green funeral

Parish notices

11 October 2010
Charles
3 Comments
Categories: alternative funerals, Art and death, Attitudes to death, Books, green funeral, natural burial, Plan your own funeral

First, an event, Dying to Live.

It is organised by Archa Robinson at Living and Dying Consciously and is billed as: Suitable for anyone facing death in the next 90 yrs… a reflective, meditative, poignant, life changing and fun weekend !

Here’s more:

We live in a society conditioned to deny death. It’s a taboo subject and is often seen as a failure or at best ‘unfortunate’. We live as if we live forever, ignoring the truth of change and impermanence. Yet the acknowledgement of them holds the key to life itself. To be truly

conscious in our lives and present to each moment means to ‘let-go’—to die to the last moment and open to the next—to live and die consciously, moment to moment. Death is the ultimate ‘let-go’. From the moment of our birth our bodies are dying, so the more we face the fears of our own death the more we are able to love and celebrate our lives now.

We will use image-making, meditation, writing and other experiential ways  of exploring these themes   To support participants on their own inner journey they  will be asked to stay in silence during the workshop.

Venue: Boswedden House, Cornwall.

Dates: 12, 13 & 14 November.

Cost: £125, with an early bird fee of just £95 if you book before 22 Oct. B & B available at £96 for 3 nighsts; £70 for two. Sounds like terrific value!

Further information and booking here.

Boswedden House

Second, a survey conducted by Jean Francis, author of Time to Go and one of the team at ARKA Original Funerals.

Jean conducts workshops on funeral planning and would love you to respond to a survey she is conducting into the importance people place on environmental considerations when planning a funeral. It’ll take you less than five minutes (I know, I’ve done it myself). You’ll find it here.

What’s in a coffin?

9 July 2010
Charles
9 Comments
Categories: coffins, green funeral

At Musgrove Willow you can go and watch the coffin being made — and even lend a hand.

There’s a big coffin show on at Chiltern Woodland Burial Park this weekend. I can’t make it, sad to say. If you can, it looks good. And Chiltern is a lovely place.

Coffins are what visitors to the GFG website most want to know about. Brits are really into coffins. Does any country offer a bigger range? I don’t think so.

It bugs consumers that they cannot buy direct from most coffin manufacturers because the funeral directors ‘persuade’ manufacturers not to sell to them. It bugs consumers that funeral directors slap the biggest margin on coffins they can get away with. It probably bugs the manufacturers, too. It bugs consumers when they learn that funeral directors bury some of their professional fee in their coffin prices. This all adds up to a feeling that they are being cynically diddled when their defences are down.

But, here’s the point, even a normal retail markup would likely be reckoned unfair. It is observable that the same people who are wholly happy to pay for a meal out when they could buy the food on their plate for 5x less at Tesco cannot see why the same rule should apply to coffins.

It is related to a general feeling that funerals are too expensive. This is a problem for funeral directors, because they are not. Funeral directors need, therefore, to work extra hard to demonstrate that they give value for money. One of those ways is to be hyper-transparent about costs.

But I think there’s more to it than that. Why do consumers feel that the normal rules of retail do not apply to coffins? The answer may be that funeral consumers have a particular feeling about the coffin: it is the last beautiful, personal gift they can buy for the person who has died. They would like to feel that they chose it and bought it and gave it to the funeral director to put their dead person in. Or that they chose it and asked the funeral director to get it for them. They see the funeral director as agent, not retailer. Above all, they want to own that coffin.

If there’s anything in this – and I’ll be interested to find out if you think there is – then funeral directors will do well to sell their coffins at more or less cost and justify their professional fee in terms of: specialist expertise + hours + overheads expressed as an hourly rate, like any other professional. This need not make them feel insecure. They do things other people can’t or won’t, after all.

A Good Send Off

21 June 2010
Charles
3 Comments
Categories: alternative funerals, celebrants, cemeteries, ceremony, cremation, funeral cost, funeral customs, funeral reformers, green funeral, natural burial

A Good Send Off was the title of this year’s Centre for Death and Society (CDAS) annual conference. Well, part of the title – the snappy part. In full it read: A Good Send Off: Local, Regional & National Variations in how the British Dispose of their Dead. It took place last Saturday in Bath.

