funeral

The presence of the dead is essential

28 September 2013
Charles
11 Comments
Categories: Attitudes to dead bodies, funeral, funeral customs, Good books, open-air cremation

We bear mortality by bearing mortals — the living and the dead — to the brink of a uniquely changed reality: Heaven or Valhalla or Whatever Is Next. We commit and commend them into the nothingness or somethingness, into the presence of God or God’s absence. Whatever afterlife there is or isn’t, human beings have marked their ceasing to be by going the distance with their dead — to the tomb or the fire or the grave, the holy tree or deep sea, whatever sacred space of oblivion we consign them to. And we’ve been doing this since the beginning. 

The formula for our funerals was fairly simple for most of our history: by getting the dead where they needed to go, the living got where they needed to be. 

Ours is the species that deals with death (the idea of the thing) by dealing with our dead (the physical fact of the thing itself). 

The presence of the dead is an essential, definitive element of a funeral. 

These four essential, definitive elements, then: the corpse, the caring survivors, some brokered change of status between them, and the disposition of the dead make a human funeral what it is. 

Stements extracted from an essay by Thomas Lynch here. 

If Mr Lynch is right, how much more essential and elemental to bring the dead to their funeral for all to see and mourn, as in the case of of Mitul Shah, killed by terrorists in the Westgate mall in Kenya. 

Funerals must address dreams, too

14 September 2013
Charles
5 Comments
Categories: celebrants, funeral, funeral directors, Religious funerals

In an excellent article in the Christian Century, the Rev Samuel Wells, an American, describes taking a British funeral. There are lessons here for clergy, funeral celebrants and undertakers. 

And so it was that I was called to preside at the funeral of Michael. Michael had had a difficult life. He had Duchenne muscular dystrophy.

At the funeral tea I lingered and asked Michael’s mother what it was like to say goodbye. “Oh, it wasn’t much fun,” she said. “But d’you know what?” she added. “I slipped a packet of condoms in the coffin just before they closed it.” And she winked.

Was ever a parting gesture so laden with complexities of meaning? The young Tutankhamen, teenage pharaoh of the 14th century BC, was surrounded in his tomb by an array of golden artifacts. Michael was sent to the hereafter with a supply of prophylactics … The condom represented the adulthood Michael had never attained, the manhood he’d never inhabited.

Whatever the packet represented, it was a poignant symbol of care and abandon, restraint and permission, encouragement and playfulness, fertility and wistful regret. Michael’s mother had spent 14 years caring for his every bodily need: her final gift was a gesture toward the single bodily desire that remained out of his reach, the one that she couldn’t satisfy for him. It was a microcosm of what this life had not given him—and maybe the next life would.

Since that day I’ve changed the way I talk with grieving families about their loved ones. I ask if there’s something they want to put in the coffin. I wonder with them if there’s something their beloved had always longed for or something that remained out of reach. Is there a way the funeral can name and address what could never happen or the dream that could never be? I try in each funeral to include something visual, tangible, laden with unspoken meaning—a gesture, an artifact, a procession of gifts, a picture, a focus for prayer. Michael’s mother taught me that God makes heaven out of our faltering, foolish and fragile attempts to imagine and construct it.

If clergy will not shape liturgy to incorporate people’s longings and regrets and desires … then people will simply go ahead and construct their own. Only if they’re very lucky will the clergy hear about those homemade liturgies. With a wink.

Read the whole article here

Reaching the Fathers

30 August 2013
Charles
6 Comments
Categories: Archaeology, ceremony, funeral, funerals in other cultures

The second in a series of guest posts which consider the question, ‘What is the purpose of a funeral?’ by Jenny Uzzell

The first ‘purpose’ of funerals that I am going to consider is the one that, arguably, has the least relevance to most people in the modern western world. For most of human history there has been a tacit assumption that funerary rites are an efficient cause of change of some sort on a spiritual level. In other words they ‘do something’ in the supernatural world. Either they ensure the safety, survival or wellbeing of the person who has died in the afterlife or they protect those who are still living from an otherworldly threat. 

While there is some evidence (albeit hotly debated) for funerary ritual even before the emergence of Homo Sapiens, we cannot make more than an educated guess about the meanings of rituals and the beliefs associated with them until we are into the historical period and can read about what our ancestors thought they were doing. Even then it is no easy matter to be sure about what the funeral was expected to achieve. 

