At a funeral home death is something that may become a daily routine. And it is also where some kind of performance is taking place. ‘The last performance’ is a behind-the-scenes look at the place where funeral rites are prepared.
Directed by Jorge Tur Moltó. On Vimeo here.
Posted by Charles
These last outfits were chosen by some of the 23 people taking part in a photo project initiated by The Straits Times, the leading Singapore daily, in partnership with Lien Foundation, a Singapore philanthropic house. Entitled “The Last Outfit”, the project showcases individuals in the clothes they wish to wear for their own funeral.
The Last Outfit seeks to remove the taboo of death and enthuse people to view life and death differently.
Full text here.
Posted by Kathryn Edwards
Serbia’s been generating news of late, featuring the Old Carnivore and the Young Herbivore (as one local commentator has characterised the players). While Djokovic nibbles the Wimbledon lawn and Mladic huffs and postures in the Hague court, there’s been a lot of grave-digging taking place in a former meadow just outside the east Bosnian town of Srebrenica.
This once charming little place comprises both a main centre and a sprinkling of hamlets and smallholdings in the surrounding mountains. In the old days there was a healing spa, the iron-rich water being thought useful for various complaints. Along the cobbled path up to the source of the river Guber, which emerges from a rockface above the town, there are extra springs and pools that are reputed to offer remedies for various complaints and for general beautification. The 1990s genocide attempt put paid to all that. The chalets were torched, the woodlands mined – the mosques blown up, too, and the rubble barrowed away – and on a boiling hot July day in 1995, most of the locals were bussed out of town, to be deposited in ‘free’ Bosnia (women and little children) or slaughtered (lads and men). Sensing what was coming, many men and boys fled through the woods and mountains, aiming for freedom; about half of them perished through murder or misadventure on the journey.
Most of the victims of the mass killings were buried, the perpetrators’ motive being disposal rather than mourning ritual. They were buried more than once, as often as not, in an attempt to hide the bodies or confound the search for them. The quest in that post-conflict, partitioned country is to find the mass graves, exhume the bodies, and identify them using DNA analysis, inform the relatives, and bury the dead in identified plots and with due rites. Each year, new mass graves are revealed; each year the burials number hundreds. A dedicated burial-ground has been created on some land just outside the town. Known by official decree as the Srebrenica-Potocari Memorial and Cemetery for the Victims of the 1995 Genocide, it was inaugurated by US President Bill Clinton in September 2003. Since then, July 11th – the anniversary of the final capture of the town – has been the day chosen for the burials.
Momentum builds from the day before the ceremony. The coffins, wooden trays with uniform green canvas stretched over a wooden frame, arrive on trucks. Each one will weigh very little, the contents being merely bones (the dismal circumstances even having required a fatwa on the quantity of remains that can legitimise an individual’s funeral). The precious cargoes are laid out in rows, each coffin named and numbered. Members of the Bosnian diaspora will have arrived from all over the world, and the atmosphere is like a fairground of grief: people stare at the ranks of coffins, they weep quietly, they pray and read the Qur’an, they gossip and exchange news. Some stay all night. Before the dew falls, the coffins are covered in enormous sheets of polythene.
Next day, yet more people arrive, by car, by bus, and some – greeted with waves and cheers – are the last few of the thousands who have completed the March of Peace, that traces in reverse the so-called March of Death from Srebrenica out to the west and north that had been attempted by those fleeing the 1995 disaster. On the route to the Memorial Centre opportunistic hucksters sell knick-knacks at the side of the road. By mid-morning the field is a mass of tens of thousands of people, many of wielding umbrellas against the searing sun or teeming rain, according to the vagaries of this changeable mountain climate. Latecomers hurrying along the valley will hear the sound of singing as the ceremony begins.
