The Good Funeral Guide

There’s an exhibition on at Compton Verney, 13 November til 12 December, entitled Kurt Tong: In Case it Rains in Heaven. It’s a photographic celebration of the Chinese custom of burning paper consumer goods of all sorts — clothes, cars, iPods – in order to provide for the dead person in the afterlife. It’s a custom that probably makes little intuitive sense to anyone not brought up in the tradition, by which I only mean that it makes little intuitive sense to me.

As well as being a lovely place with a very good restaurant and a tradition of excellent exhibitions, Compton Verney is home to the largest single piece of stone ever taken from the Isle of Portland. It’s a boulder 5 metres high and weighs 100 tonnes. Its installation was the inspiration of artist John Frankland. They had a heck of a job getting it off the island, I remember it well, and having got it to its destination the best name Mr Frankland could find for it was ‘Untitled’, which sounds a bit like artspeak for ‘Er…”

I digress. If you’d like a foretaste of Tong’s snaps, have a look here.

I’ll never make a funeral director. Yesterday’s experience reinforced that. No presence of mind. No eye for detail. In any case, I like things to hang loose, come a little unravelled if they will. But the mourning public likes to be held in a reassuring grip, I was reminded. They like someone to look to; someone commanding. To what extent this is a conditioned response, the product of strict timetabling brought about by the exacting demands of crematoria, I don’t know. But there is a decidedly British funeral behaviour and there’s more to it than Britishness. It goes with a lot of glancing at watches. Everyone except the dead guy, that is.

It all went well, just in case you’re wondering. Along the way I met some great people. And herein lay another reminder. Some of the nicest people we’ll ever meet work in the funeral industry. There was Richard who prepared the body and was so happy to be told what a very good job he’d done. There was Mandy at Adlam’s, where the body was being looked after. She couldn’t have been kinder or more generous. There was Margie McCallum, the celebrant. She gave up most of her day to this funeral and conducted the ceremony with clarity, intelligence and unhurriedness. And there was lovely Dave of ClassicRentabug whose fun lim followed me in the estate car in which poor Margie was crammed against the dashboard because the coffin was 6’ 8”.

Once at the crem my essential incompetence was made manifest. I even found I was unable to reassure myself that the coffin goes in feet first. So I threw myself on the mercies of the crematorium manager, confessing myself to be an imposter. This might have made him disdainful. It didn’t. With great magnanimity and gentleness he didn’t tell me what to do, he took over. He briefed the bearers, who were intent on shouldering the coffin. He arranged the procession. He seated everyone, and was alert to every latecomer. And while I have been to many crems and met many very nice people who work in them, this man, Nick Pearce, manager of West Wiltshire Crematorium, is, in my unwavering opinion, the Best in Britain. His staff are lovely, too.

Perhaps you have your own local hero whom you would like to nominate. Please do. I’d be happy to settle for equal best (if grudgingly).

There’s interesting work going on over in Boston, Massachusetts. Two women, Ruth Faas and Sue Cross, offer a range of services to the bereaved. They have a reading room where people can sit in comfort and find out about death and dying. They offer advice and contacts to those wanting a green or self-managed funeral. And they have  an art studio where people can come and make something commemorative, or simply work through their emotions.

Have a look for yourself here.

(Hat-tip to The Modern Mourner for this link)

An interesting thread here in a US forum about the custom of stopping to show respect for a hearse passing. I don’t suppose it’s a custom to be found anywhere in Britain any more. Pity. Any reminder that the bell tolls for every single one of us can’t be a bad thing. “We slowly drove, he [Death] had no haste.” That’s the way to do it.

On the subject of reminders of our eventual demise, I rather like this over-the-top urn cover which Shirley (I hope I’ve got that right) at Modern Mourner has commissioned. She says: “I plan to keep my most precious personal possessions in it for now, and when my time comes my ashes can kept sheltered in this most stylish cover. If my ashes are scattered at some point, I hope this wrap can be used to store meaningful mementos.”