The ancient funerals with which we are most familiar are, perhaps, those of Egypt. In the Old Kingdom it is not clear what afterlife expectations, if any, were held by the majority of the population. Only the Pharaoh, already partially divine even before his death, was assured of an eternal life as an aspect of the sun god Re. The soul or ba of the king made a perilous voyage to the Duat or underworld where it joined Re and so helped to preserve the future security of the kingdom. This apotheosis was a dangerous and complicated affair and could only occur if the funeral rituals were carried out with precision. The pyramid itself (sometimes referred to as the king’s ba or as his ‘horizon’) may have been a complicated piece of supernatural machinery designed to facilitate the Pharaohs transformation into a god. 

By the Middle Kingdom the afterlife had become far more democratised and everyone expected to access the Duat after death. Literature of the period uses euphemisms for death that tell us much about Egyptian attitudes. Egyptians often refer to finding a ‘safe harbour’ or to reaching their father safely. This life was seen largely as a preparation for the next, and so to invest a large proportion of one’s wealth in securing a good afterlife seemed quite rational; after all, the next life will last much longer than this one. 

Egyptian belief of this period was very complex. The human in the otherworld was comprised of the ba (similar to our idea of ‘soul’ this was, essentially the personality) the ka (life essence or vitality) and ankh (intellect). The ka needed to be sustained with food and drink offerings and needed a place to live. This was the mummy, which had to be recognisable so that the ka could find it easily. Many tombs have a false ‘ka door’ through which the spirit could come and go. Only if all three of these elements elements were successfully reunited by the funeral rites could the person live again. It was therefore imperative that the rituals were carried out with absolute precision; the right words, pronounced correctly at the right time and accompanied by the right action. This could only be performed by highly trained priests who held an honoured position in Egyptian society since it was only through their skills and knowledge that one could hope to live again after death. The purpose of the funeral was to ensure the continued life and well-being of the person who had died. This in turn served the living who could expect their sons to do the same for them and ensured that the ancestors, well fed and cared for, would look out for them in this world. 

All of this seems a far cry from the modern world, and many would argue that most funerals today do not aim to bring about a real change to the person who has died or to those they leave behind, but many modern traditions actually grew from such beliefs and there are those for whom this is still the most important aspect of a funeral. 

Another ancient culture for which the funeral was crucial for the well being of the whole of society was Vedic India and it is to this that we will turn next.

 

A eulogy sandwich is not enough to nourish grief

26 August 2013
Charles
13 Comments
Categories: celebrants, ceremony, Featured, Formality vs informality, funeral, funeral customs, funerals in other cultures, Grief, Personalisation, Ritual

As Jenny Uzell embarks on a series of posts which will consider the knotty question, What Is A Funeral For? it’s worth reflecting on what has been a game of two halves, funeralwise, in the last fortnight. Two people have expressed contrasting approaches to a funeral.

First, there was Dave Smith, who arranged the funeral of his daughter, Hannah, the 14-year-old who committed suicide after being bullied online. Desperately sad though this was, Dave wanted the funeral to celebrate Hannah’s life, and he asked mourners and relatives to wear colourful clothes, onesies, her favourite garment, in particular,  to reflect Hannah’s joie de vivre.

The church was decorated with purple and white balloons, photographs of Hannah, and a poster that read “Be Happy for Hannah”. Purple was Hannah’s favourite colour. Her coffin was purple. Her father did not want her to travel in a hearse, so he brought her himself in a blue Audi 4×4. The coffin was carried into church to In The Air Tonight by Phil Collins. The service was conducted by the Church of England vicar, the Rev Charlie Styles, who described the proceedings as informal and relaxed. Four hundred people came.

Hannah’s was a very zeitgeisty funeral, highly personal, focussed on positives. There were tears, yes, and there was also laughter.

At the other end of the scale, over in Ireland, the bishop of Meath, Dr Michael Smith, courted howling and outrage when he restated the Catholic church’s doctrinal ban on the personalisation of funerals. He outlawed eulogies. This embargo seems to be restated in a newsworthy way in a more or less five-yearly cycle. Since compromise is impossible, it is one that looks set to keep on coming round.

The good bishop’s rationale for resisting what he calls the dumbing down of funerals accords with Catholic dogma. In his words:

“The context of the funeral Mass in the church should be focused entirely on the celebration of the Eucharist. What we’re trying to do is focus on the essence of the Christian funeral rite. The essence is, of course, two things. One is to support the family, through prayer and the community, but also the other function of it is that we support the person on their journey to salvation. What we are trying to do then is maintain the integrity of the Eucharist.”

