The Good Funeral Guide

Thomas G Long here, one of this blog’s great heroes. Though he comes at funerals from a Christian viewpoint, most of his ideas have a universal application.

There was a little light larking at the Dead Interesting blog last week as we debated best funeral songs for atheists. Off the tops of our heads we came up with You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere - Bob Dylan, No God – Darkest Hour, Heaven is a Place on Earth – Belinda Carlisle, and, from Rupert, a variation on the famous Bob Marley song: No Jesus, No Cry. Perhaps you can think of others?

Then I found this string over at Fluther in response to: What would be an inappropriate song to play at a funeral? Most of them are a little weak, but I have to declare a weakness for We’ve Only Just Begun – Carpenters, Stayin’ Alive – Bee Gees, and Who Wants To Live Forever? – Queen. Bitches Ain’t Shit by Dr Dre sounds a contemporaneously anarchic note much favoured at Brit funerals. But for me the clear winner is: Anything by ABBA. I don’t know that it’s possible to get inappropriater than that. Made me chuckle for the rest of the day. Oh, except that, now I think of it, Take A Chance On Me has got to be a pretty good way to go for an agnostic:

But. Seriously. Worst funeral song. It’s got to be My Way, surely? It’s clear in its renunciation of any divinity (otherwise you’d have done it God’s Way). Nothing wrong with that: it’s a defensible existential stance. But what about the message to spouse/partner, family, friends, work colleagues, neighbours – indeed, every else in the entire world? It’s perfectly clear. I didn’t need you. You meant nothing to me. I did it without you. Yes, and in case you were wondering, I was self-created, too.

Could there be a more self-regarding, more narcissistic funeral song than this?

I hate it. Got anything worse?

From their press release:

Singers for Funerals is the brainchild of two professional opera singers, mezzo soprano Kirsty Young and soprano Toni Nunn. Both have performer with professional opera companies across the UK and beyond, including Kirsty’s own company, Hatstand Opera. Between them, the two ladies have sung in over 600 venues in the UK, from cathedrals to tiny parish churches, theatres to town halls, mansions to marquees.

Kirsty Young is keen to bring all that performing experience to provide quality singing for funerals:
“After singing at various funerals over the years, we realised how music could be a great comfort to family members at a difficult time, by celebrating what their loved one enjoyed in life. It is often very difficult for churches to provide a choir to sing at funerals or cremations. Many families therefore had no choice but to use recorded music, where they might have preferred a real ‘live’ singer. We give families back that option for live music, sung by an experienced professional, at an affordable price.”

I like them. Check out their website and their voices here.

There’s a new book out about dying and death. It’s called, appropriately, The D-Word. Now, there’s a heap of books out there about long-term care of the very ill; there’s another heap about bereavement. We don’t urgently need more of them. But there’s hardly anything out there about grim D. We do urgently need more D-books.

I didn’t feverishly tear it free from its Amazon packaging. Two reasons. I know the author, Sue Brayne, slightly. On a personal level I like her a lot. She’s absolutely not one of these too-nice-to-be-true people you can meet too many of in the death industry. She tells it as it is. We met at a conference of conjoined quangos which has now re-badged as Dying Matters. I blogged about it intemperately at the time. I sounded off in the street afterwards as I walked with Sue to the station. She made no objection to the f-word, either. I honour her for that. I very, very much don’t want to not like her book.

Second reason? The father of a good friend went to hospital a fortnight ago. After conducting batteries of tests, the people who work miracles, the doctors, had that conversation with the family where they make it gently clear that, this time, there’s no cure, just care. He’s going to die. Probably quite soon. Unthinkable? No, they all knew it would happen sometime; he’s been getting old fast recently. But thought about? Not much. Some things you don’t think about till you have to.

So what my friend, and his family, and his dad all need is somewhere to go where they can find out about this business of dying. They need information. And because news like this can make you feel very lonely, very disconnected, they need to know how it felt for others, too, so that they can set their experience in a broader context. And for all the well-meaning advice I have been able to offer them, and not very much at that, it’d be so much better to have a book to recommend.

