The Good Funeral Guide

Going Nowhere

Long way back home

Posted by Belinda Forbes

As a secular funeral celebrant, I’ve noticed a growing trend for colour at funerals – this could be a general request to wear bright colours or a suggestion to wear something in a particular colour.  At one young man’s funeral, the theme was yellow: as well as people wearing yellow ties and scarves, there were yellow flowers covering the coffin; each person who spoke held a sunflower and we all sang Coldplay’s Yellow.  At another, the coffin was purple and adorned with purple feathers and balloons – the mourners were dressed in shades of lilac and purple.  

This can, of course, be fraught with difficulties – many people take great comfort from tradition and the “respect” of wearing black.  Six people carrying the coffin wearing Man U shirts with the deceased’s name on the back is not for everyone.  And what about the people who didn’t realise that the dress code was “wear something red”?  Suddenly the respectful black tie looks out of place.

However, as I look out from the lectern, it is surprisingly moving to see all the men wearing pink ties.  As we become used to each funeral being a unique and personal event, we will make sure to find out if there is a dress code.  Instead of feeling uncomfortable in our colourful clothes on a drizzly day outside the crematorium, we can feel proud that we are honouring the wishes of the person whose life we are there to commemorate.

Belinda Forbes is a secular celebrant working in Berkshire, Hampshire and Surrey. Her website is:

www.thinkceremonies.com

Source

Posted by Pippa Wilcox

I wish I could tell you that the real-life stories portrayed in Nell Dunn’s play Home Death are over-dramatised.  But they aren’t.  

It seems to be a terrifyingly random lottery out there in terms of whether or not you will stumble across the sort of care package which will result in a ‘good’ death at home – which is the aim of each of the characters we are introduced to in this beautiful, moving, unflinchingly honest 90-minute piece.  

Such a thing as a good death does exist and when someone dies, if they and the people who love them believe it to be as positive an experience as is possible in the circumstances, the difference it makes is profound.

A ‘bad’ death leaves a gnawing, corrosive legacy for those left behind.  A good death results in a sense of pride and — amongst the complexities of grief — a thankful absence of guilt, remorse and torment about the decisions made in the approach to those final breaths.

I know this from speaking with the 200 or so families I’ve worked with in my role as a humanist funeral celebrant.  I’m inspired by hearing about those endings which we would all wish for ourselves and the people we love; and I’m haunted by the ones you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy.

In Home Death we hear of 7 deaths following cancer and we are spared no detail, no matter how uncomfortable.  We learn of the sense of loneliness and abandonment experienced by the friends and family of the dying; of the steel that appears to have replaced the heart of a doctor attending a dying man; of the desperately chaotic, disorganised and interminable scrabbling around for morphine; of the blood-spattered hospital ward; of the women who might be sent to sit with you in the night and whose only contribution to your well-being is to silently dispense medication and note in a book that they have done so; of the ridiculous insistence that you cannot die in your own home without a “horrible, scary, cold hospital bed.”

We learn that to organise a good death at home for someone we love often requires near-superhuman levels of determination, tenacity, time, energy, courage and an ability to rage against the machine.  And it would seem that above all else, access at the right time to morphine and anti-nausea medication is fundamental and all too often absent.  The NHS does not come off well in this piece.

Nell Dunn, now in her 70′s and renowned for giving a voice to ‘ordinary’ people in her work has assembled this play from her and her lover’s own experience and the experiences of others who had cared for a dying loved one at home. These true stories are told with commitment and integrity by the 11 strong acting ensemble.  There isn’t a weak link amongst them.  The production and performances are pared down, stripped back and utterly convincing.  

It is not wall-to-wall bleakness.  Although it is not so much the more positive stories that you leave the theatre dwelling on, there are some good deaths here as well as some air and light breathed into this piece.  The George and Diana Melly pairing and the trio of Mick, Lisa and Mary in particular provide some welcome laughter and the exchange between Juliet and James lets us off the hook for a while – the other five stories are told directly to the audience.

The Finborough seats might not be the most comfortable but this is one of those venues that makes me feel proud to be a Londoner.  The shamelessly intimate space, the courageous programming choices, the exceptional performing talent which it attracts, the hip and truly sweet theatre and bar staff, the very respectable loos, the (new) air-conditioning, the Firezza pizza which you can have waiting for you when the show’s over and the brilliant array of wines you can order by the glass… what’s not to like?