Can’t argue with that, can you? If you want to belong to the club, them’s the rules.

Both Dave Smith and the Bishop of Meath have very clear ideas about what they think a funeral should aim to accomplish, and how it should achieve it.

But the good bishop has other things to say about funerals that may be relevant to all of us. He says:

“I suppose that people’s understanding when they hear about a funeral is that they focus entirely on the funeral Mass but the rites of Christian funerals begin long before that. You have the vigil for the deceased, the wake house and the removal and, of course, the prayers of commendation at the graveside. So we’re saying look, there are opportunities for family members who want to pay a personal tribute to the deceased.”

He’s got a point, hasn’t he? Why do we feel that farewelling and remembrancing have to be packed into brief, bulging crem slot, leaving so much to be said in short order that, in order to get the biography recited and the grandchildren named, a celebrant must, with one eye fixed on the clock,  zoom through a script at 360 words per minute, ruthlessly fading the music for prayer and/or reflection on the way?

Why do we place so much of a burden on the single event of the funeral ceremony? After all, there’s the time before it, as the bishop says. And there’s time afterwards — oh god, all that time afterwards.

That’s the time we need to focus on.

Secularists are neglecting to develop a case for the introduction of practices and rituals either side of the ceremony which might promote both good remembrancing and, also, the emotional health of bereaved people. This is probably why no celebrant association has made a public statement in support of the e-petition calling for statutory bereavement leave. That they haven’t is nothing short of astounding.

The Jewish practice of sitting shiva is a brilliant example of the sort of practice I’m talking about. For seven days following the funeral, the close family take a complete time out — stop the world, I want to get off: “The mourners experience a week of intense grief, and the community is there to love and comfort and provide for their needs.” Find more here.

Jews mourn in a structured way for a year. Shiva is followed by three weeks of schloshim, a less intense mourning period, followed by further regulated re-entry into the world. 

Like all rituals rooted in belief systems that have developed over hundreds of years, Jewish mourning is characterised by a thicket of impedimental ordinances, many of which strike outsiders as completely bonkers or, where gender equality is concerned, utterly unacceptable. For all that, the degree of difficulty they present is at the heart of the solace they offer. My friend Graham is presently saying the mourning kaddish daily for his father. It’s a short enough prayer. Translated, it reads:

Magnified and sanctified be God’s great name in the world which He created according to His will. May he establish His kingdom during our lifetime and during the lifetime of Israel. Let us say, Amen.

May God’s great name be blessed forever and ever.

Blessed, glorified, honored and extolled, adored and acclaimed be the name of the Holy One, though God is beyond all praises and songs of adoration which can be uttered. Let us say, Amen.

May there be peace and life for all of us and for all Israel. Let us say, Amen.

Let He who makes peace in the heavens, grant peace to all of us and to all Israel. Let us say, Amen.

Graham could mutter this while he waits for his kettle to boil or just think it as he brushes his teeth. But he’s not allowed to do that. No, he’s got to leg it down to the synagogue and recite it every day without fail at teatime in the presence of a minyan, a quorum of ten adult males. As a result, it rules his day. Everything is built around it. If he’s away on business he has to contact a synagogue before he’s even booked his flight in order to assure himself that there’ll be a minyan ready and waiting for him. Graham’s a man who has not been as observant as he might have been, in the past, but he’s doing his bit for his Dad, whom he loved. It’s hard work, he says, and it’s doing him a surprising amount of good.

Unglamorous work, isn’t it? Saying kaddish doesn’t fit with all those culturally untranslatable fun customs Brits get so bedazzled by, like the Dia de los Muertos (nobbut a lot of facepainting and larking about over here). Kaddish reminds us that mourning is a matter of hard yards.

The eulogy sandwich served up by celebrants is all very well in its way, but it’s not enough to nourish grief.

POSTSCRIPT: Jews are pro-eulogy. Here’s the halakhic ordinance:
Delivering a proper eulogy (hesped) is a major mitzvah. The mitzvah is to raise one’s voice and to speak heartrending words about the deceased in order to arouse the weeping of the audience, and to mention his praises … If one is negligent about the eulogy of an upright Jew one does not live long and is worthy of being buried alive.

