The Good Funeral Guide

Did you know that earlier today, in the Indian state of Assam, a funeral was held that was expected to be the one of the largest the world has seen in recent years?

Yesterday the Times of Assam reported that:

Unofficial sources have claimed that the number has already crossed the number of attendees who paid the last respect to Late Princess Diana, Pope John Paul II, US president John F Kennedy, etc.

The subject of this grief and devotion is Bhupen Hazarika, the bard of Brahmaputra, who died earlier this week at the age of 86. The service had already been delayed by a day because of the large numbers attending and the Times of India reports that today:

Heartrending scenes were witnessed at the Gauhati University campus, close to the banks of the great Asian river Brahmaputra. As the funeral pyre was lit at 10.26 a.m., chants of ‘Bhupen Hazarika amar raho’ rent the air and people broke down, with some crying loudly and others barely managing to hold back their tears.

An overwhelmed Tej pleaded with the surging crowd to control themselves and maintain calm even as Hazarika’s companion of 40 years, Kalpana Lajmi, cried inconsolably, unable to check her emotions.

“I am speechless with the overwhelming response and love for my father,” an emotional Tej told IANS after performing the last rites of the 85-year-old legend.

An estimated 100,000 people were present at the funeral site, some atop trees, and others trying witness the last rites from every possible vantage point available in the area.

A 21-gun salute was offered by the Assam Police with doctors and forensic experts taking the foot impressions of the man for posterity.

Some vidoe footage of the ceremony can be found here:

I was struck by the way in which the family were close to Dr Hazarika’s body thoughout. In this brief video, the intimacy is very touching:

For the pyre enthusiasts amongst you the Assam tribune reports that:

The GU authorities too have arranged for about 60 to 70 kgs of sandal wood to prepare the pyre of the great artiste in keeping with his stature. The wood has been collected from the University Botanical Garden, said GU Vice Chancellor Prof Okhil Kumar Medhi.

But the best way to pay our tribute to him is through his music. It’s not the best recording but well worth a listen – and it does give you a sense of why his passing is so much mourned:

Presently serving the bereaved of Essex and Suffolk we have a new concept in funeral service, the professional mourner. They’re called Rent a Mourner, we wish them every possible success, and you can find them here.

Did we say new? There’s nothing new in Funeralworld. Every innovation is an act of necromancy. In our scholarly and vigilant way we have covered this business of rentasob before, here and here.

And because our curiosity, like yours, is global, you may be interested to know what the market looks like in China.

One can make a decent amount of money being a proxy mourner … Wailers actually belong to an ancient profession that now keeps a low profile thanks to its singular characteristics. InChongqingandChengdu, wailers and their special bands have, over the course of more than a decade, developed into a professional, competitive market … wailers are predominantly laid-off workers.

Wailing is an ancient funeral custom. Texts show that dirges began to be used in ceremonies during the time of Emperor Wu of Han and became commonplace during the Northern and Southern Dynasties. Customs varied across ethnicities and regions. During the Cultural Revolution, wailing was viewed a pernicious feudal poison and went silent. In the reform era, it was revived in a number of areas.

Hu Xinglian’s hair is tied into pigtails pointing up in opposite directions. Her stage name means “Dragonfly” … and the two pigtails, which resemble dragonfly wings, are her trademark. She is fifty-two years old, and she is a professional wailer.

Before the ceremony begins, she asks the family of the deceased about the situation. She must do this every time. She says that wailers usually put on some makeup and wear white mourning clothes. Some of them are more elaborate, with white stage costumes and “jeweled” headdresses.

Hu calls the family of the deceased into the mourning hall and begins to read the eulogy. There is a formula to the eulogy that is adapted to the particular circumstances of the deceased. Most of these say how hard-working and beloved the deceased was, and how much they loved their children. The eulogy requires a sorrowful tone and a rhythmic cadence. As Hu reads, she sometimes howls “dad” or “mom.” And then the bereaved begin to cry as they kneel before the coffin.

Hu on the job

After the eulogy comes the wailing, a song sung in a crying voice to the accompaniment of mournful music. Hu says that the purpose of this part is mainly to create a melancholy atmosphere which will allow the family to release their sadness through tears.

Hu says that more time is devoted to wailing in the countryside. In video recordings, Hu can be seen howling, weeping with her eyes covered, and at times crawling on the ground in front of the coffin in an display of sorrow. At some funerals, she crawls for several meters as she weeps. This never fails to move the mourners. As she wails, the family of the deceased sob, and some of them weep uncontrollably.

