The Good Funeral Guide

Posted by Vale

Some personal reflections on the Southbank Deathfest this weekend:

Imagine a wire and steel footbridge over the Thames: brown water lapping, St Paul’s, pale in the wintry light, downstream. Drop down to buildings, a collection of concrete and glass halls, that were modern once but which, in the way of those that brave 50s buildings, now feel curiously dated.

Inside, people. Lots of them. It’s like an arty concourse in a railway station. Not everyone has come for the Deathfest – though hundreds of them have – but it seems that the lobbies of the Royal Festival Hall are a gathering place for Londoners anyway. The mill of people – talking, drinking coffee, mooching about, characterises the whole of the Deathfest. The day is made up of different events – talks, Death Cafe’s, discussions, stalls, happenings. Each of them has a charge of energy – and, depending on the venue and what’s going on, this mill of people round about sometimes makes them seem open and dynamic and, sometimes, dissipates them so that it is impossible to concentrate.
Actually there was a general sense of mild chaos everywhere. 

Decorative coffins from Ghana

Through the door and, whoop! there are old friends and GFG regulars – Sweetpea, Belinda Forbes, Charles (whose phone rings constantly so that he is no sooner there than darting off again) and Gloria Mundi.There seemed to be friends of the GFG everywhere. Our religious correspondent Richard Rawlinson, Ru Callender, Fran Hall and Rosie Inman-Cooke at a very lively NDC stand, Tony Piper and then GFG heroes like Simon Smith from Green Fuse, Shaun Powell from the Quaker initiative in the East End, helping poorer families to a good funeral. James Showers, Kathryn Edwards too. Who have I missed out? Who did I miss?

If I am honest there was a lot that was interesting, some that was moving and a lot that I thought was not really for me as a practicing Celebrant. But it wasn’t aimed at the likes of us and it was hugely exciting that so many there had come for themselves, to find out and start their own explorations. At the sessions I took part in – where the question was asked – I think 80%-90% were ‘ordinary’ people.

I enjoyed an NDC hosted talk about the need to prepare for death. It made me realise that, as a celebrant, almost all of our time is spent with families after the event. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to meet people earlier? I came away with a resolution to start to make a video recording as part of my own end of life preparations. Just, you know, to make sure a few good things get said. Met an inspiring spiritual midwife too!

After, off to the Beyond Goodbye session that began with Charles’ talk and closed with the film and questions about Josh’s extraordinary funeral. Well, extraordinary because of the film and the standard and quality of what was done, but, I wanted to call out, there are lots of ‘extraordinary’ funerals now. Any family can – should – have one. But that hardly needs saying here. Josh’s mum and brother though came across as pure gold. It really is worth watching it – find the GFGs original posting here. The website for Josh and for Beyond Goodbye is here.

I hung on to my seat (this was in the smaller Queen Elizabeth Hall) because, after Josh, came John Snow and the assisted dying discussion and lot’s of people wanted to see that.

At the end of a lively debate I’m with Helena Kennedy on this: let’s, for goodness sake, have a proper commission about end of life issues. We’re mired in piffling debates in the Leveson enquiry and the doubtful (but surely unsurprising) morals of newspapers when there is an issue here that is both urgent and important and where popular feeling is pulling ahead of the current legal position. Society as a whole would benefit from open, reasoned, public enquiry and debate. I feel a GFG campaign coming on…

There were lots of things in the discussion that did make me think – especially the realisation that assisted dying has to be considered in the whole context of how we, as a society, treat vulnerable people. The whole debate would change – wouldn’t it – if we could be confident that we treated the elderly and disabled generously, with respect and true consideration?

So much that I didn’t see. Paul Gambaccini’s session on Friday about Desert Island Death Discs, the poetry, Paul Morley and Sandi Toksvig – but I still came away with a sense that, maybe, in places like the pages of this blog, in the work of pioneers like the NDC and the Quaker Social Action project, and most of all in the energy and interest of the people who came and took part, we really might be able to bring death our lives. One thing is certain – we need more festivals like this one.

See the full photo essay (16 photographs) here. 

Over the course of one year (2003-2004) Elizabeth Heyert photographed the deceased members of a Baptist community in Harlem. Heyert took her photos at the funeral parlour of Isaiah Owens, one of the few places where the old tradition of festively dressing up the dead lives on.

All of The Travelers photographs are accompanied by the name of the person in the portrait, as well as their date and place of birth and death. Significantly, the individual stories of each photographed person are absent from the work, in spite of their value to Elizabeth. I asked Elizabeth why she didn’t make them part of the project. Elizabeth explains that it was mainly an issue of privacy. Although the stories were important for her to be able to establish intimacy with the subjects, they were not really meant for public consumption. They form the narrative of a community that Elizabeth is not a member of. She wanted to be careful not to be presumptuous and act like she belongs to this community. Therefore she did not claim the stories as part of her project.

