The Good Funeral Guide

You can tell how developed a society is by the price it puts on life. Could, rather. In the most developed societies there’s a re-evaluation going on. The Office of National Statistics calculates that death is now preceded by the unendurable prospect of an average 10 years’ chronic illness or dementia. It scares the hell out of us. No one wants to go there.

So there’s a national conversation about assisted suicide and self-deliverance. We read about Debbie Purdy and lovely Omar and we say, “If that was me… Yes, of course she should be allowed to. It’s what I want for me, too.”

What price life, now?

What price keeping all our old people alive, too? Can we afford it? Can we not incentivise them in some way to sign up to an accelerated end-of-life care plan? Yes, we’ve got ADRTs, a thin end of the wedge, but something faster? Because if we don’t, there’s going to be a heck of a doubly-incontinent lot of them when the baby boomers start their final, slow descent. And I don’t know who’s going to look after them. And I don’t know where the money’s going to come from. No one does.

So we’ve identified a brand new human right: the right to die. There’s been remarkably little fanfare about that.

But with rights come responsibilities. Have not the old a duty to vacate the stage, leave the building?

We’re getting our heads around it, this de-sanctification of human life. We’ll get our heads around the eu-word. We’ll have to. We have our abortions, after all.

So it’s interesting to see the Nuffield Council on Bioethics talking today about ways to incentivise organ donation. In the words of Management in Practice:

Under the Nuffield Council on Bioethics’ plans, organ donors would be put on a transplant priority list and their families would be helped with funeral expenses.

The priority list proposal would see donors at the front of the queue for kidney, heart and other organ transplants, while contributions would be made to the funeral expenses of dead donors’ relatives.

Financial incentives, “presumed consent” systems, personal “thank you” letters and certificates and souvenirs such as T-shirts and mugs could also be considered. The financial incentives may range from payments to the regulated selling of organs, eggs or sperm and a fully-fledged free market or just modest expenses.

Today’s Guardian quotes Dame Marilyn Strathern, professor of social anthropology at Cambridge University, who is leading the consultation working party: “We could try to increase the number of donors by providing stronger incentives, such as cash, paying funeral costs or priority for an organ in the future, but would this be ethical?”

Ethical? Cash for corpses? Leave it out, Dame Marilyn. You are the future.

Here’s a nice biz opp for someone in the UK: a jobs review site.

Wossat? It’s a site where people leave anonymous reviews about the company they work for. Very useful for people thinking about working for that company.

Over in the US they have a few of these sites. One of them is JobVent. As you might expect, it’s those who hate their job who are more likely to leave a comment than those who love it. But if, as a prospective employee, you evaluate judiciously, I’d have thought that this site would give you a pretty good insight into what to expect. If you’re thinking about working for Paragon Application Systems, for example, you’ll be impressed by a string if stuff like this:

I have worked for Paragon for 10 years. This company has a family-type atmosphere, and we genuinely care about each other. The owners are generous with the benefits, as well as praise for all of the employees. The employees respect each other and strive to work together as a team.

But you might detect an odour of rodent in this:

Why are all the reviews on the same date? Same person perhaps?

I found JobVent yesterday and checked out Service Corporation International, possibly the most incompetent corporate undertaker the world has ever seen and almost certainly living proof that no corporate, however stealthy, however well camouflaged, can ever thrive in the funeral market. There was one review when I first looked. This morning, seven. Six are extremely negative. The positive one looks like a plant.

I wonder what reviews our own dear corporates would get? And I don’t mean that in a nasty, snidey sort of way. It’s easy to guess the negatives, nothing new there. It’s the positives I’d be interested to see.

Over in Apple Valley, Ca, Stephen Atmore, 11 years retired from the local phone company, has gone back to work. He’s opening a crematorium in a strip mall and trying to get his head around it: “I still wake up every morning asking myself why I am doing this.”

Like a lot of people in the death business he was inspired to get stuck in as a reaction against the exploitative practices of service providers which he experienced when two close family members died. He was further affected by the spectacle, common enough in the US, exceedingly rare in the UK, of families on the side of the road advertising car washes to help pay for a funeral.

Says Mr Atmore: “This is for the economically challenged families who don’t want to and can’t spend the money on cremations.”

