funeral trends – Page 9 – The Good Funeral Guide

Maggie Brinklow on what makes a good funeral

9 June 2010

Charles

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Categories: alternative funerals, ceremony, DIY funeral, Formality vs informality, funeral cost, funeral customs, funeral trends, home funerals

Everyone agrees that choice in funeral arrangements is a good thing. Even the UK’s most Jurassic undertakers are nodding their heads fervently on this one. They’ve come round at last (sort of). It’s the mantra in Funeralland: Personalisation x 3 (I can’t be bothered to type it).

There’s money in it, of course. Because personalisation (x3) can merely = accessorisation (x3). Instead of a bog standard box, why not this lovely one here, look, emblazoned with bluebells and kingfishers and a steam locomotive at 3x the price? There are lots of ways to personalise. We know what they are. They overlook making your own box, a very useful exercise in grief therapy. They overlook picking flowers from your own garden, not even tying them at the stems, and taking them home after, if it was a cremation.

There’s pressure in personalisation. The media love to pick up on wacky funerals, outrageous dress codes, iconoclastic songs. Trad is so last century, so gloomy, so boring.

This exerts an expectation. “So what are we going to do? He loved his veg, especially his leeks, so, er, let’s tell everyone to dress up as a leek??” There’s a tyranny taking hold.

There’s personalisation (x3) and there’s costly and unnecessary distraction (x3).

So it’s really good, this morning, to publish this post (the first of many, I hope) by Maggie Brinklow, a celebrant, member of the Association of Independent Celebrants (AOIC), who is keen to broaden her skills to include body preparation. She hopes shortly to do a course with the distinguished Mark Elliott, one of the best in his field, and I hope she’ll tell us all about that. Maggie says “I am passionate about putting the funeral back in the hands of the family.” She reminds us that trad has legs.

What makes a good funeral?

I’ve just got back home from a funeral. Nothing unusual in that – I’ve been to so many family funerals that I’ve lost count. I’ve also acted as a celebrant at quite a few as well, so what made this one any different? Well, this is the first funeral where I acted as the Funeral Arranger, working on behalf of a small independent company. It wasn’t anything special, a church service followed by interment in the local cemetery – a hearse and limo, the usual flowers and mourning dress and then back to the house for the ‘do’.

So, why am I writing about it? Well, it got me thinking. What makes a good funeral? Is it the gold coffin with stretch hummers and 300 mourners or, is it the small intimate gathering, the cardboard coffin pulled on a hand bier while the children sing, before being laid to rest at a woodland site? For me, it’s both and neither of these options – personally I’d like people to take up the alternative ideas, but it’s not my decision. I offered the family the different venue, transport, coffin etc etc but, in the end, the traditional route was the right one for them.

Like I said, today’s funeral was nothing unusual, but it was what the family wanted, and really, isn’t that what it’s all about?

German way of death

22 January 2010

Charles

1 Comment

Categories: funeral trends

Interesting piece in the Earth Times on how Germans are doing funerals differently:

Germany is experiencing a new type of culture of bereavement. People are moving away from the classic funeral with a priest and familiar rituals to one that confronts grief and death in a more personal way.

“Germany’s funeral culture is experiencing fundamental change at the moment,” says Professor Norbert Fischer, a historian at Hamburg University. Fischer says a growing number of people want to decide what happens to their bodies after their death. The bereaved also want a less tense and cramped approach to the funeral ceremony.

This change is expressing itself in a number of very different ways. “On the one hand there is rapid growth in the number of anonymous burials. There is also growth in the type of place where funerals and memorial ceremonies are taking place,” says Fischer. In Germany there are over 80 forested areas, for example, where ecologically friendly urns can be buried beside trees.

There is also an increasing number of common graves. Fans of Hamburg soccer club can now find their final resting place at a plot close to the club’s grounds in Altona district. Members of the club “Garden of Women” can be buried alongside former famous Hamburg residents in Ohlsdorf graveyard.

Read the whole article here. The pic at the top is by Mike Egan.

Forward backwards!

4 November 2008

Charles

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Categories: funeral pyres, funeral trends, open-air cremation, viking funeral

My good friend the embalmer is not noted for halfway utterance, nor for half-tones in her vocabulary. She calls a spade a spade and hits you with it if she thinks you’re wrong, thwang thwang. She’s never less than invigorating.

One of the themes she warms to hotliest is that of the present reinventing the past. “What do they think is so new about that?!” she’ll expostulate in response to some new funerary trend. “It’s all been done before!!”

Quite right. So it has. Personalisation, for example. Everyone’s talking about that — unique funerals for unique people. Turns out the Vikings were doing it more than a thousand years ago.

They were more like us than you might think, the Vikings — and I’m not inviting comparison here with Friday night revellers in our city centres.

For starters, they had no defined religion. Instead, according to Professor Neil Price, Chair of Archaeology at the University of Aberdeen, they “made up a set of spiritual beliefs, which were then acted out at the graveside … They were aggressively pagan and strongly anti-Christian.”

Just like so many of us.

Possibly more emotionally sophisticated. Professor Price observes “how slim they perceived the boundaries to be between life and death”. We haven’t got there, yet.

He talks about burial rituals which became a form of theatre lasting up to ten days, during which order cialis online australia mourners told stories about men and gods — stories “intended to provide the deceased with a poetic passage into the next life,” stories which predate the sagas and may even be the progenitors of Norse mythology.

We haven’t got there, yet, either, but the trend towards more participative funerals is, er, a move in the right direction.

As for personalisation, they benchmark it. “No two graves were the same,” says Professor Price, who has studied thousands. “Some bore evidence of a military career, with whole ships containing the corpse left open. Other graves were found to have had animal remains – one had no fewer than 20 decapitated horses – and occasionally there were human remains as well. Some Vikings were buried with their wives and families; others were laid to rest in more simple single graves.”

Way to go.

It turns out that the Vikings’ reputation for raping and pillaging is unmerited. They were actually far more interested in poetry and spirituality. A medieval English chronicler, John of Wallingford, observed that they combed their hair every day, washed every Saturday and changed their clothes regularly. He meant it disparagingly.

We’ve a long way to go to catch up with our forefathers. Indeed, you could say that Viking funerals illustrate how the forward march of our civilisation has in fact been a retreat into fear and impotence.