Dignitaries send substantial floral tributes. There is a reading of the names of the dead, and. It will take a while this year: 614 are being buried. An imam speaks – with too much focus on politics for some people’s tastes – and also leads the prayers, men and women stretching in long lines where there’s open space, or squeezing in with whatever decorum can be managed in the tighter corners. Suddenly the invocations are over and it’s time to act. Scores of men move forward to shoulder the coffins and hurry them through the crowds, like ants carrying foraged treasure, to their designated sites. People stretch out to touch the passing coffins for a blessing; in the manner of their deaths these dead are perceived as ‘shahid’ or ‘witnesses’ for their religion.
The ground has been thoroughly prepared: each grave is marked, with the traditional wooden planks hard by. Mourners cluster by their dead men’s graves, faces tense. The coffins are manhandled into place, then covered with the planks, and the graves become a frenzy of mass shovelling of soil – or mud or dust, as the climate disposes. And all of a sudden, it seems, it’s over. People pour out of the gates and away, the business of burials completed for another year. Meanwhile, the earth will settle, and the green wooden markers will be replaced by pillars of white marble in a stylised version of the traditional turban-top gravestone.
Hostile elements of Serb society assert that the Potocari memorial site will foment vengeance. The Srebrenica prayer, engraved in stone in Bosnian, Arabic and slightly wobbly English, suggests otherwise:
In the Name of God the Most Merciful,
the Most Compassionate
We pray to Almighty God,
May grievance become hope!
May revenge become justice!
May mothers’ tears become prayers
That Srebrenica never happens again
To no one and nowhere!
James Showers, sole proprietor of the Family Tree Funeral Company, undertaker to the discerning decendents of Gloucestershire, has been badgering me to rediscover something he lost on his computer. He thought it might be on mine, since I once sent it to him. It’s not. But by dint of indefatigable googling I have unearthed it. It’s far too good to keep between me and James. Here are some extracts which will send you galloping in a jostling, whooping horde to the blog whence it came. By jingo it’s wonderfully well written.
…perhaps you won’t mind if I recount the Funeral Parlor Affair … For lo, and it did come to pass that the sibling and I were obliged to saunter along to the Sparkman/Hillcrest Funeral Home, Mausoleum, and Memorial Park to pick up the patriarch’s ashes. For some reason — maybe because we’re not a couple of swooning Victorians — we’d expected to stroll in, palm the urn, and buzz along home.
…
But no. The consummate weirdness with which modern American death-angst imbues the mortuary biz turned what should have been a 5-minute transaction into a Gothic theatrical production that dragged on for half an hour.
…
I dare anybody to keep a straight face who darkens the stoop of the Sparkman/Hillcrest Funeral Home, Mausoleum, and Memorial Park. You wouldn’t believe this joint. It was like the set designers from Twin Peaks and Napoleon Dynamite had fused with Elvis Presley’s interior decorator and been reborn as Liberace’s angst-ridden evil twin, who then suffered a psychotic break, and bought up the world’s supply of harvest gold flocked wallpaper, brass upholstery tacks, and fake oak paneling, and ate it all with fava beans and a nice Chianti, and then puked it up all over the living room from Sartre’s No Exit.
…
But nothing in my education or upbringing could have prepared me for our encounter with the Funeral Director. I almost spontaneously combusted when this specimen materialized out of the Stygian mist. The dude was the ne plus ultra, the transcendental essence, the Platonic ideal of funeral directors. He was still. He was shadowy. He was bloodless. He was creepy. He wore an ill-fitting suit made of larceny and doom.
There are two ways of looking at it – aren’t there always? Either funerals, by loosening up, jettisoning the f-word and calling themselves celebrations of life, are becoming more meaningful, more expressive of what people want to express; or they have become merely conventions of gaudily-clad denialists engaged in an altogether silly and fruitless buck-u-uppo displacement activity.
Wherever the truth lies we have reached a pass – it’s a sign of progress – where certain folk are going to dig their heels in, wind back the clock and go for something retro.
Blogger Matt Archbold (thanks for this link, Pam Vetter) is a Catholic and he wants to restore the oft-dropped tradition of praying for souls in Purgatory (well, his soul, anyway). Active interventions by the living to ensure the wellbeing of their dead, practised to the max by the excellent Hmong, died out with the Churches’ downgrading of Purgatory and the Other Place. All sorts of theological reasons. They don’t seem to be consistent with a loving and merciful God, do they, Purgatory and Hell? As for Protestants, they are taught that salvation is down to whether or not you deserve it. No amount of cheering from the touchline can possibly sway a just and omniscient Supreme Being.
