funeral

Funerals, who needs em?

19 January 2014
Charles
24 Comments
Categories: celebrants, funeral, funeral cost, funeral customs, funeral directors, funeral trends, Secular approaches to death, traditional funerals

When England first played Scotland, on 30 November 1872, both teams employed formations that would raise eyebrows today. Scotland went for a cautious 2-2-6 while England employed a more swashbuckling 1-1-8. The game was all kick-and-rush in those days.

Kick-and-rush. It’s how businesses, anxious to futureproof themselves, respond to prophecy. Some bright spark peers into a crystal ball, dreams a dream and holds up a trembling finger. No matter that their vision is little more than a projection of their wishes and values, everyone rushes towards it.

Remember the Baby Boomer Hypothesis which held that, just as baby boomers reinvented youth culture, so they would reinvent death culture? Pretty much everybody bought that, including the entire advisory council of the GFG. The theory was that these free radicals would reject bleakness and embrace creative, themed, personalised, sometimes iconoclastic celebrations of life. The good news for the industry was that there would still be good money to be made from funerals so long as undertakers made the switch from cookie-cutter to bespoke; from being po-faced solemn-event planners to bright-eyed party-planners adding value through accessorisation and offering concierge-level service and red-carpet delivery. Pretty much the package Alex Polizzi tried to sell to David Holmes in The Fixer.

It’s not happening, is it? And as we take that in, we reflect that baby boomers have, yes, always been insouciant about what went before and unsentimental in their rejection of it. They’re re-inventors, not renovators. And they’re not all going the same way.

The evidence seems to be that baby boomers are increasingly asking themselves what good a funeral would do, really. More and more of them see little or no emotional or spiritual value in the experience. They’re not all rejecting them out of hand all at once. Some are dressing trad funerals up in a gently creative way with wacky hearses, jolly coffins and startling music choices. But on the whole they’re whittling them down. The reasons are complex and we’ve rehearsed some of them here before.

Dissatisfaction with the value offered by a funeral is probably most widely evidenced in the near-universal belief that funerals are too expensive — ie, they’re not worth what they cost. The strength of this rejection of funerals is evidenced in people’s unrealistic incredulity that a basic funeral should cost much more than having an old washing machine taken away.

Read the comments under any broadsheet article about funerals. The evidence of rejection is everywhere. If the effect of a funeral is to leave you feeling, next day, beached and empty, that’s not surprising. A funeral is supposed to fill a hole, not leave a void. Here are some recent comments in a discussion forum on Mumsnet, of all places:

My MIL has said … she wants the absolute bare minimum in terms of coffin and cremation. No service, no ‘do’ afterwards. Then she wants close family to either go somewhere nice for the weekend together. 

I had it put in my will that i don’t want any sort of funeral when i die. I think the money funeral directors charge for the most simple of services is utterly abhorrent

[My mother-in-law] died recently, she didn’t care what we did by way of funeral (I think her only words on the subject were that we could drop her off the pier for all she cared…)

My uncle didn’t want a service – he just went straight to the crematorium.

I wouldn’t want to burden love ones with the cost, I have life insurance but would want the cheapest option

It is criminal how the respectful disposal of our loved ones has turned into a million pound industry!

I have left strict instructions that I am to have no funeral service and I have made sure everyone knows about it. It is written in my will and my family would never go against my wishes. They know how strongly I feel about it.

Immediate cremation, ashes in a simple box and then take me down our local and stick me on the bar whilst everyone has a quick drink. Next day, throw my ashes in the sea at the place I grew up in as a child. That will do. No order of service with dodgy photos and poems, no wittering on about my life and no-one failing miserably to pick out my favourite songs. Boo hiss boo.

I am a crematorium manager, and can confirm that plenty of people choose to have no funeral service.

I just don’t get the whole thing. I’ve only ever been to one funeral that was really a lovely rememberence and not out of duty of what they thought they had to do. I would much rather my family used money to go on holiday to our favourite place and remembered me there.

