The Good Funeral Guide

Little Jimmy’s gone
Way out of the backstreet
Out of the window
Through the fallin’ rain
Right on time
Right on time
That’s why Broken Arrow
Waved his finger down the road so dark and narrow
In the evenin’
Just before the Sunday six-bells chime, six-bells chime
And all the dogs are barkin’
Way on down the diamond-studded highway where you wander
And you roam from your retreat and view
Way over on the railroad
Tomorrow all the tippin’ trucks will unload
Every scrapbook stuck will glue
And I’ll stand beside you
Beside you child
To never never never wonder why at all
No no no no no no no no
To never never wonder why at all
To never never never wonder why it’s gotta be
It has to be
Way across the country where the hillside mountain glide
The dynamo of your smile caressed the barefoot virgin child to wander
Past your window with a lantern lit
You held it in the doorway and you cast against the pointed island breeze
Said your time was open, go well on your merry way
Past the brazen footsteps of the silence easy
You breathe in you breathe out you breathe in you breathe out you breath in
You breathe out you breathe in you breathe out
And you’re high on your high-flyin’ cloud
Wrapped up in your magic shroud as ecstasy surrounds you
This time it’s found you
You turn around you turn around you turn around you turn around
And I’m beside you
Beside you
Oh darlin’
To never never wonder why at all
No no no no no
To never never never wonder why at all
To never never never wonder why it’s gotta be
It has to be
And I’m beside you
Beside you
Oh child
To never never wonder why at all
I’m beside you
Beside you
Beside you
Beside you
Oh child

You remember Neil Brunton? He’s the singer-songwriting-undertaker you voted for a while back in that Radio 2 competition. Let us refresh your memory here. 

Well, partly thanks to you he’s made it to the final.

Here’s the story (abridged):

Neil Brunton has reached the final stages of a national songwriting competition called Oldie Composers, on behalf of the charity Barnardo’s.

His self-penned melody ‘Jacob Street’ secured enough on-line votes to make the final 21 – which will be judged on January 30 by Sir Terry Wogan, Ken Bruce, Johnnie Walker, Bob Harris and Radio 2 music producer Malcolm Prince.

The leading four will then be recorded professionally in London and released on i-Tunes for Barnardo’s.

Neil (43) was surprised and delighted with his success to date – and overwhelmed by the number of votes he received, thanks in part to a previous story in the Mail.

“Just the thought that someone like ‘Whispering’’ Bob Harris is sitting down to listen to one of my songs is pretty special.”

Neil said he’d continue writing songs as a hobby and if other competitions arose, he’d certainly consider entering.

“But with a young family and work commitments, it is difficult time-wise, so I’m not planning any world tours just yet,” he added.

Full story here.

With a Festival Day Pass for Saturday 28 January or Sunday 29 January, muse upon mortality, tackle the taboo and join us for a weekend of discussion, workshops and talks.

Ask questions, share your stories or simply be enlightened about the end.

Including:

-  Assisted dying: The Human Rights Debate with Jon Snow

- The Long Goodbye – Meghan O’Rourke recounts her personal experience of grief from her memoir

-   A Scattering – Christopher Reid reads from his Costa Book Award-winning collection of poems

-  27: the age the rockstar died by Paul Morley

- Death Bites – Hear all about death including cryonics, the art of obituary writing, what happens to your data after you die, and body politics                             

-  Of Mutability – Jo Shapcott reads from her Costa Book Award-winning book

-  Writer Ian Clayton tells his heart-rending experience of bereavement and the new paths that can arise from loss

- Panels consider a range of subjects including organ donation, suicide and survival

-   Death Bites – Hear all about death including the rise of women funeral directors, memorial tattooing, celebrity death, and the lives of gangs and inner-city young people and their relationship to death

In addition to a packed daytime programme covered by the Festival Day Pass you can also enjoy evening concerts and performances which are ticketed separately.

GOODBYE MR MUFFIN

Friday 27 – Sunday 29 January

An uplifting children’s story about the last days in the life of much-loved guinea pig Mr Muffin, told through puppetry, animation and music.                    

MUSIC TO DIE FOR BBC CONCERT ORCHESTRA

Friday 27 January

A heavenly mix of devilishly popular classics from composers obsessed by death, including Saint-Saëns and Mahler, and excerpts from requiems by Verdi, Fauré and Mozart.

THE SANDI TOKSVIG MEMORIAL LECTURE

Saturday 28 January

Die Laughing: Bringing life back to the subject of death, Sandi Toksvig seeks out a mix of merriment and the macabre in morbidity.                          

AN INSTINCT FOR KINDNESS

Friday 27 – Sunday 29 January

Chris Larner explores the contentious issue of assisted dying through his candid, poignant and sometimes comic tale of visiting Switzerland’s Dignitas clinic with his chronically ill ex-wife.

