The Good Funeral Guide

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One interesting fact I encounter is what constitutes a ‘religious funeral’. I have on a number of occasions met and prayed with distressed familes who have had humanist funerals because they thought that ‘non-religious’ meant C of E!

Comment in the Guardian here.

Posted by Lyra Mollington

Apart from a brief encounter with cancer when I was in my forties and a slightly dodgy back, I am in good health for a 74 year old.  Neverthless I was perturbed to discover that I am only six months older than Jane Fonda.  However, as my mother used to say, it’s not what’s on the outside that counts…  She also used to advise me to study hard because I was unlikely to bag myself a rich husband or indeed any husband at all.  How wrong she was!

This morning I awoke (always a good start to the day) to the dulcet tones of James Naughtie and a nice cup of tea made by Mr M.  By the time I was in the kitchen preparing Colin’s breakfast, it was Thought for the Day.  Have you noticed how they cleverly begin with something topical and then, before you know it, they’re talking about Jesus? 

On Tuesday I was especially interested to hear Canon Angela Tilby telling us about death.  I don’t know how I missed it, but apparently it’s Dying Matters Awareness Week.  She was just getting to her point – how to talk meaningfully about something we don’t really understand – when Colin started barking at one of the cats who occasionally risk life and limb by straying into our back garden.  Frustratingly, I heard only the words scepticism, brutal and metaphor which made me even more desperate to know how it ended. 

Later that day, when my grandson Sebastian popped in after work, I asked him to show me how to find Angela’s podcast.  I could have done it myself of course but I like him to think that I rely on his expertise.  Which, come to think of it, is how I bagged the husband my mother said I would never get.

With Colin safely curled up in his bed, Mr M. preparing supper and Seb surfing the web, I listened again to Tuesday’s Thought for the Day.

As Canon Angela concluded with the words, ‘Death, though a change of state, is not the end of being,’ I noticed Seb rolling his eyes.  I was perplexed – Angela had spoken so movingly about how she helps people come to terms with death through the language of faith.  As a family I would say we are all at the agnostic end of the Anglican spectrum.  However, I’m beginning to think that Seb might be one of those aggressive atheists one hears so much about. 

He asked me if I had ever seen a ‘brilliant and funny’ website called Platitude of the Day.  I told him that I might take a look if I had some spare time.

I have to confess that the moment Seb left, I clicked on the link.  I am afraid that Mr Peter Hearty (the author of Platitude of the Day) had deliberately misinterpreted Angela’s wise words.  Indeed, I was taken aback to discover that he does this to all the contributors of Thought for the Day.  However, to my great shame, after reading his archives, I was addicted. 

Where Angela speaks of how we soften the language of death by the use of metaphor, Mr Hearty writes, ‘You would think that people… would be more candid when one of your loved ones dies, and say things like, “Well that’s the end of your husband that you’ve been married to for the last 50 years. He’s gone, dead, kaputt, finito, so you just better get used to it.” Oddly, they don’t. They tend to try and soften the blow, even though they don’t believe in the invisible magic afterlife.’

He then gives her a rating of 5 out of 5 – extraordinarily platitudinous.

Angela and Peter are both sincere in their beliefs. I am grateful to both of them for giving me so much to think about in this week of Dying Matters Awareness.  I am also grateful to Seb for finding me this article and video about Ms Fonda’s plastic surgery — here. 

An email flies in from a consumer advocacy org in the US. It’s about a British funeral consumer, let’s call him Jim, who has asked them for help. Jim has been told by his funeral director that there will be no funeral until he pays most of the bill upfront. Jim can manage much of the bill now, and can pay the balance very soon, but his funeral director won’t budge and the funeral is just days away. So Jim appoints another, more reasonable, funeral director, who rings up FD1 and says he’s coming to collect the body. FD1 refuses to release it.

What, the consumer advocacy org wanted to know, is Jim’s legal position?

I responded with the standard spiel. The executor/administrator is the legal ‘possessor’ and ‘controller’ of the body and it is an offence for anyone except the coroner to withhold the body from that person. Further, there being no property in a corpse, it is illegal to arrest one for debt. What’s more, it is almost certainly lawful to exercise reasonable force to gain (or regain) lawful possession of the corpse.