My FIL keeps saying he doesn’t want a funeral and wants to be cremated asap with no ceremony or fuss.

We chose not to have a funeral for my dad when he died. Cardboard coffin, cremation with no service. I think he would have been pleased but I tend not to tell anyone as I have some judgey reactions as if we were being cheap (was not relevant) or he was not loved (he was very much).

The Mumsnet discussion includes a few objections on the lines of: ‘To be fair, it’s not really about you. It’s about the loved ones you left behind, it’s an essential grieving process.’ But the overwhelming majority can see no good in a funeral.

This would seem to overturn the supposition that excellent secular funeral celebrants and empathetic undertakers would save the public ceremonial funeral by making it meaningful once more. But there’s a growing realisation that you don’t need to put a corpse in a box and tote it to the crem in blackmobiles, you can create a perfectly satisfying, private, informal farewell event with ashes. Direct cremation, already growing rapidly, looks set to skyrocket.

I know that there are lots of people who believe that reports of the demise of the funeral are exaggerated. They tell me to stop being so pessimistic, things are getting better. But I had lunch with Fran Hall, chair of the Natural Death Centre on Friday, and was struck to discover she thinks as I do. She said, “One day soon the industry is going to wake up and find itself dead”.

It’s possible that there’s no saving the funeral — it’s had its time. After all, it’s not just Britain that’s saying nah. But funeral people, overly focussed on commercial concerns, are putting up absolutely no concerted philosophical defence.

If the public, ceremonial funeral is worth saving, now is the time for the best in the business, from all walks of belief, to come together and be an influential voice in public discourse about funerals, much of which remains incoherent. If the emotional and/or spiritual health of the nation is at stake, who better to do it? Ans: among others, the people whose livelihoods depend on it. Come on, don’t go down without a fight. Do we really need funerals? If so, why?

Don’t all rush, I could be wrong, this may not be a Dunkirk moment. But crisis or no there still exists a pressing need to make a considered, rational and persuasive case for funerals — if, that is, you truly believe they do any real, deep and lasting good. Do you?

There are an awful lot of people out there who don’t. If you can’t demonstrate the purpose and value of your product, who’d want to buy it?

Seen and heard: should young children attend funerals?

12 January 2014
Charles
5 Comments
Categories: Children, funeral

Posted by Richard Rawlinson

Some say death is too sanitised these days, with few people dying at home where all the family can say goodbye, and with professionals now taking over the duties of preparing the body for the funeral.

Has this social development made us over-protective of children, just as they’re now sometimes even shielded from losing in a sports match or failing an exam? Or is it prudent to exclude under-10s from funerals lest they become traumatised, or distract attending adults by being loud and needy?

For the nays’ side the debate, young mother and widow Rachel West says, ‘It’s hard to imagine what my daughters [aged four and six] would have gained from attending their dad’s funeral, but very easy to imagine the potential damage. I was in absolute pieces that day, and needed to be. That alone would have caused them immeasurable distress. I have remained strong in their presence at all other times, which I believe benefits them in these early years.’

On the ayes’ side, experts say attendance can be therapeutic for little ones as long as they’re well prepared. They advise giving child-friendly explanations about death beforehand: it’s one thing to say grandpa has gone to rest in a peaceful place and won’t be coming back, and another to find safe words to explain he’s in that box and is about to be buried or burnt.  

Ann Rowland of Child Bereavement UK also says children need to be forewarned about the possibility of adults crying and be given permission to cry, too. She also recommends an adult is on standby to take them out if they get bored or can’t handle being there.

Santa’s final ride

4 December 2013
Charles
No comments
Categories: funeral, Hearses

We are pleased to host a series of posts, in monthly instalments, recounting the adventures of Vintage Lorry Funerals. Here’s the second.