It is forbidden to exaggerate excessively in praising the deceased. However, one is permitted to exaggerate slightly, as long as one does not go too far. If the deceased had no good qualities, one should not mention his character … If one attributes good qualities to someone who did not possess them at all, or excessively exaggerates the good qualities he had, this causes evil to the speaker and to the deceased.
Source

The Purpose of Funerals: Overview

20 August 2013
Charles
11 Comments
Categories: funeral, funeral trends

The first in a major series of posts by guest blogger Jenny Uzell, scholar and undertaker

One of the highlights of the National Funeral Exhibition for me earlier this year (other than the chance to contemplate, yet again, the many ways in which my life has taken an unexpected turn for the bizarre) was hearing Charles speak about modern funerals. This was a memorable event, not least because of the determination required both to listen and, I imagine, speak, over the ambient noise of several hundred people on the other side of the frankly rather flimsy ‘walls’ doing whatever it was they were doing. It was, as you might expect, an erudite and thought provoking talk that led me to the sort of semi-professional navel gazing I have become used to after speaking to anyone involved in the GFG. 

One of the things he said particularly held my attention. He said that unless there is a clear affiliation to a particular faith, modern funerals have no clear purpose. That worried me a lot, because if funerals have no purpose, what on earth are we all doing wasting time, effort, money and a not inconsiderable amount of emotion on them! That’s not what he meant, of course. I know this because I asked him later. What he meant was that we often do not really know what the purpose of a funeral is. 

That is worrying as well. Over the years I have been a teacher, a teacher trainer and a senior examiner as well as, to my lasting surprise, an undertaker and the one thing that all of those roles have in common is that you cannot design something (a lesson; a training document; an exam paper) unless you are very clear indeed about what exactly it is that you are trying to achieve. Otherwise, how do you know if you did it well or not? We talk a great deal on this blog about ‘good’ funerals (odd that, on the Good Funeral Guide!) but what exactly is a ‘good funeral’? Aristotle had an interesting definition of ‘goodness’. He said that something is ‘good or fails to be ‘good’ to the extent to which it does or does not fulfil its final cause (loosely, ‘purpose’). So a ‘good’ knife is one that cuts well; a ‘good’ chair is one that is comfortable to sit in and does not deposit you unceremoniously on the floor; and a ‘good’ person (in case you were wondering) is one who lives up to his or her own innate potential; who is, to be all fluffy for a moment, ‘all that they can be’. By this measure a ‘good’ funeral is one that fulfils its purpose well. Annoyingly, this means that everyone involved in designing the funeral needs to have a common understanding of what that purpose is. 

Its one of those questions that we think we know the answer to. Its obvious what a funeral is for…until we really start to think about it at which point it becomes clear that there really isn’t an easy answer. There are many different purposes that a funeral can serve and just as every funeral will be different, so it will serve a different set of purposes. Unfortunately, the family of the person who has died (or the people responsible for organising the funeral) often are not clear in their own minds about what they want the funeral to achieve. It is therefore an important part of the role of any good funeral director and/or celebrant to be able, through talking to a family, to help them to understand what this particular funeral will be for. Of course each individual funeral will have more than a single purpose, and the different people responsible for it may have different purposes in mind. Understanding this can sometimes help to make the way forward clearer and to shed light on disagreements which may seem trivial but which are actually based on different assumptions about what the funeral is intended to do. 

So what is a funeral for? I think there are quite a number of different answers to this question and over the next few weeks, with Charles’ continued indulgence, I would like to explore each in turn in an attempt to see how well modern funerals do, might or even should fulfil them. Some are far more common than others and some are almost consigned to history: almost, but not quite. It goes without saying that ‘my’ list is by no means definitive and I am aware that others have written on this subject far more eloquently than I could hope to. Still I hope that my musings might be of interest to some and at least form a starting point for some interesting discussions.

What would you like to see on your TV?

19 June 2013
Charles
8 Comments
Categories: ceremony, death and funerals, funeral, funeral customs, funeral trends, funerals in other cultures, memorialisation, Reasons to go to a funeral, Secular approaches to death

When media people phone the press office here at the GFG-Batesville Shard, their requests for information often conform to whatever they suppose to be trending.

“We’re doing something on living funerals. Are these catching on?”

“No.”

“We’re doing a documentary about the dying process and we want to film someone actually dying. Can you help us?”

“No.”

“Arranging a funeral?”

“No.”

When they say they want to expose malpractice, we urge them to shine a light on good practice, too, in the interest of fairness and balance.  We can introduce you to lots of good undertakers, we say. They always promise. They never do.

