The Good Funeral Guide

“You have landed on the latest, most innovative, honorable, and dignified way to “release” and scatter  ashes, reverently up and away into the air, like a cloud forever and ever. An ash scattering event that is unforgettable, heartwarming and memorable.

Several years of design and engineering were invested to create an automated cremation urn, The Angel Aire Urn. This unique cremation urn completely “releases” and scatters all of the ashes, all with one simple pull of a knob. The cremated ashes ascend up and away into the atmosphere completely dissipating over a few moments.

The Angel Aire Urn is honorable and dignified because the cremated remains / ashes are first loaded by your preferred Funeral Home Director or Angel Aire Urn Representative. Once at your desired ash scattering / release site, with the “pull” of the release knob, the ashes are cleanly scattered from the cremation urn, released upwards and like a cloud away from you and your attendees.“

Angel Aire website here.

Hat-tip to Sarah Murray, author of just-published Making an Exit.

That Brits are born with an acute and possibly pathological sensitivity to absurdity is well known. The Great American Funeral has engendered great and gloriously funny books by Jessica Mitford and Evelyn Waugh, neither of which had more than minimal success in laughing Americans out of their (perceived) absurdity.

There is method in the funerary lunacies of the GAF, of course: they come at a cost to the client. The recent rise in the cremation rate has filled most US undertakers with helpless economic terror, and it is interesting that they have taken no lessons in adapting to this from Brit undertakers, who have been making a tidy living out of burial deniers for as long as anyone can remember.

The GAF has, it seems, some capability to evolve. Burning necessity has begotten ingenious adaptation of the hearse, conserving it as the only fit and proper vehicle not only for the reverent transportation of cosmetised corpses but also the burned and reduced version, cremains. No glove compartment or passenger seat of the family car for them; only the full hush and awe will suffice. And it’s billable!

My thanks to Sarah Murray, author of Making an Exit, for bringing these hearses, more correctly termed urn enclaves, to my attention. She adds: ‘It was explained to me that urn enclaves have “adjustable bier pins” accommodating different sizes and shapes. They flip up from the floor of the hearse and are cleverly stowed again when the vehicle needs to carry a coffin. One brochure tells me that if you don’t want to buy a new hearse or go to the expense or trouble or getting yours refitted, “portable urn enclaves are also available for funeral directors who wish to extend the service of their existing coaches.”‘ Coaches, forsooth!!

Find another YouTube clip (unembeddable) here.

James Showers, sole proprietor of the Family Tree Funeral Company, undertaker to the discerning decendents of Gloucestershire, has been badgering me to rediscover something he lost on his computer. He thought it might be on mine, since I once sent it to him. It’s not. But by dint of indefatigable googling I have unearthed it. It’s far too good to keep between me and James. Here are some extracts which will send you galloping in a jostling, whooping horde to the blog whence it came. By jingo it’s wonderfully well written.

…perhaps you won’t mind if I recount the Funeral Parlor Affair … For lo, and it did come to pass that the sibling and I were obliged to saunter along to the Sparkman/Hillcrest Funeral Home, Mausoleum, and Memorial Park to pick up the patriarch’s ashes. For some reason — maybe because we’re not a couple of swooning Victorians — we’d expected to stroll in, palm the urn, and buzz along home.

…

But no. The consummate weirdness with which modern American death-angst imbues the mortuary biz turned what should have been a 5-minute transaction into a Gothic theatrical production that dragged on for half an hour.

…

I dare anybody to keep a straight face who darkens the stoop of the Sparkman/Hillcrest Funeral Home, Mausoleum, and Memorial Park. You wouldn’t believe this joint. It was like the set designers from Twin Peaks and Napoleon Dynamite had fused with Elvis Presley’s interior decorator and been reborn as Liberace’s angst-ridden evil twin, who then suffered a psychotic break, and bought up the world’s supply of harvest gold flocked wallpaper, brass upholstery tacks, and fake oak paneling, and ate it all with fava beans and a nice Chianti, and then puked it up all over the living room from Sartre’s No Exit.

…

But nothing in my education or upbringing could have prepared me for our encounter with the Funeral Director. I almost spontaneously combusted when this specimen materialized out of the Stygian mist. The dude was the ne plus ultra, the transcendental essence, the Platonic ideal of funeral directors. He was still. He was shadowy. He was bloodless. He was creepy. He wore an ill-fitting suit made of larceny and doom.

Here it is.

Time spent on a Monday morning in the company of Don unfailingly gets the week going with a smile.