He’s not set his prices yet, but he’s going to keep them as low as he can.

He’s providing a service which no one in the UK is allowed to offer. You can bury people as a freelancer over here, but you can’t burn them. Under the terms of the 1902 Cremation Act only a local authority (Local Government Board) can do that:

The powers of a burial authority to provide and maintain burial grounds or cemeteries, or anything essential, ancillary, or incidental thereto, shall be deemed to extend and include the provision and maintenance of crematoria:

Provided that no human remains shall be burned in any such crematorium until the plans and site thereof have been approved by the Local Government Board, and until the crematorium has been certified by the burial authority to the Secretary of State to be complete, built in accordance with such plans, and properly equipped for the purpose of the disposal of human remains by burning.

The model of a British crematorium doesn’t work. In order to be more or less fuel efficient it must burn as many bodies as it can in a day. But because the incinerator is attached to a ceremony space it must hurry people through with indecent haste. It’s a thinly disguised production line which can’t, when winter comes, even keep up. You pay for the ceremony space whether you want to use it or not. Your fee is further inflated by a sum used to subsidise the maintenance of the cemetery.

What’s more, for the poorest people in Britain the state provided funeral payment will almost certainly fall short of the full cost. A budget cremation service would make all the difference.

Why should a Brit not be permitted, like Mr Atmore, to offer an alternative to that provided by the state? With local authorities increasingly contracting out their crematoria to big corporates like Dignity and Co-operative Funeralcare, there’s already more than a whiff of privatisation in the air.

How, under the Cremation Act, will it ever be possible for anyone to build a pyre for open-air cremations? This who want to do it must be thinking it through. I hope one of them will tell us.

Good to see that Malcolm McLaren will be going out in the anarchic style he did so much to popularise. We are all invited to observe a minute of mayhem at noon on Thursday.

More funeral arrangements here.

There’s a good piece over at Salon magazine which I’ve been holding over for a while to use on a slow news day in Deathworld. This is such a one. And what follows is a lot more nourishing than a bit of tittle-tattle.

The piece is by Fred Branfan and is titled Choose Death. What follows are extracts only – to whet your appetite.

This must be said about death: It is unacceptable. Who of us would design a world in which we spend our whole lives learning to live well only to die before fully experiencing our lives? Who of us, if we truly searched our heart of hearts, would really choose to die if we could live indefinitely in good health, able to learn and grow, in loving and meaningful relationships, doing work useful to our species, other living beings and the cosmos?

And what about the way it happens? This business of growing old, losing function and dignity, suffering, and pain?

A holocaust which will eventually claim the lives of every single person we have known, met, seen or heard, every loved one, every friend, every family member, every person who has lived before us and all who will follow us. Every one. Even us. Especially us.

And, sooner or later, we ask with Tolstoy, “How?” How, indeed, shall we live in the face of this knowledge, this outrage, this negation of everything we seek to be? Is there an alternative to denial on the one hand, and anger, bitterness, depression on the other?

There is.

Choosing to accept the unacceptable.

Choosing to accept the acceptable is very different from resignation, passive submission. Resignation is life-denying, a deadening, numbing reaction to life in which we die before dying. Choosing to accept is vital, life-affirming, an embrace of life.

No, it is our sweet, poignant and unique fate to alone have the ability to achieve genuine inner peace by choosing to accept what we know is unacceptable, reaching the outer limits of the creative tension between life and death, pain and bliss, love and fear.

It is as true as when Gautama Buddha articulated the Third Noble Truth 2500 years ago: It is possible to be happy in this world, through non-clinging, by experiencing life as we appreciate a sublime painting that we would not even think of trying to own, possess or control.

It is precisely because death is so unspeakable, so horrible, so unacceptable, that choosing to accept it can become our liberation, our pathway to the deepest set of experiences of which the human soul is capable.

Read the entire article here.

If you didn’t catch Rupert’s delightfully unbuttoned comment on yesterday’s post, have a look.

The interesting thing about the death deniers is that they don’t just put their hands over their ears and count noisily to ten until you stop. Whether death is the Old Enemy or just a Disgusting Old Man, it certainly brings out the streetfighter in the citizenry.

