The Good Funeral Guide

Posted by Charles

Commentators on Mr Maiden’s letter to the Funeral Service Journal (here) deploring some coffin manufacturers’ willingness to sell their boxes direct to the public did not find in favour of Mr Maiden’s practice of burying some of his service charge in an excessively marked-up coffin. The latest score is 26-0. 

James Leedam summed it up well when he offered Mr Maiden this counsel: ‘Charge a commercial rate for the time and care you take to make sure that everything runs faultlessly on the day and for the service you take pride in – much of which is not apparent to the consumer. Don’t be embarrassed to mention all that you do – proudly justify your charges. Don’t hide costs in the inflated price of the coffin – you’ll get found out.’ 

It’s not that Mr Maiden, let’s be fair, is being slippery and sly in doing what he does, it’s that he exhibits commercial timidity. In this he is not alone. 

Kathryn observed: ‘I can see why it’s not such a sacrifice for undertakers to offer their ‘services’ for ‘free’ in the context of babies’ and children’s funerals if they’re charging £££ for a small box.’ If undertaking is a proper, respectable commercial activity, why would you not charge for babies’ funerals? 

Which focuses on the question: Can undertaking ever be a respectable commercial activity? 

And the answer is yes, of course it can. Can’t it? You offer to do for others what they can’t or don’t want to do, and you charge them for it. This is mainstream stuff. Isn’t it?

It’s not necessarily how consumers see it. They don’t silently accuse plumbers of preying on the misery of others, though plumbers certainly profit from just that. Undertakers, with some shining exceptions, have never managed to dispel the perception that what they do is exploitative of the bereaved. It is a perception which Mr Maiden and his kind only reinforce. 

But it’s not all their fault. The public’s refusal to engage with the reality of what undertakers are there for compounds the dysfunctional relationship. 

People ask, ‘Do undertakers sit by the phone hoping that someone is going to die?’ Well, of course they do — though they’d rather it wasn’t anyone they know. That’s not the same thing as causing people to die. Get real. 

People — educated people — ask what really goes on at a crematorium. You lay it on. You tell them about lids prised off, bodies crammed into cremators, and the rusty white van out the back waiting to take the coffins away for re-use. And they exclaim, spellbound by such pornography,  ’I always thought so!’ And you shout back, ‘If you always thought so, what are you doing about it?’ 

Where do we go from here? 

Posted by Vale

Some personal reflections on the Southbank Deathfest this weekend:

Imagine a wire and steel footbridge over the Thames: brown water lapping, St Paul’s, pale in the wintry light, downstream. Drop down to buildings, a collection of concrete and glass halls, that were modern once but which, in the way of those that brave 50s buildings, now feel curiously dated.

Inside, people. Lots of them. It’s like an arty concourse in a railway station. Not everyone has come for the Deathfest – though hundreds of them have – but it seems that the lobbies of the Royal Festival Hall are a gathering place for Londoners anyway. The mill of people – talking, drinking coffee, mooching about, characterises the whole of the Deathfest. The day is made up of different events – talks, Death Cafe’s, discussions, stalls, happenings. Each of them has a charge of energy – and, depending on the venue and what’s going on, this mill of people round about sometimes makes them seem open and dynamic and, sometimes, dissipates them so that it is impossible to concentrate.
Actually there was a general sense of mild chaos everywhere. 

Decorative coffins from Ghana

Through the door and, whoop! there are old friends and GFG regulars – Sweetpea, Belinda Forbes, Charles (whose phone rings constantly so that he is no sooner there than darting off again) and Gloria Mundi.There seemed to be friends of the GFG everywhere. Our religious correspondent Richard Rawlinson, Ru Callender, Fran Hall and Rosie Inman-Cooke at a very lively NDC stand, Tony Piper and then GFG heroes like Simon Smith from Green Fuse, Shaun Powell from the Quaker initiative in the East End, helping poorer families to a good funeral. James Showers, Kathryn Edwards too. Who have I missed out? Who did I miss?

If I am honest there was a lot that was interesting, some that was moving and a lot that I thought was not really for me as a practicing Celebrant. But it wasn’t aimed at the likes of us and it was hugely exciting that so many there had come for themselves, to find out and start their own explorations. At the sessions I took part in – where the question was asked – I think 80%-90% were ‘ordinary’ people.

I enjoyed an NDC hosted talk about the need to prepare for death. It made me realise that, as a celebrant, almost all of our time is spent with families after the event. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to meet people earlier? I came away with a resolution to start to make a video recording as part of my own end of life preparations. Just, you know, to make sure a few good things get said. Met an inspiring spiritual midwife too!

