The Good Funeral Guide

Hands up, who here has a business continuity plan? Ok a few hands, but half of you have already fallen asleep. Well before you do nod off have a look at this from the Connecticut newspaper, the Hartford Courant.

Last week there were early and unexpected snowstorms across the state. Snow isn’t unusual but this deluge was unexpected and, with the leaves still on the trees, unusually disruptive causing power outages and loss of telephone lines. It hit funeral businesses hard. Apart from the candle-lit wakes, it reports that:

Funeral homes need power for equipment used in embalming bodies. Although gasoline-fuelled generators are capable of providing enough power to embalm, many are not powerful enough to keep all the lights on and to heat a large building. Once bodies are embalmed, they can be stored for long enough that a funeral could be pushed back if that is the families’ request.

Lack of Internet access has been a major snag this week for funeral directors who typically file their obituaries online with photos. Instead, many are calling in the information, faxing — if they have a functioning phone line, or handing the information over by hand. Any of those options takes time, and, in some cases, the fewer obituaries in newspapers this week is a result of families pushing funerals back as they deal with urgent matters like day care for out-of-school children, work, trees on cars and finding a place to stay while their home is cold and dark.

You can read the full article here:

Business continuity plans are where you write down what you would do when your business is disrupted. It doesn’t need to be bad weather. It could be a power cut, mechanical failure, fire or flood.

But, you say, ‘I am experienced, I know what I would do’. And so you are – but is everyone you work with as experienced as you are? Would they all be able to make the same decisions?

Worth thinking about with – so they say – a bad winter on the way.

Presently serving the bereaved of Essex and Suffolk we have a new concept in funeral service, the professional mourner. They’re called Rent a Mourner, we wish them every possible success, and you can find them here.

Did we say new? There’s nothing new in Funeralworld. Every innovation is an act of necromancy. In our scholarly and vigilant way we have covered this business of rentasob before, here and here.

And because our curiosity, like yours, is global, you may be interested to know what the market looks like in China.

One can make a decent amount of money being a proxy mourner … Wailers actually belong to an ancient profession that now keeps a low profile thanks to its singular characteristics. InChongqingandChengdu, wailers and their special bands have, over the course of more than a decade, developed into a professional, competitive market … wailers are predominantly laid-off workers.

Wailing is an ancient funeral custom. Texts show that dirges began to be used in ceremonies during the time of Emperor Wu of Han and became commonplace during the Northern and Southern Dynasties. Customs varied across ethnicities and regions. During the Cultural Revolution, wailing was viewed a pernicious feudal poison and went silent. In the reform era, it was revived in a number of areas.

Hu Xinglian’s hair is tied into pigtails pointing up in opposite directions. Her stage name means “Dragonfly” … and the two pigtails, which resemble dragonfly wings, are her trademark. She is fifty-two years old, and she is a professional wailer.

Before the ceremony begins, she asks the family of the deceased about the situation. She must do this every time. She says that wailers usually put on some makeup and wear white mourning clothes. Some of them are more elaborate, with white stage costumes and “jeweled” headdresses.

Hu calls the family of the deceased into the mourning hall and begins to read the eulogy. There is a formula to the eulogy that is adapted to the particular circumstances of the deceased. Most of these say how hard-working and beloved the deceased was, and how much they loved their children. The eulogy requires a sorrowful tone and a rhythmic cadence. As Hu reads, she sometimes howls “dad” or “mom.” And then the bereaved begin to cry as they kneel before the coffin.

Hu on the job

After the eulogy comes the wailing, a song sung in a crying voice to the accompaniment of mournful music. Hu says that the purpose of this part is mainly to create a melancholy atmosphere which will allow the family to release their sadness through tears.

Hu says that more time is devoted to wailing in the countryside. In video recordings, Hu can be seen howling, weeping with her eyes covered, and at times crawling on the ground in front of the coffin in an display of sorrow. At some funerals, she crawls for several meters as she weeps. This never fails to move the mourners. As she wails, the family of the deceased sob, and some of them weep uncontrollably.

