The Good Funeral Guide

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.

Posted by Vale

A young girl went missing. A body was found. A young man went to the police and said that she might be his sister. They said that was not possible; her age is wrong. That was how it happened back in 1994.

Today, police are looking for this man. The man who said that the young unidentified girl found in Pogonip Park was his sister. She still might not be his sister, but they need to find him to make sure.

The young girl was murdered in an area of the park where homeless people stayed. Now new tests have shown that she might have been younger than the police first thought…

I was an African American Male, about 50 years old, I stood about 5’8 and I wore a gold loop earring in my left ear. Now you know what they know. What they don’t know and maybe you do is my name.

Let me back up for a minute.

On July 23, 2006, a man and his son were crossing Mosquito Lake (Cortland, Ohio – Trumbull County) in the swampy area. While they were crossing they saw what they believed to be human remains. The authorities were contacted. Tests were run, they figured out my general description, the one I gave you above; but they couldn’t match me to any of their records on file, missing persons, etc. In time, the phone stopped ringing and all leads simply dried up.

The unknown victim is one of many whose stories are told on an American blog called Can You Identify Me? In its own words:

The site was started in 2007 as a blog dedicated to America’s Unidentified. It brings these individuals back to life if only for a brief moment to share some invaluable information along with their forensic reconstructions. Can You Identify Me gives the victim a first-person narrative and temporary Doe name until someone out there recognizes them. Once they are identified, they can be reunited with their families and the victims can rest in peace with a tombstone shining with their given name.

As one of their readers says ‘Not many blogs make me stop and read almost all their current posts. Topics like these bring be extreme sadness. Its a great thing you are doing. It saddens me to see how many lives go off without any closure.’

You can find the site here.

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!

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

Posted by Vale

This lovely jazz piece was actually a requiem for Charlie Parker – but at risk of offending purists I thought Frank O’Hara’s poem for Billie Holiday on the day she died fitted perfectly with the music.

The Day Lady Died

It is 12:20 in New York a Friday
three days after Bastille day, yes
it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine
because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton
at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner
and I don’t know the people who will feed me

I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun
and have a hamburger and a malted and buy
an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets
in Ghana are doing these days

I go on to the bank
and Miss Stillwagon (first name Linda I once heard)
doesn’t even look up my balance for once in her life
and in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I get a little Verlaine
for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do
think of Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore or
Brendan Behan’s new play or Le Balcon or Les Nègres
of Genet, but I don’t, I stick with Verlaine
after practically going to sleep with quandariness

and for Mike I just stroll into the PARK LANE
Liquor Store and ask for a bottle of Strega and
then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue
and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre and
casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton
of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with her face on it

and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of
leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT
while she whispered a song along the keyboard
to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing

Posted by Vale

One evening last month we lit some candles, sat by the fire with an old book of photographs and reminisced about my wife’s mother who had died just over ten years before.

It was the first time we had done anything like this, but, over the last ten years, we have lost three of our four parents and are having to learn for ourselves how best to remember. The idea of the quiet time and the candles was our first attempt.

Then, a few days ago, with enormous pleasure and surprise, I came across this from the Gail Rubin in her book A Good Goodbye:

Every January 10, March 16, May 4, and November 2, I light a candle in memory of Grandma Dot, Grandma Min, Grandpa Ben, and Grandpa Phil. I put a picture on my kitchen table, and light a candle next to it the evening before. For that day, I imagine that particular grandparent sitting in with my husband and me as we go about our business and talk about our day.

It’s as if they get a glimpse into our current lives and I feel their presence for that day…

Remembering is about continuity and wholeness. It is restorative. In secular funeral services we tell people that the only afterlife we are certain of is in the stories we tell, the memories we share and the influence we feel in our lives. In the early days remembering is easy but In our fast forward world we have few traditions and no habits of personal and individual remembrance. Life rushes us along and too often the person you have lost feels as though they have been left behind.

Gail lists lots of ways that we could make space in our lives for remembering: cemetery visits of course, but how about memorial obituaries in the newspaper, placing photographs in the room at family get-togethers like Christmas, even household shrines.

We need something – a time or a place, an action, a personal ritual – to make remembering real again. Maybe it’s about tangible memorials and those glorious crafted containers. Maybe its something more private and personal. I know that in March and April I will be lighting candles for my own mother and father. What will you be doing?

By the way we’ve blogged about Gail’s book before. It’s worth reading not least because it led to a great discussion about shrines in the home. You can find our original review – and a link to Amazon if you’d like to buy a copy – here

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.

Views?

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?

Posted by Charles

There is a tendency among some visitors to this blog vastly to overrate the significance of death. How salutary it is, therefore, to remind ourselves that our legislators keep mortality both in perspective and in its place.