Whatever you think about Shirley’s urn cover, wouldn’t it be a good thing if everyone kept their end of life docs in a dedicated hollow object which all members of the family know all about? I’m collecting mine in a wooden ashes pyramid that I bought from Carl Marlow. It’s satisfying to point and say, “It’s all in there.”

I enjoyed this piece by David Nobbs, creator of Reginald Perrin, in yesterday’s Observer. Here are some extracts.

My mother died on 7 August 1995. I didn’t realise, that day, my life had changed … My mother died, as she had lived, unselfishly. After she’d died, my wife Susan and I were just in time for Sunday lunch at my aunt’s. That may sound frivolous, but it was so typical of her I actually believe that some unconscious influence was at work.

She had lived about as happily as it was possible to live in the 20th century, for almost 95 years. She had been ill and in hospital only for the last two weeks. At times, during those two weeks, she had been restless and disturbed, but that Sunday morning she became more and more peaceful. Her breathing began to get slower. She had worried for Wales, and I had no doubt this contributed heavily to her worry lines, but now all those lines disappeared – her face became smooth and she looked young again. Her breathing faded and slowed so imperceptibly it was hard to recognise the moment she actually died.

I can honestly say, on reflection, that witnessing her death took away from me all fear of my death. (Not of my wife’s death. I fear loss dreadfully.)

That doesn’t mean I welcome the ravages of old age. I fight against them. In my 70s I have taken on a fitness trainer and last month I began to tweet! I hope that I will not die in great pain or in an old people’s home. But I no longer fear the moment when I will cease to exist

But the most important thing that happened to me in the wake of my mother’s death wasn’t the strengthening of my feelings against religion. It was the strengthening of my feelings for disbelief. I believe that there are just as many of the “Christian virtues” to be found among the faithless as the faithful…

Loss of faith. It sounds so negative. I didn’t lose faith. I gained faith. Faith in people. I am proud to describe myself as a humanist.

This growing conviction has had quite an effect on my writing – on the novels, at least. I am sometimes described as a comic novelist, but I describe myself simply as a novelist. I write about life, and in life I see much humour and much tragedy, and that is what I write about.

An irony of all this is that if my mother could hear me, could read this, she would be very distressed and would be horrified to think that her death had led me down this road. Well, there it is, it’s what has happened and luckily I believe (know?) that she can’t.

Read the entire article here.

David Nobbs talks about how he is dealing with ‘the ravages of old age.’ I guess that, as we embark on an era when, for most of us, we’ve never had it so old, there will be more and more writers dealing with if and how ageing can be made endurable as physical debility advances and we are deserted by all interest in sex and shopping. A book which has been well reviewed is Jane Miller’s Crazy Age: Thoughts on Being Old. There’s article by her in the Guardian here. The social problems thrown up by an ageing population will become more and more apparent in the next 20 years and I suppose the answers to them are, for the time being, unthinkable. But not for very much longer.

Over on BBC Radio 4 tonight at 8pm there’s a challenging-sounding if uncheerful-sounding  programme, Exit Strategy, by Jenny Cuffe about assisted dying and self-deliverance. “The debate over whether we should legalise assisted suicide is not going away. But whilst we flounder over the grey areas of the British legal system, a radical Australian doctor has found a loophole. Because physically helping someone to die is illegal, he is providing information to paying participants on how to die peacefully and painlessly kill themselves … Talking with geriatricians, psychologists, campaigners and elderly people she explores society’s last great taboo: death. She asks why so many people approaching old age are scared of dying. Are they being failed by our care system? Are advances in medicine extending quantity but not quality of life? Or is even discussing assisted suicide for the elderly symptomatic of an ageist society that undervalues the old? Should the ‘I want’ generation be able to make the choice of when we die and have the right to plan our own Exit Strategy?” If you miss it, you can always catch it on the Listen Again.