After, off to the Beyond Goodbye session that began with Charles’ talk and closed with the film and questions about Josh’s extraordinary funeral. Well, extraordinary because of the film and the standard and quality of what was done, but, I wanted to call out, there are lots of ‘extraordinary’ funerals now. Any family can – should – have one. But that hardly needs saying here. Josh’s mum and brother though came across as pure gold. It really is worth watching it – find the GFGs original posting here. The website for Josh and for Beyond Goodbye is here.

I hung on to my seat (this was in the smaller Queen Elizabeth Hall) because, after Josh, came John Snow and the assisted dying discussion and lot’s of people wanted to see that.

At the end of a lively debate I’m with Helena Kennedy on this: let’s, for goodness sake, have a proper commission about end of life issues. We’re mired in piffling debates in the Leveson enquiry and the doubtful (but surely unsurprising) morals of newspapers when there is an issue here that is both urgent and important and where popular feeling is pulling ahead of the current legal position. Society as a whole would benefit from open, reasoned, public enquiry and debate. I feel a GFG campaign coming on…

There were lots of things in the discussion that did make me think – especially the realisation that assisted dying has to be considered in the whole context of how we, as a society, treat vulnerable people. The whole debate would change – wouldn’t it – if we could be confident that we treated the elderly and disabled generously, with respect and true consideration?

So much that I didn’t see. Paul Gambaccini’s session on Friday about Desert Island Death Discs, the poetry, Paul Morley and Sandi Toksvig – but I still came away with a sense that, maybe, in places like the pages of this blog, in the work of pioneers like the NDC and the Quaker Social Action project, and most of all in the energy and interest of the people who came and took part, we really might be able to bring death our lives. One thing is certain – we need more festivals like this one.

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!

Simon Ferrar will be opening his first natural burial ground, Clandon Wood, in May this year — after months of painstaking research.  He writes here about the lessons he has learned from loss. 

I was moved to write the following, firstly as a response to a blog post but more importantly, while thinking of a friend who was killed, very recently in an accident.

His family situation was very similar to mine, a wife, adult children, siblings and a close family unit.

He did not know that he would not return home again that day.

Was he prepared or his family prepared for when he didn’t?  I don’t know for sure but, looking at my situation and that of most of us, the answer is probably a most definite “No.”

It has caused me to reflect on the first real tragedy of my life in 1999 when my mum was diagnosed with what turned out to be an exceedingly aggressive cancer in her lungs.  She declined treatment so that she could enjoy as natural quality of life as the disease would allow.

I was with her at her diagnosis and I was with her when she died.

The time in between was filled with anger, rage, sadness and tears.

And laughter.

We talked and talked, not just about her imminent death and all of the ensuing practicalities when it did finally happen, but about things we had never talked about before.

We spoke of her childhood and mine. We talked about my dad, who died when I was nine and who I never really knew. And we talked about grown-up stuff and how mistakes and misjudgements on both our parts had impacted on each of us through the years. And then we forgave each other.

Nothing bad had ever happened between me and mum, just emotional misunderstandings that were never conciously realised or aired at the right time.

But nevertheless, we forgave each other.

Purposely and out loud.

And there was nothing left in that room apart from pure love and contentment.

And so to the point of this reflection.

Why does it need such acute pain to say the things we need to say?

My mum and I had the ‘luxury’ of three months to say everything that needed to be said and come to an understanding of each other.

I was with her as she gasped her last breath and I closed her eyes after. 

Thirteen years on, I sill bathe in the beauty of that peace between us in those last weeks. 

So, a generation on and nothing changes. The usual daily strife in my own family generally goes unresolved as we all go about our busy lives.

And I have forgone the profound lesson that I learned with my own mum.

I need to tell each member of my family what they mean to me because one day, probably when we least expect it, one of us won’t come home.

That beauty and peace should be part of us every day; or do we really have to go through the pain of losing someone before we experience that exquisite awareness? 

I know the answer; I just need to do something about it. 

Thank you Gerry, you were a gentleman in life and because of your death, you have made these thoughts real.

This post was first published here. 

Find Clandon Wood here.

 A 90 year-old woman, told she was dying:

“How could this happen to me? Just bad luck I guess.”

Quoted here. 

We’ve extracted this from a Q and A with mortician Caitin Doughty in the Los Angeles Times. Some brilliantly expressed insights here, we’re sure you’ll agree. 

Do people see death differently in other parts of the world? How — and how does that change the way they respond to death?

Some cultures are terrified of corpses being dangerous and filled with bad spirits, so only designated “unclean” people handle them. Other cultures see the corpse as something to be intimately interacted with and practice something called secondary burial, where the corpse is cleaned and prepared by the family over a manner of months as it decomposes.

Americans fall somewhere in the middle. There is almost an apathy about it. We don’t think the corpse is going to attack us with bad spirits, but at the same time we don’t want anything to do with it if we can pay a professional to handle it instead.