If you are a stakeholder in palliative care you must see this; if you believe that forewarned is forearmed you must see this. It’s hard to imagine a more effective means of highlighting the issues we all need to be aware of if we, or someone we love, would like to die well at home.

Home Death is currently playing at the Finborough Theatre for only 6 performances over 3 weeks.  Further performances may be added: http://www.finboroughtheatre.co.uk/productions/2011/production-home-death.php

Pippa Wilcox is a humanist celebrant who conducts funerals and memorial services for those who have chosen to live without religion:  http://www.humanistcelebrant.com

Posted by Charles Cowling

According to the blurb: 

Rare, three-strand 28″ (or so) inch necklace made of antique brass beads from Northern India. Originally used in funeral pyres, these beads are then gathered from the ashes and restrung.  

Buy them here. 

Posted by Ariadne

For an altar there was the chest of drawers in the corner by the window.  Flowers, candles, drawings and sea urchin shells collected from the beach.  The bedroom had turquoise walls or perhaps they were white and it’s just memory doing the decorating.  When everything was right and ready, I made my parents and 10 year old sister file in and stand solemnly bearing witness, hands folded.  I may have bossed them around further, but from this distance the details are hazy.  I spoke and they did as they were told and so we all said our goodbyes to Uncle Arthur.  I count this as my first service.  It was my 8^th summer.  

Uncle Arthur had come to live with us after the death of his wife Dotty, my Father’s Aunt.   In his eighties, he wore a collar, tie and waistcoat even at weekends and had fought in the First World War.  I was 6, wore an eager expression most of the time and fought with tying my shoelaces.  We had plenty in common.   He taught me the names of garden birds, trained me in shoe-polishing, button-sewing and cigarette rolling.  We’d watch Thunderbirds, Dixon of Dock Green and Z cars together on a small black and white TV.  I’d play my recorder along to the Z Cars theme tune.   This would put him in a bad mood.  We’d cheer together for Mick McManus or Giant Haystacks on Grandstand wrestling – One-AH!  Two-AH!  Some days I’d tip out my felt pens and starting at either side of the paper, we’d create what he mysteriously termed a ‘joint effort’.  Abstracts mostly, in our early period.  

We were abroad on holiday when the news came of his death; he’d been staying with my grandparents in Wales and I have no idea what kind of funeral took place as we stood remembering him in the afternoon heat of another country. 

It’s now about 40 years later and I’m still a novice celebrant, having recently trained with Green Fuse.  It’s early days.  Days during which I have become no less exasperated with inevitably having to explain what ‘funeral celebrant’ means.  Need to work on that one.  Keep wanting to say ‘oh you know, fake vicar’ or ‘someone who dances at the graveside  – for cock’s sake what do you THINK it means?’  and it won’t do.  

Dealing with those who can’t understand – for the life of them! – why anyone would be interested in doing such a thing is another matter.  The Persistent Vegetative State would appear to be a lifestyle choice for some people.  For me, caring about death seems as obvious or as basic as caring about life.    It’s been pointed out that everyone dies, but not everyone lives.  Despite this, discussing the subject or even simply acknowledging its attendant practicalities can still mark you out as a bit weird.  Apparently.  Even in London.  

 I’m not a believer in the afterlife, or any other kind of life apart from the one here and now and at times even that one’s too much.  I’m hugely drawn to the ideas put forward by Irvin Yalom in Staring at the Sun.  And surely everyone’s entitled to believe whatever they damn well please –  I love the fact that there’s no right answer and sort of expect everyone to defend their own views as robustly as I’ll defend mine.  Speak as if you’re right, listen as if you’re wrong, as Charles Cowling said to me at the London Funeral Exhibition recently.  I’m rubbish at listening as if I’m wrong, but it’s good advice.  I may add it to my To Do list.    

Posted by Kathryn Edwards

Serbia’s been generating news of late, featuring the Old Carnivore and the Young Herbivore (as one local commentator has characterised the players).  While Djokovic nibbles the Wimbledon lawn and Mladic huffs and postures in the Hague court, there’s been a lot of grave-digging taking place in a former meadow just outside the east Bosnian town of Srebrenica.

This once charming little place comprises both a main centre and a sprinkling of hamlets and smallholdings in the surrounding mountains.  In the old days there was a healing spa, the iron-rich water being thought useful for various complaints.  Along the cobbled path up to the source of the river Guber, which emerges from a rockface above the town, there are extra springs and pools that are reputed to offer remedies for various complaints and for general beautification.  The 1990s genocide attempt put paid to all that.  The chalets were torched, the woodlands mined – the mosques blown up, too, and the rubble barrowed away – and on a boiling hot July day in 1995, most of the locals were bussed out of town, to be deposited in ‘free’ Bosnia (women and little children) or slaughtered (lads and men).  Sensing what was coming, many men and boys fled through the woods and mountains, aiming for freedom; about half of them perished through murder or misadventure on the journey.