Today we received an enquiry about the growth of professional mourners in the UK. We replied a little perfunctorily that there hasn’t been. Actually, there’s an outfit called Rent A Mourner but we’ve always thought it must be a spoof. Have you ever encountered a professional mourner? We thought that would be the end of it.

But the enquirer, Malcolm Neaum of CB Films, pursued the topic on a broader front. Are British funerals being in any way cross-fertilised by multiculturalism, he wondered. And it’s a good question because, even though they haven’t to any remarkable degree, we have from time to time, on this discount cialis coupon blog, discussed the desirability of respectfully and gratefully adapting rituals and observances from other cultures with which to enrich our own ‘secular’ funerals, many of which are beautifully and expertly scripted, but are characterised by a DVT-threatening inactivity on the part of the audience. Funerals are going to go on evolving. The question is whether they are going to evolve in the direction of elaboration or extinction. 

Malcolm is keen to make a documentary about funerals — has been for some time. He tells us: ‘I’ve been working in documentaries for 15 years and have never been able to get a commissioning editor interested in even approaching the topic of death.’ 

He adds: ‘My grandfather died last year and I can’t help but feel that so much of the symbolism and power has been stripped from a modern day funeral. Hopefully, an interesting programme may be an opportunity to you explore the funeral ritual in modern times.’

Malcolm has asked me to ask you what you think. What could he most usefully make a programme about? 

It’s a rare thing to be asked what we think. I hope you will tell him. He says, ‘it’s very exciting to think what we will hear back.’ 

Go on: excite him!

I like large funerals, they’re so intimate

18 June 2013
Charles
4 Comments
Categories: funeral, memorialisation

Posted by Richard Rawlinson

“I like large parties, they’re so intimate. At small parties, there isn’t any privacy.” With this memorable quip in The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald captures the emptiness of Jordan Baker, one of the flappers who attend the parties at the mansion of Jay Gatsby.

A great thing about The Great Gatsby is that none of the characters are great. It’s about flawed individuals forming a flawed society. Gatsby made himself rich by dodgy means, and invented a persona to disguise his humble roots: the dapper bootlegger makes out he attended Oxford University and insists on calling everyone “old sport”. And his charade is part of an obsessive-compulsive ploy to win the heart of the socially-privileged Daisy Buchanan, who ultimately puts class status before love.

West Egg, the part of Long Island where our anti-hero lives, is for the nouvs, and East Egg, across the bay where Daisy lives, is for the toffs. It’s a commentary about East Coast snobbery which, in common with Europe, is where old money had traditionally kept new money in its place.

Gatsby, who hails from the wholesome Mid-West, is a dreamer but the American Dream is hollow in the east. Yet his romantic idealism is what makes him great in the eyes of the novel’s narrator, Nick Carraway. “‘They’re a rotten crowd,’ I shouted across the lawn. ‘You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.’”

After Gatsby is shot dead in his pool, Nick sets to work trying to organise the lavish funeral he thinks his friend would have wanted. No-one shows up, except Gatsby’s servants and his father, who is touchingly proud of his son’s social mobility. Everyone else turns out to be uncaring: Gatsby was a drink ticket and a corpse can’t throw parties.

There are echoes with Fitzgerald’s life and death. An Irish Catholic, he felt like a pauper among the WASPs in the fast set at Ivy League university, Princeton. When he fell for his well-to-do wife-to-be, Zelda, he was spurred on to make his fortune in order to win her and keep her in the style to which she was accustomed. His first novel, This Side of Paradise, was a hit and the couple briefly became the decadent darlings of the Jazz Age.

But their lifestyle took its toll, Zelda ending up in asylums, and Scott becoming an alcoholic whose work was greeted with apathy. The Great Depression was looming and there was little appetite for the frivolity of the roaring 20s. Even The Great Gatsby was a flop.

With no book sales and estranged from Zelda, he tried his luck as a hack in Hollywood, where he took a gossip columnist mistress. It was there that he died in 1940 of a heart attack, aged 44, broke and feeling like a failure. Only a handful of people attended his funeral. His lifestyle also meant he was considered a non-practicing Catholic, so was denied the right to be buried on the family plot. He was buried by a Protestant minister—who allegedly didn’t know who he was—in the Rockville Union Cemetery in Maryland. Zelda joined him in his grave in 1948, but, in 1975, they were both moved to Rockville’s Catholic St Mary Cemetery.