This applies, of course, whether or not the consumer has entered into a contract with the funeral home. A dead person cannot be used as a bargaining chip, and the executor can take their dead person home whenever, within reason, and as often as they want. I’m almost certain that’s right. 

And then my mind wandered sideways. For a long time I have wondered what it is legal and what it is illegal to do to a dead body. What constitutes what Americans classify ‘abuse of a corpse’?

And I wondered also about something else that’s been bugging me for a while: what status does routine embalming confer upon a body?

Having more pressing, urgent and duller things to do, I went a-googling. This time, I put in my thumb and pulled out a plum. Actually, two plums.

Plum One

The law case that altered the legal maxim that ‘the only lawful possessor of a corpse is the earth’ was the Anthony-Noel Kelly case. He is an artist. In 1998 he exhibited casts of body parts which had been smuggled out to him by lab technician Niel Lyndsay from the Royal College of Surgeons. Both were arrested and charged with stealing human body parts.  At the trial, the defence submitted at the close of the prosecution case that (i) parts of bodies were not in law capable of being property and therefore could not be stolen, and (ii) that the specimens were not in the lawful possession of the college at the time they were taken because they had been retained beyond the period of two years before burial stipulated in the Anatomy Act 1832, and so did not belong to it. The trial judge rejected those submissions, ruling that there was an exception to the traditional common law rule that there was no property in a corpse, namely that once a human body or body part had undergone a process of skill by a person authorised to perform it, with the object of preserving it for the purpose of medical or scientific examination, or for the benefit of medical science, it became something quite different from an interred corpse and it thereby acquired a usefulness or value and it was capable of becoming property in the usual way, and could be stolen. The same applies to body parts “if they have acquired different attributes by virtue of the application of skill of dissection and preservation techniques for exhibition and teaching purposes“.

There we have it. “Preservation techniques for exhibition … purposes.” Does this apply to bodies embalmed for viewing? After all, they have undergone a process of skill.  If Jim’s detained dead person has been embalmed, can his dead person now be classed as property?

Plum Two

The second discovery comes from a case before the European Court of Human Rights in 2007. Briefly, two men were killed in a firefight with Turkish security forces. When things had died down, members of the security forces cut the ears off the corpses.  The applicants complained of violations under Article 3 of the Convention on Human Rights, which prohibits torture, and “inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment”. The court’s judgement was that it appeared that the deceased’s ears had been cut off after they had died. Article 3 had never been applied in the context of respect for a dead body. Human quality was extinguished on death and, therefore, the prohibition on ill-treatment was no longer applicable to corpses; notwithstanding the cruelty of the acts concerned in the instant case. It followed that there had been no violation of art 3 on that account.

I don’t want to speculate on the implications of that.

Information source here.

Click on the photo to make it bigger. Note the address on the headstone — for a Traveller. Anyone know why?

Thanks to Phoebe Hoare for this

From an article in Stuff.co.nz:

New Zealanders may be shy and reserved, but we hold long, personalised funerals for our loved ones, and show far more emotion than Norwegians, Swedes, English and Scots.

Our funerals lean towards the American style, where everything – down to the cup of tea and biscuits afterwards – is organised by a funeral home.

Auckland researcher Sally Raudon, with the assistance of a Winston Churchill Memorial Trust grant, researched death, dying and funerals in New Zealand, and the four other countries.

The results were surprising, given the perceived similarities between the countries, particularly when it came to the time between death and a funeral.

In New Zealand funerals generally happen about three to five days after someone has died.

In England one to three weeks is the norm, and in Stockholm, Sweden, the average interval between death and the funeral is five to six weeks.

And the Swedish do not embalm, she said.

“We embalm almost automatically. That’s because a lot of our funeral directors went to the US in the middle of last century and came back with these techniques to be more professional.”

In New Zealand many people speak, and most ceremonies last about an hour. “When we have a funeral it is not uncommon for someone from the family to talk, maybe a work colleague, someone from a sports club. Sometimes it is like an open mic session. And if it is a young person who has died, it’s common for up to 12 people to talk,” Raudon said.

