The Good Funeral Guide

‘I won’t be Tutankhamun, I’ll be Tutanalan… the grandkids will be able to tell their friends their grandad’s a mummy.’

Alan Billis, whose body has been successfully mummified using ancient Egyptian techniques. 

Here are two dead people from the Chapel of the Virgins in Monastery of Santa Maria della Pace, Palermo

St Pancras was beheaded in 304 during Diocletian’s persecution when he was only 14 years old. His skeleton was clothed in armour in 1777. He now resides at the Church of St Nikolaus in Wil, Switzerland.

Fra Pietro Antonio da Rieti died in 1754, and is to be found at the Monastery of Santa Maria della Concezione in Rome.

There are 18 mummified corpses in the tiny Church of the Dead in Urbania, Italy. They were looked after by the Brotherhood of Good Death, founded in 1567, in whose costume Vincenzo is dressed.  Click him to make him bigger. The original goals of the Brotherhood were to assist the poor and the dying, provide free burial for the dead, and register the deaths.

Among the mummies is that of a young Down’s syndrome corpse who died of heart failure, a woman who died during a caesarian, and the victim of a stabbing. 

Italy – Urbania e la Chiesa dei Morti (The Church of the Dead) HD – Sept. 2007 – Subtitled in english from myksto on Vimeo.

You heard it on the news? You read it in your newspaper? The Nuffield Council on Bioethics has published a report calling on the government to find out of people like the idea of getting a free funeral in exchange for donating their organs.

Professor Dame Marilyn Strathern, of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics, says: “The possibility of sparing relatives the financial burden of a funeral might encourage more people to register as donors.”

The report rules out offering people an up-front cash inducement in exchange for agreeing to donate an organ or two sometime down the line.

The whole scheme is so fraught with contradictions you wonder how it ever saw the light of day. The point being that those who agree to donate organs cannot be sure where or how they are going to die; unless a person dies in hospital in pretty good health, their organs are no use.  No use = no funeral payment.

So no potential donor is going to be able to bank on a free funeral.

Which means that donors would be mad not to make provision for their funeral anyway. They may even do the dumb and trusting thing and buy a funeral plan or other financial product.

So when the cheque for three grand arrives, what does it go towards? Furnishings? White goods? A plasma TV?

It’s a turkey, Professor Dame Marilyn. And don’t give us this talk about rewards for altruism. Altruism is by definition its own reward.

An interesting thing about this report is that no one has picked up that it is not the first time the Nuffield Council has flown this kite. It first flew it in April 2010.

Guardian report here. Telegraph report here. Daily Mail report here. 

He’s in Waldsassen in Germany after being exhumed from the catacombs of Rome between 1688–1765.

He was a Slav, an eighteen-year-old soldier in the army of the Emperor Maximian. He refused to obey the imperial order to offer sacrifice to the Roman idols, because of which it fell to Captain Tiberian to tell him either to deny Christ or be tortured and killed. As all this advice was in vain, Tiberian arrested him and took him through Macedonia to Constantinople, whither he himself had an errand. In every place, the young Alexander was harshly tortured, but in every place also, the Christians came out to him, begging his blessing and encouraging him in his sufferings. His mother, Pimenia, followed him. In the course of this journey, Alexander was many times visited by an angel of God, who eased his pains and encouraged him. In one place called Carasura,the martyr worked a miracle by his prayers: when the soldiers who were escorting him were tormented by thirst, he made a spring of cold water come out of a dry place. On the bank of the river Ergina, Tiberian ordered that the executioner behead Alexander and throw his body into the river. When the executioner swung his axe above Alexander’s head, he saw angels of God around him, resplendent with light, and was afraid and stayed his hand. Alexander asked him why he had done this, and he said that he had seen some young men in a nimbus of light surrounding him. Desiring to die and so be united with the Lord, Alexander prayed to God to take the angels away, so that the executioner would not be afraid. And so the executioner completed his work, in 298. Pimenia retrieved the body of her son and gave it burial. There were many healings at the martyr’s grave. After his death, he appeared to his mother and gave her tidings of her own imminent departure to the other world. [Source]

At a funeral home death is something that may become a daily routine. And it is also where some kind of performance is taking place. ‘The last performance’ is a behind-the-scenes look at the place where funeral rites are prepared.

Directed by Jorge Tur Moltó. On Vimeo here. 

Posted by Vale

Euphemisms are all about not facing up to reality. We like to think we use them for good reasons, but they have a darker side too. This poem, written by Harold Pinter in 1997, uses one of the words we often shy from, yet it too is a euphemism. It was written in the year that his own father died and I think that, writing about death in this way, he was describing something of his own experience of the way that deaths are managed and, in the midst of the form filling, the way that language can help us hide from what has happened and what we have both done and not done.

Because it is Pinter, of course, I think he was also making a point about the way that being ’official’, can lead to the denial of both feelings and humanity at many different levels. Of course the poem is an extreme version of unfeeling officiousness but does it remind you at all of the way that some funeral businesses handle their first contact with families?

Death (Births and Deaths Registration Act 1953)

Where was the dead body found? Who found the dead body?
Was the dead body dead when found?
How was the dead body found?

Who was the dead body?

Who was the father or daughter or brother
Or uncle or sister or mother or son
Of the dead and abandoned body?

Was the body dead when abandoned?
Was the body abandoned?
By whom had it been abandoned?

Was the dead body naked or dressed for a journey?

What made you declare the dead body dead? Did you declare the dead body dead?
How well did you know the dead body?
How did you know the dead body was dead?

Did you wash the dead body Did you close both its eyes Did you bury the body
Did you leave it abandoned
Did you kiss the dead body

The photograph at the head of the post was taken  by Bob Van Zahn of an installation by the artist George M Tokaya. The poem was silkscreen printed on 7 hospital bedsheets and 7 forensic dissection tables surrounded by the smell of lysol.

Posted by Charles

These last outfits were chosen by some of the 23 people taking part in a photo project initiated by The Straits Times, the leading Singapore daily, in partnership with Lien Foundation, a Singapore philanthropic house. Entitled “The Last Outfit”, the project showcases individuals in the clothes they wish to wear for their own funeral.

The Last Outfit seeks to remove the taboo of death and enthuse people to view life and death differently. 

Full text here.