The Good Funeral Guide

A delightful account here from the funeral in the chapel of King’s College, Cambridge, of Sir Frank Kermode, eminent literary critic and, most important, very nice man, by John Naughton. It was, says Naughton, “elegant, moving, celebratory and only slightly elegaic. I think he would have approved.” Fittingly, “Afterwards, there was a splendid tea in the Senior Combination Room.” How very Cambridge!

“Ursula [Owen] told a lovely story about a trip she and Frank had gone on together — to the Yeats Summer School in Sligo, where he had been invited to lecture. When they settled into their seats on the plane, Frank opened his folder and realised that he’d brought the wrong text. So they checked into their hotel and he then calmly reconstructed the missing lecture, walked out and delivered it.”

But what I enjoyed most was this reflection by Anthony Holden on the nature of friendship, the value of which is enhanced by the fact that it was delivered by one supremely analytical brain and endorsed by another:

“At the end of his eulogy, Tony said something that rang true for all of us. “What I did to earn Frank’s regard”, he said, “I’ll never know”. Me neither. To be granted the friendship of such a great man was a wonderful privilege. So I’ll just count it as one of my blessings and leave it at that.”

Read the entire post here.  More about Sir Frank here, including his thoughts about death: “Death may be, is likely to be, a little too early or a little too late.” And (another) very nice tribute to Sir Frank, again by John Naughton, here.

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.

On a slow news day, I quite enjoyed this piece by Jane Miller in my favourite newspaper:

Many of us have been possessed at times by thoughts that the life we are living is not the real one, but some botched job we somehow fell into, provisionally as it were, fine for the time being, until we’ve decided what we really want to be or do.

Old age certainly sorts that out for us. Saying to yourself that this is it, all it was ever going to be, has its consolations, allowing us to shed the frustrations of a lifetime of try-outs.

…

In Coda, the book written by playwright-Simon Gray when he was dying of lung cancer, he ended one chapter with the words: ‘I wish there were a way of just dissolving in the sea, without having to go through the business of drowning first.’

I like that idea, but my absence from my own death and my own funeral robs both of a good deal of interest. My funeral is not, after all, a family occasion I shall be required to organise. And what will be the point of it, anyway, if I’m not at it and in a position to check who has made the effort to turn up and who has not?

Read it all 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.

Here are some extracts from a cheering story in the Newburyport News, Massachusetts which has set me thinking about the nature of identity and community.

My father, Arthur Allen, died at the age of 63 on Aug. 2. My dad was the embodiment of compassion, duty, style and bravery. He was the guy fighting for the rights of the victims; he was the man campaigning for a friend; he was a proud member of the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company of Massachusetts; he was a humble member of the Byfield Protection Fire Company No. 1; he was an EMT [Emergency Medical Technician], EMT trainer and swim instructor for underprivileged children; he was a promoter for the annual Firemen’s Ball; he was an organ donor; he was the chairman of the Mass. Aeronautics Commission; he was president of his own business, Security Team; and he was the one who enjoyed doing magic tricks for kids. He was always ready to buy you a meal and even quicker to pick up the tab. He was a true friend to many, my greatest supporter and my mom’s best friend. My dad was a great thinker who spoke provoking truths about our lives, towns, country and times.

…

He was a collector of people and a fixer of troubles. I think it was his own painful childhood, being orphaned at 12, that made it possible for him to connect with injured people and drove him to find ways to alleviate their pain. He was living proof that a person could rise above their problems and make a positive difference in this world. He wanted to help others find their way to healing, too.

…

Who could step up and make sense out of this senseless loss. Who would comfort my mother, my sister, his sister, the people? I felt alone, overwhelmed, and in a dark place.

Then a funny thing happened.

Messages started pouring into our home from friends, families, neighbors and acquaintances. Stories of who my father was and how much he meant to so many were shared in person, by phone, by mail, and even through Facebook postings and poems. Food flowed from every nook and cranny. Pictures of holidays, vacations and events were shared. Children were playing in the yard with my father’s dog. Friends and foes united in grief were hugging in the living room. I heard laughter coming from my parents’ kitchen. I heard my mother laugh. Ready or not, the healing had begun. How was this possible?