I wonder if you spent any time over at The Modern Mourner yesterday? If you didn’t, think again and have a gander. It is the creation of Shirley Tatum, a generous spirit who signposts her readers to all manner of more or less wonderful designers. Okay, there’s nothing quite so divisive as taste, but I’m going to nail my colours to the mast here. I love ‘em.

Here’s Shirley’s manifesto: My goal is to bring a sense of design to the way we mourn. I’ve noticed how much care goes into the aesthetics of weddings and births, but there seems to be little consideration when it comes to funerals and remembrance. There are so many aspects that need to be overhauled in the funeral industry – from attitudes toward death to industry practices. Design & mourning is a little niche that I’ve chosen to focus on, and hope to make a difference.

Before long I hope she will write a guest post here.

On her site she has an interview with Patrick McNally, aka The Daily Undertaker, whom I think we all admire hugely. If you’ve never been, go now. Here’s Patrick’s response to one of Shirley’s questions:

The word “Undertaker” is actually quite beautiful, but it’s a word most Americans have come to fear. Why is that?
‘Undertaker’ originally described a person who undertook to provide funeral services and goods, not someone who takes your body under the ground, and it had a neutral connotation. However, all words that are used to describe things that we are uncomfortable with end up taking on a negative tinge. When we change the word to remove the negative feeling, though, we solve nothing other than confusing people about what we really do. ‘Mortician’ is a fancied-up job title like ‘beautician’ and Funeral Director was the next step after that, but what does that title even mean? To effect a real change we need to talk openly about death, and stop changing the words associated with it. When you say ‘Undertaker’, everyone knows what you are talking about whether they are aware of the origins of the word or not. It’s plain talk and yes, plain talk has a real beauty to it.

One of the designers and makers Shirley signposts is LBrandt Terraria, which supplies an entirely new receptacle for ashes/memento mori with a strong delight factor,  as evidenced in the pic at the top.

An interesting thread here in a US forum about the custom of stopping to show respect for a hearse passing. I don’t suppose it’s a custom to be found anywhere in Britain any more. Pity. Any reminder that the bell tolls for every single one of us can’t be a bad thing. “We slowly drove, he [Death] had no haste.” That’s the way to do it.

On the subject of reminders of our eventual demise, I rather like this over-the-top urn cover which Shirley (I hope I’ve got that right) at Modern Mourner has commissioned. She says: “I plan to keep my most precious personal possessions in it for now, and when my time comes my ashes can kept sheltered in this most stylish cover. If my ashes are scattered at some point, I hope this wrap can be used to store meaningful mementos.”

Whatever you think about Shirley’s urn cover, wouldn’t it be a good thing if everyone kept their end of life docs in a dedicated hollow object which all members of the family know all about? I’m collecting mine in a wooden ashes pyramid that I bought from Carl Marlow. It’s satisfying to point and say, “It’s all in there.”

When ceramist Chris Smedley was asked by a client if he could make a unique commemorative piece using the ashes of the client’s father, he didn’t know what to expect. When he set about experimenting by using the ash in a glaze, he found that it produced a range of colours from green to blue through to purple. “These effects,” he suggests, may “come from minute traces of metal oxides that collect in our bodies during our lifetime.” Fascinating!

Liking what he saw, Chris, in partnership with Kieran Challingsworth, established Commemorative Ceramics in the crowded and ever-expanding market catering to people looking for creative and befitting ways with ashes. There’s plenty of room here for more good ideas.

You like? I like.  A lot. They deserve to do well.

Prices from £300. Good value, I’d say. Better still, there’s a promotion to celebrate the launch of the enterprise running til 31 October 2010: 25 per cent off the entire range.

Find Chris and Kieran’s website here.

Two interesting new websites for you today. Both are labours of love, and both are run by nice, intelligent people.

The first is homegrown ScatteringAshes.co.uk. It’s a resource for people who, once they’ve got the ashes back from the funeral director in one of those plastic cartons, wonder what on earth to do with them. It can take them a long time to get their heads around it. It can take a long time, as a family, to agree. And, of course, they wonder what their options are. So Richard Martin, impelled by his own experience of bereavement, has created for them a sort of Ashes Central where they can survey their options and pick up some good tips about what sort of ceremony might best suit them. In his own words: “The site was born out of experience and a desire to tell people that they can celebrate a life in their own way. Often people can hold onto ashes for a couple of years or more before they decide what to finally do. By which time the funeral director is not at hand to guide you. Hopefully we can.” It’s well informed, comprehensive and a work in progress. Do write to Richard, if you feel the urge. He’s a ready learner who wants to do the best he can. His is a good idea and I think it deserves to do well. He runs a nice little blog, too. Well worth subscribing to.

