this practice of deterring people from visiting their dead. I made some phone calls and asked undertakers how much notice they required. Here are my results.

Co-op Funeralcare, Aylesbury: Later the same day.

Arnold Funeral Service, High Wycombe (independent): None. Walk in off the street. If the chapels of rest are full you may have to wait for up to an hour or so.

Midlands Co-op, Stirchley, Birmingham: None, but prefer families to visit three days before the funeral.

Henry Ison and Sons, Coventry (independent): None – unless busy.

R Morgan, Dudley (a satellite branch of Dignity): Will try to make an appointment for you to visit buy cialis online in canada when you make your funeral arrangements. All bodies stored in a mortuary in Birmingham where they are embalmed (optional), washed, dressed and coffined. You can visit before the body goes to the mortuary: they will put a dead person on a trolley and make him or her as presentable as possible.

T Hadley, Halesowen (independent): None – unless busy.

T Broome and Sons, Baguley, Manchester (United Co-op): Prefer appointments but around an hour’s notice usually enough.

Haven Funeral Services, London (independent): None

Co-op, Hammersmith: None, but prefer you to make an appointment when you make arrangements and hope that’ll be the day before.

AW Lymn, Nottingham (many satellite branches): None. All bodies kept at city centre mortuary, or at Long Eaton. Either pop down there, or the body can be sent up to the satellite. They have a bed with quilt if you prefer that to visiting your dead person in a coffin. If they’re really busy and no one’s available to drive a body out to a satellite, “management will step in and do it.” Oh yeah? “YES!”

I stopped ringing. The picture is clear enough. Small, independent funeral homes are very responsive. Members of chains aren’t, with the exception of Lymn’s, quite so willing: they’d rather tie you down to an appointment made when you make funeral arrangements. That’s a heck of a lot of big decisions to make in a very short time!

My emailer’s undertaker would appear, thankfully, to be a rare exception.

While ringing round I made a discovery I ought to have made ages ago about transparency of ownership. This is a debate which rages and will go on raging. When a big beast buys out an independent it goes on trading under the old name in which all the good repute is tied up. There’s nothing unusual about this. No one demands that Harrods change its name to Al Fayeds. But in the case of a funeral home it can be misleading to those who are looking for an independent funeral director.

Here’s a scenario. Someone has died and I am looking for an independent, family undertaker close to me in Moseley. What do I do? I google funeral director birmingham moseley. What do I get?

Funeralsearch.co.uk tell me about N Wheatley and Sons. Good-oh! So does zettai.net. And fastfiners.co.uk. And 192.com. And uk.local.yahoo.com. And yell.com. And businessclassified.com. And cylex-uk.co.uk. And sheriffratings.com.

That’s only for starters. There’s plenty of help on the internet. But what none of these sites tells me is that N Wheatley and Sons is, actually, in the ownership of the Midlands Co-operative Society.

I needed to know that.

My apologies for the sudden reappearance of this. I’ve been doing a spot of categorising, resulting in the usual inexplicable nonsense, of which this is but one example.

From rags to riches

23 August 2010
Charles
3 Comments
Categories: funeral cost, funeral directors

Whether or not funerals are too expensive depends on how much money you’ve got and how you like to spend it. Some like to say it with a Batesville casket, mountains of flowers, a fleet of vintage Bentleys, prancing horses, a military band, the Red Arrows—the sky’s the limit. If you’ve got lots of dough to blow and, therewith, administer a little fiscal stimulus to some local service providers, that would seem to be wholly unobjectionable.

Others prefer something simpler. Of those, a significant proportion urgently need something simpler. If you are jobless and skint, no disgrace in times like these, the Social Fund will pay up to £700 towards the cost of a funeral. But you can’t get a mainstream funeral at anything like that price. The average cost of a simple funeral is £1050 and that doesn’t include disbursements, which will eat up £500+. You’d be paying off the balance for what would feel like eternity. The Social Fund will only cough up after the funeral. No wonder so many undertakers are refusing to take on clients who need to apply to it. They think they may never get paid.
What advice for such as you?

