The Good Funeral Guide

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!

We sometimes have good ideas here at the GFG, but we rarely make them happen. In life there are starters and there are finishers. We have little of the latter about us. 

One of our better ideas was a model Viking longship for launching ashes in. We urged this on our good friend Richard Martin over at Scattering Ashes. 

He’s done it. Ain’t it lovely? Too nice to burn?

As we said when we thought of it:

The flames rise (vertically) to the heavens as the wind fills the longboat’s sails and it journeys (horizontally) to the horizon in a way which mirrors the words of the Christian prayer: “But as thou didst not lose them in the giving, so we do not lose them by their return. For not as the world giveth, givest thou, O Lord of souls: that which thou givest thou takest away: for life is eternal, and love is immortal, and death is only the horizon, and the horizon is nothing save the limit of our sight.”

There is compelling emotional and spiritual appeal in this imagery, of journeying, transition, transfiguration and consummation (deliberate pun). The spirit rises as the craft moves over the face of the waters; that which is earthly is subsumed by the sea. All the elements are present: earth, air, fire, water. And there is an inexorable dynamic.

Find Richard’s ideasy, info-packed website here. 

A young man whose brother died in a car crash takes his ashes on the trip his brother always wanted to take to Holland, Sweden and Scotland.

Gentle, thoughtful, touching.

5 mins 34 secs.

The maker says: 

This was shot in Holland, Sweden and Scotland over the summer. This is largely recycled material from a similarly themed bigger project that just didn’t turn out the way I was hoping it would.

What I learned is that I definitely don’t belong in front of the camera, it’s very difficult to film anything with just two people, guerilla film-making can be difficult, there will always be unforeseen obstacles, getting good sound is difficult, and carrying an urn around draws attention to you and will get you stopped and searched in an airport, especially if it has remnants of white powdery substance inside. 

My wife did most of the camera work. I did the rest. Some of the colors grading came out pretty well and some of it looks a bit muddy. We’re just beginners.

You wouldn’t have thought so. 

“The burnt ashes are put into a cremulator that grinds them fine and grinds the bits. Some funeral homes prefer not to grind all the bits out, so that you can see it’s the remains. It’s a bit like peanut butter. Some prefer chunky. Some prefer smooth.”

From an online Q and A with an American funeral director 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. 

Ashes at the funeral home
six hundred still to be collected
small boxes, cardboard, filed in rows
a kind of shell grit for the chickens
fifteen years six hundred still
that somehow somewhere should be scattered:
sown like seed across a paddock
thrown as gravel upon water
or set there upon the mantelpiece
and added to at parties
or dug perhaps in some well-loved
old gardner’s acidic corner
that needs a spot of lime
or tossed aloft like hard confetti
at weddings in the park
where at the end he might have sat
or stowed in brass behind a name
the cemetery as mail exchange
and postbox minus key.
How is it that they cannot face this morning’s meeting long deferred
this grey irrelevance of ashes against what dawn and memory bring
so vertical and three-dimensioned
though growing slowly blurred?
They cannot bear to sign the book
a woman at the counter holds
so long inured to tears.
And some themselves
who would have come
are patient on the shelves.

Geoff Page is an Australian poet. You can read more about him (and more of his poems) here.

This music video may interest you. Here’s some text from Consequence of Sound: 

Everyone deals with death in their own personal way, but psych-rock outfit Crystal Antlers offers a unique perspective on the topic in their music video for “Dog Days”. In said clip, a group of friends commemorate a dead friend by carrying around his/her ashes in various cups and cookie jars, as if said friend is still “one of the guys.” For a final tribute, they channel the Vikings by setting up a funeral pyre and spreading the friend’s ashes throughout the woods.

The song is called Dog Days. Find Crystal Antlers’ website here.

We’ve always liked Daisy coffins. They’re a quality product and use a range of lovely looking, renewable materials: water hyacinth, banana leaf, wicker — imported, of course. The people at Daisy are nice, too. 

Daisy don’t just make nice coffins, they also thoroughly understand design. They present themselves beautifully. They use an excellent graphic designer; their ads would look great in any glossy lifestyle magazine. And it’s all a bit wasted on their target audience, funeral directors, who are, of course, much more interested in things like price and whether they leak and creak. Funeral directors have a thing about creaky coffins. 

Daisy don’t sell direct to the public. A great pity; they’d shift a few. 

But they have just started selling urns direct to folk like us. We liked the look of them and asked us to send us one. They did — with a return postage sticker. We took it out to lunch to test reactions. Nobody reckoned it was an ashes container; one person thought it was a box of chocolates — encouraging for anyone wanting to transport ashes in a container which doesn’t shout Dead Man’s Dust at innocent bystanders. 

The urn pictured above is from their leaf range. They do them in a variety of shapes and colours. They are made of cardboard decorated with dried leaves. They’re biodegradable, of course, if you want to bury — and reusable as a memory box, or whatever, if you want to scatter. At £35 they are nicely priced. 

Check out the Daisy Memories website. They do other urns in all sorts of materials. Click here. 

Note to cynics: no, they’re not paying us a penny to say this. We say what we like.  

You may remember this post, The Chaos of Meaning, about the photographic essay which Jimmy Edmonds created in commemoration of his son Josh. If you missed it, click the link and go see it; it’s rare that we are lucky enough to post anything so extraordinary and beautiful.

Above is a trailer for a film Jimmy has made about Josh’s funeral. I went to see it earlier this week with; it really is marvellous.

And it complements what Rachel Wallace says in the previous post about the importance of making a record of a funeral.

The coffin, in case you wonder, was handmade by Jimmy with expert help. 

At the weekend we’ll post another film made by Jimmy about life, death, ageing and more. He’s a Bafta winner, is Jimmy. It shows. 

Below is some text from the BeyondGoodbye.co.uk website.

Joshua Harris-Edmonds 
23 May 1988 — 16 January 2011
Forever in our hearts and minds

On 16th January 2011 Joshua Amos Harris Edmonds was tragically killed in a road traffic accident in Vietnam. Joshua was 3 months into a trip of a lifetime travelling across South East Asia. 

He was 22 years of age.  

A life cut short, but a life lived well.

In honour of our Josh and as a memorial to his life, Beyond Goodybe, the website, will continue Josh’s inspiration on others and offer a place to remember, to pay tribute and share their love for Josh with others. 

This site also houses the book ‘Released’ and the film ‘Beyond Goodbye’, family tributes to our Josh and also perspectives on death and the grieving process. 

If you’d like to get in touch, please do: info@beyondgoodbye.co.uk

We have just received the following press release: 

In early 2011, Jimmy Edmonds’ son Joshua was killed in a road accident in SE Asia. 

RELEASED is a photographic essay and a personal response to the tragedy of his son’s death. Intended for publication both as an exhibition and as a book, the project features a mix of Edmonds’ powerful photography and personal poetry.

The title refers to the label on the container holding Joshua’s ashes on which the word “released” appeared.  This becomes the starting point for a personal journey in which Edmonds navigates a way through his own grief to an exploration of photography itself. The “chaos of meaning” he finds lying at the heart of photography mirrors almost exactly his own confusion surrounding the loss of his son.

The result is a work of remarkable depth and drama. 

As indeed it is. Here’s what one of our regular reader, James Showers, thought of it: “I literally gasped at the way you worked with the ashes – treating them with such delicacy, as beauty not as leftovers.”

You can read the entire book fullscreen online here.  You can find the Facebook page here.