The second site is US-based. It is the creation of Felix Jung, like Richard an industry outsider, who is much influenced by the work and thinking of Thomas Lynch. It’s called DeadAdvice.com and is reminiscent of the site established by Bill Drummond, MyDeath.net, where people can plan their own funerals. Whereas MyDeath is now a mature site, and has been infiltrated to an extent by jokers and drunks, DeadAdvice is very young and as yet has few postings. It is a place where people can write letters which address the Big Questions. In Felix’s words:

“Am I a good person? Have I been living a meaningful life? Am I spending the time I’ve been given wisely and well? In trying to answer those questions, I began thinking of the advice people have given me… and of the advice I might give others.

“Every letter on Dead Advice begins with the same first sentence: “Now that I’m dead, I want to tell you a few things.”

“Imagine, for a moment, that you have just died. If you had to look back over the arc of your life as it stands today, what stories would you tell? What lessons would you share, what things might you regret or confess?”

I’m really going to enjoy watching these two unfold.

ScatteringAshes.co.uk

DeadAdvice.com

Why a pillow, I wonder? Especially a pillow that looks nothing like a pillow. I’m not at all sure that the feeding-duck look as it goes down is a good look. If you turn down the music this gets dull.

These guys have missed a trick, leaving a gap in the market for you. Stuff the pillow idea, develop a biodegradable Viking longship. With fireworks. People don’t want to go down with a glug, they want to go up in a blaze, right? You read it here first. If you make a few bob, remember me.

Hangman’s Cottage in Dorchester. Once a place set apart and viewed with dread, now a decidedly des res

A few weeks back I lazily asked whether a private entrepreneur could open a crematorium in this country. I say lazily because I hoped someone would know the answer and spare me research time.

I supposed that only local authorities can get permission from the Secretary of State to build a crem. I was wrong, and I am very grateful to Tim Morris, Chief Executive of the Institute of Cemetery and Crematorium Management, for putting me right. There is, he tells me, nothing to stop a private operator from doing this – subject, he warns, to the usual planning procedures which would, of course, be influenced by the responses of people close to the proposed site.

We discussed the uneconomic model of our crems. In order to be more or less fuel efficient a crem must burn as many bodies as it can in a day. But because its incinerator is attached to a ceremony space (sometimes more than one), it must hurry the living through with indecent haste. It’s a thinly disguised production line. When winter comes it can’t keep up; when summer comes it hasn’t enough to do. You pay for the ceremony space whether you want to use it or not. Your fee is further inflated by a sum used to subsidise the maintenance of the cemetery. This is economically and environmentally a bad deal. It may also be bad value emotionally.

I have a feeling that any ceremony space (chapel if you like) devoted exclusively to farewelling the dead is always going to be bad value emotionally.  Churches, set in the midst of living communities, do a much more rounded job, incorporating as they do all rites of passage. Crems are set apart – in much the same way the public hangman used to be in English towns. In spite of the best and most careful efforts of those unsung people who work in them them, they have the wrong aura. We need to bring funerals back into the land of the living.

Our crems have, it turns out, addressed the environmental and economic issues. A few years back Wandsworth borough council proposed the model of a central crematorium serving several satellite ceremony spaces. The idea was that neighbouring local authorities could decommission their underused cremators and send their bodies over to a really efficient plant for incineration. The proposal foundered. Local authorities, it seems, take too much local pride in their crems to give them up. How would the idea have been greeted by users? Perceptions were never tested.

To get back to the main question. Could a private entrepreneur build a crematorium to serve the direct cremation market? It seems there would be no legal hurdle. Mr Morris reckons that securing the Secretary of State’s approval would be no problem. What would be harder, much harder, would be getting planning permission. In the US and Canada a great many crematories are built in industrial parks. That might not go down so well over here. In any case, there isn’t enough of a market for it yet.

But will people grow weary of schlepping joylessly to the crem for their funerals? Will a significant number begin to question the value of having the body at the funeral? Will they begin to opt, as so many do in North America, for a celebratory memorial service held at a more congenial venue with (optional) just the ashes present?

I see no reason why not. In the meantime, the model of a central crematorium serving several satellite ceremony spaces is an idea well worth revisiting. Public opinion should be tested.

Read past posts for more on this discussion and on the merits or otherwise of direct cremation.