Maternity leave

As an employee you have the right to 26 weeks of Ordinary Maternity Leave and 26 weeks of Additional Maternity Leave making one year in total. The combined 52 weeks is known as Statutory Maternity Leave. 

Paternity leave

As long as you meet certain conditions you can take either one or two weeks’ Ordinary Paternity Leave. You can’t take odd days off and if you take two weeks they must be taken together. 

Compassionate leave

If you are an ‘employee’, you have the right to unpaid time off work to deal with emergencies involving a ‘dependant’ – this could be your husband, wife, partner, child, parent, or anyone living in your household as a member of the family.  

When a dependant dies, you can take time off to make funeral arrangements, as well as to attend a funeral.  

If you need time off to cope with a situation that doesn’t fall under the ‘time off for dependants’ right, you may have a right to time off under your contract of employment. Many employers will have a scheme for compassionate leave and details should be included in your contract or company handbook. If the situation is not covered by any scheme then you can still ask your employer for the time off, although they do not have to agree to your request. 

Source: directgov.co.uk

Posted by Jonathan

A celebrant said today:

“Even when funerals are designed to be a celebration of life, I nearly always begin by acknowledging people’s grief and sadness.”

Jose (see his thought provoking blog post of 19^th September), ever enquiring and studiously leaving no stone unturned, wants to know about incorporating grieving and celebration of life in the same goodbye ceremony.  His tenaciousness is stimulating for us celebrants, who must every day question our way forward.

His query:  “Which are the elements that you use afterwards to move the mourners and their emotions to a more positive feeling?” is not an easy one to answer.  I never thought of it in terms of involving ‘elements’, and I never thought of grief as being any less positive than celebration of life.

Grief has to do with sadness, not unhappiness.  There’s a big difference between the two. Unhappiness is isolating and unattractive and faces towards depression.  We’ve all been there.  It’s not grieving, it’s self pity.  Sadness, particularly about death, is beautiful even when it’s unbearable.  It’s feeling sorry not for yourself but for your loss – loss is not separate from you, but it is not you; it encompasses you, and it’s helpful to share it with others. We’ve all been there, too.  It is a noble feeling, and one I certainly wouldn’t want to be deprived of after even a tragic loss.

Following the last funeral I conducted, when I was trying to ‘let it go’, I found I couldn’t do so until I’d understood what it had taught me.  I was feeling uncharacteristically sad that it had ended, but I didn’t want to stop feeling sad because I knew if I did I’d miss something very important.  So I sat at the pavement table outside a café, watched the human beings go by with all their inner concerns showing or not showing, had a fag and a double espresso, and I thought deeply and wrote down what these last ten days of ‘funereality’ had given me.  Why was I reluctant to release it, this recent experience that my sadness was holding so close to me? 

It was only then, after I’d understood just what I was losing, that I was prepared to say goodbye to it and feel glad I’d had it while I did.  That’s what a good funeral does, too.  You could say it bequeaths you with a greater energy, a wisdom, as this did for me.  It crystallized into a poem, which I kept to remind me why I do this (and incidentally why, unlike some bereavement workers tell me they feel, I actually find myself energized rather than burnt near the furnace of recent death).  It also approaches the matter of our relationship with, and our role in, others’ grief, so I can happily share it with you here:

‘The funeral nourishes me
by embrace in the humanity of strangers.

I relieve them of their bewilderment
and reveal them to themselves in the majesty of their pain,
with words, with voice, with actions.

I touch their hurting hearts
to know they are not in isolation;
that their own grief is universal;
that healing lets love in and does not banish it;
that anguish is their invited guest;
that tomorrow will still come.

And then I leave.’

OK, I was only losing an experience, not a real live person, but the principle is the same; you have to be aware of what and whom you have lost, and the desirable pain to which love commits you, to move you on from just the raw feeling of pure loss before you can celebrate what you did have and what you still will have.  The pain of loss doesn’t go away with celebration of life.  It just becomes less overwhelming and more manageable when you’ve identified your loss, and understood that you still have something real and priceless, yours to keep.  And it brings to your attention that we are all human, and that this is the deal.

If a bad funeral damages you by making you unhappy, that detracts nothing from the healing value of a good one, even a good sad one.  And I think there’s something to do with loyalty where grief is concerned.  We can’t in good conscience abandon our dead by just getting intoxicated at a hooray party, any more than we could by indulging in the misery of a self pitying orgy, or going through the motions of an irrelevant tradition. 

Our dead leave us through no fault of their own.  We have to include their absence in our funeral for them, painful as it is, and I believe we owe them our mourning as much as our appreciation.