The Good Funeral Guide

Consumers are best served by people whose interests are their interests – people who want what their customers want. Ethics-driven natural burial ground operators are a good example. This is an equation, so it works the other way around.

There’s not much understanding of this in the funeral industry. There are shining exceptions, but their example is seldom spotlighted. I’m thinking here of a big business like AW Lymn which goes out of its way to trade transparently and join up arranging a funeral to conducting it. I am thinking of AB Walker, a business old enough and sufficiently well thought of not to give a stuff when this blog criticises it, but which extended the hand of friendship and listened to what I said with astonishing good cheer and magnanimity. I am thinking, too, of businesses like Bristol South Funeral Services whom I visited yesterday. They’re minnows, a new start-up. If people knew just how lovely they are, let me tell you, they’d be swamped.

Perhaps it is because the funeral industry has been subjected to so little consumer scrutiny that honour, ethics and excellence, unsung, have gone unrewarded. Result? Too many funeral directors have lost their consumer focus. They seem to be more interested in each other, actually. In the absence of healthy competition there is, often, morbid, rabid mutual loathing of an intensity which would surprise and revolt you. Where the best are not singled out for praise and reward by consumer advocates (I hope I’ll soon be joined by many others), open, healthy competition for market share can turn into a very nasty, underhand turf war in which the interests of consumers are confounded. Funeral directors are united by nothing so much as a perceived threat to their business. Here’s an example. The prospect of people conducting home funerals, if reckoned realistic, will, I’ll put my house on it, bring some local groups together like a bag of rats for just long enough to agree to deny these people any help. I shall highlight the first case as soon as I hear of it. Perhaps I just have.

The most egregious example of turf war at its most clamorous, ugly, bloody, nasty, underhand and atrocious is that of the marketing of funeral plans. The consumer hears nothing of the clamour, only the sweet siren songs of helpful plan providers playing both to the finer feelings of decent, thoughtful folk who want to die with everything in order, and to their terror of steeply rising costs (32.8 per cent in the last five years). There’s a big, big question mark over this latter claim. In the words of one of my correspondents, “If we look at the elements of a cremation, typically costing £2500 now, around 28-30% (£700) goes in cremation and doctors fees. So if the rest of the charges (due to the funeral director) go up by 3% pa (about the rate of inflation), for five years, that £1800 will rise to £2086. So for the Dignity prediction to be true, that funerals will cost £4,000 by 2015, that means the price of the cremation and doctors fees will have to rise to nearly £2000! This is clearly nonsense (or the reason why Dignity is buying crematoria!)”

The opening shots in this war were fired, I think, by the disgraced Service Corporation International (now, as the result of a management buyout, Dignity, and no longer scandal ridden). So effectively have Dignity and The Co-operative Group sold their plans and cornered future market share that consumer choice in the future is under the gravest threat. The independents are fighting back, but they can’t risk taking hits and already some are complaining that they are having to honour plans made 15 years ago for no profit. The winners will be the The Co-op and Dignity, whose prices are currently higher than most independents, who do not, generally, offer the same level of personal service and, in the case of The Co-operative, is gravely susceptible to negligence and malpractice.

Do these plans offer anything like value for money? In the words of my correspondent: “If you buy the Co-op plan over 5 years, the total cost of their mid plan rises from £2825 (already nearly £300 above the cost of an average funeral – the Golden Charter mid plan is £2549) to £3825 (another 6% + pa), so the customer is actually paying for the projected price rise themselves!”

Does an insurance scheme offer better value? We now hear of insurance companies who will pay out only to funeral directors who will bung them £250 first. There’s no shortage of scavengers picking the pockets of the dead.

Every funeral plan sold denies those responsible for arranging a funeral their choice of funeral director; every plan sold is a nail in the coffin of breadth of choice. What seems to be the consumer’s friend is in fact the consumer’s enemy.

If independent funeral directors were governed by the best interests of their clients they would call this war off – because there’s an equation at stake here. Instead, they are drumming up their own destruction. And they won’t stop, it’s too desperate and way beyond the reach of reason, neither will charities like Age Concern (Age Concern, for heavens’ sake!!) stop promoting the Dignity plan, until we can blow a whistle loud enough and show the world a better way to pay for a funeral.

My correspondent thinks this is a case for the OFT. I suspect that this is a cause better served by consumer education. You think?

Check this out. BBC Radio Four’s Soul Music. All about Dido’s lament. You’ve got seven days starting now!

Most people don’t reckon to look their best when they’re dead, but this was not how the status conscious citizens of Palermo in Italy saw it.

Starting in 1599 the Capuchin friars were mummified or embalmed, then displayed, standing, in the catacombs beneath their friary. The idea appealed to the wealthy citizens of Palermo, who clamoured to join them. Permission was granted and, over the centuries, their numbers grew and grew. The custom was only discontinued in the 1920s.

There to this day they stand or sit or lie, gathered according to profession, wearing the clothes they wore in life. They now constitute a fascinating record of social history – and an object of appalled fascination to goggling tourists.

