The Good Funeral Guide

Photo by Mel Evans

Denise Meletiche leans over to kiss her son, Army Spc. Pedro A. Millet Meletiche, 20, during a funeral service at the Christ Fellowship Church, in Elizabeth, Meletiche died Sunday, Aug. 22, 2010, during a combat operation in Afghanistan.

At the Dallas Morning News blog, photo editor Guy Reynolds considers the rightness of publishing the photo above. He says, “We often are hesitant to run photos showing the deceased in the paper. I think editors here (and at other papers I’ve worked at) are overly sensitive to publishing these. If the family has invited us to attend and document the event and freely chooses to have its loved one on display then why would we, in the gatekeeper role, disregard their wishes?”

Most newspaper editors would reject this photo in favour of something less direct—a photo in which the “casket is out of focus and in the background,” and he prints an example. Here’s his reflection on this practice: “Out of sight, out of mind? Are our readers’ sensibilities protected by us deciding that they don’t need to see the face of the dead?”

Here in the UK we do not have the tradition of the visitation where dead people are displayed for a final farewell. For that reason, we are much more easily shocked by photos of dead people—even if they’re out of focus and in the background. So I wonder what effect a photo like the one above would have on people in this country. And I wonder what its effects would be on attitudes to the war in Afghanistan.

Do read Guy Reynolds’ blog here.

The media loves death and funerals — wacky music, funky coffins, all that sort of stuff. Best of all, the media loves to find people working in the funeral industry who do not conform to the common conception of deathworker as  inhabitant of a dark and terrifying otherworld. Normal people; people like us. Better still, people who are young. Best of the best, beautiful young women.

If the effect is to educate the public about the reality of funeral service, all well and good. Last week’s Channel 4 programme, Teen Undertaker, served this purpose pretty well, I believe. It follows two teen undertakers, Laura and Paul. It panders, yes, but it also reveals responsibly.

There’s one bit that made my eyebrows rise. I wonder if yours will, too.

Catch it on 4 oD here.

In his excellent book Curtains, Tom Jokinen quotes US undertaker BT Hathaway on the subject of home funerals. Hathaway reckons a home funeral suits “the 5 per cent who have money, time, resources, education and political and emotional will.” With preconditions like these, how come it ever got as high as 5 per cent? Hathaway concludes: “It’s poetic, but the truth is, I don’t know that many poetic families.”

Poetic? I’m not sure about this elegant disparagement. Jokinen draws his own wrong conclusion: “This is of course the same argument for why people eat at Pizza Hut instead of milling their own wheat and breeding their own pepperoni cattle.” Here we have an overstatement. You don’t have to grow a tree to make the coffin, neither do you have to plant your own jute to make the lining.

But convenience is a seductive thing. And time is of the essence. A dead body is potentially a chaotic, eruptively ugly thing; it makes a lot of sense to call the experts in and keep a safe distance. And we reflect here that, when people die, those who loved them urgently want the body back from wherever in the world it conked out. They want this with a fervour which arguably defies reason. This may be not so pronounced in the UK, where dead soldiers were buried where they fell as late as the Falklands war. But in the US the historic clamour to have the body returned led to a stream of dug-up coffins coming back, once hostilities were over, from the battlefields of the first and second world wars.

So: distance matters. The body must come home. Propinquity is good. But closing the distance and engaging with that body? NO!  At the last, we need our cordon sanitaire, cowards that we are. Here we record the loss of the lesson of the teachings of all the great religions that the dead body should be treated as an object of veneration.

At the end of his book Jokinen begins to reap the harvest of his experiences as an undertaker’s understrapper. Here’s what he says:

“Instead of deflecting a confrontation with death through commerce, you face it, fill the hole by hand, and then get on with the hard work of mourning, knowing that instead of passively choosing an object from a catalogue and subcontracting the ritual to someone else, you’ve acted, taken a stand, not against dirt, in fact, but in favour of it. An act with a meaning.”

Later the same day he meets his wife for supper. “I have seen the future,” I tell her. “And it’s Jewish.”

In other words, he finds the middle ground between doing it all (the home funeral) and doing nothing: giving in to “the impulse to fix grief through shopping.”

A lot of religious law has to do with physical and emotional health. Much law relating to diet has been rendered obsolete by simple advances in hygiene. Leviticus is for that reason looking decidedly old hat these days, and pigs unfairly deprecated. But a number of Jewish practices, however ritualised, retain their (thank you, Mr Hathaway) poetic value because they promote healthy grieving.

Sitting shiva, for example. Taking yourself out of the loop, telling your employer to get stuffed and staying at home for either seven or three days after the burial. Time exclusively spent getting your head around it but, importantly, time which is bounded. Got to be good.

And then there’s the work of the chevra kadisha, the little community team that performs the tahara – the ritual preparation of Jews for burial. This involves the right prayers, of course, and also the washing and dressing of the body with immense respect, concluding with an apology to it should anything done have offended it.

I’m not making a pitch here for the return of the splendid and formidable laying-out woman. All I would observe is that, if a dead body is held precious, then it makes good emotional sense to play a part, under the eye of experts, in getting it ready for burial.