For the GFG this was a great day out. For £25 we got a full day of talks about all things funereal with a very good lunch thrown in. The turnout will have been gratifying for the organisers, I hope. Their warm welcome, typical of CDAS events, was appreciated. If you’re not an academic, and you know you do not have the cranial contents to be one, it’s reassuring to be put at your ease.

Academics sometimes speak a variant or dialect of English which makes them incomprehensible to ornery folk. There was little of that. Cleverness levels at these things can sometimes climb so steeply that we ornery folk fall off the back of what they’re talking about. There was little of that, either, but you’ve got to expect a bit; these are mental weightlifters after all. As for the papers, there are normally a few which unpack research into fields so rarefied that you can only wonder what on earth led the researcher there. A sprightly 20 mins on, say, the iconography stamped into funeral biscuits in a remote Yorkshire village, 1807-1809. Not the sort of stuff us non-acs can take away and use. There was none such. I regretted that.

There were too many highlights to describe in a blog post and too many talks to attend: so many that they ran alongside each other (in different rooms, of course). Let’s just focus on the groundbreakers: the natural buriers and the forward-looking undertakers.

Simon Smith and Jane Morrell from green fuse contemporary funerals do things differently from most funeral directors and they get different results. Okay, so they work out of Totnes; they wouldn’t be doing quite so many funerals like this in a working class industrial town like Redditch. But they offered persuasive evidence that their way of working has broad appeal to the sort of people – hands-on, self-reliant, not deferential to convention, not necessarily educated middle-class – who do not want to be relieved of the duty of caring for their dead and creating their farewell ceremony; rather, they want to play whatever part they feel they can. Inasmuch as they have little idea what they can do and whether they’ll be up to it, their exploration of the options under the guidance of the funeral director is vitally important. In the words of Simon and Jane, “This demands the funeral director actively listen to the client in order to understand the values and reality of the family and the community, to pick up on their needs and desires.”

Together with their clients, Simon and Jane collaboratively create send-offs which are demonstrably transformative of grief; send-offs which yield some truly remarkable statistics:

  • Of funerals arranged for people over 70 years old, 69% are cremations compared with a national average of 72%. But for those under 70, the figure drops (alarmingly if you are a cremationist) to just 35%
  • Most green fuse funerals are conventionally religious or broadly spiritual, and here comes the next astonishing statistic: of the over-70s, 28% opt for a non-religious or atheist ceremony but in the under-70s that figure plummets to just 9%.
  • In both groups only 7% opted for professional bearers.
  • Among under-70s, 42% opt for a trad hearse and among over-70s, 55% opt for a trad hearse. I thought the figures would have been lower.

For me, Simon and Jane made their case: if funeral directors interview their clients carefully and collaboratively and have a discussion with them which is values-based, not merchandise-based, they find themselves not only doing things markedly differently but also in a way which produces far higher levels of satisfaction. These are real funerals which make a real difference to people. But they take much, much longer to arrange and to perform. Can they pay for themselves?

There were two excellent papers on natural burial. One was given by Melissa Stewart of Native Woodland (featuring James Leedam on slide projector). She took us through the many sorts of natural burial ground we now find in different parts of the country according to topography and population density. We tend to think of natural burial as generic, but it most certainly is not. Some of these grounds are surrounded by miles and miles of open country; others by housing estates and busy roads. In aspect, they span the sublime and the _______________ (use whichever word you think applies.) Thank you, Melissa, for a brilliant neologism: treestone, n — a tree planted at the head of a grave.

Another paper, by Jenny Hockey and Trish Green of Sheffield University, looked at, among other things, how some people who opt for natural burial do so out of sense of rootedness in the place they have chosen to live, and as a demonstration of that. Out of this impulse, and because their identification with a particular place is such a strong descriptor of their identity, comes a sense of continuing existence after death, a sort of immortality, as if the self remained embodied, sleeping on in the evergreen, forever a part of the place. Thus is a natural burial ground a sort of dormitory of the dead: “He’s here.” This is in complete contrast with a local authority cemetery, where the dead go to be just that: dead. Any sense of their continuing existence always locates them somewhere else.