After the wailing is done, the second part of the funeral performance begins. Hu says that a funeral performance is usually sad in the beginning and happy at the end. Once sorrow has been released through tears, then the bereaved can temporarily forget their sorrow through skits and songs.

She says that the performance is draining to both mind and body. When she wails, she says, “My hands and feed twitch, my heart aches, and my eyes go dim.” Wailing has more lasting effects, too: Hu says that her hands have gone numb from time to time over the past year.

Like many wailers, Hu also performs at weddings. She says that because of the transitions between such high-intensity work, wailers are liable to make mistakes. For example, if the line “Would the new couple please enter the mourning hall” is let slip at a wedding, that mistake would mean the forfeiture of the fee, and a beating as well. [Source]

Back to Rent a Mourner, we can’t help thinking that, in preference to bringing another separate specialism to the grief market, it might make more sense for secular celebrants to offer a joined up service here.

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Posted by Vale

If Kutna Hora and Capela dos Ossos show anything it is that we cannot let bones lie.

Buried and disinterred, stacked and stored these vast collections become places where the living can meet and marvel at the dead.

In Naples, at the charnel house in the middle of its Fontanelle Cemetary, this urge has flowered into a full blown relationship. In the 1870s a cult arose around the anonymous dead. People adopted skulls, cleaned and polished them, gave them names, brought them offerings and asked them for favours.

The cult lasted until the late 1960s when the church closed it down.

You can read about Fontanelle here and here.

By Nicola Dela-Croix

Look at any comments left on fan sites, on-line news stories and Facebook pages for people who have died, and you will see it there – on comment after comment after comment – those three letters ‘R.I.P.’. Look on flower cards left at death scenes, in books of condolence, there it is again ‘R.I.P.’.

It hit home this weekend after the 24-year-old MotoGP rider Marco Simoncelli was killed during a race in Sepang, Malaysia on Sunday morning. As a MotoGP fan I was watching the race live and felt very shocked to see him killed in front of my eyes. And then to see it again in sickening slow-motion during the action re-play. Like many fans, I went on-line to find stories and see what people were saying about the tragic event. And there they were, list after list of reader comments:

“R.I.P. Marco”

“R.I.P no. 58”

“R.I.P Simoncelli”

And it wasn’t just fan comments. Sports commentators and personalities, including F1 drivers Mark Webber and Jenson Button, were all R.I.P’ing Marco.

This abbreviation of Rest In Peace isn’t new. It’s been used for centuries. But I’m starting to feel uncomfortable about it and I’m not sure exactly why. It’s not that I doubt the sincerity behind its use. And I know that some methods of communication, like Twitter, need to be kept short and to the point.

But in an age of ‘LOL’ and ‘GR8’ has R.I.P been adopted by the quick-fire, short-speak generation who don’t know what else to say when offering their condolences? Just a thought…

Posted by Vale

That’s the headline on a Mail online story about tonight’s Channel 4 documentary about mummification.

In it a Devon taxi driver – Alan Bills – is mummified following, as closely as possible, ancient Egyptian practices. Alan died in January after suffering from lung cancer and wanted to take part in the experiment in part at least because of his grandchildren. He said

“Perhaps this would give them an insight into what their granddad was like, I don’t know.

“They’ll most probably tell somebody at school that my granddad’s a pharaoh. That’s my legacy I suppose.”

There’s a good preview on the BBC website. The show isn’t simply prurient interest or sensationalism either. Scientists are hoping to study the mummification and the effect on the decomposition of the body as part of research into alternatives to formaldehyde.

The Mail’s, always keen to find fresh sticks to beat Channel 4 and the BBC with, states:

“The broadcaster looks set to find itself at the centre of another taste row after agreeing to air the macabre documentary”.

But will it? Is death or the treatment of dead bodies such a taboo subject for broadcasters these days? Or is it only violence that justifies publicity. The Mail – with its article and photographs of Gadhafi’s corpse seems to think so.
The documentary’s on at 9.00 tonight if you are interested.

‘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. 

Over at Theaodeadpool.com they have an annual competition. The idea is to guess who will die in the next year (they’ve got to be famous enough to merit a newspaper obituary). Editorially, it is GFG policy to present you with everything that’s going on out there. Personally, we’re squirming more than somewhat. 

Here is an abridged version of the rules:

Send us 40 names. People you think will die (none of this pass away bullshit) in 2011 and get an obituary in one of the many fine news outlets that still produce obituaries. 