Archbold holds no truck with this revisionism: “Here’s what I want you guys to say at my funeral: Matt Archbold was fairly despicable at times. He was meaner than he was kind, proud of his humility, and not all that nice to his family or friends. Vain. Sarcastic. Selfish. While these may be qualities of a good blogger, they do not bode well for sainthood.
“We have no reason to suspect that Matt Archbold is in Heaven. In fact, I’d just about guarantee he’s not. If God in his infinite mercy somehow allowed Matthew to enter Purgatory it would be a reflection of His mercy rather than any attributes Matt evidenced throughout his life.
“Let us all assume, to be safe, that Matthew is in the bottom rung of Purgatory. Matthew’s fingernails are firmly dug into a cliff at the furthest edge of the Purgatory city limits and he’s hanging on there, his little feet dangling over Hell.
“And the only way you can get him out of there and nearer to Heaven is through your prayers. Pray now. Pray on the ride home. Pray when you get home. Pray. Pray. Pray for days, weeks, and years to come. Please pray.”
Sky News journalist Colin Brazier, who recently survived cancer, shares related retrogressive tastes in funerals:
“Do not go to Tesco and buy one of the supermarket’s tasteless In Sympathy cards. They come in a range of bright colours. Many of them display a lily – popular even before the death of Our Lady Of Versace – but even more so now.
“Do not buy one of the Hallmark cards which could easily be mistaken for an invitation to a child’s birthday party. Contrary to the message these cards are trying to communicate – death is actually grim, frequently bleak, and my (hopefully) grieving family will not be comforted by mass produced frivolity.
“Do not, if you are invited to my funeral, turn up wearing colours of a celebratory hue. I deplore the fashion for “wearing bright colours” – a trend in danger of becoming every bit as obligatory as the rigid absurdities of Victorian widow’s weeds were a century ago. There is nothing starchy and stuffy about wearing black. Dignified dark clothing is not an expression of despair. It is a way of stopping other people bathing in the attention which should be reserved for the deceased and his or her close family. I want my life to be remembered, not celebrated. I do not want my faults airbrushing from history.”
More Matt Archbold here.
More Colin Brazier here.
I enjoyed this blog post from an American woman living in Paraguay. Her husband is some sort of religious minister. Here’s the custom out there:
In the jungle, among the Ye’kwana tribe, burials also had to be done quickly. If the family was christian, the dying person would be allowed to remain in his hammock and home to die. If not believers, the ailing one would be taken off and left alone in the jungle to perish, away from the community, so as not to bring evil spirits into the village. Once known, or hoped, to be dead, another tribe would be paid to retrieve the body and bury it in a place unknown to the Ye’kwanas.
And here is a Paraguayan open-air cremation. This delight Richard Martin over at Scattering Ashes:
The first time I experienced this was at the invitation of the family of a Sanema woman. I walked across the log which was the foot bridge between our two villages, I climbed a muddy bank and was led to the clearing in the center of their small village where a large pyre of wood had been laid.
The elderly women were already writhing in grief, moaning and swaying to and fro. It was as if their hearts were ripping open and a wounded animal sound was gushing out from their very soul. The children roamed around confused and bewildered, the men stood stoically by, and the shaman was painted and covered by a jaguar skin making inhuman sounds and growls.
I sat on a bit of log taking in the sights and sounds around me. I felt the despair, I heard the anguish, I was chilled to the bone by the actions of the shaman as he danced and waved his rattle fiercely, seemingly, in my direction. Do not judge me, for you were not there!
Then, the body, wrapped in a tattered old hammock was slung onto the fire. A new sound emerged, a cracking, popping sounds, and a new smell filled the air. It takes a long time to burn a body. More logs needed to be added to the fire every so often. People fainted. Others went into drug induced dazes. Some wept until they had no more tears.
