The Good Funeral Guide

The dead man’s father, a Jehovah’s Witness, had been estranged from his funny, funloving, humanist son for years. Now that his boy was dead, he wanted to reclaim him and give him a proper Jehovah’s Witness funeral.

We talked about this, the dead man’s widow and I; we explored compromises. We wanted to include the parents but they fortified their position. We were compelled either be true to the truth and celebrate the life, or let the Witnesses repossess the body and recycle it through an alien theology.

When, outside, after the godless ceremony, the father emerged from a huddle of Witnesses and came for me, I knew it was going to be angry and ugly.

“I didn’t recognise any single thing of my son in that twaddle you spoke, you had no idea what or who you were talking about … disgraceful …shameful …how dare you…” and so on. It wasn’t a dialogue, it was a performance.

The abuse having expended itself, I walked back to the car reflecting wryly that, of course, he was right. The life story I had told was but a version. I’d never met the dead man; I had no idea who I was talking about. His friends happily told me I had hit the spot, got him bang right. But, as with the father, I only had their word for it.

This is the essentially absurd thing about being a secular funeral celebrant, and it’s exactly the same for religious celebrants when the dead person was not a member of their congregation. The celebrant, the only stranger at the funeral, is often the one who speaks with absolute authority about the dead person. Celebrants tell stories but can visualise none of the events we describe; we talk of what dead people mean to others, but they mean nothing to us. At the funeral of a scientist his friends appraised me with the cool objectivity of high intelligence; their eyes conveyed the message, “Who the heck are you?” I had to concur. I felt like an interloper. I was.

I’ve just enjoyed this blog post. It speaks for itself and it doesn’t want me climbing all over it.

“We don’t want the wedding to be a happy, jolly occasion. No, we want it to be a lament; an elegy for everything lost. Marriage marks a beginning, yes, but also an ending, a parting from family, a distancing from friends, the loss of personal sovereignty, the extinction of the old way of life. If a wedding doesn’t confront these things it isn’t emotionally honest. That’s why we’ve asked everyone to wear black.”

Make sense to you?

“We don’t want the funeral to be a sad, gloomy occasion. No, we want it to be a celebration of life, a time to dwell on happy times. I mean, death isn’t the end, is it? It doesn’t take away what we feel, does it? Our love? Our memories? Death – it’s a new beginning, right? Life goes on. That’s what we want to focus on. That’s why we’ve asked everyone to wear red.”

Better?

Fact is, both weddings and funerals are about renunciation and parting. It would perhaps make wedding vows more meaningful if bride and groom publicly acknowledged the new world order and reaffirmed the duty they owe each other and their friends and family. But, primarily, weddings are about celebration – obviously.

Just as funerals are about sadness. Obviously. People overlook that at their cost – their emotional cost. A lot of people, these days.

Tears, laughter; laughter, tears. You get ‘em at weddings and you get ‘em at funerals. You can’t have a good one without both.

Dan emailed from Scotland this morning. He’d seen an account by Matthew Parris of a memorial service that struck him. It struck me, too. Here’s an extract:

Sweet word

So it came as a relief to escape into Derby Cathedral on Saturday to speak at a concert in memory of Jeffery Tillett, whose death I noted on this page earlier this year. A local Conservative politician over many decades, former mayor, many times parliamentary candidate, patron of the arts and licensee of what was for many years Derby’s only gay bar, Jeffery would have loved his concert, led by his surviving partner, Councillor Robin Wood.

Robin read Betjeman’s heart-achingly understated poem, The Cockney Amorist. As he read the final lines…

I will not go to Finsbury Park

The putting course to see

Nor cross the crowded High Road

To Williamsons’ to tea,

For these and all the other things

Were part of you and me.

I love you, oh my darling,

And what I can’t make out

Is why since you have left me

I’m somehow still about.

… I was struck by the almost choking intensity that the word “darling” – though you would have thought it cheapened beyond recovery by overuse – still retains when spoken with passion. Most strong words become weakened by lazy repetition: “disaster”, “chaos”, “lovely”; but a few seem to have an inner integrity that keeps them honest. In the right circumstances, “my darling” really tightens the throat.

Read the entire piece here.

Secular celebrants congratulate themselves on delivering better funerals than ordained ministers. They think they do because people tell them they do.

They risk complacency.

A secular ceremony is often reckoned better than a religious one not so much for what it does as for what it doesn’t. Remove god and the dead person is free to assume the starring role; excise worship and you relieve people of the obligation to go through motions they’d rather not. The positives are all in the negatives.

The resulting ceremony often leaves the audience with nothing to do except sit like obedient puddings and listen to a stranger offer them consolation and tell them all about their dead person, whom the stranger never met. To say that celebrants don’t know who they’re talking about is the precise truth.