Vintage Lorry Funerals took Santa Claus on his final journey in Bristol who was buried in his red uniform and black boots. It wasn’t Santa Claus, but a man who had played him in the local shopping malls during November & December. With his long white beard and rotund figure he was often recognised even without his red suite. He was even chosen to be Santa Claus for a party at a Spanish Hotel when young children thought he was Santa Claus on holiday whilst he was taking a well earned break in January.

As the Deceased lived by the waterfront in Bristol and had an interest in the Power Boat Races, his family bought an ‘Anchor’ as the main Floral Tribute which was displayed prominently with a chain attached to it. Every effort is taken to create an appropriate background for the main Tribute and a Family mourner remarked an Anchor isn’t an Anchor without a chain.

Two days before the funeral the Family asked if the Deceased’s Wheel Cover could be positioned against the head of the coffin. Whilst this would have been a simple task in a hearse, it was a little more complicated with the 1950 Leyland Beaver where the risk of the Wheel Cover flying off had to be eliminated.

David Hall, who owns Vintage Lorry Funerals, made a Support Structure specifically for the Wheel Cover which told everyone who was in the blue wicker coffin. The cortege stopped outside Brunels Buttery on the quayside where the Deceased had visited each day for his breakfast and his tea, which always included his favourite rock buns. It was at this location that the Deceased took ill and passed away, so many people congregated around the café.  When the lorry pulled under the canopy at South Bristol Crematorium the silence was broken by the sound of sleigh bells and the occasional ‘Ho Ho Ho’ from mourners wearing Santa Hats.

 http://www.vintagelorryfunerals.co.uk

The GFG blog represents all points of view. If you’ve got something to say and an urge to say it, we’d be pleased to publish it here. We reach close to 2000 people every day, so this is a good place to get your message out. Send your words to charles@goodfuneralguide.co.uk.

Location, location, location

12 November 2013
Charles
3 Comments
Categories: Embalming, funeral, funeral plans, memorialisation

Guest post by author and journalist Ann Treneman. 

Over the past four years, I have spent almost all my spare time in cemeteries for my new book ‘Finding the Plot: 100 Graves to Visit Before You Die‘. One of the key things that I have discovered is that having the right funeral is all about planning. There’s no point in dying and just hoping for the best. You’ve got to treat your funeral as if it were a major event in your life (which, of course, it is, except for the tiny detail that you are dead).

So, here, then, are three cautionary tales: three brilliant men who got their deaths quite wrong.

The first is Charles John Huffam Dickens, as his full name was. The man who wrote so much about cemeteries (not to mention grave-robbing) and funerals did his best to micromanage his own: “I emphatically direct that I be buried in an inexpensive, unostentatious and strictly private manner; that no public announcement be made of the time or place of my burial; that at the utmost not more than three plain mourning coaches be employed; and that those who attend my funeral wear no scarf, cloak, black bow, long hat-band or other such revolting absurdity.” So what was the only thing he forgot to stipulate? Yes, that’s right: location.

Dickens died in 1870 at his home Gad’s Hill, near Rochester, Kent. Apparently that is where he wanted to buried but The Times newspaper had other ideas (just a tiny unostentatious plot in Westminster Abbey) and as this was the one detail that the hyperactive novelist had failed to mention, The Times prevailed. Thus, in the middle of the night, a grave in Poet’s Corner was dug. The body arrived at 9.30am by anonymous hearse. Only 12 people attended although history does not record if any dared to wear an “absurd” hat-band. But, even as the quiet event finished, journalists were banging at the abbey doors. In the end, the grave was left open for two days as thousands came to pay their respects, throwing in flowers. So not quite the strictly private event that Dickens decreed. In fact, not at all.

If only Thomas Hardy had studied his Dickens a bit better he might have been more explicit about what was to become of him. The great novelist had told his literary executor that he would like to be buried at St Michael’s Church in Stinsford in Dorset (the mythical Mellstock of his writings). “I do not, in truth, feel much interest in popular opinion of me,” he said, “and shall sleep quite calmly in Stinsford, whatever happens.”