“Our funerals are very unusual because we focus intimately on the person. New Zealand funerals often bring together all the parts of someone’s life to present a biography.

“We think things like using a celebrant, showing photos of the person and having several people speaking, are normal. But that isn’t what happens in other countries.”

“In Norway and Sweden using photos is frowned on as too personal, and in England they say they don’t have time for that kind of personalisation.

Raudon said there was now a trend in New Zealand at the other end of the emotional scale – direct disposal – where a person could request they be put in a plain casket and taken directly to be cremated, without a funeral service or viewing.

Tamara Linnhoff of the Good Funeral Guide NZ here tells me in an email that  ”NZ is still way behind the UK in terms of talking openly about funeral wishes and so the vast majority of families make decisions guided by traditional funeral directors.” 

Find the Stuff.co.nz article here.

Bryan and Catherine Powell, founders of Powell and Family Funeral Directors and Powell and Family Direct, are hosting an open meeting for all funeral directors interested in remodelling their business as a social enterprise. It’s called Social Enterprise For Funeral Directors, and it’s being held on Saturday 19 May, 11am til 3pm in their Droitwich office at 15 North Street, WR9 8JB. Book your place by ringing 01905 827 767 or email bryan.powell@powellandfamily.co.uk.

We think…

The team at the GFG has been following Powell and Family with interest. Here’s a dynamic new business run by a husband and wife team who possess impressive business savvy combined with a love of what they do. They’re the real deal, we’ve no doubt about that. 

We’re also fans of the social enterprise model for funeral businesses, as we outline on our sister site, CommunityFunerals.org.uk – here. We like the social enterprise model because of its potential to offer better service to the bereaved. We also like it because we think it the ideal vehicle for idealistic, forward-looking funeral directors. 

For such funeral directors, re-branding as a social enterprise sends out a signal all their clients want to hear. It gives these funeral directors a massive competitive advantage because it enables them to set themselves visibly apart from their  rivals. 

The Community Interest Company – CIC – model offers particular and perhaps unexpected benefits. For example, FDs retain control of their business and pay themselves what they think they deserve. Sure, they can’t sell up at any time – but they can arrange an advantageous handover. 

Those funeral businesses which re-brand as social enterprises will have opportunities to work together, on a joint venture basis, while at the same time preserving their independence and individual character. This is new and unexplored territory. 

We at the GFG thank Bryan and Catherine Powell for inviting us to the meeting on Saturday. We’ll be there – as detached observers, needless to say. We don’t do business, we do scrutiny. 

We hear that an ITV camera crew is going to be there too. They want to film cutting-edge funeral directors for an upcoming programme. We rather think they’ll be coming to exactly the right place. 

Posted by Vale

Yale University is starting to experiment with free open access video based learning.

One of the courses it’s offering is run by Shelley Kagan who is Clark Professor of Philosophy at the University. It’s all about death. This is the course introduction:

There is one thing I can be sure of: I am going to die. But what am I to make of that fact? This course will examine a number of issues that arise once we begin to reflect on our mortality. The possibility that death may not actually be the end is considered. Are we, in some sense, immortal? Would immortality be desirable? Also a clearer notion of what it is to die is examined. What does it mean to say that a person has died? What kind of fact is that? And, finally, different attitudes to death are evaluated. Is death an evil? How? Why? Is suicide morally permissible? Is it rational? How should the knowledge that I am going to die affect the way I live my life?

There are 26 lectures published as videos online. You can find them here.

If you are a reader rather than a watcher. Professor Kagan also asks the question ‘Is Death Bad for you’ in an essay published in the – online – Chronicle of Higher Education. This gives you a flavour of the discussion:

People sometimes respond that death isn’t bad for the person who is dead. Death is bad for the survivors. But I don’t think that can be central to what’s bad about death. Compare two stories.

Story 1. Your friend is about to go on the spaceship that is leaving for 100 Earth years to explore a distant solar system. By the time the spaceship comes back, you will be long dead. Worse still, 20 minutes after the ship takes off, all radio contact between the Earth and the ship will be lost until its return. You’re losing all contact with your closest friend.

Story 2. The spaceship takes off, and then 25 minutes into the flight, it explodes and everybody on board is killed instantly.