After the wailing is done, the second part of the funeral performance begins. Hu says that a funeral performance is usually sad in the beginning and happy at the end. Once sorrow has been released through tears, then the bereaved can temporarily forget their sorrow through skits and songs.

She says that the performance is draining to both mind and body. When she wails, she says, “My hands and feed twitch, my heart aches, and my eyes go dim.” Wailing has more lasting effects, too: Hu says that her hands have gone numb from time to time over the past year.

Like many wailers, Hu also performs at weddings. She says that because of the transitions between such high-intensity work, wailers are liable to make mistakes. For example, if the line “Would the new couple please enter the mourning hall” is let slip at a wedding, that mistake would mean the forfeiture of the fee, and a beating as well. [Source]

Back to Rent a Mourner, we can’t help thinking that, in preference to bringing another separate specialism to the grief market, it might make more sense for secular celebrants to offer a joined up service here.

Views?

Posted by Richard Rawlinson

I know, I know, 120 years is not a significant anniversary like a centenary, but can we spare a thought for Cole Porter, born in 1891? Two of the great American composer’s many classics, I’ve Got You Under My Skin and Just One Of Those Things, are popular secular choices at funerals. His own funeral instructions are quite interesting too.

The son of wealthy Indiana parents, he learned to ride on the family ranch at the age of six, a leisure pursuit that was to be his ultimate undoing. Attending prestigious educational establishments including the Harvard School of Music, his talent was clear early on.

After serving in the First World War, he stayed in Paris with his new wife, Linda, where they enjoyed lavish parties. Returning to the US, he fell from his horse, smashing his legs and making him wheelchair bound for five years, and enduring many operations during the next two decades.

But it was during these years when he wrote wonderful songs from Every Time We Say Goodbye; Night And Day; Miss Otis Regrets, You Do Something To Me, and many more.

Then his wife died and his right leg was eventually amputated, after which he wrote no more as his health declined, and he fell into deep depression. He became a reclusive drunk in his apartment in the Waldorf Astoria in New York, refusing to attend a ‘Salute to Cole Porter’ night at the Metropolitan Opera House.

He died in 1964, and instructed for no funeral or memorial. He has a simple gravestone at home in Indiana where he’s buried next to his wife and father. His legacy lives on. He composed over 1,000 songs, and his hit musicals include High Society and Kiss Me Kate. He’s playing on my iTunes as I write. 

The English interior designer David Hicks created the signature look of the Swinging Sixties. Those strong colours and geometrical designs — they’re his. 

He seems to have been a man at ease with his mortality, a mindset informed, perhaps, by his daily ritual of chain-smoking cigarettes. At his flat in Albany he “created a crimson drawing room and bedroom with a bed lavishly draped in red damask, which he described as ‘a bed to receive one’s doctors from, a bed to die in.’ 

“Hicks did not die in that bed but rather in his bed at the Grove, surrounded by beloved objects and gazing at the landscape. He orchestrated his own funeral, spelling out the arrangements in a book that he made called “The Demise of David Hicks.” His coffin was carried to its final resting place on an ivy-covered trailer attached to Hicks’s Range Rover. He was wearing a David Hicks tie, and his pockets were stuffed with his obituaries and press clippings.” [Source] 

Hicks designed his own coffin, of course. When lung cancer claimed him at the age of 69 he lay in state in it, at his own instructions, in his garden pavilion. Made of sycamore, it was, at his command, handle-less.

Coffin handles, he said, are “frightfully common”. 

Business in bargain basement funerals is booming in Germany. Budget undertakers now enjoy 25 per cent of the market, up from 16 per cent two years ago.

A typical German funeral is comparable in cost to a British funeral: somewhere between £2,500 and £3,000. But the funeral price comparison website Bestattungen.de will quickly lead you to Sarg-Discount (translation: Coffindiscount), who will cremate you for as little as £412.89, and to budget undertaker Aarau, who will bury you for £860.

