The Good Funeral Guide

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.

“After a horrific car accident, Anna (Christina Ricci) wakes up to find the local funeral director Eliot Deacon (Liam Neeson) preparing her body for her funeral. Confused, terrified, and feeling still very much alive, Anna doesnt believe shes dead, despite the funeral director’s reassurances that she is merely in transition to the afterlife. Eliot convinces her he has the ability to communicate with the dead and is the only one who can help her. Trapped inside the funeral home, with nobody to turn to except Eliot, Anna is forced to face her deepest fears and accept her own death. But Anna’s grief-stricken boyfriend Paul (Justin Long) still can’t shake the nagging suspicion that Eliot isnt what he appears to be. As the funeral nears, Paul gets closer to unlocking the disturbing truth, but it could be too late; Anna may have already begun to cross over to the other side.”

Over in Austria an undertaker, urged by his PR people, parks his hearse at a blackspot in order to deter sloppy driving. The hearse bears the gloating message: ‘We’re always ready for you.’ The object? Driver sees it, thinks ‘That’s jolly clever,’ slows down and uses that undertaker next time she needs one. Win-win. Read the story in our own dear Daily Mail here.

Over in the US, advertising man Dan Katz damns the initiative: ‘Whenever humor is chosen as an attention-getter, the question always has to be: is it directly relevant to the selling message, or just a gimmick … I’d argue that it falls short of the real goal, which is to strongly, indelibly link a meaningful benefit (not just death) to the advertiser’s brand … Creepy for its own sale doesn’t sell, even if it does get top-of-mind awareness. The basics of marketing still apply, including the requirement of having a compelling reason why someone should consider you over your competition.’

To position death as macabre and avoidable is dumb. To use a hearse to strike terror is dumb. That’s so obvious it needs no elaboration. We’re too frightened of death as it is.

So if you were an undertaker in the UK (perhaps you are?), would you accede to the wishes of a dead person aged just 85 and display this message on your hearse: “Smoking killed me – please give up!“?

Personal afterthought: I never see a dead person without feeling slightly envious. I often think of that line from Shakespeare: “After life’s fitful fever, he sleeps well.”

Obachan Funeral 2008 from Steven S Friedman on Vimeo.

There’s a thought provoking post over at Mindfulness and Mortality about the role of the body at a funeral. Among many other interesting ideas, blogger Gloriamundi articulates this:

Somehow, people have to let a body go. It’s very difficult to do, because the life of the person they knew was embodied – literally, in that body. The life and the body were the same thing. The body is now a different body, and the mourners have to move towards seeing it as different – something they must let go of. They have to leave with something non-physical, with an enhanced sense of the meaning of the life that is ended.

This is something we have to think through if we are to engage with the nature and the purpose of a funeral. It’s a terribly tough emotional and philosophical transition to make, from caring tenderly for the body of a dead person through to destroying it or permitting it to be destroyed. In the case of cremation, the destruction of the cherished body happens hardheartedly fast after the funeral ceremony. This is illustrated, I think, by the video above.

I was called to perform an emergency Taharah – the ritual cleansing and preparation of a body for burial. I was the rabbi of a large congregation, and although I had participated in Taharot in this funeral home, I had never been summoned for an “emergency Taharah.”

The manager of the funeral home, a friend, walked me to the door of the Taharah room but refused to enter with me. I peeked in and saw that there was a tiny body under the sheet, and assumed that the man, who had suffered the terrible loss of a son-in-law and grandchild in an auto accident, could not bear to see a dead baby.

I prepared everything I would need and uncovered the body. Whatever it was under the sheet barely appeared to be human. I was horrified by what I saw.

Phero Tran Tieu’s Funeral from Joseph Pham on Vimeo.

I’m indebted to Quigley’s Cabinet for this. It’s by Sam Jinks, who currently lives and works in Melbourne where he spends his time creating hyper-realistic sculptures out of silicon. Read more here.