First, understand that you can accomplish the really important purposes of a funeral for very little. The most important part of the process, the farewell ceremony, needn’t cost you a penny. Do it yourself.

Second, get rid of the trappings: the hearse, the cars, the banks of flowers. Does this mean doing away with dignity? Of course not. Dignity is how you behave, not stuff you rent.

What’s going to cost? The burial or cremation will cost a few bob. Cremation is a lot cheaper. For that, you’ll have to stump up roughly £350-450 to the crematorium plus £147 for two doctors to pronounce your dead person dead. You’ll probably want to buy a coffin, though you could just wrap your dead person in a shroud of some sort. A coffin on ebay will set you back just £115 + £20 delivery. You’ll need a suitable vehicle to take your dead person to the place of disposal. Say goodbye to £700. Show a finger to the Social Fund.

There’s paperwork to do. No problem there. And there’s the small problem of what to do with the body while you wait for the funeral.

Most hospitals will keep a body in their mortuary for nothing if a person dies in the hospital. Some will even do the same for someone who has died at home. The alternative is to bring the body home, but the problem here is keeping it cool enough to delay decomposition. You can do your best, and screw the coffin lid down so as to keep any bad smells inside. But you may think it safer, if the hospital will not cooperate, to ask a funeral director to do all this. You will almost certainly find an independent funeral director to let you use their fridge (the bigger firms just aren’t geared to it). This may cost you up to £25 a day. On the day of the funeral, drive down to the hospital or the funeral director with your ebay coffin, pop your dead person inside, and off you go.

It’s an unconventional way of proceeding, for sure. Will your crematorium, hospital or, if you use one, funeral director treat you as if you were a bungling amateur and a bloody nuisance? Absolutely not. It’s a heartwarming fact, the sort of discovery that restores your faith in human nature, that most crematoriums can’t do enough for you. The same goes for hospital mortuaries where a small (customary) consideration, £10-20, will earn you even more goodwill. Even funeral directors (the smaller the better) will put themselves out for you. You really will be supported every inch of the way.

Not spending more than you have is vital. If you are brave and hardworking you can save £1,000 you never had. When it’s all over you may, because you courageously rolled your sleeves up, experience a species of satisfaction that the Red Arrows could never have given you. The same goes if you could have afforded it, but preferred to engage rather than outsource.

My apologies for the sudden reappearance of this old post. I’ve been doing a spot of categorising, resulting in the usual inexplicable nonsense, of which this is but one example.

Teen Undertaker

23 August 2010
Charles
3 Comments
Categories: Attitudes to dead bodies, Attitudes to death, funeral directors

The media loves death and funerals — wacky music, funky coffins, all that sort of stuff. Best of all, the media loves to find people working in the funeral industry who do not conform to the common conception of deathworker as  inhabitant of a dark and terrifying otherworld. Normal people; people like us. Better still, people who are young. Best of the best, beautiful young women.

If the effect is to educate the public about the reality of funeral service, all well and good. Last week’s Channel 4 programme, Teen Undertaker, served this purpose pretty well, I believe. It follows two teen undertakers, Laura and Paul. It panders, yes, but it also reveals responsibly.

There’s one bit that made my eyebrows rise. I wonder if yours will, too.

Catch it on 4 oD here.

Embalming: a matter not of if but when

8 July 2010
Charles
4 Comments
Categories: DIY funeral, Embalming, funeral directors, home funerals

Nobody I can think of would dispute the assertion that it’s good for the bereaved to spend time with their dead, contemplating their absence – what I like to call their very present absence.