Old school German undertakers are not surprisingly hot under the collar about all this and respond in the language of undertakers the world over:  “Either there are hidden costs, or the body is treated without dignity,” warns Rolf Lichtner of the German equivalent of the NAFD. Whatever the truth of this, the image of budget funerals in Germany is somewhat tarnished by the fact that the ceo of Aarau, Patrick Schneider, is a former Stasi officer with a criminal record – just as the image of budget funerals in the UK has been besmirched by the activities of serial cheat and bungler Richard Sage.

German budget undertakers retort, of course, that dignity isn’t something that can be measured by the number of euros spent.

There may be an interesting sociological slant to this Teutonic trend. Dagmar Haenel, an anthropologist at the University of Bonn, thinks that cheap funerals reflect a contemporary throwaway mindset and reflect a divergence in the behaviours of different social classes, noting “We also have a rise in very individualised burials, sometimes very costly” by rich and educated people. “When it comes to funerals, the struggle of the classes is gaining ground,” she concludes. Here in Britain, on the contrary, a budget funeral is generally much more interesting to educated professionals than to working class people.

It would be impossible, in Britain, to get prices down to German levels. But there’s room at the bottom for sure. And how good it would be to see more people dispense with the customary trappings and trimmings and focus their attention instead on the principal business of a funeral, the farewell ceremony, an event where what is said and what is done matter most, and where what is spent is supplementary. Not only would the bereaved get much better emotional value for money, they would also be setting a good example.

More on budget German funerals here. 

Young motorbike riders at Marco Simoncelli’s funeral wait for the coffin to pass. 

Story here. 

Light painting, straight from the camera, by the brilliant Janne Parviainen. 

Ralph Stanley, Bluegrass pioneer and 84 years old himself, sings the old country song ‘O Death’ against a background of the deathmasks of famous people (with apologies if you’ve seen some of them before).

O, Death
O, Death
Won’t you spare me over til another year

Well what is this that I can’t see
With ice cold hands takin’ hold of me
Well I am death, none can excel
I’ll open the door to heaven or hell
Whoa, death someone would pray
Could you wait to call me another day
The children prayed, the preacher preached
Time and mercy is out of your reach

I’ll fix your feet til you cant walk
I’ll lock your jaw til you cant talk
I’ll close your eyes so you can’t see
This very air, come and go with me
I’m death I come to take the soul
Leave the body and leave it cold
To draw up the flesh off of the frame
Dirt and worm both have a claim

O, Death
O, Death
Won’t you spare me over til another year

My mother came to my bed
Placed a cold towel upon my head
My head is warm my feet are cold
Death is a-movin upon my soul
Oh, death how you’re treatin’ me
You’ve close my eyes so I can’t see
Well you’re hurtin’ my body
You make me cold

You run my life right outta my soul
Oh death please consider my age
Please don’t take me at this stage
My wealth is all at your command
If you will move your icy hand
Oh the young, the rich or poor
Hunger like me you know
No wealth, no ruin, no silver no gold
Nothing satisfies me but your soul

O, death
O, death
Wont you spare me over til another year
Wont you spare me over til another year
Wont you spare me over til another year

It is only eight o’clock pm here at GFG HQ, yet it’s already some 15 minutes since we sounded the hooter and nudged our horny-handed workforce into the weary, black, wet November night. We like to feel that we are kindly, enlightened employers, for whom wellbeing issues come first.

At the desk of one of our interns, R Cratchit, we found a discarded Daily Mail.  Leafing through it we found this appeal in the This Is Money section:

I have been saving for five years to build up some money to pay for my funeral. I always felt that I didn’t want my family to have to pay for my send off and have built up a pot that should more than cover it.

I told a friend about this and they said I was mad. They pointed out my grown up children are not poor and thought they would have no problem with paying for my funeral.

My friend said I should spend the money now and enjoy it while I can – they even suggested going on a cruise.

I don’t know what to do, should I keep my funeral pot or blow it?

The Mail would like to know what you think. If what you think is sufficiently impressive it will use your response in a followup article. So, if you have strong feelings about what this man should do with his death stash, click the link here.