Around 8,000 desiccated corpses gregariously survive in varying states of repair, their expressions altered over time, many of them now seeming silently to be singing in chorus, nattering, making merry or expostulating. One of the last to be entombed was a child, Rosalia Lombardo, who remains to this day touchingly well preserved.

There’s an excellent article by AA Gill here.

Be sure to see the photos which go with the piece here.

There’s more about Rosalia here.

There’s a melodramatic clip about Dario Piombino-Mascali, a palaeopathologist who is working hard to preserve Sicilies many mummies, here.

There’s a website full of pictures plus some very good links here.

Lastly, here is a YouTube film, described by a commenter most appropriately as “sweetly macabre.”

Is it just me or do you, too, feel that it seems like a long time ago since there was a consensus on climate change? I signed up to it because I met lots of people I liked and admired who had already subscribed and who read lots of books about it and quoted terrifying scenarios and insisted, “You must see this amazing thing on YouTube.”

I also signed up to it because I don’t understand science but I do trust scientists – in much he same spirit as Hugo Rifkind: “when I can’t be arsed properly to understand something, I tend to defer to those who can. I trust engineers to build bridges and I trust doctors to cure diseases. Likewise climatologists on man-made global warming. Most of them seem to believe in it. They might all be wrong, but they’re less likely to be wrong than I am. Call me a mindless stooge, but that’s good enough for me.”

Now, I guess, there are lots of us who are not so sure. There was the Climategate scandal: all those hacked emails which revealed, in the words of James Delingpole, “Conspiracy, collusion in exaggerating warming data, possibly illegal destruction of embarrassing information, organised resistance to disclosure, manipulation of data, private admissions of flaws in their public claims and much more.” With this scandal came allegations that climate science is driven by a political agenda, post-normal science, which encourages its followers to suppose that it is quite all right to lie if the cause is noble. Again, Delingpole is the one who writes most attractively about this.

No wonder Peter Preston thinks we need an eco-prophet to galvanise us.

If people are going wobbly on climate change, I wonder how they’re feeling about this in the natural burial movement?

No funeral director, however brilliant, can stimulate an appetite for their product – because we pass their way but once. But a funeral director can sign up tomorrow’s customers today by the ingenious means of selling them a pre-need funeral plan.

Pre-need plans look like a very good bet. They’re inflation-proof. And they are easy to sell. Just tweak people’s consciences by telling them that it’s a helpful and thoughtful thing to do for those who will be charged with disposing of you and you’ve got a win-win-win.

The Co-operative Group and Dignity, in particular, have done an incredibly good job of selling their pre-need plans. So much so that the independent sector is finding that tomorrow’s market increasingly belongs to these big conglomerates. As turf wars go, this one is looking very one-sided.

The more so with the Co-op’s proclamation on 5 March of a staggering 21 per cent growth in sales of pre-need plans in 2009. If I were an independent I’d be writing off my future.

Are pre-need plans the best way of paying for a funeral? I haven’t the financial literacy to work that out. I wonder if any reader of this blog has a view or, better still, an analysis.

What is certain is that consumer choice is under grave threat from funeral providers who, for the most part, cannot rival independents for personal service or value for money.

Read the incredibly depressing Co-op announcement here.

One more go at Canada’s Times Colonist. A rich seam, this.

There are 13 obits in the paper. Of those, 3 opt for no service; 3 opt for a celebration of life (I’m not sure exactly what that is, but at least one of them’s not a funeral); 4 opt for a memorial service; and just 3 opt for a funeral (all burials by the look of them). That means 8 out of 13 of these dead people will duck out of/be spared a conventional funeral. By UK standards, unthinkable.

There seem to be three reasons for the decline of the Canadian funeral.

First, older people (okay, seniors if you insist) move to retirement places and, uprooted from the place where, all their lives, they have done what was expected of them, feel disconnected from social conventions – fancy-free and free for anything.

Second, having moved to a retirement centre, these people suppose that there’ll be no one to come to their funeral.

Third, having been to awful funerals in the past, these (liberated, it has to be said) people reckon a funeral is not for them, so they specify: no service by request.

The local funeral director, McCall’s, is clearly so concerned by this that they have put a half-hour discussion of the no-funeral option on their website in the hope that people will reconsider.

In the UK we have retirement centres and more than enough experience of bleak and meaningless funerals.

So, why is it taking us so long to catch up?

Listen to the discussion on the McCalls site here: No Service By Request

A Christian funeral proclaims the fierce, happy truth that ‘Death is swallowed up in victory’. As Christians see it, Sin corrupts and depraves, Death annihilates and nullifies. Both are the spawn of Satan, who is Evil, the mortal (lit) enemy of God who is Good and, the theology goes, the victor in the end. It’s pure Star Wars. Nice idea, good plot, great movie, but, for so many people, no more than that. To believe, for them, requires an impossible feat of suspended disbelief resulting in that narked, defiant expression non-believers wear at religious funerals. There’s a good example of this over at Carla’s blog, where she reflects feistily and funnily on resurrection: “my caregiver Alexa wanted to know if my new perfect body would have red hair and great tits because otherwise it would be a downgrade.”