But when Hardy died in 1928, at the age of 87, he was overruled and he was no longer there to argue otherwise. His executor Sydney Cockerell and J.M. Barrie of Peter Pan fame decided that he must, instead, be buried in Westminster Abbey, as close to Dickens as possible. (How ironic is that?) His family were outraged. Finally, the vicar at Stinsford came up with a classic English fudge: his heart would be buried in Stinsford, the rest of him, after cremation, would go to the Abbey.

Thus, on 16 January 1928, there were two funerals. The great and the good gathered in the Abbey while, at Stinsford, there was a much simpler service, after which the small heart-sized box was buried in his first wife’s grave (left). Of course, in the pubs, this was the spark for many a joke, including those about resurrection (where was the rest of him?) and speculation that, actually, a cat had eaten his heart while on the slab. But, I have to say, having visited both the Abbey and Stinsford, that I have no doubt where he belongs – and it’s not London.

Finally, then, we come to Byron whose will had stipulated that he was to be buried with his beloved Newfoundland dog Boatswain in his glorious plot that still lies in the ruins of Newstead Abbey in Nottinghamshire. But Boatswain died in 1808 and his master lasted (just) until 1824. Byron, of course, was the king of scandal, with rumours and accusations of infidelity, sodomy, violence and incest all playing a part.

No one was surprised when he fled to Greece, where he died while fighting for independence. His body lay in state in Athens for three days before returning to England by boat. But back home, it turned out Westminster Abbey did not want him. And the new owners of Newstead Abbey (he had sold it to pay some debts) weren’t going to have him interred with Boatswain either. So it was nearby Hucknall for him. 

The funeral cortege that left London was really most peculiar. The first hearse contained a coffin, the next vases with his internal organs. Many of the other coaches were empty, their owners having hit on the marvellous wheeze of “ghost” appearances as a way of paying tribute to the poet without, actually, being seen to condone his behaviour. In Hucknall, though, people queued for four days to see the coffin. Creepily, in 1938, the coffin was re-opened with the vicar reporting that Byron was, indeed, there, including descriptions of his deformed foot and his genitals. Truly, for Byron, there was no peace in death, though we should not be surprised.  

Ann Treneman’s book, Finding the Plot: 100 Graves to Visit Before You Die, is published by the Robson Press at £12.99. You can purchase it online through Amazon or the publisher (https://www.therobsonpress.com/books/finding-the-plot-hardback) or in all good bookshops. It is also available on Kindle.

ED’S NOTE: We read a review of Ann’s book and asked her to write for us. We are very grateful to her for agreeing to do so. 

Telling the essential apart from the accessory

12 November 2013
Charles
5 Comments
Categories: funeral, Personalisation

Perhaps what we need just now is a bout of reactionaryism and a reappraisal of where funerals seem to be going in the light of where they have come from. 

We don’t have an intellectual hard-hitter over here like undertaker-poet Thomas Lynch, but what he says about American “monogrammed, one-off, highly personalised funerals” is broadly relevant to funerary trends over here, especially the rise of direct cremation. 

“The dead aren’t incidental to a funeral; the dead are the reason we have funerals.”

“One of the things we seem to have missed is the essential qualities, and we’ve gotten overfocussed on the accessories.”

“The corpse … is the problem we are trying to deal with and should be central to whatever goes on.”.

“The cultural impulse to treat cremation not as an alternative to burial, but as an alternative to bother.” 

Lynch seems to have relaxed his strictures on cremation. I think he said, once, “We burn the trash and we bury the treasure.” For all that, the book he has written with Thomas Long is a good and an essential read. It helps you make up your mind about things. 

If anything is going to kill funerals (apart from third-rate celebrants and undertakers who don’t understand the value of a funeral) it is going to be the evasion of bother. 

Here is the great man interviewed by the great Gail Rubin. 

It’s all in the livery

11 November 2013
Charles
1 Comment
Categories: funeral, Hearses

We are pleased to host a series of posts, in monthly instalments, recounting the adventures of Vintage Lorry Funerals. Here’s the first. 