Moreover, she found that including the date and place of birth and death was already very effective in triggering the imagination. These simple facts indicate that the majority of the 31 portrait-sitters grew up in the south of the United States and moved north. This information alone calls upon a whole history. Elizabeth identifies it as the story of the 20th century, when black people took the journey from the south of the US to Harlem, in search of a better life. It was the only way for them to escape from poverty, even though the situation in Harlem wasn’t perfect either. It was a way they could take control of their lives.

Source

The Natural Death Handbook, Fifth Edition

A thoroughly updated and revised edition of the Natural Death Centre‘s celebrated handbook. Now presented alongside a new collection of essays on death, dying and funeral practices by doctors, historians, authors, poets, theologians and artists including Richard Barnett, David Jay Brown, Dr Sheila Cassidy, Charles Cowling, Bill Drummond, Stephen Grasso, Maggi Hambling, Graham Harvey, Gary Lachman, Nick Reynolds, and Dignity in Dying.

It’s out in May 2012!

Riding with death

Black Skull

Posted by Vale

This lovely jazz piece was actually a requiem for Charlie Parker – but at risk of offending purists I thought Frank O’Hara’s poem for Billie Holiday on the day she died fitted perfectly with the music.

The Day Lady Died

It is 12:20 in New York a Friday
three days after Bastille day, yes
it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine
because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton
at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner
and I don’t know the people who will feed me

I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun
and have a hamburger and a malted and buy
an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets
in Ghana are doing these days

I go on to the bank
and Miss Stillwagon (first name Linda I once heard)
doesn’t even look up my balance for once in her life
and in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I get a little Verlaine
for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do
think of Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore or
Brendan Behan’s new play or Le Balcon or Les Nègres
of Genet, but I don’t, I stick with Verlaine
after practically going to sleep with quandariness

and for Mike I just stroll into the PARK LANE
Liquor Store and ask for a bottle of Strega and
then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue
and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre and
casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton
of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with her face on it

and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of
leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT
while she whispered a song along the keyboard
to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing

Artist: Magnus Gjoen. Find more images here.

We get quite a few emails here at the GFG from makers of ashes urns. Most of these urns are ghastly and get no more than a thanks but no thanks. We are unfailingly courteous.

This morning was an exception. We received some stunning images from a Plymouth-based ceramist, Alan Braidford — in answer, it almost seemed, to Richard Rawlinson’s post earlier on today. Wonderful work, we’re sure you’ll agree. There are virtually no makers of funeral urns whose work has evolved beyond the container-of-some-sort stage, but Alan’s urns are anthropoid — they are sculpted figures of humans. What a difference that makes. Depending on size, perfect for a garden memorial or for a family altar to the ancestors. Okay, so we don’t do altars to ancestors. Ours is a developed culture which has lost touch with the value of ritual observances based in an idea of duty. For the sake of our own emotional health, we need to reinvent these observances, and Alan’s work points the way. Do you think they speak too much of grief?

Here is Alan talking about what he does:

My ceramic work is figurative and mostly stoneware. The work is on a domestic scale ranging between 30 to 150 cm in height.

Although my natural impulse is to make sculpture, I am very interested in making functional pieces, and with this in mind I have been developing a series of simplified sitting figures to be used as funeral urns. As this work will be fired to 1250c it will be frost proof, and thus can be placed outside in a garden setting. Ashes or memorabilia can be placed inside the urn through an opening, before the ceramic is fixed to a stone base.

The look of my work is influenced by an interest in ancient history – Celtic, Etruscan, Cycladic and Middle Eastern.

Coiling is the construction process most employed, although I am currently developing a press moulded process in order to reproduce one of the urn designs.  Slips,engobes and lava glazes are used to add surface texture.

Alan is also interested in working collaboratively with bereaved people in the matter of design. If you want to contact Alan, write to him at alanbraidford(at)btinternet(dot)com. His website is here. 

The Dying Matters Coalition is holding its very own Death Booker (well, something like that). Dying Matters is offering a prize for “new creative writing about dying, death and bereavement. Anyone touched by dying, whether directly or as a relative, friend, colleague or carer, can enter.”

The judges will be looking for original writing in which the author’s feelings and thoughts about the end of life have been crafted into a succinct piece of work that attracts the reader’s attention and retains their interest. 

Prizes

1st: £200; 2nd: £100; 3rd: £50; plus highly commended certificates. All entries will also be considered for publication online or in print form.

The winners will be announced during Dying Matters Awareness Week, 14-20 May 2012.

The project could lead to the publication of a selective anthology and the formation of an archive, and we expect it to generate considerable public interest.

More details on the Dying Matters website here. 

RIP Ronald Searle