The Good Funeral Guide

Another gangster funeral today. No apologies for this. Gangster funerals are such ticklish affairs: it’s so difficult to gild a gangster when he’s dead.

Eamonn Dunne, special subject drugs, responsible for the murders of at least a dozen people including some of his own associates, was blown away while drinking in a Dublin pub.

His brother said of him: “You couldn’t ask for a better role model to be honest with you.” This drew a round of applause. The celebrant, Monsignor Dermot Clarke said with judicious ambiguity: “Life is precious and we should value it. Some have lost the sense of the sacredness of human life and that is to be regretted.” Mgsr Clarke also requested that nobody should smoke on church grounds. “The law of the land pertains here,” he told the congregation.

During the service, a football shirt, a ball and Dunne’s mobile phone were offered as gifts symbolising Dunne’s life journey. The offertory was accompanied by a woman singing a version of Bryan Adams’s ‘Heaven’.

You’ll Never Walk Alone – a song synonymous with his favourite soccer club Liverpool – was played as his coffin was lowered into the ground.

Towards the end of the service the congregation listened to Charlie Landsborough singing My Forever Friend. It is possible that those present supposed Eamonn to be the subject, not Jesus. Ah, well.

Read the account in the Irish Independent here.

Here’s the story condensed from a Guardian report, 27 September ’07:

John Joe “Ash” Amador, a 30-year-old American, was executed for the 1994 murder of a San Antonio taxi driver. He went to his death, still protesting his innocence, with an armful of lethal sodium pentathol and the words, “God forgive them, for they know not what they do. After all these years, our people are still lost in hatred and anger. Give them peace, God, for people seeking revenge toward me.” To which he added, as he slipped away: “Freedom … I’m ready,” and, finally, “Wow.”

During his final weeks as a resident of Texas’s death row, he had been in touch with Baroness Von Carrie Reichardt, a ceramicist who operates out of a studio called the Treatment Rooms in Chiswick.

“The Baroness”, as everyone seems to know her, has long been campaigning against the death penalty in the US and has been in correspondence with Amador for the past year or so. When it became clear that all his appeals were likely to be turned down, Amador asked her if she would join his wife and family as one of his five witnesses when he took the long walk.

The Baroness is a friend of Nick Reynolds, a sculptor who specialises in death masks. So when she said she was going out to witness Amador’s death and make a film about it, he suggested coming along and making a mask, so that the person whom the Texas justice system was about to snuff out would have a sort of life after death.

“It is very hard to put into words what it’s like,” she says of the execution. “It is totally surreal. You have to try to smile for them and he was trying to smile for us. It’s very hard and it took him nine minutes to die, but when he said ‘Wow’, he was looking so serene, it was as if he was looking at the angels.”

Once Amador had been certified dead, his body was taken to the local undertakers, but they were not too receptive to the idea of a cadaverous Englishman making a death mask on their premises, despite the wishes of the family … So Reynolds and the family carried the still warm body out and placed it in the back of a hired car for a one-hour trip to the woods near a town called Livingston, where Amador’s widow, Linda, had a small cabin. “We just put him on the back seat, unzipped the body-bag and took his arm out so that his wife could hold his hand,” says Reynolds.

At the cabin, Reynolds set to work. “It only took about two hours because we were paranoid that the police would arrive and ask what we were doing with the body,” he says. “So there we were, hiding out in this little wooden bungalow in the middle of the woods, like a Friday the 13th movie. I don’t normally talk to the bodies, but I did on this occasion. He looked so young because, although he was 30, he had hardly been outside for the past 12 years.”

Read the entire article here.

Here’s the film. I can’t embed it, so click here.

Hat-tip to Rupert Callender for this.

I cannot, in all conscience, leave Louise at Sentiment Farewells lying around as a footnote in a yesterday’s blog. The four playlists she has put together, music for the soul, she calls them, constitute a brilliant resource for the bereaved and also for funeral celebrants.

Do go over to her blog and see what she’s put together. Here playlists are eclectic; there’s lots here for everybody.

Click!

And in case you missed it, here’s Simon Smith’s playlist: click!