It was my dad’s extraordinary love of life, the love he shared with others, the love he instilled in me that was coming full circle home. I was not alone; we were not alone. He was right there with us in the words, deeds and memories shared by others. In the end, it was the positive energy my father sent out into the world that led his family through the dark days of his loss. It was his powerful last lesson for us.

Read the entire story 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

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?

Here’s an incredibly powerful and superbly written account from the New York Times about the consequences of life-extending interventions by medics.

It begins:

One October afternoon three years ago while I was visiting my parents, my mother made a request I dreaded and longed to fulfill. She had just poured me a cup of Earl Grey from her Japanese iron teapot, shaped like a little pumpkin; outside, two cardinals splashed in the birdbath in the weak Connecticut sunlight. Her white hair was gathered at the nape of her neck, and her voice was low. “Please help me get Jeff’s pacemaker turned off,” she said, using my father’s first name. I nodded, and my heart knocked.

It’s a gruelling read, and worth every word. You can find it here.

I don’t know if you ever wander over to Death Matters. It’s a descriptive title for a website and blog which is trying to awaken in a death-denying people a full and informative awareness of their mortality – in order that they may live better and remember better. It’s a one-person enterprise. We don’t know the writer’s name, so let’s settle, for convenience, for DM. DM’s mission statement is this:

“The best medicine for living peacefully and thankfully in a trying world is a direct and constant awareness of one’s own mortality and that of everyone around one. This awareness is also the necessary first step on the path to transcending Death.”

DM’s explanation for the way we ignore, diminish or trivialise death is encapsulated in this statement:

“As a child is furnished with organs to facilitate and allow birth, so man also possesses organs for death, the formation and strengthening of which belong to theological practices. Where this knowledge is extinguished, a form of idiocy spreads with respect to death; this reveals itself in an escalation of blind fear, but also in an equally blind and mechanical disdain of death.” Ernst Jünger, The Adventurous Heart

Whether or not this means that DM thinks that atheism generates idiocy, I don’t know. That statement would seem to make it clear that he/she does, but I’m not so sure.

Death Matters is a thought-provoking place to spend time. I especially like DM’s analysis of awareness. There is intellectual awareness of our mortality without emotional awareness; there is emotional without intellectual. There is physical awareness brought on by ageing, which we banish by putting our trust in cosmetics and medics.

I’m not sure exactly by what process and by what practices DM thinks we may best assimilate a full and proper sense of our own mortality.

DM’s latest blog post asserts that “death is the negation of all material progress,” yet that a sense of this may be dissolved in the consideration that though individuals die, society marches on, resulting in “a simultaneous loss of importance of the individual at the hands of the collective”. DM rates this a “’booby prize’ in comparison with the Grand Prix of personal continuity through eternity.”

I don’t know that I think DM is right in this. The funeral of a materialist can yield more and greater consolations than that at least this death won’t stop Apple from developing its next glittering gizmo. What else goes on? Memories, of course. And DNA—let’s not overlook DNA—because aspects of intellect and character are passed on, as are physical mannerisms. Lastly, values and example are passed on, and are commemorated in their emulation. Sure, that doesn’t compare with an everlasting crown, but it’s still a pretty rich legacy.

Having said which, I don’t know that I have understood DM completely. There’s an intellect deficit on my part which leaves me with a floundering feeling. I need some help here. Help!

Perhaps DM him/herself will help me out.

I recommend adding Death Matters to your blog feed. And I commend the YouTube sermon above, preached by a man of whom I think DM would approve.

I wonder if anyone is having problems in posting comments? One reader certainly is. It seems to be something to do with cookies. If you are, please let me know and I’ll get My Man to sort it.

All comments are as far as possible unmoderated. All first-time commenters come to me first for approval, in case they’re spam, I guess, after which all their subsequent comments are posted without my say so. I never, ever get rid of anything I don’t like.