There’s a very good little video film which talks about the work of the chevra kadisha and shows the tahara performed in a funeral director’s mortuary. I’d embed it if I had the skills. If you want to skip straight to the tahara, start 6 ½ minutes in.

Click here.

Funeral directors know that they are viewed with suspicion, aversion, distrust. It’s what they do that lies at the root of this – the dark art of dealing with dead bodies. Yuk.

How different they are from us. We don’t like people who are different from us. But most people express their feelings about funeral directors not in terms of their differentness (though a funeral director in a pub may well elicit a snigger), but of their avarice. They are skilled, too, it is supposed, in the dark art of exploiting people ‘at a difficult time’, filching fistfuls of the folding stuff from their sobbing wallets, the velveteen-voiced bastards.

Whenever people say to me they reckon funerals are too expensive, I ask, “What else could you get for that?” and leave a long silence. After we have listed some pretty untantalising consumer items that you can pick up for between £2500—3000, I ask what they reckon would be a fair price. Not having thought it through, they um a lot. “Fifty quid?” I prompt. “A tenner?” They search for a respectful figure. Hard to find one. It’s not easy to benchmark funeral costs. There’s nothing comparable. And before you say it, no, not weddings. Chalk and cheese.

All funeral directors are not so regarded. Where they are known in their community they are evaluated according to their personal qualities. In urban areas, where sense of community is seldom strong except among gang members, most people do not know their neighbourhood undertaker. In rural areas the undertaker is part of everybody’s daily lives. In the Somerset village of Henstridge, Donald Hinks and his daughters Lavinia and Mandy of Peter Jackson Funeral Services are known by everyone. They are much loved because they are incredibly nice people. And when Lavinia picks up her children from school, there’s scarcely another child whose nan or uncle or whoever has not been cared for in death by Lavinia and her family – and the kids know it. They must have a different attitude to death as a result. Much healthier, more accepting.

Some funeral directors work hard to enhance public perception of what they do. They give talks, hold open days, sponsor a youth football team or, more likely, a bowls match where they may be sure of a demographic receptive to the lure of a pay-now-die-later funeral plan. I am not sure that this goes to the heart of the perception problem.

Over at Pat McNally’s blog there is an account of a good Irish funeral by the brother of the man who had died. Much better than an English funeral, he reckons. Why so? Because “in England our funerals have become sanitised – snatched from families and communities by undertakers who no doubt check their profit margins on Excel spreadsheets.”

There you go. The perception thing. And I can hear every funeral director who reads this blog thinking, How unfair!

Over in the US, where funeral scandals tend to be egregious, unlike in the UK where they tend to be wretched, James Patton, a funeral director, blames the media: “It seems like each day, over the past year, the media has been on the attack against the funeral industry. It is as if we have returned to the days of Jessica Mitford.”

I have a feeling that Tom Jokinen gets closer to the heart of the problem. The funeral director he is working for tells him: “We live in a caste system, where the Brahmins subcontract their problems to the unclean, the Dalit caste, the corpsehandlers.” In other words, what you do is what you are. Untouchable.

I was reflecting on this the other day, up at t’crem, waiting for the hearse. For all my exposure to death I am not reconciled with it, I hate it. And I could never be a corpsehandler. I speak for the vast majority of humankind. But because of my exposure to death, I deeply respect those who do it, and do it well.

It’s the perception of everyone else that needs attention. But how is that done?

Some interesting reflections here on humankind’s relationship with the dead human body and the forces of nature. I especially enjoyed the observation that the prairie dogs happily digging in this cemetery are no respecters of social status: they have even dug up a state governor. What deplorable absence of deference so far down the food chain!

Hat-tip to the FCA for this.

Sweet story here from Georgia, USA recounted in the Monticello News:

Most people don’t reckon to look their best when they’re dead, but this was not how the status conscious citizens of Palermo in Italy saw it.

Starting in 1599 the Capuchin friars were mummified or embalmed, then displayed, standing, in the catacombs beneath their friary. The idea appealed to the wealthy citizens of Palermo, who clamoured to join them. Permission was granted and, over the centuries, their numbers grew and grew. The custom was only discontinued in the 1920s.

There to this day they stand or sit or lie, gathered according to profession, wearing the clothes they wore in life. They now constitute a fascinating record of social history – and an object of appalled fascination to goggling tourists.

Around 8,000 desiccated corpses gregariously survive in varying states of repair, their expressions altered over time, many of them now seeming silently to be singing in chorus, nattering, making merry or expostulating. One of the last to be entombed was a child, Rosalia Lombardo, who remains to this day touchingly well preserved.

There’s an excellent article by AA Gill here.

Be sure to see the photos which go with the piece here.

There’s more about Rosalia here.

There’s a melodramatic clip about Dario Piombino-Mascali, a palaeopathologist who is working hard to preserve Sicilies many mummies, here.

There’s a website full of pictures plus some very good links here.

Lastly, here is a YouTube film, described by a commenter most appropriately as “sweetly macabre.”

THE proprietor of an Indian restaurant next-door to a proposed funeral parlour is concerned the development will turn diners off their pappadums and vindaloo.