Once you’ve established the certainty of rising in glory you can look death coolly in the eyes and see it clearly for the howling, sneering, brutal, destructive hooligan it is. If you can beat this mindless yob up, you’re obviously going to whoop a bit. Thus, St John Chrysostom:

Let no one fear death, for the Death of our Saviour has set us free. He has destroyed it by enduring it.

He destroyed Hades when He descended into it. He put it into an uproar even as it tasted of His flesh. Isaiah foretold this when he said, “You, O Hell, have been troubled by encountering Him below.”

Hell was in an uproar because it was done away with.
It was in an uproar because it is mocked.
It was in an uproar, for it is destroyed.
It is in an uproar, for it is annihilated.
It is in an uproar, for it is now made captive.
Hell took a body, and discovered God.
It took earth, and encountered Heaven.
It took what it saw, and was overcome by what it did not see.
O death, where is thy sting?
O Hades, where is thy victory?

Resounding stuff. Intriguing tense change. And at least Christians implicitly recognise that the death of the body is potentially catastrophic, rendering living pointless.

What, then of those who cannot assure themselves of victory despite the knockdown on the deathbed? Is death, for them, defeat? Is having your body brought to a funeral like being paraded, accompanied by your shamed family and friends, as a vanquished captive at an emperor’s triumph? Can you make of this catastrophe something at least acceptable? Can you make it all right by calling death your friend? Well, we try, don’t we, with all that stuff about circles of life and leaves falling off an oak tree and death is nothing at all and I am not there I did not die and death is only an old door set in a garden wall; on quiet hinges it gives at dusk when thrushes call? Secular celebrants have gallons of this emollient balm to slap on.

For all these brave, naff words, twenty minutes at the crem looks to an observer like sullen surrender, a huddled duty-shuffle past the Old Enemy.

You can at least deny the Old Enemy this public humiliation by not having a funeral at all. I’m surprised more people don’t.

Click the pic to make it huge.

lap·i·dar·y—adjective: characterized by an exactitude and extreme refinement that suggests gem cutting: a lapidary style; lapidary verse. Of, pertaining to, or suggestive of inscriptions on stone monuments.

I wandered over to the Times Colonist in Canada this morning. It’s a while since I’ve been. The obituaries are some of the best. They often embody a really nicely written epitaph – a lapidary epitaph. The sort of epitaph you find in English churches before the Victorians pumped in hot air and sonority. Jane Austen’s is as fine a model as you could find:

In Memory of JANE AUSTEN, youngest daughter of the late Revd GEORGE AUSTEN, formerly Rector of Steventon in this County. She departed this Life on the 18th of July 1817, aged 41, after a long illness supported with the patience and the hopes of a Christian. The benevolence of her heart, the sweetness of her temper, and the extraordinary endowments of her mind obtained the regard of all who knew her and the warmest love of her intimate connections. Their grief is in proportion to their affection, they know their loss to be irreparable, but in their deepest affliction they are consoled by a firm though humble hope that her charity, devotion, faith and purity have rendered her soul acceptable in the sight of her REDEEMER.

At the Times Colonist we find this in commemoration of STEPHENSON, Colin Patrick October 6, 1964 – February 21, 2010:

Living courageously, often defiantly, with HIV/AIDS for many years, Colin was a man whose imposing stature was matched by a huge heart. Known for being stubborn, opinionated, and a consummate devil’s advocate, he will be remembered most for his sense of humor, his thoughtfulness and honesty, and above all his kindness, which he shared among a diverse network of friends, family and co-workers. All who met Colin were struck by his fierce independence, passion for fairness, and constant attention to friends and family. His was a life defined by caring for others. Predeceased by his father, Richard, he is survived by his mother, Ruth, his partner, Shawn, his sister, Jennifer, brothers Greg (Paivi) and Tim (Kathy), and aunts Joan (Jim), Prue (Jack), and Ruthie.

Numerous cousins, nephews, and nieces will miss his hugs and jokes. All will miss the warmth of his twinkling eyes, infectious laugh, and soft flannel shirts.

I’ve probably chosen the best of the crop. Read the rest here.

I was struck, as I read, by how many of these obits end by announcing there will be no funeral. It set me wondering… More matter for another blog post.

THE proprietor of an Indian restaurant next-door to a proposed funeral parlour is concerned the development will turn diners off their pappadums and vindaloo.

My thanks to Andrew Plume for pointing me to this excellent documentary on Channel 4, Love, Life and Death in a Day. First broadcast in Feb ’09 it follows births, marriages and funerals in Bristol on Midsummer’s Day, and features Rachel and Liz of Bristol South Funeral Service, whom I am booked to go and see next week. It’s a lovely piece of film-making. There’s so much more to it than death. Hugely recommended. Watch it here.