This was played at the end of the funeral of Carl ‘Fat Boy’ Williams last Friday. I’ve not heard it used at a funeral before, but isn’t it rather good? Celebrants out there, you might like to add this to the songs you recommend to your clients. Just don’t necessarily tell em about Carl — unless it’ll help to sell it.

Somewhere, Louise at Sentiment is posting fab playlists for funerals but I can’t find where she’s doing it. Give us the link, will you, Louise? Thanks, pet.

Heaven in the palm of your hand, says its creator.

Serious or spoof? Guess!!

Hangman’s Cottage in Dorchester. Once a place set apart and viewed with dread, now a decidedly des res

A few weeks back I lazily asked whether a private entrepreneur could open a crematorium in this country. I say lazily because I hoped someone would know the answer and spare me research time.

I supposed that only local authorities can get permission from the Secretary of State to build a crem. I was wrong, and I am very grateful to Tim Morris, Chief Executive of the Institute of Cemetery and Crematorium Management, for putting me right. There is, he tells me, nothing to stop a private operator from doing this – subject, he warns, to the usual planning procedures which would, of course, be influenced by the responses of people close to the proposed site.

We discussed the uneconomic model of our crems. In order to be more or less fuel efficient a crem must burn as many bodies as it can in a day. But because its incinerator is attached to a ceremony space (sometimes more than one), it must hurry the living through with indecent haste. It’s a thinly disguised production line. When winter comes it can’t keep up; when summer comes it hasn’t enough to do. 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. This is economically and environmentally a bad deal. It may also be bad value emotionally.

I have a feeling that any ceremony space (chapel if you like) devoted exclusively to farewelling the dead is always going to be bad value emotionally.  Churches, set in the midst of living communities, do a much more rounded job, incorporating as they do all rites of passage. Crems are set apart – in much the same way the public hangman used to be in English towns. In spite of the best and most careful efforts of those unsung people who work in them them, they have the wrong aura. We need to bring funerals back into the land of the living.

Our crems have, it turns out, addressed the environmental and economic issues. A few years back Wandsworth borough council proposed the model of a central crematorium serving several satellite ceremony spaces. The idea was that neighbouring local authorities could decommission their underused cremators and send their bodies over to a really efficient plant for incineration. The proposal foundered. Local authorities, it seems, take too much local pride in their crems to give them up. How would the idea have been greeted by users? Perceptions were never tested.

To get back to the main question. Could a private entrepreneur build a crematorium to serve the direct cremation market? It seems there would be no legal hurdle. Mr Morris reckons that securing the Secretary of State’s approval would be no problem. What would be harder, much harder, would be getting planning permission. In the US and Canada a great many crematories are built in industrial parks. That might not go down so well over here. In any case, there isn’t enough of a market for it yet.

But will people grow weary of schlepping joylessly to the crem for their funerals? Will a significant number begin to question the value of having the body at the funeral? Will they begin to opt, as so many do in North America, for a celebratory memorial service held at a more congenial venue with (optional) just the ashes present?

I see no reason why not. In the meantime, the model of a central crematorium serving several satellite ceremony spaces is an idea well worth revisiting. Public opinion should be tested.

Read past posts for more on this discussion and on the merits or otherwise of direct cremation.

It’s going to be interesting to track the development of, both, the right to die and its concomitant, the responsibility to die. Old age doesn’t just become physically unendurable, it gets to be economically unaffordable, too.

The darkness is increasingly going to fall at our behest. Choosing the moment will be straightforward enough. Humans live in the future. Our zest for now resides in our expectation of what lies in store for us next. We’ll know when we want to go:  no next, no point. Pass the dose, doctor.

Here’s a new poem by Fleur Adcock in this week’s Spectator:

Charon

Where is Dr Shipman when we need him
to ferry us across the fatal stream
and land us gently in Elysium?

Shipman, boatman, ferryman – whatever
the craft he plies to help us cross the river –
we seem to have been waiting here forever.

How did we get the timetable so wrong?
Things are becoming vague, and we’re not strong.
Life was OK, but it went on far too long.

When we’ve forgotten how to keep afloat,
Scoop us up, Doctor, in your kindly boat,
And carry us across the final moat.

Watch it