SONG OF SUMMER: FREDERICK DELIUS

Sunday 29 January

A screening of the late Ken Russell’s classic film followed by a discussion with Julian Lloyd Webber, Delius expert Lyndon Jenkins, Barry Humphries and David Mellor (chair).                         

MARKUS BIRDMAN A STROKE OF LUCK

Sunday 29 January

Life begins at 40. Then you have a stroke. Oh goodie. Stand-up comedian Markus Birdman’s show is about life, love, death and laughing in the face of it all.                               

FREE EVENTS, INSTALLATIONS, HEART TO HEARTS AND SLICES OF CAKE

Come along to a variety of free events to get you thinking about death. See a vibrant collection of bespoke coffins, discover uncanny death-themed games, request made-to-order poetry and hear stimulating discussions at the Death Café and Paul Gambaccini’s Desert Island Death Discs. Join us to consider death through a wealth of thought-provoking, informative and amusing activities and displays.

southbankcentre.co.uk/death           Ticket Office: 0844 847 9910

Southbank Centre is a charity registered in England and Wales No.298909.

Registered office: Southbank Centre, Belvedere Road, London, SE1 8XX.

Ozzy Osborne is an agony uncle at the Sunday Times. Here’s a recent interaction: 

Dear Dr Ozzy, is it bad form to shop for your own coffin? (I ask this as a cancer patient with very particular tastes.)
Anonymous 

Ozzy replies:

It ain’t bad form, but there’s gotta be something better to do with your time if you’re expecting the worse. I mean, it’s not like you’ll get much of an opportunity to admire your brass handles and velvet padding after the funeral. You’ll be a gonner! If you wanna go shopping, Dr Ozzy’s advice is to buy something you can enjoy while you’re still breathing.

Sunday Times 8 Jan 2012

Paul Sinclair, he who begat Motorcycle Funerals, has a bicycle hearse for sale. 

It’s made to his own design, and it’s been thoroughly tested. Says Paul, “We put a coffin on it and 30 stones of sandbags then rode it with two, me being pillion. It went fine.”

Paul warns: “I won’t sell it to someone I think will just stick it on display somewhere as I want it to be used.” He adds: “The pillion rider needs shoe size ten or under! Riders MUST be trained in sidecar riding, it is difficult and disconcerting with almost no weight, but it can be done with the training we would provide and it is much easier with a coffin. If the buyer was using it a lot we’d advise fitting leading link forks and again we could explain all that. I don’t advise hacking it round bends as bicycle spokes have their limits with transverse forces, but on the half dozen plus funerals we’ve done sensibly it has never ever let us down. The coffin is tied down with straps to the handles rather than stoppered in, so it is very secure.”

It’s seen some lovely funerals. Says Paul: “Our most amazing one was where it was ridden into a church in Devon and sat at the front all through the service. It was then turned round and off back out straight down the aisle. How cool!”

Find out more, or put in a bid, by contacting Paul here. 

For more details, please contact us by email: charlescowling@blueyonder.co.uk

When the GFG went to the London Funeral Exhibition last summer at Epping Woodland Burial Park we met Angie Whitaker, who works at a sister burial ground, Chiltern.  Her husband is buried in the woods there. Angie gave a talk to visitors about her experience of natural burial. I asked her to write it up for the blog, and here it is:

There is an element in all of us that likes to be in control. We work, we plan our birthdays, our holidays, our weddings; it all has to be perfect. Very few of us think of our death, we put it to one side, hope it will go away.

That was me.

Then the worst possible thing happens. My husband is diagnosed with Motor Neurone Disease. Both of us become very quickly aware that this part of our story will not have a happy ending.

It doesn’t.

It is December 2009, and I have the local doctor talking to me about funerals. Through the haze of unreality I hear him mention a local funeral director, and know this is not what I want. The thought of waiting in a conveyor belt at the local crematorium fills me with dread.

Fortunately I found an advert in the local directory for a Green Funeral Director, rang them, they came to see me. Please tell me I can have a funeral with a difference? I said Keith, my husband, was an artist, a woodsman. At this, a brochure was presented to me. Chiltern Woodland Burial Park. Great, let’s go see it. But I need an unusual coffin. A brochure appears. Brilliant. Cardboard coffins with pictures on.

On a bleak, wet, icy, windy January day I go to the Burial Park. We are met by Peter Taylor, given coffee, kindness and a woodland tour. A tree is chosen, the date confirmed.