Come to think of it, I need some advice, too, on how to conduct myself towards this dying man and his family. I like them all very much. I’ve known them for years. They are good people. It’s going to be really hard.

So: reviewing Sue’s book isn’t an exercise in judicious objectivity. Bluntly, it had better be very good or I’m going to feel badly let down.

And the good news is that it is superb.

Sue sets out her stall: “The D-Word is based on the lived, felt, human response of what it’s like to die.” Her method? To tell it “through the personal narratives of relatives, friends and carers”. Sue draws conclusions from these stories. She also gives us lots of useful information and, by doing so, a language of dying. Literally. A vocabulary. So that we can talk about it and understand the hazards of not talking about it – and the hazards of talking about it in treacherous euphemisms.

Sue covers the ground. A little potted history tells us how we got to be so death denying. She examines the value of an existential explanation – a faith (though she doesn’t cover atheism). She examines how professional carers regard dying. There’s an excellent chapter about survivors of violent or sudden death, what helped and what didn’t. She talks about both where to find support and how to give it. She tells us how to support the dying. And she tells us what dying feels like, much of which is the fruit of her years of research with Peter Fenwick. She does all this in just 165 pages. She has interviewed the best possible people, and must be congratulated on finding them. She has even tracked down one of the UK’s best and nicest undertakers, James Showers, whose definition of a funeral is, I think, both moving and brilliant. A funeral, he says, transforms “a fact – that someone has died – into a ritual that is authentic and relevant to those who were close to that person, to help them say goodbye in public and with meaning … to turn their grief into something beautiful.”

I don’t know how many copies Sue has sold yet – it’s early days. She’s just sold another. I am sending one to my friend as soon as I have posted this. Thank you, Sue.

You can buy the book from Amazon. As recommended as it gets. Find it here.

Dave Matthews here, supporting my campaign for shallower burial.

The novelist Martin Amis has called for euthanasia booths on street corners, where elderly people can end their lives with “a martini and a medal”.

The author of Time’s Arrow and London Fields even predicts a Britain torn by internal strife in the 2020s if the demographic timebomb of the ageing population is not tackled head-on.

“How is society going to support this silver tsunami?” he asks in an interview in The Sunday Times Magazine today.

“There’ll be a population of demented very old people, like an invasion of terrible immigrants, stinking out the restaurants and cafes and shops. I can imagine a sort of civil war between the old and the young in 10 or 15 years’ time.”

Read the Sunday Times account here. And the Independent account here.

No new technology devised for the improved disposal of dead bodies has managed to achieve both efficiency and spectacle. There’s a perfectly good reason for this: the brains behind cremation and cryomation and resomation never reckoned spectacle to be a selling point. After all, funerals in the UK are private events, most of them. When they aren’t, it’s the processional that’s spectacular, not the disposal. Where’s the climax point in such a funeral? I’m not at all sure that there is one. Ought there to be? I don’t know. What do you think?

Over in Pattaya, Thailand, there’s a foreigner who records his assorted ramblings in a blog. When I say ramblings, I’m using his word. I’d have gone one better. It’s a good blog, an interesting read, and our rambling foreigner is a good photographer.

He recently witnessed the spectacular funeral pyre of a local Buddhist monk. So long did the construction of the pyre take, the monk had been dead for a year before being able to check out on it. At the top, a pic of the pyre. According to our rambler: “the pyre was an impressive sight, and they had even built in a degree of animation. Yellow tapes extended out on both sides into temple buildings, and unseen hands were pulling them to flap the wings and move the elephant head and trunk.”

Below is a photo of the pyre in its full glory. Read the blog post and see more photos here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Another home funeral story today. It’s beautiful. And the account was written by a man. So much of what read about home funerals is by women, so it’s good to have this balance.

It’s called No Grey Suits. Grey Suits = funeral home staff. You can download it as a pdf (all 52 pages of it). Very well written and illustrated. Very empowering. Here’s how its author, Jack Manning, begins:

This book is a love story, or more correctly, a story of love. And how a bunch of friends and family came together to celebrate the end of life and help each other get through the loss of their friend, mother, wife, daughter, sister and colleague.

Download the book here.