Near the rail tracks and glum office blocks, it’s a modest setting for one of America’s greatest 20th century novelists. The only thing that distinguishes his grave is the placing by visitors of the occasional bottle of booze and coins, symbols of the two things he needed most before his death.

With Baz Luhrmann’s film being a box office hit 70 years after Fitzgerald’s death, the writer’s finest novel is at the top of the Amazon bestseller list. Had he and his creation, Gatsby, died in happier and more fulfilled circumstances, they would no doubt have appreciated more ceremonial fanfare. Manhattan’s St Patrick’s Cathedral perhaps, where mourners could have contemplated their transition from this life to the next in the intimacy of a crowd.

Funeral attendance in a transient, modern world

24 May 2013
Charles
3 Comments
Categories: funeral

 Posted by Richard Rawlinson (who is 100 today)

The love between husband and wife or parent and child is natural, bred into us over millions of years. Not so friendship, apparently. Until farms and villages started to appear around 35,000 years ago, people allegedly refused to talk to each other, networks of friends being anathema. 

Fast forward to the 21st century when prosperity and technology allow plenty of leisure time, when people cross the globe for education and employment, when social media allows friendships to form across countries and continents. 

But how many of us find we’re still so busy as to neglect all but a handful of our closest friends, that our A-Z list of names in our mobile is unsustainable? How many of us move jobs or homes, or change partners, and find former friends drop off the radar? Those friendships didn’t seem fragile at the time. 

And how has modern life affected funeral attendance? Do we go to more funerals because we know more people, even if some of them are not particularly close? Was friendship so much deeper in the days when more people lived in the same close-knit community all their lives, or is this a view of the past through rose-tinted spectacles? 

My hunch is that mobility and greater leisure time enable more meaningful friendships than in the past, but, as we no longer necessarily have intimate knowledge of many of our wider circle’s physical and internal lives, perhaps some friendships are less intense, less ‘familial’. 

And how has transient modern life affected the love between parent and child, and, therefore, family funerals? Despite the bonds of blood, I’m sure it was ever thus that parents and children can irritate each other, and even more so when being constantly in each other’s vicinity.

Death somehow strengthens bonds, whether or not we fully appreciated family in life. In our busy lives, we might live far from home, and fail in our duty of visits and phone calls. Some feel regret and guilt when their neglected parents die.

It’s spring, the season of cleansing and renewal. Make amends with a long lost friend. Show your Mum and Dad how you love them. Even make peace with a blog sparring partner. 

Footnote: Social media relationships are especially fickle. Strangers bond in agreement but, distanced by technology, also sneer more readily in disagreement. Mutual respect can end at the press of a ‘Send’ button, and a war of words can escalate at a pace it rarely would at a ‘real’ social gathering. Like Hyde Park Corner on a global scale, the internet liberates the ‘soap-boxer’ and heckler in us. I should know: this is my 100th blog here! Oh, the pain and pleasure of being a square peg in a round hole.

 

Born on a barge and borne to his final resting place on a barge

21 April 2013
Charles
1 Comment
Categories: funeral, Hearses, Processions

Walter Harrison was born on the coal barge Baron in July 1921. He lived on the canal for 30 years and worked on the waterways for much of his life.

Family and friends of the pensioner, known as Wally, followed the coffin along the towpath.

Full story here. 

That bloody box

17 April 2013
Charles
2 Comments
Categories: Attitudes to dead bodies, Attitudes to death, coffins, funeral

“This was a funeral that celebrated unity. Like all other funerals. That bloody box: the awful finality: the dreadful unduckable certainty that life has to come to an end.

So of course it was the same today. We knew she was dead, and all of us, no matter how little interest we take in politics, have been talking about her life — and how some people thought she was great and some people thought she wasn’t and how some people thought a state funeral was great and how others thought it brought back the divisions of the 1980s. 

But in the end it was the usual infinitely solemn, infinitely banal parading of a box with the usual unspeakable contents. The flag and gun-carriage and the marching bands and the statuesque airmen with reversed arms outside the church of St Clement Danes in the Strand didn’t try to conceal the fact it contained death. 

Miners and policemen, tycoons and street-sleepers, liberals and authoritarians, winners and losers, wets and drys, warmongers and pacifists, the cruel and the compassionate, the bullies and the gentle: every funeral you ever go to reminds you that in the end there are no divisions between us. Death is the ultimate unity. 

Why should the funeral of Baroness Thatcher be any different?”

Simon Barnes in The Times