If someone on your list dies before the year ends, I will write to you and ask for a new name. 

People on death row are eligible if they a) die from a cause other than execution or b) their level of celebrity is such that their passing would have been newsworthy even before their crime and/or conviction or c) their crime or some element of their trial, conviction or incarceration is newsworthy enough that they have wide name recognition. Saddam Hussein was a valid pick under “b.” Ted Bundy and Timothy McVeigh would have been valid picks under “c.” Ordinary murderers are not acceptable. In many different ways.

There is no entry fee. There is a prize for first, however. Thanks to Mark in Maine, you will win Moxie Soda, generally two bottles. Some think this makes second place more desirable. If you win, you must be gracious and thank him, even as you’re spilling it down the drain.

After each hit, Bill, Brad or I, or a guest updater, will write either a respectful or irreverent obit and post it on alt dot obituaries with the relevant scoring update. 

There’s more to it than being the luckiest guesser. There’s also a scoring system. You get more points for a young person than you do for an older person. There are also bonus points — you’ll need to check this all out — here. 

Updates are recorded on the alt.obituaries Google Group, together with a well-written and respectful obituary. 

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James Horwill, the Australia rugby captain, puts the World Cup semi-finals into perspective.

Before every match, he winds white tape around his left forearm and writes two names on it with a black marker pen, Macca and Ponto.

They were his close friends of his from childhood who, a week before he was due to join up with the Wallabies for his first tour, to Europe in 2006, died in a boating accident.

He went on the tour at the urging of his friends’ families and ever since then he has written the two nicknames on tape before every match, whether for the Reds or Australia.

“Footy is not life and death,” he said. “It’s still a game.”

Posted by Vale

Pat is a Bereavement Counsellor working in an NHS Trust hospital. Her job is to help people affected by a death in a hospital, supporting them through their grieving. Pat is the subject of a long article inSaturday’s Guardian. It can be found here.

It’s a heartening read. Death in a hospital can be a very fraught business. Treatment, perhaps in intensive care, is hard to comprehend, and the workings of the institution are often alienating and frustrating to people who want to support someone they love at the end of their lives. And death comes in so many forms that it’s sometimes difficult simply to come to terms with what has happened.
Pat’s role – carried out, it is clear, with great love and understanding -  is to help people come to terms with what has happened. Sometimes it is a matter of looking at notes, talking to doctors and taking time to explain why someone died. Sometimes it is just about making space for grief. Pat:

“has a mantra that “nothing is wrong in grief”. She almost always honours requests from bereaved relatives, however unusual. A common wish is to touch the body of a loved one: hold their hands, or kiss their foreheads or even wash their face. One woman asked Pat if she could help her retrace the journey her 15-year-old daughter’s body made from the hospital to the mortuary, after she died from a very protracted illness. She then wanted to see where she had been blessed in the mortuary. “And there’s nothing wrong with that,” she says.”

It’s good to know that hospitals are recognising that the death of a patient is both an ending and, for bereaved family and friends, the beginning of another vital process – the need to grieve, mourn and say farewell. Important too that they recognise that their role in this next stage is crucial. Reading about the work that Pat does, however, did make me want to ask more questions about the way that the NHS treats people at the point of death.

If there is recognition of these human issues after death, is there the same concern for people as they die? How well are patients supported at those last moments? How easy is it for people to sit with the person they love; hold them and comfort them; share in the business of dying?
I’ve tried to find the relevant NHS guidance, but with little success. I did, however, turn up a Scottish NHS report called Shaping Bereavement Care – a framework for action. It has 14 recommendations, some of them recognisably relating to the good work that Pat does. The recommendation relating to the process of dying though is this one. It is a commitment to:

“undertake a review of all current policies and procedures relating to care of the dying patient, and care of the deceased, to ensure that they reflect good quality care and to assess and reduce any real or potential negative impact of these processes on those who have been bereaved.”(Recommendation 3)

It suggests that there are important connections yet to be made in this area – in the Scottish NHS at least. Although, surely, it’s not hard to join the dots between the way that people feel when they are not involved in a death and the need to involve them more in the process of dying itself? It seems clear enough to me that if the humanity, care and understanding that Pat so clearly brings to her work after a death could be brought into the hospital itself and allowed to take their place at the bedside of the dying patent, then acceptance, understanding and the grieving process itself would be immeasurably improved.

But maybe the NHS in England is already there?