When one person speaks from start to finish, pausing only to play a bit of a contemplative Pink Floyd track, a funeral ceremony can soon start flat-lining. Secularists may be unobjectionable, but boy can they be dull. Religious folk, by contrast, get to enjoy great live music, great archaic language, a bit of community singing, a bit of mystery, a celebrant in eye-gladdening fancy dress and even remission from deep vein thrombosis as they kneel down to pray. It’s a far more interactive and sensuous rite.

We can’t blame celebrants when family and friends won’t step up to the lectern and do their bit. It leaves them with no option but to do it all. It’s this that numbers my days as a celebrant. The only good funeral, in my book, is a participative one.

For some time, I have looked to technology to lift secular ceremonies out of monotony. The multimedia presentation, for me, is the future, and Wesley Music, together with people like Louise Harris, are the people to deliver it. I phoned Wesley today to find out how fast things are moving.

They’ve installed equipment at Peterborough and Liverpool, but the funeral directors are being very slow to recommend it. Nothing new there; you’ll rarely find the dismal trade at the cutting edge. But a far bigger brake to progress is, it seems, the fraught matter of copyright. Scan in a wedding photo and you infringe the copyright of the photographer who snapped it. Play James Blunt and James wants a slice of the action. There’s a lot of patient negotiation going on about licences.

The plot thickens. You’ve got to weigh up the effect of showing, say, a video clip of the dead person last summer on holiday. Will that be more than people can bear? And if you show that wedding photo, will it reignite a family feud?

As Neil at Wesley wisely puts it, “You’ve got to try and give families what they want, but you’ve also got to warn them of the implications of what they choose.”

Fools rush in. I’m feeling foolish.

It’ll come, though. And it will make all the difference.

At yesterday’s funeral I invited people in the audience to have their say after they’d listened to tributes from the family. I tried to make it easy. I gave them time to think about it in advance, acknowledged that speaking in public is hard, invited them to speak from where they were sitting and reminded them that the only thing that mattered was getting it right for their dead friend.

Hardly anyone spoke. I had made an elementary error: I had supposed that their primary medium for expression is words.

Like many secular celebrants, I set great store by words. For me, they say it all. I also know that they often come over as so much blah-blah-blah – and that that may not necessarily be a bad thing. Blah can be just what people need so long as it is served soothingly warm – ask any Anglican vicar. “Death is nothing at all…” is warm blah. So is “Do not stand at my grave and weep”. To me, they’re blurry and worthless – but that’s my private problem.

For those times when words are likely to fall short, there are eloquent alternatives. There’s

· saying by doing.

· music

· dance

· saying by doing nothing

I remember planning a funeral with a family, fruitlessly trying to get them to tell me about their dead mum. Very little came until they explained that, as a family, talking was something they just didn’t do. Words, to them, were just so much blather. After some thought, I suggested lighting candles. They weren’t at all the sort of people who like lighting candles, I reckoned, but they leapt at the idea.

On the day of the funeral, I set up my stand, lit a tall candle in the centre and called people forward to light a satellite tealight. Normally, only a few come. On this occasion, everyone did – maybe thirty of them. The array of flames looked very pretty beside the coffin, where they spoke more eloquently than words.

Later in the ceremony, as I recited the solemn words of the committal, I heard a loud, alarming clunk, followed by chuckling in the audience. Afterwards, I discovered what had happened. The heat given off by the massed tealights had toppled the tall candle in their midst. Near-disaster for me but, for those there, the memorable, hilarious highlight of the funeral. It was typical, they said, of their mother to do that.

Words are unlikely ever to court disaster so long as they have been checked for precision and cleansed of ambiguity. Saying by doing, though, can be tragic-comically perilous. I’m thinking of the deplorable incident of the dove (symbolic of the soul of the dead person) which, when released, flew inside the crematorium for warmth, could not be chivvied out, and had to be shot. I’m thinking of another dove which, when released, was all at once attacked by a sparrow hawk. As the horrified mourners gazed up, bloody feathers fluttered down on them. I am thinking of the balloon which settled, miles and miles away, in the horns of a £50,000 prize bull. Enraged, the bull burst its fence, charged into a road, was hit by a car and had to be destroyed. These are all true stories.

A piece of music can be eloquent, but only when it is exclusively associated with the dead person. Music so often fails to be effective because those listening to it have their own, private relationship with it.

Dance could be eloquent, but mostly not in embarrassable Britain. Hippy-dippy. Toe-curling.

“It’s amazing / How you can speak / Right to my heart / Without saying a word” sings Ronan Keating. Silence can be defined as saying by doing nothing at all. Quakers do this very expertly, but hardly anyone else. If you invite people to sit in silence and contemplate, all they’ll do is wait. To remedy this, the custom is to fill the silence with music and invite people to do two things at once: think and listen. Doesn’t work. They still mostly wait.