Story 2 is worse. But why? It can’t be the separation, because we had that in Story 1. What’s worse is that your friend has died. Admittedly, that is worse for you, too, since you care about your friend. But that upsets you because it is bad for her to have died. But how can it be true that death is bad for the person who dies?

You can find the essay here. Worth reading.

We’re huge fans of Poppy Mardall here at the GFG-Batesville Tower. Just you watch her, she’s going to go far (when she gets started, that is; she launches in a couple of months’ time; we’ll be sure to tell you all about it).

Poppy went to the art on Sunday, to the David Shrigley show at the Hayward. Shrigley’s a pretty sardonic kind guy and, to her unsurprise, Poppy found some deathy stuff which she snapped on her phone and sent along to cheer us all up. As Poppy observes, “I think artists know a lot about death because they allow themselves to think about it.”

More about David Shrigley here  here and  here  People get Shrigley tattoos. Look out for them on his website. 

Thank you, Poppy! 

Posted by our religious correspondent, Richard Rawlinson

RR writes: I had planned to discuss funerals in Islamic cultures, but concluded anyone interested could find such information elsewhere. See link to 10 Muslim Funeral Traditions here:

Instead, I want to address concerns about Islam’s conflict with faith-tolerating, secular society. This is not about funerals per se, but it’s waving the flag for freedom in a forum that celebrates choice in the field of secular and religious funerals.

A few years ago, I worked for a time as an expat in the Middle East, where I interviewed for the Catholic Herald the Bishop of Arabia about the struggle to attain the same religious freedoms for Christians in Arab nations that Muslims enjoy elsewhere in the world. A few weeks ago, an Arab friend I met in the region visited me in London, and conversation turned to grief between Islam and the West.

As he drank my wine, he described himself as a moderate-but-observant Muslim who admittedly lapsed on some observances. He said he was offended by the way, since 9/11/01, Islam has been defined by despotism, claiming the West is demonising his faith as purely radical, and thus impeding progress in battling terrorism – effectively consigning us to a state of permanent war with the world’s billion-plus Muslims.

I replied by asking him if he would support the battle against terrorism by speaking out against the uses of the Quran for radical purposes. After all, he perceived himself to be a Muslim who embraced our freedom culture, for whom sharia is a matter of private belief, not public mission. Yet he stuck to the line that the West was inflaming the ‘Arab Street’, and seemed reluctant to link ‘real’ Islam with regarding women as chattel; killing those who apostasise from Islam; institutionalising religious intolerance in society, or regarding Jews as subhuman.

The problem is that while moderate Muslims are a reality, they are often in denial that Islam itself is in conflict with secular society, because it’s not merely a religious doctrine, but is a comprehensive socio-economic and political system whose tenets are fundamentally at odds with democracy.

Almost from the beginning, the West has tempered religion by acknowledging the legitimacy of secular institutions, thus making space for individual freedom.

Like Communism, Islam doesn’t ‘render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s’ but rather aims to control the state without being subject to it. By insisting on the submission of everything to the will of Allah, they end up with the Taliban, Iranian Mullahs and al Qaeda.

All religions are exclusive, but Islam almost immediately developed into a state which seemed to be all of a piece with the religion. The Koran is its spiritual and secular book of law – Allah’s personal word, with orders that need to be fulfilled regardless of place or time. Then there’s Muhammad, a warlord who is nevertheless deemed the perfect human role model.

In his book America Alone, Mark Steyn says we have three options: 1) capitulate to Islam, 2) wage all-out war against it, 3) it undergoes a reformation and enlightenment, retaining its name but eschewing its political substance. With 1) and 2) being unacceptable and horrific, is the best way to achieve 3) accommodation or resistance?

I believe resistance is the best course of action. A concrete theology of moderate Islam does not exist and will have to be created. It will have to be non-literal and reformist, and will have a tough time competing with Islamist ideology, which is anti-constitutional and anti-freedom in many of its core particulars. Instead of letting my friend pretend to be moderate, I’d rather empower him with a clear choice: defend Islamic despotism or man up as a reformer by promoting a coherent, moderate Islam that embraces the West, and in particular the separation of secular public life from privately held religious beliefs.