Now, I’m not at all sure that that is what they were saying, but it’s the idea I came away with. And it’s easily tested. I would hazard a guess that when the living talk to the dead in a conventional cemetery, their words fly up. But when they talk to their dead in a natural burial ground their words fly down. Anything in it? I really don’t know. Probably complete nonsense.

At the plenary session at the end there was a lively discussion of taste in memorialisation items and the legitimacy of grave visitors imposing their own taste by clearing away stuff left by others. The natural buriers came in for some unmerited stick here (and I apologise for the way I fluffed my own response). The whole point about true natural burial is that there is consensus about how the ground should look: people have made an informed choice and bought into the unspoilt, ground-zero concept. Grave visitors have both a right and a duty to keep it looking as it ought.

It was great fun, at Bath, to meet so many friends and to make new ones, and to come away with one’s head a-buzz with ideas. This was a typically inclusive event, and I would urge anyone with an interest in funerals, especially funeral directors and celebrants, to go to the next one. There weren’t nearly enough of you. I can understand any misgivings you may have. Well, these academics may be terrifically brainy, but they’re also very kind, human, hospitable and even interested in what we have to say.

Why, when the day was over and I discovered to my dismay that I had left my bank card at home, who was it who galloped to my rescue with a pound coin for the parking meter? None other than Professor Walter himself. Thank you, Tony. It was a lifesaver!

Greening grief

18 May 2010
Charles
No comments
Categories: celebrants, green funeral, Grief, natural burial

The GFG motored purposefully south yesterday afternoon to Chiltern Woodland Burial Park. It was a three-birds-with-one-stone mission: to have a look at this well-heeled natural burial ground; to hear the great Dr Bill Webster talk about grief; and to meet up with Louise from Sentiment and Jon from MuchLoved, two of Funeralworld’s Good Guys.

I think I’ve reached a stage now where I don’t know what I think about natural burial. On the one hand, there is the seductive loveliness of the best burial grounds; on the other, the seeming forgottenness of those whose gravesites have resolved themselves into indistinguishability. We are all forgotten eventually, of course, and our graves unvisited for some time before that. What would make the best sense of the environmental mission of Chiltern would be a re-use of graves policy—impossible under present legislation. In the meantime, I wonder if they’re burying enough people to recoup investment. The buildings are either very beautiful if you like that sort of thing, or unobjectionable if you don’t. There’s a gathering hall and a ceremony hall with lots of glass and a lectern a little like an elaborate bird table. The design of the site conforms to an elaborate conception of the architect that your experience should mirror “the inner journey that we humans where to order cialis online make as we honour and release the body of a loved one to the grave”.  This is not necessarily apparent, of course, but, in addition to money, a lot of thought has gone into this place.

Outside the hall I was greeted hospitably by Dr Bill, whom I had not met before, and invited to join his group of tea drinkers. Dr Bill is sharp, funny and humane. He talks a lot of sense, and in a way which people can relate to. I was a fan in around 1 second, possibly less.

A great deal of what he said about grief counselling related to funerals. Here’re just some of the things he said that I jotted down: “You have to make the words with which to put someone to rest—that which cannot be put into words cannot be put to rest … Put the dying and the death into the context of the whole life lived … Empowerment is the antidote for loss of control. Never do anything for those who grieve which they can do for themselves.”

There’s a big lesson here for funeral directors and celebrants, I think: “Never do anything for those who grieve which they can do for themselves.”

Do have a look at Dr Bill’s website. It’s full of excellent resources. Click here.

Going Out Green

2 October 2009
Charles
1 Comment
Categories: green funeral, natural burial

Rupert Callender made this observation of Dan Cruickshank’s The Art of Dying:

I was surprised by how little thought Dan had apparently given the matter. I thought everyone mused endlessly about their own deaths.

I don’t know that they do, Rupert. When, over in the US, Bob Butz was asked by his publisher to write a book about green funerals in three months, this was his response:

“Three months?” I said, incredulous. “That’s some deadline. Har. Har. But seriously, what do I know about planning a green burial? I’m no expert.”