Vintage Lorry Funerals 1950 Leyland Beaver is sometimes chosen to carry the Deceased solely because of its colour.

The lorry was used in a Leeds Traveller’s Funeral for no other reason than its livery is mainly blue, the Deceased’s favourite colour. The blue and red livery has also created opportunities with Football Fans, whose teams play in similar colours. However, it was never perceived at the outset of the business that the lorry would be appropriate for Military Funerals until the first one in Gosport.

When the lorry was booked for a former Royal Marine’s Funeral, David Hall, who owns the lorry, was advised that a minimalistic approach should be adopted with only the coffin, covered by a Union Jack, on the flat-bed. David has developed securement techniques so that a flag can be held tight to the coffin in transit. On a cold November morning the Marine’s Widow walked 100 yards down a slippery path in the cemetery to shake David’s hand and to thank him for his part in a fitting send off. She said, ‘I knew that the colours would match’. However, it wasn’t until the photographs from the funeral were analysed did it become evident that the Oxford Blue and Post Office Red livery closely match the Blue and Red in the Union Jack.

Other Military funerals undertaken include that of a Commando in Eastleigh, where his comrades commented that the manoeuvring of the coffin, on and off the deck, was like a military procedure. An RAF family in Swindon chose the lorry not only because of its colour, but also due to the wing embellishments on the cab resembling RAF wings. Over the road from Hillier Funeral Service is a Primary School and loading the coffin coincided with the children’s diner time. A group of boys beckoned David, dressed in his black boiler-suit and black beret, across the road. One boy asked, ‘Was this soldier killed in Afghanistan?’ and a second boy, who was transfixed by David’s uniform whispered, ‘Are you part of the SAS?’

A C of E funeral

19 October 2013
Charles
3 Comments
Categories: funeral, Religious funerals

To Salisbury and the funeral of the mother of two friends.

The venue is the cathedral, no less. We get there in good time, but not good enough: the place is almost full and we forage for a seat at the back.

Who’s the celeb who died, you ask. No one you’ve heard of. Andrea was the wife of a Wiltshire vicar who touched the hearts of everyone she met. Her achievement was that she was a first-rate human being. All these people testify to that, having got themselves here at, doubtless, some inconvenience.

The service is billed as one of gratitude and thanksgiving. It’s the full and formal Anglican rite. As we wait for it to begin we contemplate the poem by RS Thomas in the service booklet, The Other. It begins:

There are nights that are so still
that I can hear the small owl
calling

And concludes:

And the
thought comes
of that other being who is
awake, too,
letting our prayers break on him,
not like this for a few hours,
but for days, years, for eternity.

There’s a procession comprising all manner of appropriately attired officiants, and the Bishop of Ramsbury bringing up the rear. It’s a proper procession. The nave of the cathedral is 134 metres long and the land-speed record for getting from start to finish is nowhere near lowered on this occasion.

The ritual wraps itself lovingly around Andrea. There’s a bidding prayer which commemorates Andrea’s “love of being a parish priest’s wife who welcomed all who came to the vicarage door” at the same time as proclaiming the faith that “all who believe in [Christ] will rise with him”. I guess there’s a good sprinkling of unbelievers and agnostics present, but it’s by no means alienating. The tone is humane and gentle.

There are good hymns – ‘Angel-voices ever singing’; ‘Brother, sister, let me serve you’; and ‘Tell out my soul’. There are prayers and communion.

A family friend delivers a tribute which deftly balances biography, naming of attributes and affectionate anecdotes. A woman from the Mother’s Union pays tribute to Andrea’s dedication to that organisation. The bishop speaks with admirable concision. His text is George Herbert’s Bitter-Sweet:

Ah, my dear angry Lord,
Since thou dost love, yet strike;
Cast down, yet help afford;
Sure I will do the like.

I will complain, yet praise;
I will bewail, approve;
And all my sour-sweet days
I will lament and love.

