The Good Funeral Guide

Yesterday I drove to Norfolk to meet Anne Beckett-Allen and her husband Simon. It was well worth every mile of the journey. They greeted me with warmth and kindness. They took me somewhere nice for lunch. And we chatted – oh, about death and funerals, mostly. What else?

Anne and Simon have been notably successful. They have opened five funeral homes in five years; they’re doing fine. Theirs is a partnership made in heaven (or thereabouts). Anne was born into the funeral business, worked for several of the big corporate outfits and now revels in the freedom of independence. She is intelligent and she knows how to make a business tick. Simon is an electrician by trade and a builder of considerable talent and taste. He has converted all of their funeral homes brilliantly. He is a funeral outsider, so he’s able to come at things from a client’s point of view. Both Anne and Simon are people of great heart.

As always when I meet funeral directors I become aware of the severe limitations of being an ideas-driven commentator. Things always look so much easier when I’m sitting in front of my keyboard. I put it to Anne and Simon that the most perilous occupational hazard of funeral directors is not formaldehyde vapour but, if they are intelligent, paternalism, and if they are dim, self-importance. Funeral directors of all sorts come to reckon that Undertaker Knows Best. The brighter ones want to give you the funeral you need rather than the funeral you want; the dimmer ones give you the funeral everyone else has because there’s only one way to do a funeral. I know, as a celebrant, that I am increasingly inclined to boss my clients about.

There’s an upside. A brilliant natural burialist, whom one might typify as paternalistic, told me of the time when a family came to scatter ashes. They reckoned something perfunctory would do (it was their dad and they didn’t like him). The natural burialist stopped them cutting it short, told them there was more to it than that and invited them to speak. There was a long, agonising and awkward wait followed by an extraordinary and cathartic vocal outpouring of rage and love. It was exactly the right bossy thing to have done.

I talked to Anne and Simon about this business of exploring choices with a client, especially opportunities for participation. To me, sitting in front of my screen, there’s absolutely nothing to it. Just give them the info. What could be simpler? It may take more time and make things more complicated but it’ll make for a much better funeral.

And they responded that it’s not as easy as that. You have to take into account the mindset and emotional state of the client – what sort of people are they, what can they take in? Rupert Callender supports this: making a client aware that they can, say, come in and wash and dress their dead person can create in their minds a feeling that they ought to, even though they really don’t feel up to it – a feeling that they may be letting their dead person down.

So it’s a fine line, isn’t it, between offering choice on the one hand, and Undertaker Knows Best on the other?  Given the emotional state of the bereaved person in front of you, you need to be incredibly careful and empathic. No two people are the same, so there can never be a best practice.

I drove home musing on this, reflecting on just what an incredibly difficult job funeral directing is. And of course I reflected on the occupational hazard of being an inky fingered commentator. You can so easily turn into a glib, opinionated smartarse.

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.

I think we’ve all done some good hard thinking, over the last few months, about the value and role of the dead body at a funeral. The discussion of this, and other matters, has elicited some extremely interesting ideas and some statements which, to my eyes, look likely to become axioms. I’m thinking of Gloria Mundi’s “A funeral is not an artefact.”

And I think there’s a sentence in a comment Jonathan left on a recent post which will go the same way. The entire comment deserves another outing. If you missed it, enjoy and marvel. If you didn’t, well, it bears any amount of re-reading.

It is interesting to reflect that, while the comments columns of so much online content attract all manner of beastliness sheltering behind anonymity, the comments column of the GFG is of no interest to such. Long may it remain so. I’m sorry that so many comments from previous blogs were lost in the translation from Blogger to WordPress. But the blog is extant in Blogger and can be reached through your Blogger account.

When I allowed myself to love you, and you me, we entered into an unspoken pact: that one of us would come to grieve the other, that it would be the worst possible experience to put a loved one through, yet we willingly agreed to do it to each other and to ourselves for the sake of our love. We may not have given it a moment’s thought, but we both knew, and we didn’t shy away from our inevitable pain then. So why do it now?

Can you remember howling for lost love? Of course you can. So if someone offered you a painkiller, would you have taken it? I wouldn’t, because although grief hurts me worse than any physical pain it’s a pain I want. If I’m really honest with myself, I actually enjoy crying for the loss of someone whom I can’t bear the thought of living without. It’s the nearest thing to the comfort of physical contact with them I can find at that time. Don’t ask me why; it’s an animal thing as much as anything. But it’s your body I’m grieving for, as much as grieving for you. When I think of you, I see you still in it; all your dear characteristics expressed in its movements and gestures and sounds and appearances and and and… It’s how I came to even know of your existence, and how I came to love you. I still love you in your body – your dead body, yes, aren’t I foolish! – and now I’m going to have to love you out of it, and that’s a transition that doesn’t happen straight away. So I want your useless, dead husk here with me when I put you – yes, you, even though I know it’s not you, it’s it – into a cremator or a hole so that I can begin to make sense of the difference between you and it. That’s why I put on this funeral for you.