For all his ignorance, Bob is predisposed to a green funeral:

Green burials came to interest me because, frankly, all the traditional ones I’ve seen over the years were a real drag. They left me thinking that there had to be a better way.

He’s a realist:

Although a reviewer once called me a nature writer, I’ve never been accused of being an environmentalist. I do what I can where the planet is concerned … At this point, I doubt very seriously that “going out green” will come anywhere close to rectifying the environmental mayhem I’ve wrought simply by virtue of being born

Bob embarks on his researches:

Only three weeks into this project and I’m beginning to wonder if I’m cut out for thinking about being buried all the time. For one thing, and I know this is going to come as a shock, it’s depressing.

He tracks down the Natural Burial Company, which is run by a good friend of the Good Funeral Guide, Cynthia Beal, with whom he tangles. He is withering about Ecopods:

…the Ecopod seemed to run contrary to the fundamental tenets of the natural burial movement … In the words of Jim Nicolow, “shipping a $3000 recycled coffin 5000+ miles to reduce burial’s environmental impact feels a bit like selecting the rapidly-renewable bamboo trim package to reduce the environmental impact of your Hummer.”

Bob digs his own grave—to see what it feels like. He reflects on the way people don’t discuss funerals:

I found this odd given that every other life-defining decision up to that point—getting married, having children, where to school those children—involved long and careful deliberation

He researches home funerals and embalming. He goes to see his father’s grave for the first time in years, to see how it makes him feel. He concludes:

For three months I thought about death more intensely than I think the average person should have to.But in an odd sort of way that was also the best part, too—that maybe in trying to die and be buried green I may now live my life a little bit better, too.

I hope this has whetted your appetite. This is an unpretentious and informative blunder through some of the mysteries of death and dying written by, this is important, an industry outsider. It is serious, funny and highly readable. At £11.25 it is a tad pricey—but heck, you can’t take it with you.

All shades of green in the green shade

2 February 2009
Charles
2 Comments
Categories: green funeral, natural burial

Progressive movements in the world of funerals mostly march resolutely forwards into the past. The past is that place where they did things properly, the place we need to return to if we are to reclaim the care of our dead and the rituals of their passing; the place we must to return to if we are to slough off the professionalisation of death and the supremacy (you could call it the dead hand) of the undertaker.

Not that it’s the undertakers’ fault that they became preeminent; that’s the fault of self-disempowered consumers. Let’s be certain of that.

Even for people who want to distance themselves from the care of the corpse, green burial looks like an attractively retrogressive, daisy-pushing option—low carbon, high ethics, no toxins, primal simplicity, rustic loveliness, all nature rejoices, bluebird sings, deer and antelope play, feather-footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole, etc.

It’s not necessarily cheap. Privately owned natural burial grounds do not benefit from subsidies and tax breaks available to local authority owned cemeteries. But green burial makes an attractive offer. Statistics generated for our guidance tell us that over 60 per cent of us would prefer burial to cremation if we could be buried in a nice place. And, as James Leedham of Native Woodland points out, there’s a saving to be made in not having to buy a headstone.

If you’re planning to go green there are things you need to know. Not all these things are nice if you are going to get real and compel ethical necessity to subjugate aesthetic wishfulness. Real green buriers do it for strenuously puritanical and ecological, not sentimental pretty-pretty, reasons.

Many criteria for natural burial are obvious and easy to adhere to—simple coffin made from locally sourced material, no embalming, local flowers unwrapped in cellophane. No problem.

Some criteria present definite difficulties.

First, you can’t have a delineated grave, neither may you, if you want to do it properly, mark the spot. Most natural burial grounds won’t let you. This can be very hard to bear. No, you can’t plant a tree on the grave—it would be too close to the other trees on the other graves, and in any case trees don’t like being planted in disturbed earth. Those natural burial grounds which have relaxed their strictures forbidding memorialisation now fight a losing battle against shrubs, teddy bears, windchimes and all manner of sentimental gewgaws which, in a natural setting, amount to trash. A thoroughgoing natural burial ground looks as if no one is buried there. If you want to overrule the dead person’s wish that you “Do not stand at my grave and weep”, then you will be able to find it using GPS, electronic marker or unobtrusive wooden markers only.