There is singing from the choir – Gelineau’s setting of Psalm 23 and Byrd’s Agnus Dei from the Mass for Four Voices – which conjures all the usual adjectives: timeless, ethereal, etc. In a building like this, with the gloaming settling, all the usual adjectives fall short by a distance.

An hour and forty minutes later, it is over: “Andrea, go forth upon your journey … May your portion this day be in peace.”

And the procession makes its way back down the nave which Andrea walked up, years ago, as a young bride.

Fifty years since JFK’s assassination

17 October 2013
Charles
No comments
Categories: funeral

Posted by Richard Rawlinson

We’re approaching the 50th anniversary of John F Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas, Texas, at 12.30pm on Friday, 22 November 1963. In the wake of a media deluge, here’s a video of the state funeral on Monday, 25 November.

Preparations were speedy. The president’s body was brought back to Washington and, after 24 hours in the White House, the coffin was taken to lie in state at the Capitol, viewed thoughout Sunday by thousands of mourners. Meanwhile, representatives of countries from all over the world flew in to DC for the Monday requiem mass at St Matthew’s Cathedral, after which the president was laid to rest at Arlington National Cemetery.

From Abide with Me to the Last Post, from John-John’s salute as his father’s coffin went by to Jackie Kennedy’s mourning veil, the funeral seems remarkably timeless and universal.

An essay in melancholy

14 October 2013
Charles
3 Comments
Categories: funeral, funeral customs, funeral trends

Last week I passed an empty hearse going the other way. It set me musing.

Freed from its solemn duties, no longer slowed by a weighty coffin and all the gravitas attendant upon such a thing, emptied of flowers and no longer the misty-eyed focus of profoundly sad people, it had about it none of the majesty and decorum,  the grandeur and grace, that properly wreath a hearse.  It looked inessential, superfluous, dispensable. Gawky. Going too fast. 

You think I’m banging on a bit. You’re right. 

I then fell to musing on the way people in cars treat hearses these days. They buzz and harry them, cut in and chop up processions. It’s like watching a kestrel mobbed by crows. People these days have no manners, no solicitude. They’re in a hurry, they’ve got places to go. 

But it’s not just a manners thing, is it? Or a hurry thing? There’s more to it than that. 

Once upon a time (not so long ago) the death of someone touched everyone. It evoked the mystery of existence. In everyone’s mind a funeral procession awoke questions: how long have I got? What does it feel like? What comes after? It spoke of the universal human drama of those born to die. It inspired awe and the doffing of hats. 

It’s not a manners thing. No, it’s a universality thing. In place of a general drama of life and death and the mystery of existence played out in our midst, for us, disconnected from matters elemental, there are one-off sketches in which unknown unfortunates die — bad luck. Seek not to know for whom the bell tolls, it ain’t tolling for me, mate. 

And so a funeral procession, instead of speaking to and for the human condition, is seen as descriptive of no more than a little local difficulty afflicting someone else. 

And the funerals of these incogniti address the particular and the personal, the private hurt, the here and the now, in crematoria which divert those who cared for them briefly from life’s mainstream (where death belongs) before setting them on their way again. 

Moral: it’s much easier to write prettily about mortality and funerals wearing a reactionary hat. 

In the borderlands

4 October 2013
Charles
22 Comments
Categories: Art and death, Attitudes to dead bodies, funeral, funeral customs, funerals in other cultures

 Posted by Jenny Uzzell

There is a very useful word frequently used by anthropologists and students of religion and mythology to describe something that is neither one thing nor the other; something that is ‘in between’. The word is ‘liminal’.

Classic examples of things that are ‘liminal’ are marshes or other places at the water’s edge, crossroads, twilight and, interestingly, people who are in any way trans-gender. Liminal things are very powerful and very dangerous. They create ‘thin’ places where the ‘Otherworld’ can bleed into this. This is, unless your shaman has deliberately created the situation and is very much ‘In Control’, generally considered to be a Bad Thing. 