Most of the victims of the mass killings were buried, the perpetrators’ motive being disposal rather than mourning ritual.  They were buried more than once, as often as not, in an attempt to hide the bodies or confound the search for them.  The quest in that post-conflict, partitioned country is to find the mass graves, exhume the bodies, and identify them using DNA analysis, inform the relatives, and bury the dead in identified plots and with due rites.  Each year, new mass graves are revealed; each year the burials number hundreds.  A dedicated burial-ground has been created on some land just outside the town.  Known by official decree as the Srebrenica-Potocari Memorial and Cemetery for the Victims of the 1995 Genocide, it was inaugurated by US President Bill Clinton in September 2003.  Since then, July 11^th – the anniversary of the final capture of the town – has been the day chosen for the burials.

Momentum builds from the day before the ceremony.  The coffins, wooden trays with uniform green canvas stretched over a wooden frame, arrive on trucks.  Each one will weigh very little, the contents being merely bones (the dismal circumstances even having required a fatwa on the quantity of remains that can legitimise an individual’s funeral).  The precious cargoes are laid out in rows, each coffin named and numbered.  Members of the Bosnian diaspora will have arrived from all over the world, and the atmosphere is like a fairground of grief: people stare at the ranks of coffins, they weep quietly, they pray and read the Qur’an, they gossip and exchange news.  Some stay all night.  Before the dew falls, the coffins are covered in enormous sheets of polythene.

Next day, yet more people arrive, by car, by bus, and some – greeted with waves and cheers – are the last few of the thousands who have completed the March of Peace, that traces in reverse the so-called March of Death from Srebrenica out to the west and north that had been attempted by those fleeing the 1995 disaster.  On the route to the Memorial Centre opportunistic hucksters sell knick-knacks at the side of the road.  By mid-morning the field is a mass of tens of thousands of people, many of wielding umbrellas against the searing sun or teeming rain, according to the vagaries of this changeable mountain climate.  Latecomers hurrying along the valley will hear the sound of singing as the ceremony begins.

Dignitaries send substantial floral tributes.  There is a reading of the names of the dead, and.  It will take a while this year: 614 are being buried.  An imam speaks – with too much focus on politics for some people’s tastes – and also leads the prayers, men and women stretching in long lines where there’s open space, or squeezing in with whatever decorum can be managed in the tighter corners.  Suddenly the invocations are over and it’s time to act.  Scores of men move forward to shoulder the coffins and hurry them through the crowds, like ants carrying foraged treasure, to their designated sites.  People stretch out to touch the passing coffins for a blessing; in the manner of their deaths these dead are perceived as ‘shahid’ or ‘witnesses’ for their religion.

The ground has been thoroughly prepared: each grave is marked, with the traditional wooden planks hard by.  Mourners cluster by their dead men’s graves, faces tense.  The coffins are manhandled into place, then covered with the planks, and the graves become a frenzy of mass shovelling of soil – or mud or dust, as the climate disposes.  And all of a sudden, it seems, it’s over.  People pour out of the gates and away, the business of burials completed for another year.  Meanwhile, the earth will settle, and the green wooden markers will be replaced by pillars of white marble in a stylised version of the traditional turban-top gravestone.

Hostile elements of Serb society assert that the Potocari memorial site will foment vengeance.  The Srebrenica prayer, engraved in stone in Bosnian, Arabic and slightly wobbly English, suggests otherwise:

In the Name of God the Most Merciful,

the Most Compassionate

We pray to Almighty God,

May grievance become hope!

May revenge become justice!

May mothers’ tears become prayers

That Srebrenica never happens again

To no one and nowhere!

Posted by Charles Cowling

Coming soon, A Giving Tribute — ‘the caring alternative to funeral flowers’ — a project I wholeheartedly endorse. 

Over in Canada, “Cartoonist Adrian Raeside once placed an obituary in the Times Colonist in which he asked mourners to send singlemalt scotch and Cuban cigars in lieu of flowers.” [Source] 

What’s your alternative to funeral flowers? 