Second, true greens turn their faces against climate warming machinery. This comprises both machinery used to dig graves and maintain the burial ground, and motorcars used to get there. Almost all natural burial grounds require an object-defeating longer car journey than your local authority cemetery, and subsequent visits rack up what natural burial guru Ken West calls ‘grieving road miles’. If you have to visit after the funeral, therefore, you ought to do it on foot or bike. If you can’t, stay away.

Third, probably everyone who uses a natural burial ground fondly supposes that the corpse will decompose in an environmentally agreeable way in a process graphically described by Hamlet:

‘Your worm is your only emperor for diet. We fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for maggots. Your fat king and your lean beggar is but variable service, two dishes, but to one table. That’s the end.’

It’s a desirable ecological outcome for the body to compost rapidly and push up daisies, fatten maggots and enrich the soil. It’s called aerobic decomposition and it happens only if a body is buried in bug-filled topsoil. Any lower and decomposition is anaerobic; the body simply turns slowly to methane and sludge. It is against the law in the UK to bury a body with less than 2’6” of soil on top (2’ where soils conditions allow). But this law arguably only applies to local authority burial grounds and, in law, there is nothing to stop you from burying a body in a shallow grave or even on the surface, so long as it is covered with at least two feet of earth.

Many natural burial grounds bury at an unaccountable, cold, dark and lifeless six feet. This, more than anything else, makes a nonsense of present-day natural burial and is a typical example of what Dr William ‘Billy’ Campbell of Ramsey Creek, the first US green burial ground, calls ‘green-washing’. So far as I am aware there have been no studies conducted in the UK to determine optimal green burial depth. Billy Campbell has done something I have not heard of anyone doing in this country: he fills in graves with twigs, creating micro-channels to speed decomposition and encourage soil nutrients to rise to the surface rather than be leached into the water table.

When asked why they don’t bury closer to the surface, UK burial grounds tend to rehash what may or may not be a rural myth, namely that foraging foxes and/or burrowing badgers will use the burial ground as a restaurant and charge off with dangling limbs in their jaws. Green grounds also point out that if a corpse is buried close to the surface it stinks out the surrounding area. Well, from another point of view you could regard this as encouraging evidence of merry, useful decomposition. Noxious smells may make you gag but they never harmed anyone’s health. And they abate in a short time.

Billy Campbell confounds (or does he?) the myth of foraging animals:

‘Burial is a very ancient and very successful “low tech” solution for the concern that animals would be attracted to bodies. Pioneer cemeteries located in wild areas that contained animals such as grizzly bears were not disturbed. In the last decade at Ramsey Creek, we have seen absolutely no evidence whatsoever that animals are attracted to natural burial sites, despite the presence of dogs, coyotes, and the occasional black bear. Anyone who has ever dug or filled in a grave would be doubtful about such worries. Even relatively shallow natural burials where no casket is used are safe from animal interference.’

Fourth, are natural burial grounds sustainable? Do they have a reuse of graves policy? No, none of them. So, while such burial grounds, by virtue of having bodies in them, ensure the conservation of their sites, they remain in exclusive occupation until Doomsday by far fewer bodies than makes good green, or even common, sense. Vanity of vanities. What’s the solution? It’s difficult. Once a body is skeletised (8-10 years) it’s time to move on. In the middle ages they had charnel houses to put dug up bones in, but they seem unlikely to make a comeback. Would there be any objection to digging up the bones, grinding them and spraying them over the woodland or meadow? Aesthetic objections, possibly—but grinding’s what we do, after all, to bones burnt in a cremator. Legal objections for sure: you’d need an exhumation order to do it. But, let’s get real, it makes good green sense, doesn’t it?

Natural burial grounds have some way to go to become truly green, a truly ethical option, and they shrink from becoming so because they are commercial operations and need to be alluring to the consumer. Billy Campbell’s analysis is this:

‘In the U.K., dozens of “green burial grounds” are cropping up, but no clear standard is emerging. Projects differ widely in terms of aesthetics, social utility and ecological functionality. For example, most of the projects in the UK are so small – often less than 5 acres – or are located so haphazardly that they fail to achieve even modest conservation goals beyond that associated with not using excessive resources for burial or introducing toxics into the environment.