So what’s wrong with a celebration of your life? Nothing. In fact it’s essential, unless it takes the place of mourning for your death. I’m celebrating even my pain of your loss because if it hadn’t been for you I’d have had nothing to lose, and no pain to tell me how fortunate I was to have had you in my life for the precious time we had together. I’m celebrating you to prolong the agony in a way, to be completely and unbearably aware of just what, just how much, I have lost because that’s all that makes sense of my grief.

So yes, Charles, anything that trivializes or masks the agony of grief in the name of ‘celebration of life’ should be shot down in flames. It is a betrayal to celebrate you without railing against the dying of your light, or without shouting my anger at you for bloody well dying on me.

And if I go first, I want it to hurt you just as much.

Here’s an extract from another blog entitled “No funeral service, no headstone … can these be good things?”

A friend died recently. At his request, there were no services of any kind. Since he left his body to a medical school, there is no gravesite to visit … I always found him to be an interesting person, but the details in the obituary made him even more interesting than I had imagined. I looked forward to learning more about him when friends and family would gather to celebrate his life. Sadly, I never had that opportunity … and I feel cheated. While I totally respect his right to leave this planet in any way he chose, I wish he had chosen another path … No services, no headstones. How do you suppose either of these affects a person’s long-term legacy?

Find the entire post here.

There’s a new book out about dying and death. It’s called, appropriately, The D-Word. Now, there’s a heap of books out there about long-term care of the very ill; there’s another heap about bereavement. We don’t urgently need more of them. But there’s hardly anything out there about grim D. We do urgently need more D-books.

I didn’t feverishly tear it free from its Amazon packaging. Two reasons. I know the author, Sue Brayne, slightly. On a personal level I like her a lot. She’s absolutely not one of these too-nice-to-be-true people you can meet too many of in the death industry. She tells it as it is. We met at a conference of conjoined quangos which has now re-badged as Dying Matters. I blogged about it intemperately at the time. I sounded off in the street afterwards as I walked with Sue to the station. She made no objection to the f-word, either. I honour her for that. I very, very much don’t want to not like her book.

Second reason? The father of a good friend went to hospital a fortnight ago. After conducting batteries of tests, the people who work miracles, the doctors, had that conversation with the family where they make it gently clear that, this time, there’s no cure, just care. He’s going to die. Probably quite soon. Unthinkable? No, they all knew it would happen sometime; he’s been getting old fast recently. But thought about? Not much. Some things you don’t think about till you have to.

So what my friend, and his family, and his dad all need is somewhere to go where they can find out about this business of dying. They need information. And because news like this can make you feel very lonely, very disconnected, they need to know how it felt for others, too, so that they can set their experience in a broader context. And for all the well-meaning advice I have been able to offer them, and not very much at that, it’d be so much better to have a book to recommend.

Come to think of it, I need some advice, too, on how to conduct myself towards this dying man and his family. I like them all very much. I’ve known them for years. They are good people. It’s going to be really hard.

So: reviewing Sue’s book isn’t an exercise in judicious objectivity. Bluntly, it had better be very good or I’m going to feel badly let down.

And the good news is that it is superb.

Sue sets out her stall: “The D-Word is based on the lived, felt, human response of what it’s like to die.” Her method? To tell it “through the personal narratives of relatives, friends and carers”. Sue draws conclusions from these stories. She also gives us lots of useful information and, by doing so, a language of dying. Literally. A vocabulary. So that we can talk about it and understand the hazards of not talking about it – and the hazards of talking about it in treacherous euphemisms.

Sue covers the ground. A little potted history tells us how we got to be so death denying. She examines the value of an existential explanation – a faith (though she doesn’t cover atheism). She examines how professional carers regard dying. There’s an excellent chapter about survivors of violent or sudden death, what helped and what didn’t. She talks about both where to find support and how to give it. She tells us how to support the dying. And she tells us what dying feels like, much of which is the fruit of her years of research with Peter Fenwick. She does all this in just 165 pages. She has interviewed the best possible people, and must be congratulated on finding them. She has even tracked down one of the UK’s best and nicest undertakers, James Showers, whose definition of a funeral is, I think, both moving and brilliant. A funeral, he says, transforms “a fact – that someone has died – into a ritual that is authentic and relevant to those who were close to that person, to help them say goodbye in public and with meaning … to turn their grief into something beautiful.”

I don’t know how many copies Sue has sold yet – it’s early days. She’s just sold another. I am sending one to my friend as soon as I have posted this. Thank you, Sue.

You can buy the book from Amazon. As recommended as it gets. Find it here.

I’m indebted to Quigley’s Cabinet for this. It’s by Sam Jinks, who currently lives and works in Melbourne where he spends his time creating hyper-realistic sculptures out of silicon. Read more here.

For the Victorians, sex was the great taboo. Nowadays, it’s death.

Every time I hear someone begin to say that I jam my fingers in my ears. I may even moan softly. Gibber a bit, even. I’m, I can’t tell you, I’m just so sick of it. Talk about cliché, god, it makes even the most clichéd cliché look fresh.

For the truth is that we love talking about dying and death. We’re spellbound by it. The media are always talking death, doing death. We love a good funeral. Does Wootton Bassett look taboo-struck?