Going through my stats, researching for a blog post, I saw that someone had clicked through a link I did not recognise. So I clicked through myself and found this wonderful account of embalming excellence at Harlem-based Owens Funeral Home “where beauty softens grief” . I used it in a blog post so long ago I’d forgotten. If you didn’t see it way back then, enjoy it now. If you recall it, I’m sure you’ll enjoy it again. The quality’s good enough to go full screen.

What a wonderful selling point this funeral home has: “I’m the guy who puts the smile on your face. Other places you just look dead.”

On a related theme, I’ve just stumbled on another article describing cosmetic treatments for the dead. While a certain amount of beautification goes on in UK funeral homes (it reflects well on an undertaker’s standards of care), we do not have over here the ritual (ordeal if you like) of the open casket visitation. So while, when thinking forward to our own funeral, we customarily conclude with the reflection that we won’t be there, Americans don’t. Because they will. And, of course, they want to look good and they’re bound to worry that they mightn’t. “People used to say, just throw me in a pine box and bury me in the back yard,” says Mark Duffey, president and CEO of Everest Funeral, a national funeral planning and concierge service. “But that’s all changing. Now people want to be remembered. A funeral is their last major event and they want to look good for it. I’ve even had people say, ‘I want you to get rid of my wrinkles and make me look younger’.”

“I’ve had people mention that they want their breasts to look perky when they’re dead,” says David Temrowski, funeral director of Temrowski & Sons Funeral Home in Warren, Mich. “Or they’ll say, ‘Can you get these wrinkles out?’ It’s all in humor, but I think people do think [more] about what they’re going to look like when they’re dead and lying in a casket.”

“My brother’s a plastic surgeon and I joke with him all the time that funeral directors were doing Botox long before any doctor thought of using it,” says John Vigliante, owner and manager of the Branch Funeral Home in Smithtown, N.Y. “Or at least we use a material that’s similar. We‘ll inject tissue fillers into the lips, the nose, the cheeks, above the eyebrows, the chin, and the hands. It’s the same concept as Botox and dermal filler.” … Lips are plumped, cheeks are filled and contoured, and hollowed hands are injected with filler to give them what Vigliante calls “a nice fuller appearance.”

Read the full article at newsvine.com here.

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When Eulogy magazine came out in June there was excitement and chatter and speculation. Would it catch on? How long would it last? The lowest estimate I was aware of was a curmudgeonly six issues, volunteered by a funeral director in the west country.

In the event, it seems to have underperformed more grievously. There has been nothing since. I had £250 riding on it for an article I was commissioned to write about… I’ve forgotten. Ah well, where Eulogy has gone we shall surely follow. Ink to ink, ashes to ashes.

Over in the New World, Funerals Today goes from strength to strength, it seems (I’ve never read it). I couldn’t resist posting this pic of their newest cover.

There’s a good, long piece in the Huffington Post by Lloyd I Sederer, a doctor, describing his mother’s decline and death. He describes a problem which is going to become more and more common.

Longevity is not all it’s cracked up to be. If we are lucky enough live into ripe old age, our dying may well be a protracted and unbearable ordeal prolonged beyond humanity and reason by attentive medics. That’s why more and more people are going to Switzerland to swallow hemlock.

It’s something society needs to address with some urgency. The problem is already big and it’s going to get huge.

Here are some extracts from the Huffington piece. I’m sure they’ll impel you to read the whole thing.

My mother died on a Monday a few weeks ago. We buried her, in the Jewish tradition, the next day. But we lost her more than a year before when a cardiac event she survived robbed her brain of the oxygen that sustains it and ushered in a dementia that took her away well in advance of her death.

The mental torment of dementia is what gives it its unique cruelty. As horrific as the psychic pain of dementia is, I wonder if it gets the recognition it warrants. Medical care has come to appreciate the crucial importance of mitigating physical pain but mental pain, no less agonizing, has yet to receive its proper due. Psychic pain is equally distressing as physical pain, and to make things worse, for dementia it has few good remedies.