How else would you characterize the American way of dealing with death? 

American death is a cycle of denial and fear. If you’re not exposed to the realities of death and dead bodies, death becomes something not entirely real to you. Of course, we naturally fear what we don’t understand and what’s hidden from us. But the more we fear it, the less likely we are to face it head on. So the cycle just keeps going until someone we love dies and we’re entirely unprepared.

Find Caitlin Doughty’s blog at The Order of the Good Death here. 

Article in the LA Times here.

Fran and her Mum on her 70th

Fran Hall, a funeral industry practitioner of many years’ standing, much admired by the GFG, now works as a consultant. She is also the newly-appointed Chair of the Natural Death Centre. For years Fran successfully managed to balance detatchment and empathy in her professional life, so how did it feel when one of her own died? Here, she tell us. 

It’s a rum thing, this death business. You can familiarise yourself all you like with the subject, read every book, article or blog there is to read, immerse yourself in working daily alongside the dying or the dead, consider yourself an expert on the ‘D’ word, and then suddenly you find yourself wrong-footed, knocked sideways out of theory by a swipe from the cold bony finger of the grim reaper.

For years I have grown a reputation for knowing all about death. From humble beginnings as a (completely untrained) funeral arranger, through qualifying with a diploma in funeral directing and then veering slightly sideways to participate in the fast expanding world of natural burial as a marketing manager, I have explored many avenues, and gained some notoriety within the business at the same time. I have sat with stunned, weeping families, bathed cold stillborn babies, collected broken bodies from the roadside or train tracks, cut decaying corpses down from loft hatches with white faced police constables standing by, dressed little children in their pajamas or favourite outfits, coordinated plans for huge ceremonies that needed roads closed and police escorts, conducted hundreds of corteges, written and delivered numerous ceremonies, and been intimately involved every time with the people I served.

I considered myself pretty sorted when it came to dealing with the emotional stuff, checking in with how each contact was impacting on me and those around me, crying sometimes, but not often – you find a way of assimilating some of the worst things you see, and you support each other, because people outside the hidden world of undertaking just don’t get it. Nothing really got through the defence system I created, not enough to impact on me. I was on top of it, cool with mortality, and therefore cool with the fact that at some point it would be my body on the tray in the fridge, or the body of someone that I loved…

And currently, the body of my mother is lying in a fridge somewhere within Kings College Hospital. She’s been there almost exactly a year. She died on January 23^rd 2011, and what remains of her will probably be cremated sometime in 2014 in some godforsaken crematorium in South London. Her decision to leave her body to medical science was something we all applauded when she produced the paperwork back in 1999, such a thoughtful, generous thing to do. I had no idea of the actual effect it would have when the time came and we were left without the comfort of a ritualised farewell to her existence. That’s what I mean about being wrong-footed. 

Let me go back. It was a mercifully brief illness that snuffed out the bright light that was our mother. Always the centre of attention, glamorous, bossy, difficult and charming, she was a true Leo, a powerfully dominant matriarch at the heart of our family. The drama of being the hostess of a Grade IV glioblastoma multiforme – the most deadly of brain tumours – was only fitting for someone who shone so brightly and who numbered her friends in the hundreds. She was fit and healthy in the August, and dead four months later – sixteen weeks exactly from diagnosis. In those sixteen weeks I realised that all my years of being alongside death had been just that, a journey beside others, a second hand experience. My practical knowledge was useful – I knew how to talk to the professionals, what questions to ask, how to get the help we needed, I was able to do stuff that my brothers couldn’t, because I knew my way round the system. Emotionally it was easier for me too, I had learned how to deal with grief over the years, knew what to expect – and yet being immersed in the swirl of feelings that ebbed and flowed during those four months was something quite new.

Walking on Epsom Downs on the last all-family day out

We were incredibly fortunate, the planets had aligned themselves in such a way that we were able to give our mother the best gift, a death at home in the house where she had lived for fifty years. Not that she discussed it at all – she never once spoke about death, she refused to be drawn into any conversation about her deteriorating health, somehow complying with hospital appointments, radiotherapy sessions and visits from the Macmillan Nurses without ever acknowledging the unspoken fact that everyone knew. Out of earshot my brothers and I had long conversations, each of us at different stages of acceptance of the inevitable, but in her presence we took our cue from her and kept conversation light and easy.