And every time someone writes about it they say, “For Victorians…” Aaaaargh!!

Matthew Parris doesn’t say it because he’s fastidious and he picks his idioms judiciously. Perhaps it’s his age, but he’s writing about death more than he used—and very well, too. He’s getting older, of course. He’s reached that age when we realise that we are not going to be the first one ever to slip beneath Reaper G’s radar (the bastard).

Here’s how he begins a recent piece in the Spectator:

It is five years since my father died. I thought I would get over it, but I haven’t. This is not a plea for sympathy — I’m fine, all’s well — but simply an observation, a report. Unusually for a man of 54 I had never, before Dad’s death, lost anyone close; and I had no idea what to expect.

I guessed, though, that the experience would not differ from other violent emotional traumas: first the shock, then a blank aftershock; then busy-ness — displacement activity; then perhaps a relapsing into grief. And after that and over many years a slow but steady process of what sensitive people might call ‘healing’ and the rest of us would call getting over it.

The shock, it turned out, though expected, was the phone-call. At the bedside of a dying man I expected no theatre, and found none. Just as I’d supposed the immediate feeling was only bleak, banal — no trumpets or violins, no wailing or floods of tears, but a kind of bleakness, a grey hour in a grey dawn. And so it proved: the rain coming down softly (I remember) outside in Catalonia. Blank.

Then (I thought) might follow a few weeks’ false-normality: still numb, but with arrangements of a practical nature to busy myself with. One would have too much to do to mope.

And so this proved, too: there’s plenty to fill close relatives’ days when somebody dies, and hardly time to miss the deceased. And it rained at the funeral too, and there were hundreds of Catalan and Spanish mourners to air-kiss at the door of the little church before Dad’s coffin was borne away in the hearse: red tail-lights in the rain. And I still wasn’t feeling much.

But waiting, I suppose, for the lapse into grief: a month or two of wallowing.

This never came. I went back to England and back to work. Ordinary service was resumed. There was no time of quiet, after-the-event confrontation with what I had lost, no delayed grief once I had, as they say, ‘time to grieve’. There we are, then, I thought. One down — and how many more to go? The waters had closed over my father’s head and the ripples subsided. I missed him, of course, but from now on, with each month that passed, I would surely miss him a little less. Time heals all wounds, etc. So now, I thought, begins that famous healing process.

To whom does grief belong? For whom should we grieve? How should we behave when we grieve and what should grief be allowed to spill over into?

When motorists cut up a cortege, sound their horns and curse it for getting in the way we observe the collapse of community values and understand that death has become a private misfortune—a social faux pas, almost. We curse Thatcher and recall the days when folk would stop, stand, and, in their way, salute – doff their hats, bow. In those days the grief of one was the grief of all. What was private was also public. People felt as John Donne did: Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind.

Once in a while the public mood alters. It fixes on the death of someone unknown to them. People become involved and engulfed in grief. In the case of some people this is explicable—up to a point. Diana is a case in point. But what about Baby P? Why him and not any of the other children beaten to death by their parents every week? As for Jade, we don’t yet know how her end will be greeted. Will she be the new Queen of Hearts? Or will she have already become yesterday’s news? It could go either way. Grief for strangers can be as fickle as love.

Out of the blue comes the death of Ivan Cameron on a day like any other: some children died, as usual; some people died too young, some too suddenly; some, very old, were borne away gently, serenely, happy to be done with it.

You know how you feel about the death of Ivan Cameron and you may have thought about why you feel as you do. He has triggered the pent feelings we all have for the way things are in a world where people go too soon, we can see that, but how do we account for the tsunami of grief? How should people express their grief and how should they manage it?

My anxiety is that grief unmanaged can express itself in ways which may, yes, discredit it. The way, for example, it focuses on one and not another. And, yesterday, the way grief for Ivan interrupted the government of the nation. I think I am with Simon Carr in today’s Independent:

The deeper we look into each other the fewer differences we find. Politics divides us a lot, our daily lives less so, death least of all. There’s an equality there, of a sort, in the end. As General de Gaulle said to his wife at the graveside of their disabled daughter: “Come: Now she is like the others.”

…

As a matter of fact, Ivan really was a beautiful boy. I ran into the family having a Saturday lunch in a pub on the Windrush river some months ago. We chatted.

Ivan was lying on his back in his specialist carrying apparatus, in the middle of his easy family with a brother under the table and a Mrs Darling mother beside him. He had beautiful eyes and skin, chubby cheeks. And he looked wonderfully cared for; cherished; a beautiful boy.

Having said that, they really shouldn’t have suspended Parliament for him. “As a mark of respect to Ivan,” the Speaker said. They must have let the idea run away with them. The deputies could have managed a muted PMQs, surely. And for all the private pain, there is the life of the nation going on day by day.

A suspension has happened once before in a similar circumstance. But that was for John Smith, one of the parliamentary figures of the time. He was of the place. He was a public part of the place. This confusion or conflation of private life with the Government’s, it’s just not right.

Read the entire piece here.