There is a debate about how dead a person should look. Some people want to spend time with an embalmed, cosmetised body; others reject this with some force, the more so when they find out what embalming entails. In the funeral industry itself there are two camps, the routine embalmers and the default refrigerators. When routine embalmers seek to make embalming a condition of viewing, they often do so from the best possible motives. Many of them rank among the industry’s best and most dedicated funeral directors. But that doesn’t necessarily make them right. At the same time, any holier-than-thou blanket rejection of embalming is going to fail those who would benefit from it. As Maggie Brinklow says, you can only make good decisions on a case-by-case basis. It may be mutilation to those who reject it, but it is not to those who do not. It is certainly not mutilation in the eyes of the best embalmers, whose gentleness confounds any such condemnation.

In an interesting article on AlterNet, Frankie Colman quotes Gary Laderman on the very high value of embalming skills as a professional attribute: “Without this procedure, funeral directors would have had a difficult time claiming that they were part of a professional guild, and therefore justified as the primary mediators between the living and the dead from the moment of death to the final disposition.” It is observable that in the UK, where the whole embalming-casketing-visitation caboodle never took off, the status and prosperity of funeral directors does not ride half as high as it does in the States.

When the funeral reform movement in the States took off in the 60s, with Jesscia Mitford as its most vocal spokesperson, Laderman observes:  “Funeral directors were arguing forcefully against charges that their mediation between the living and the dead translated into social obstruction that barred the stricken from facing death with maturity, realism and honesty.” But, Coleman asks funeral director Shaun Newburn, in what condition does the body need to be? “Newbern believes his clients don’t want any odor or leakage of body fluids during the wake and is concerned that it could happen if the deceased is kept at home.”

It is when funeral directors say things like that that you want to strangle them. It’s the sort of fright-thing some of them say in this country to clients interested in a cardboard coffin: “Oh, no, we can’t have one of those. Your Dad died of cancer, you see, there is likely to be considerable leakage…” leaving a picture in the mind’s eye of Dad falling through the sodden bottom.

Jerrigrace Lyons, the eminent US home funeralist, tackles this business of leakage and odours, and here I learned something I didn’t know about the properties of dry ice – and which you may well not know either: “For three-day wakes we generally use dry ice. It is extremely cold (minus 110 degrees Fahrenheit). We place it under the torso of the body and a small piece on top so it freezes the fluids in the lungs and stomach. We have rarely seen any fluids coming from the mouth or nose because of this. Even when the deceased has purged a little brownish fluid from the mouth (again rare) it has not upset anyone. Families often deal with far more fluids and other matter released from the body when their loved one is in the dying process.”

For Jerrigrace and her kind it’s the subtle changes that take place in a dead body over days that impart psychological and emotional value and underline the irrevocability of death. Others, though, are grateful for the unchangingness of the stabilised, embalmed body. It’s an effigy, if you like, a devotional object, and this is what they need.

Funeral directors are taught that they are the custodians of the bodies they look after. Actually, they are not: they are agents for the custodians, for the dead belong, by law, to their people. They can become very proprietorial about their role, act as gatekeepers to the body and forbiddingly dissuade people from spending time with their dead if they think they will be upset by what they see. These undertakers need to read the study Viewing the body after bereavement due to a traumatic death: qualitative study in the UK by A Chapple and S Ziegland, published on the BMJ website. Its conclusion is as follows:

Even after a traumatic death, relatives should have the opportunity to view the body, and time to decide which family member, if any, should identify remains. Officials should prepare relatives for what they might see, and explain any legal reasons why the body cannot be touched. Guidelines for professional practice must be sensitive to the needs and preferences of people bereaved by traumatic death. The way that relatives refer to the body can be a strong indication for professionals about whether the person who died retains a social identity for the bereaved.

Funeral directors as social entrepreneurs?

7 July 2010
Charles
7 Comments
Categories: funeral directors, funeral trends

Yesterday I wrote about the two problems that most bedevil funeral directors. First, in the public perception, they offer poor value for money, a charge of which they are, most of them, innocent. Second, they may feel that they occupy a marginalised position in society because people wonder what’s under their fingernails. As ever, it was the comments that yielded the best thoughts. If you missed them, read them.