I know death was a relief for my mother — a desired end … She also had made her wishes perfectly clear years before in her health care proxy and power of attorney. She understood, though never used the term, what dying with dignity meant.

…decisions abound during the process of first declining then dying. Not to mention the often tortuous decisions about money, there are decisions about treatments: how should someone be treated for their illness as well as the cascade of complications that frequently befall someone as their immunity diminishes and their infirmity increases. There are decisions about care taking … the most well known decision is whether to DNR (Do Not Resuscitate), but the questions are far more nuanced, as a rule. Here is where a living will or health care proxy is a blessing.

My mother’s time was ushered in after she fractured her hip trying to climb out of bed during a night of terror we could only infer was from her distress. But here is a story about American medicine that needs to be told.

The fracture was discovered some days after it occurred when she was rushed to the hospital with trouble breathing. I received a call from the physician’s assistant to the chief of orthopedic surgery. My mom had a hip fracture but the bone had not been displaced from its socket … She was in no pain. The PA said they wanted to operate, to place a set of screws in her hip … I called back to say no and soon received a call from the surgeon himself to urge me to proceed with the surgery.

That moment was a wake up call for our family. We asked ourselves what would give mom the best moments of life and experience in the time she had left? We realized that goal would be best achieved if we placed her in hospice care. This may sound oxymoronic, but when the time comes give it a try. Fundamental to hospice, contrary to common understanding, is how to make the most out of what time remains, not how to deny care or bring life to a rapid conclusion.

Fighting death and disability at the end too often steals what few moments of actual life remain for someone facing imminent passing. For my family, it was human kindness and eschewing aggressive and dubious treatments that enabled our mother to savor at least a few good moments while still on this earth. But thankful as I am for that I still wonder, until we have more miracles in medical care, is there a better way than the path we are so stubbornly now on?

Find the entire article here.

There’s an interesting article in yesterday’s Guardian about funeral rites in the Church of England Book of Common Prayer (BCP). Here are some tasters:

Life expectancy in Tudor England was mid thirties, and about a third of children died before attaining the age of ten. Mortality was very much in the air and on the streets, what the Book of Common Prayer described as “divers diseases and sundry kinds of death.” … Before modern times the unjust and random nature of fate was inescapable. Death was no stranger, and contemplating your end was not an exercise for a retreat, but the inevitable consequence, half the time, of going out in the streets. In the midst of life you were in death … Death’s carriage delivered us, in the end, to the public crematorium of the 1970′s, with its Terylene curtains, cheesy music, elaborate floral tributes, and shuffling, embarrassed mourners. Death still comes to us all, but now as a sanitised stranger.

Most interesting, though, are some of the comments left by readers. Here’s a sample:

This summer I visited the convent chapel in the aragonese castle on Ischia.
What I thought at first to be toilets, were in fact the penultimate resting places of deceased nuns, whose corpses were seated on these bowls as corruption removed the flesh slowly from the bones and the fluids drained away. To be constantly reminded of their mortality, the other nuns would visit this apalling spectacle daily, many of them sickening and dying themselves as a result of the germ-laden atmosphere.

Give me sanitation and terylene curtains any day.

Dead nuns’ draining seats, Ischia

Existences of null consequence seems to be the modus operandi of modernity. Organs in bodily transition – no future / no past a linear journey from birth to death with no stops and seeming little point.

This seems to that ino our “yoof” obssessed culture we journey into invisibility and then pass away pointlessly. The links to the past and the future give us meaning in the present.

I’m fascinated how you could write a fairly extended piece on the BCP Funeral Service without mentioning the Funeral Sentences ?.

So I will.

Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery. He cometh up, and is cut down, like a flower; he fleeth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay.

What language. If I don’t have these words said at my funeral, I shall return to haunt CiF [Comment is Free]  belief !

Read the entire piece here.

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.