The cruel indignities of a failing body are very basic, very simple things that signpost the shortening path ahead. Gradually, gradually the world closed in – in October we walked as a big family group on the Downs, by November she could no longer walk up the stairs, by December she couldn’t raise herself from a chair. The hospital bed and commode arrived, furniture was shifted and a boudoir created in part of the living room, complete with ambient lighting, feather boas and beads, candles and flowers, and drapery over the mirror so she didn’t catch sight of her features bloated by drugs. Pleasures became little and intimate – no more grand dinners or shopping for bright coloured clothes, she was happy to have her nails painted and perfume applied and to gaze for hours out of the window. We didn’t know what she was thinking, but she seemed content with her thoughts, whatever they were. And while she passed each day quietly and comfortably, we three journeyed with her towards the end, each of us in the experience, part of it, not just observing it.

We were blessed with the kindest of carers to help us in the last few weeks, wonderful ladies who arrived every few hours with gentle hands and loving hearts. They bathed her and changed her, spoke softly and cheerfully to her, marvelled at her grace and serenity and shared jokes with us while they wrote their notes before slipping away. We were able to just be with her, offering food and drink, sitting with her while she slept, changing places with the various friends and family members who came every day to see her. It was a wonderful, dreadful time, a time in which we were able to contemplate what was coming and reach a kind of acceptance, safe in the familiar surroundings of the house we had all grown up in. I know how lucky we were, so many other families aren’t able to have such a softened approach to a death.

The day before she died all of her grandchildren were together in the room – separated from the bed where she lay semi-conscious by a DIY partition, nine of them sprawled on sofas and chairs, playing cards, eating pizza, fooling about quietly to the accompaniment of ‘Nan’s music’. Probably the last sound that she heard was their laughter – it was surreal, and yet so right to have them all being normal just feet away from their dying grandmother. Each of them came and went as they wanted to her bedside, holding her hand, stroking her hair. When the older ones left that night, they all knew they wouldn’t see her again and this was one of the hardest things, seeing my children leave the house stumbling with grief and tears and holding each other tightly. The little ones wanted to stay, so we made beds for them on the floor, and they slept as we adults sat vigil with our mother as she died.

You don’t get much preparation for what to do once someone has died. I don’t mean the immediate practical stuff, like closing their eyes, laying them back onto the pillow, wiping their mouth; I mean you don’t really know what to do with yourself. She had left us irrevocably, gone. Completely gone. There were six of us in the house, my brothers and sisters in law, my mother’s dearest friend and me. Seconds ago there had been seven. It was the opposite of being in a delivery suite when a baby enters the world. Bizarre thoughts like that arise unbidden as you experience the profundity of what has occurred. Someone made tea, someone else went off upstairs to be alone, my nephews were gently woken and told, as we had promised them we would, and the adults then had to look after them and try and assuage their grief – a welcome distraction I think.  After an hour or so I went out and walked in the freezing January night to an ancient oak tree a mile or so away and just sat at the foot of the huge trunk and looked at the stars, without thinking. It was beyond thoughts, that night. And beyond feelings too – it was just elemental and unconstructed and without boundary, it was death.

In the morning my sister in law and I laid my mother’s body out, washing her and dressing her and making her look lovely again after the ravages of the night before. We hadn’t rushed to call a doctor to certify the death, and we didn’t rush to call a funeral director either, choosing to keep her body at home all day to allow other family members and friends to come and be with her. This was in direct disobedience of the ‘donation to medical science’ rules, but we judged it cold enough to take the risk, and fortunately for us we got away with it (I wouldn’t recommend it to others though if they needed to ensure the donation is accepted, I had to be somewhat economical with the truth on the phone the following morning!)

Eventually, on the Monday afternoon, an undertaker friend of mine came and collected mum’s body and drove her off to her new role as a cadaver for medical students to practice their skills on. This was yet more uncharted territory, and something that I found really difficult to accommodate. I felt denied the opportunity to ‘lay her to rest’, and really struggled to get my head round the absence of a funeral. After all, that was what I did, I made funerals happen – and I wasn’t to be allowed to for my own mother – that was a real tough one for me. I ended up by substituting a funeral with what was to become the most extraordinary memorial service for her a couple of months later.

It’s been a strange journey, this one from ‘knowledge’ through experiencing to where I am now. Probably the best summary is that I am older and a little wiser – an orphan has more insight than a funeral expert. I’m still buying books on death and learning all the time from others, but the process of being alongside my dying mother has taught me more than anything.

Today is the anniversary of Fran’s Mum’s death.

Contact Fran at franhall [at]sky [dot] com

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. 

Hellraiser Charlie Sheen, no stranger to drug, alcohol and domestic abuse, claims to have turned his life around under the influence of having played lead corpse in two fictional funerals in 2011. He says, “It was a little bizarre to watch your own funeral and it certainly gets you thinking.”

Could become a useful therapeutic tool?

Story here. 

“Last week, I attended the funeral of one of my uncles. His irresponsible lifestyle, which included eating meat, smoking, drinking alcohol and ignoring sell by dates, resulted in his life being cut short at the age of 94.”

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