Consequently, the public will be confused, and might not recognize the difference between a superficially green (“green-washing”) project and one that makes a significant contribution to conservation and sustainability. The range of possibilities for the conceivable permutations for greener or more sustainable cemeteries is dizzying, and the market barriers for creating superficial projects are lower than that for creating larger and more functional projects. Without some broadly accepted rating system for projects, we can expect greater market fragmentation and a lost opportunity for funding socially and ecologically meaningful open spaces.

Natural burial grounds have a duty to educate the public and stop permitting aesthetic green-washing at the expense of ethical imperatives.

At the same time, the public has a duty to educate itself and stop being so squeamish and sentimentalising in the matter of disposing of its dead.

And, yes, Mr Campbell, it’s high time we had a rating system.

Annihilating all that’s made / To a green thought in a green shade

13 October 2008
Charles
No comments
Categories: green funeral, natural burial

I had to go to Wales to see the burial ground at Usk Castle Chase because it’s just been garlanded with the title of Green Burial Ground of the Year 2008.

Wales doesn’t know it’s Wales, of course: that’s simply the name its present tenants have given it. But it is a ‘country’ with a strong sense of national identity, something which makes me feel, as I drive towards the border, defensively prickly. Patriotism is too often a symptom of a bi-polar inferiority complex; its manifestations can be ill-natured. I anticipate being categorised as English. I am not. I am a republic of one.

My misgivings are groundless. The satnav goes on speaking to me in the easy way it always used. The road signs are intelligible, for all that they leave me coming up gasping for vowels. I am charmed by the Welsh way of slowing you down as you approach a sharp corner. Araf, say the signs, and I fancy they sound like the warning bark of a Welsh corgi: Araf-araf! Arrrrr…!

The burial ground is a large sloping meadow flanked on three sides by woods. Beside it is a simple wooden shelter. It is a blissful spot and the most complete contrast to any other burial ground I have ever seen, whether conventional or green. It is the fulfilment of the idea of a natural burial ground, utterly uncompromising.

There is no memorialisation allowed whatsoever, so there’s none of the possessiveness and territoriality that go with a conventional cemetery – no jealous demarcation and personalisation of plots, no visual jabber of talkative, decorated headstones, sunwashed artificial blooms, dead roses in cellophane, blue chippings, solar powered angels. There is no tingle-wingle from a single windchime. Nothing. Nothing at all but birdsong.

Most other natural burial grounds compromise – because grieving people can’t help feeling proprietorial about the grave site — and permit grave markers (albeit biodegradable and non-renewable), gardening of the plot and a certain amount of what green burial pioneer and guru Ken West elegantly terms ‘grieving waste’ – flowers, plastic pots, stuff. The result tends to be tawdry, half-hearted – in the worst cases, a sort of shanty town of the dead.

Usk Castle Chase probably scores as close to full marks as makes no difference according to Ken’s ultra-puritanical criteria of greenness. I was particularly pleased to learn that they bury at 1.3 metres, allowing bodies to rot aerobically and, therefore, environmentally usefully. Too many green grounds bury bodies at six feet; no one’ll never push up daisies from down there.

On the day I was at Usk I saw no freshly turned earth, no evidence at all that anyone has ever been buried there and no visitors. The words of Psalm 103 express it perfectly: As for man, his days are as grass: as a flower of the field, so he flourisheth. For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone; and the place thereof shall know it no more.

Anyone thinking about natural burial — and 64 per cent of the population say they favour it — needs to consider all this both from their own point of view and also from that of those they will leave behind. It’s not emotionally easy to embrace the idea that it is the whole place which stands as a memorial to each dead resident, but that’s what green burial logically means.

Green burial ought to be about sustainability in terms of the re-use of graves, too, after, say, 40 years. But I suppose no one would buy a plot on those terms. Not yet, anyway.

(The title of this piece quotes from Andrew Marvell’s The Garden.)