Up in Morpeth the town council was recently asked if it would permit a humanist funeral to be held in a community centre. Councillor Derek Thompson had this to say on the matter:

“Funerals are not what the centres were intended for when they were established, they are to be used for community recreation and social and leisure events. Holding them would be an inappropriate use of these buildings and we have no duty to provide them for this reason, so I’m strongly against this. I would also be worried about the effect they could have on people turning up for the next event after the funeral, whether it’s a bridge club or a children’s party.”

Whether the applicant had been a paedophile ring or a witches’ coven, you wonder if it would have elicited greater disapprobation.

Read the sorry story here.

Ever heard of Jane Jacobs? I hadn’t til this morning. I’m a fan already. I live in Redditch, a new town which must have looked great on paper but turned out a brutal, car-clobbered flop – even before a majority of misguided citizens voted in the felonious Jacqui Smith as our MP. If only the planners had read Jane Jacobs. In Ms Jacobs’ acute analysis, Redditch is a town not of neighbourhoods but of disparities. Spot on.

Who was Jane Jacobs? Here’s something from the website:

Jane Jacobs (1916-2006) was an urbanist and activist whose writings championed a fresh, community-based approach to city building … her 1961 treatise, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, introduced ground-breaking ideas about how cities function, evolve and fail, that now seem like common sense to generations of architects, planners, politicians and activists.

Jacobs saw cities as integrated systems that had their own logic and dynamism which would change over time according to how they were used. With a keen eye for detail, she wrote eloquently about sidewalks, parks, retail design and self-organization. She promoted higher density in cities, short blocks, local economies and mixed uses. Jacobs helped derail the car-centred approach to urban planning in both New York and Toronto, invigorating neighborhood activism by helping stop the expansion of expressways and roads … A firm believer in the importance of local residents having input on how their neighborhoods develop, Jacobs encouraged people to familiarize themselves with the places where they live, work and play.

Here’s Ms Jacobs:

“…that the sight of people attracts still other people, is something that city planners and city architectural designers seem to find incomprehensible. They operate on the premise that city people seek the sight of emptiness, obvious order and quiet. Nothing could be less true. The presences of great numbers of people gathered together in cities should not only be frankly accepted as a physical fact… they should also be enjoyed as an asset and their presence celebrated…”

Here’s a delightful description of the “intricate ballet” performed by people as they walk the pavements:

“Under the seeming disorder of the old city, wherever the old city is working successfully, is a marvelous order for maintaining the safety of the streets and the freedom of the city. It is a complex order. Its essence is intricacy of sidewalk use, bringing with it a constant succession of eyes. This order is all composed of movement and change, and although it is life, not art, we may fancifully call it the art form of the city and liken it to the dance — not to a simple-minded precision dance with everyone kicking up at the same time, twirling in unison and bowing off en masse, but to an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole. The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and in any once place is always replete with new improvisations.”

Jane Jacobs

Fans of Jane Jacobs keep her legacy alive by going on walks together. Jane’s Walk, they call this programme, “a series of free neighborhood walking tours that helps put people in touch with their environment and with each other, by bridging social and geographic gaps and creating a space for cities to discover themselves.” Each walk has a theme and, as they walk, everyone talks to each other.

In Toronto on 2 May they’re holding a Jane’s Walk with a death theme and will debate the proposition by its leader, funeral director Kory McGrath, that “the disappearance of funeral homes & burial grounds from urban neighbourhoods further removes us from our own understanding and acceptance of death, funeral rites & ceremonies, and compassion towards bereaved members of our communities.”

These are the themes the walkers will explore:

-How is a location of a funeral home or burial ground important to the living?
-How does a visual reminder of death affect the bustle of city life?
-What do we learn about our neighbours and ourselves when sacred buildings and spaces are a part of our urban landscape?
-Why have funeral homes & cemeteries moved out of the city?
-With the secularization and multiculturalism of cities, how can funeral providers and burial grounds be redesigned to integrate meaningfully into a diverse community and become part of the fabric, not a place that is taboo or morbid?

Brilliant.

Find out more about Jane Jacobs here and here.

Nice crazy story from the US, where the townspeople of Tracy City, TN, have just thrown out their mayor by electing a dead one instead. What an admirably creative protest vote.