Undertakers need people to stand up for them and tell them as they are. And a very good suggestion comes from a comment on this blog in the Houston Press. The writer is talking about what bereaved people need most:

[O]ne thing that would have been really helpful would have been someone to answer the phone and the door, and keep the kitchen in some semblance of order. We had DOZENS of phone calls every day for over a week. Next time we’ll know that if someone asks, “Can I do something for you?” We’ll say, “Yes, would you mind coming over for a couple hours on Wednesday to help out.” I think there might even be a business opportunity in this for funeral homes to offer, and retired people — who know how to answer the phone, and have been through a few funerals — would be ideal for this sort of duty. My father-in-law and I have actually discussed starting a service like this.

I don’t go along with the business opp line. I think that would spoil it. But I do suspect that there are lots of people who would welcome the opportunity to do good voluntary work for the bereaved. Many people who have been bereaved want to use their understanding and experience for the benefit of others. Helping others helps them.

Some bereaved people don’t drive and need to get to the registrar, the bank. Some of them have never had anything to do with the household accounts; others have never cooked for themselves; some are skint; some have lawns that need mowing; some have never been alone before… Almost all are too blown away to think and act at anything like full effectiveness.

So there is a role for drivers, advisers, social fund form-fillers, cooks, hooverers, phone minders and listeners. And there are lots of people out there who would do this for the sake of it – who would, indeed, not do it if they were paid for it. They would also play an important part in joining up the funeral home to mainstream society. And they would become ambassadors for that funeral home, for they would testify to the excellence and humanity of the funeral director and his/her staff.

Few funeral directors are likely to find this proposal attractive. They are more defensively secretive than they think they are. And they are uncomfortable with any activity which might seem to subvert or subtract from their pre-eminence in the arrangement process.

But if they think about it, were they to have a little band of handpicked volunteers they would, by offering an enriched service, greatly enhance their prestige.

It takes confidence to relax the control freakery and embrace collaboration. But good funerals are created by communities, not martinets.

Something for the weekend

2 July 2010
Charles
No comments
Categories: funeral directors, funerals in other cultures

An insight here into the Nigerian way of death.

For mankind, death is an inevitable end. Whenever it comes, no matter the age of the dead, pains, sorrow and unquantifiable anguish are its accomplices. Ironically, this is simply not so for those in the business of coffin making and funeral management. While their patrons mourn and lament over the loss of their dear ones, the coffin makers and funeral managers smile very broadly to their various banks. This then makes real the adages that ‘it is different strokes for different folks’ and ‘one man’s meat is another man’s poison.’ Odd and startling as it may sound, it is a confirmed fact that the undertaking business in Nigeria, is a booming one that permits only the bold and the liberal hearted. YEMISI ADENIRAN takes you to the world of the undertakers, as they reveal the peculiarities of their ‘calling,’ why many are favouring it all of a sudden and the challenges of the business.

The business of funeral management, as far as Dehinde Harrison, the Managing Director of Ebony Funeral Home, is concerned, is one business just like any other business … Describing the basics for the success of those in the business, he said it is all about destiny. “Ori ti yoo su’po ko ni je kalaare o gbadun. This means that when a man is destined to inherit another man’s wife, his luck will never grant the former his utmost wish of recovering from his illness. Relating this to his profession, he explained that since he has been designed to care for the dead, it is simple and normal for somebody to die.

Harrison had a query to answer: But do undertakers then pray for people to die? His prompt response, “Yes and no. We pray for the old and the aged only to die and not the young ones. When an aged person dies, it is fun and we would be free to make good charges and display all that we have at our disposal to entertain everyone. But if it is the other way round, everyone will be sober as they will be mourning. And in that wise or condition, we would not be chanced to even charge as much as we would have loved to.”

Read the entire article in Nigerian Compass here.