Leonard Cohen, Dance Me to the End of Love, London 2009

Posted by Charles Cowling

I HAVE wonderful friends … one, from Texas, put a hand on my thinning shoulder, and appeared to study the ground where we were standing. He had flown in to see me.

“We need to go buy you a pistol, don’t we?” he asked quietly. He meant to shoot myself with. 

In addition to wonderful friends, New York Times journalist Dudley Clendinen has ALS, commonly called Motor Neurone Disease in the UK. In a very powerful piece he describes what he’s going to do about it.

There is no meaningful treatment. No cure. There is one medication, Rilutek, which might make a few months’ difference. It retails for about $14,000 a year. That doesn’t seem worthwhile to me. If I let this run the whole course, with all the human, medical, technological and loving support I will start to need just months from now, it will leave me, in 5 or 8 or 12 or more years, a conscious but motionless, mute, withered, incontinent mummy of my former self. Maintained by feeding and waste tubes, breathing and suctioning machines. 

No, thank you. I hate being a drag.  

I think it’s important to say that. We obsess in this country about how to eat and dress and drink, about finding a job and a mate. About having sex and children. About how to live. But we don’t talk about how to die. We act as if facing death weren’t one of life’s greatest, most absorbing thrills and challenges. Believe me, it is. This is not dull. But we have to be able to see doctors and machines, medical and insurance systems, family and friends and religions as informative — not governing — in order to be free. 

He’s not going to do anything to prolong his life:  “Lingering would be a colossal waste of love and money.”

Read the whole beautifully thought, beautifully written piece here.

Death makeup offered by Illamasqua in partnership with Levertons

Posted by Charles Cowling

What is the well dressed corpse wearing? Clothes which co-decompose: http://bit.ly/jOJlxm

Aussie undertakers strategise for the future. Better experience, better service. Full marks. http://bit.ly/m8t88b

Music therapy for the dying. Touching. http://nyti.ms/mzIjDW

Queenslanders urged to employ industry regulator to weed out “rouge [sic] or ‘cowboy’ operators.” http://bit.ly/leMNWF

From the US: “for-profit health chains are cynically exploiting this model to fill their own pockets.” Beware, UK! http://nyti.ms/lr4CW3

Check out Dignity’s projected price increase for funerals in the UK. Complete cobblers? http://tgr.ph/mJOZeo

Exploding funeral pyre injures 20 - http://bit.ly/jcDxnx

MakingAnExit Sarah Murray RT by GoodFunerals

When I’m dead and “green” – a look at the options for a more environmentally friendly exit: bit.ly/qnDsR1

Spend some time in the mind of an old-school undertaker. It may creep you out - http://tinyurl.com/6khd6ns

‘Abuse of a corpse.’ There’s such a ring to that. Could you be done for this in the UK? http://bit.ly/rgZ1dK

Germans are being cremated in Holland – cheaper + more respectful. Great piece here: http://bit.ly/pomDrH

Deer wake up and smell the roses at Salisbury crem -http://bit.ly/nTh0Tj

Graphic pics of drug wars on the Mexico-US border -http://bit.ly/p3GKO9

‘The scraped were condemned to topical infirmary with non-life threatening injuries’ - http://bit.ly/oc2YiS

What use funerals when people say things like “The loss is incalculable. It will not kick in until after the funeral”?http://bit.ly/pCKHR9

GoodFunerals Charles Cowling 

Corpse makeup the next big thing, say fashionistas. http://bit.ly/nKg1FL

C of E dead set on raising minister fee to £150. Great news for secular celebrants - http://reut.rs/n1ziPK

The priciest funeral homes in Vermont are owned by… SCI, surprise surprise. These corps are so crap - http://bit.ly/puahxc

Natural burial ground ran out of money, dammit! http://bit.ly/q1c9MbWill sustainability issues soon haunt others?

Spice up your sex life: do it in a funeral home - http://bit.ly/nOygTU

Celebration of life planned for dead elm - http://bit.ly/qdyYN1

Bristol council publishes zombie attack contingency plan -http://bit.ly/iw3EAL

You’ve got to feel sorry for these people. 1st the vile Co-op buys their crem, now it wants to close down their post office http://bit.ly/rdk48J

More on bespoke deathwear which co-decomposes -http://ind.pn/od4Bzc

Boomers, a stuffed bear and the hyper-personalised funeral -http://bit.ly/nann4A

Oh dear, the C of E has thrown out the proposed fee increase for funerals - http://tgr.ph/rlxsLB

Taiwan funeral strippers, lower gods and the heat and noise factor -http://on.io9.com/qNyC5l