The weather worsens. It snows like it never has before. The Woodland Burial Park somehow manages the whole event. A hundred and twenty-five people have battled their way through blizzards and closed roads to stand in awe at our very own Narnia. They gather together, drink wine and talk about Keith, then walk through the trees to find the turquoise-blue coffin with images of a sparrowhawk flying a Sparrowhawk aeroplane, one of Keith’s mad ‘Animals That Travel’ pictures. Keith was a graphic artist and was working on illustrations of animals that travel. He had an idea to put together a little book for Motor Neurone Disease. The pictures included a hippo in a hot air balloon, a jaguar driving a Jaguar car, a freisian cow driving a milk float, and a sparrowhawk bird flying a Sparrowhawk plane.

So many people said to me we had a great day, it was the best funeral we have ever been to. So many people did not know that there is a choice, you can have the exactly the kind of funeral that is right for you, and right for the environment.

I knew that I had got it right.

And afterwards, when we go back to visit, we are always met with kindness.

Our woodland is exactly what the brochure says: a place to celebrate life.

A very big up to Saint and Forster Funeral Services, who have just gone public and transparent with their prices.

From us, a big ask to all funeral directors to follow suit.

Saint and Forster prices here.

Saint and Forster here. 

In death she left her body to science, thereby avoiding a funeral from which she would have wanted, her family knew from experience, to exclude so many enemies.

From Janey Buchan’s obituary, here. 

In a comment stream following a provocative post by someone or another, probably Richard, our religious correspondent, I suggested that because death generates chaotic feelings, many of which seek to vent themselves in disorderly behaviour, funerals ought to accommodate this. Our brilliant and erudite new commenter, Jenny Uzzell, reckons there’s no call for it.

Well, Jenny, I’m coming back at you on this. And I’m doing so because I want to examine what it is necessary for mourners to do at a funeral in order to promote their emotional health. This has to be, after all, the rationale of a funeral. A funeral must be cathartic. 

My text for this morning comes from The Mourner’s Dance by Katherine Ashenburg. If you haven’t got a copy, amazon one now.

The Irish folklorist Sean O’Suilleabhain tells the story of a peaceful wake and funeral in Leinster. Immediately after the burial, the son shouted, “This is a sad day, when my father is put into the clay, and not even one blow struck at his funeral!” In tribute to his father’s memory he proceeded to strike the man next to him. A scuffle broke out in the graveyard, more fights ensued, and the dead man’s son went home well pleased.

Ashenburg’s explanation of this behaviour, together with drunkenness, sexual licence, riot and practical jokery, is as follows:

Death can make those left behind feel piercingly, singularly alive in a way that nothing else can. Caterers will tell you that people eat much more at a funeral than a wedding. Jokes at a wake or after a funeral can seem disproportionately funny. And grief can mutate into fierce energy.

She concludes by proposing that the needs of the living overcome the duty they owe to the dead.

To me this makes intuitive sense. You? A conflict of emotions, all of them at boiling point.

And then I read in Caitlin Doughty’s blog a piece about the Aztec Goddess Tlazolteotl. It seems the Aztecs understood these things.  Tlazolteotl was a goddess who embodied contending characteristics, creative and destructive.

Here’s a description,  and I apologise for having lost the source:

Tlazolteotl (pronounced tla-sol-TAY-otl) is the Aztec Goddess of the earth and sex. She has four aspects, corresponding to the four phases of the moon. As the waxing moon, she is the young and carefree Maiden, the lover of Quetzalcoatl. As the full moon, she is the Mother of all. As the waning moon, she is the Great Priestess who cleanses the soul and destroys sin. As the new moon, she is the old Crone, Goddess of witches and witchcraft.

Tlazolteotl was also called “the eater of filth“, from her aspect as the Great Priestess. It was said that at the end of life, Tlazolteotl comes to the dying who confess their sins to her. She cleanses the soul, devouring the sins (the filth). As a mother Goddess, she is often depicted giving birth.

The hallmark of a so-called developed culture is the decorum of its members. The measures of decorum are self-regulation, propriety, civility. Decorum deplores disorder and requires self-control. 

Or, if you like, repression and denial. 

So, at a funeral, what behaviour is healthy and what behaviour is unhealthy? What is permissible and what is impermissible? What ought we to express and what should we bottle up? 

Does that Leinster funeral set us an example? 

Buy The Mourner’s Dance here. 

Visit Caitlin Doughty’s website here. 

We don’t know how often this is played at funerals. It is the concluding scene of Gotterdammerung with the voices taken out. It speaks of fire. Gotterdammerung is the last opera in Wagner’s Ring Cycle. You either love or hate Wagner, but you’ve got to admit that from 5 mins in it’s pretty good stuff for a farewell/committal.

The story is too complicated to give you here — look it up. Basically, this lass jumps on a fire and is immolated.

Here is a painting by young American artist Dana Schutz of Brunnhilde throwing herself on the pyre.