Dead bodies are most definitely ‘liminal’. A dead body hanging around in the community belongs neither to the world of the living nor to the world of the dead. It is, both practically and ‘magically’ a very dangerous thing. It both is and is not your husband, mother, son, friend… Dead bodies, by their mere presence blur the boundaries between life and death and this is definitely a Bad Thing… things can become confused. Things can cross over. On a purely practical level there is disintegration and a very real risk of disease as time goes on. 

It is little wonder then that our ancestors sought to neutralise the risk of a dead body by rendering it, practically and ritually, into something that is stable and does not present a threat to the living. Before burial the body was treated with great care. In some cultures the body could not be left unattended between death and burial. Sometimes all mirrors in the house were covered. The shoes of the dead person removed. Doors opened. Always the purpose is to ensure that the dead remain dead, the living remain living and nothing leaves its appointed place. We saw a good example of this in the Vedic funeral mentioned last time in which Death is ritually restricted to the burial mound and a boundary drawn which it cannot cross. 

Whilst this may be very interesting to an archaeologist or an anthropologist, you could be forgiven for asking what it has to do with modern funerals. The answer, as it happens, is ‘quite a lot’. One of the major purposes of a funeral, ancient or modern, is to move the person who has died from ‘here’ to ‘there’. The body itself is removed from the community through burial, cremation, mummification or some other means. The ‘person’ is removed from the realm of the living to the realm of the dead. What this means will depend on the beliefs of the community which is carrying out the ritual. Where there is a clear belief in life after death in some form then the purpose is clear and I talked about this at length in the previous two articles here and here. Where there is a hope rather than a belief, then this will be expressed and affirmed by the community. Even where there is no hope at all of an afterlife, and the understanding is that the dead person has truly ceased to exist, there will still be a transition from the living person who was a part of the fabric of society and of the community to one who lives in the memory and imagination of those left behind and who will be different to each person who remembers.

This is one reason why for many people, myself included, it is so vital to have the body present at the funeral. The community gathers together to acknowledge and bear witness to the appalling fact of death in general and this death in particular. They stand with the body, accompanying it as far as the living are able on its journey from ‘this’ to ‘that; from; ‘here’ to ‘there’ and then they acknowledge not only that someone has gone from their midst, but also that they are still alive and can start the long and painful task of re-constructing the community without the missing member. 

Many people feel that the real journey of grief and healing cannot begin until after the funeral because it not until then that the person is really ‘gone’. 

It is in the case of secular, materialist funerals in particular that there is, perhaps, a need for new rituals and new ‘liturgy’ that effects and bears witness to this transition from one state of being to another. We do not do badly with the words, but the ritual, the ‘acting out’ of this transformation is still not fully recognised and acknowledged in many non-religious funerals and I suspect that over the next hundred years or so this will change. Humans are ritual animals, and where no ritual or tradition exists that fully expresses what we need to say or need to feel we will continue to use the old ones, even if they are irrelevant, for a very long time. Eventually, however, we will create new ones that reflect our own reality. 

Of course, the process of moving through and out of the liminal state does not entirely end with the funeral. Memories are still fresh and immediate; sometimes it is difficult to accept, even to remember that the person has gone. For this reason many religions and cultures have a second ritual about a year after the death that effectively moves the dead person into an ‘ancestral realm’. Regardless of whether this is seen as an actual thing which happens to the ‘soul’ or not, this is, I think, a healthy thing which could, usefully, be incorporated into modern funeral tradition. 

One modern development is likely to have a far reaching impact on this whole idea of the realms of life and death which as yet we cannot even begin to grasp. Online ‘personas’ on Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites, to say nothing of virtual worlds such as Second Life, may continue beyond physical death so that the ‘person’ remains in the virtual community in some form or other. This is an eventuality for which our ancestors could not prepare us, and it remains to be seen what its impact on the way we approach death will be in the coming centuries.