When the fire was allowed to extinguish itself and was left to cool, the entire tribe seemed to have been given new energy. I watched in amazement as the women ran to the cooling embers and began frantically digging with their hands and sifting through the ashes. I noticed they were placing things into a blackened cooking pot. Finally, the shaman came over and prodded the dying fire with his big toe and then nodded to the women who ran off with the pot and its contents.
I saw as they began to use a simple mortar and pestle to grind the fragments in the pot. I saw as they added this fine powder to a prepared banana drink. I saw the family members of the deceased line up.
I saw them drink the bones.
There was much excitement when Davender Ghai won his case for open-air cremation at the Court of Appeal in February 2010.
It established the legality of the principle of open-air cremation but, as Rupert Callender noted at the time:
“this is only a battle that has been won, not the war. The next impenetrable ring of defence, our Orwellian and inscrutable planning system and our perversely selective Environmental Health department will no doubt dig in for a long siege. For those of us who dream of blazing hilltops lighting up the night sky and illuminating dancing crowds, we still have miles to go before we sleep.” [Source]
In court, the battle raged around the legal definition of a crematorium. Baba Ghai’s lawyers argued: “The expression crematorium should mean any building fitted with appliances for the burning of human remains. ‘Building’ is not defined. We say it should be given a broad meaning.”
When the judgement was delivered, everyone noted the difficulties which could be thrown up by planning and public health legislation should an application be submitted.
Over in India a new, eco-friendly pyre is catching on – the Mokshda green cremation system, a simple heat-retaining and combustion- efficient technology. The Mokshda crematorium is a high-grade, stainless steel and man-sized bier with a hood and sidewall slates that can withstand temperatures of up to 800 degrees Celsius.
It’s a building, all right. That’s encouraging.
But it doesn’t solve the vapourised mercury problem…
Read more here and here. Read other blog posts on this: click on a category below to bring up the archive.
Two really nice stories here.
First, a marvellous and extraordinary insight into funerals in Gaza — community, ritual and politics. Here.
Second, the ten most loathsome lunacies of the Westboro Baptist Church (the GOD HATES people), who are so biblecrazy they once protested outside a shop selling Swedish vacuum cleaners after a Swedish pastor was prosecuted for being horrible about homosexuals. Now they’re going to protest at Elizabeth Edwards’ funeral on the grounds that she did not praise God enough while dying of breast cancer. Here.
Have a lovely weekend!
Have you been following Gail Rubin’s 30 funerals in 30 days? I hope so. If you haven’t, you can easily catch up. Go over to her site as soon as you’ve read this and take up where you left off.
The cultural differences are intriguing. The preaching at religious funerals in the US is hotter. More friends and family stand up and talk. Photo and video montages are much, much more common — as are tables with photos and memorabilia. And I like the custom of giving people rubber wristbands — over there they’re the new armbands. My overall impression so far is that Americans do it better. Not that we do it well, of course, we’ve got a long way to go.
Today Gail attended the funeral of a young man — he was 24. Among the songs played at his funeral was When I Get Where I’m Going by Brad Paisley. Here’s one for you celebrants (a good day, this, for celebrants). Another was If Die Young by the Band Perry, which even I’ve heard so I guess everyone has. Again, a good one for a funeral like this.
Listen to Brad (I can’t embed him, I’m not allowed). Then go straight over to Gail.
This put a spring in my step. It is extracted from a letter to the Irish Times:
I never cease to be amazed at how we Irish continue to celebrate and embrace death so excellently.
The morgue is now giving way to families’ increasing desire to bring the body home for a wake, not just for a few hours but overnight, so that neighbours and friends can gather as a community for lashings of tea, cakes, sandwiches, etc, all prepared by the neighbours as genuine gestures of friendship and community.
The importance of the community wake is also to be seen in the new development of taking the body directly from home to church, not on the evening before burial but on the morning of the service, with the community present in full support to the bereaved.
We Irish celebrate and embrace death so well that a good funeral is still a more social event than a good wedding.
The whole letter is worth reading here. It is a response to this article here.