Presently, funerals give the eyes little to do. Innovation is afoot. We now have Colourful Coffins, which I love. On its way, with us soon, is the multimedia review/celebration of the dead person’s life – words, music, slideshow, film clips. Louise Harris is doing pioneering work at Sentiment Productions. See her work here. I believe that the multimedia presentation is going to have a transformative effect on the way we do funerals once crems and other venues have installed screens, projectors and sound systems. I can’t wait.

Back in the here and now, I am chewing over the second lesson I learned from my mute mourners. I had wholly overlooked the fact that they had already done the most eloquent thing they could do for their dead friend. It was this: at some inconvenience to themselves they had made the effort to come to his funeral.

All the bells and all the whistles in all the world cannot speak more meaningfully than simply being there.

A ceremony to mark the end of a marriage. A funeral for a marriage.

What do you think?

The concept comes to us from (I think) Australia, the country which pioneered the secular funeral ceremony. One practitioner in this field is Jennifer Cram. I wonder how may others there are?

Of course, if you’re into the business of celebrancy, it makes sense to expand your portfolio by devising as many sorts of ceremony as you can dream up. Jennifer does ceremonies for: ‘the loving commitment of partners who are not marrying; the naming and welcoming of a child into the family; renewal of marriage vows for couples celebrating staying married; the end of a relationship; reaching puberty or maturity (wise-woman ceremonies also known as croning); launching of businesses or other ventures…’ She even does relinquishment ceremonies for parents giving a child up for adoption. She’s staked out her patch.

Obviously, it’s funerals for marriages that interest us. And, do you know, whatever your incredulity is telling you, there’s actually lots of symmetry with funerals for dead people (she’s jolly clever, is Jennifer). Without using the word liminality once, here’s what her marriage funeral addresses: ‘issues of endings, separation, and letting go (disappointment, anger, sadness, fear and trying to achieve closure); issues of acceptance, forgiveness, becoming open to new beginnings and new possibilities.’ To get the whole picture, click here.

For what other emotional thresholds might you devise a funeral ceremony?

The death of youthful dreams and ambitions, perhaps…

Do say!

An entertaining way of assessing trends in the UK funeral industry is to have a look at what’s going on in the US. The best way I’ve found of doing that is by following Tim Totten’s blog, Final Embrace. It lends perspective to the view. And Tim is sharp, with an engaging quality of bright-eyed energy and optimism.

DIY and green funerals are becoming the rage over there, but rarely, intriguingly, do we see any reference or homage to the ground-breaking work done in the UK. I find it hard to believe that there are not some very well-thumbed and indispensable samizdat copies of the Natural Death Handbook in circulation. A pioneer DIY group is Final Passages. I think you’ll agree that Jasmine looks terrific. And while we Brits may, in our smug, post-Mitford way, suppose that American death rites are suffused with euphemism, you may find yourself reflecting that we don’t often see prurience-free pics of corpses on our own websites.

Tim’s blog is currently enjoying a tiff with the Funeral Consumer’s Alliance, a nonprofit watchdog org whose boss, Joshua Slocum (yes, really) was recently quoted savaging undertakers in an article in Newsweek. It’s pretty bog standard fare — undertakers rip you off; the only way is the DIY way — but the comments are worth reading. There are lots of them, not a few from funeral directors. You wouldn’t get that in the UK; funeral directors here don’t do online. Pity.

Undertaker-bashing is a sport for dullards. What interests me is the pervasive belief that the only good funeral is a cheap one. A similar attitude to husbandry does not apply to birthdays, weddings, baby-namings or coming-of-age celebrations.

Actually, birthdays provide an apt analogy.

Ahead of the event, you protest that you don’t want anyone putting themselves out on your account — you don’t want any fuss. After your arm has been twisted, you helpfully hint at what presents you’d like and what sort of celebration. Then you sit back, wait for the day and, hopefully, enjoy the ride.

There are two sides to your birthday celebration:
o the joy of receiving (yours)
o the joy of giving (theirs)

The part you play is mostly passive. You smilingly, gratefully, undergo what has been planned for you.

The part played by others is active. The more they do, the more fun it all is. Your birthday may cost them a great deal of money or very little. This is of little or no account compared with the amount of thought and hard work they put into it.

If they’d listened to you, it would have been crap.

Moral? Disregard the self-deprecatory utterances of dead people (when alive, of course) and give them the funeral you think they deserve.

We don’t, most of us, work hard at arranging funerals; we just trail along, endure, undergo. The undertaker and his or her staff do all the work, and not very much of that — oh, and the celebrant, of course.

I have a theory that, channelled properly, grief can be much more empowering. If we work harder and leave less to others, a funeral can be a great occasion enhanced by the one element missing from all of life’s other great ceremonies: finality.

How much it all costs is a matter of little or no account.