The Good Funeral Guide

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!

Extraordinary footage from the BBC of the effect of ice reaching down from the surface to freeze and kill everything it touches on the sea floor. Natural cryomation?

Japanese robot for collecting dead  indigents

Here’s how a recent piece in the Daily Mail began:

Being freeze dried and smashed into little pieces sounds like the stuff of sci-fi horror movies.

But it is one of two methods of dealing with our dearly departed that could soon be available from a funeral director near you.

And in keeping with sci-fi’s often chilling view of the future, the details are not for the squeamish.

It goes on to describe the cryomation process: bodies are placed in silk bags and submerged in an alkaline solution that has been heated to 160c. Flesh, organs and bones all dissolve under the onslaught, leaving behind a combination of green-brown fluid and white powder.

It’s the sort of piece designed to excite max indignation, I suppose. The Daily Mail specialises in fury porn. But, judging by the comments at the end, the readership of this vile newspaper refuses to be stirred. There’s a characteristic if off-the-wall comment by Donna of Croydon:  Shouldn’t we addressing WHY we have no burial space? Like close the borders? (bloody foreigners stealing our jobs, choking our graveyards) But for the most part commenters show a hilarious or unsentimental indifference to what happens to their bodies once they’re dead.

For all the trainspotterly debate about the relative merits of alkaline hydrolysis and freeze-drying there is, as natural burial guru Ken West likes patiently to point out, already a greener, simpler way of disposing of bodies. Yes… natural burial.

Mail article here

Last Orders: Compost from Jason Hendriksen on Vimeo.

The prospect of Promession, the brainchild of Susanne Wiighe-Masak, has been around for a few years now. It offers an extremely attractive alternative to cremation. It is clean. It is gentle. Above all, it enables us to return to the earth in an environmentally useful way. If you want to remind yourself how it works, go here.

The method of preparing a body for disposal by freeze drying it was invented in the US by Philip Backman. He patented it in 1978, and that patent has now expired. Backman’s proposed method of reducing the body to particles left a little to be desired (I have emphasised the key passage in bold):

“A further step entails subjecting the intact, frozen body to fractionalizing means reducing same to a particulate state. This step may be termed surface enhancement i.e., an increase in surface area of the remains is provided. Existing mechanical means such as that used in the reduction of organic or inorganic substances may be utilized in this step. By way of example, a hammer mill may be utilized.”

Promessa’s breakthrough was to develop a process whereby the body can be reduced to particles by means not of  hammer mill but vibration.

At the end of last year or the beginning of this (I can’t remember) I cast doubt on whether Promessa had, actually, managed to perfect this most important stage of the process. This earned me a letter from Promessa’s lawyers. I withdrew the blog post and stood back.

Yesterday I was able to go and hear Susanne Wiighe-Masak speak at the Institute of Cemetery and Crematorium Management (ICCM) annual conference. For this I am indebted to the kindness of Julie Dunk, Technical Services and Events Manager at the ICCM. It was my chance to apologise to Susanne in person, and also to listen also to the presentation by Richard Maclean, Business Development Director of Cryomation Ltd, a UK firm which has developed its own, rival freeze-drying technology.

Susanne spoke with a passion born of idealism and showed us the short film above describing the promession process. Richard Maclean spoke with the detachment of a technocrat. He outlined the development history of the Cryomation process and described briefly how it reduces the body to a ‘safe and sterile powder’ using heat and compression. He told us that Cryomation Ltd had tried to reduce a frozen body to particles by means of vibration but had failed.

Both processes have attracted interest in countries around the world. Each developer will bring their Promator and Cryomator, respectively, to market imminently.

Good piece by the George Pitcher in the Daily Telegraph:

I’m afraid I slipped into a daydream in church on Easter morn yesterday. It started by wondering how different the story might have been if the Jerusalem of 2,000 years ago was like the London Borough of Bromley today.

The idea that Joseph of Arimathea could have got a quick verbal consent from the head of the local authority to take possession of Jesus’s body would be ridiculous; he’d never have got the paperwork organised in time. Mary Magdalen would have been so tied up with the bereavement services she’d never have got back to the tomb before dawn. And that’s before having to explain to the bureaucrats that the tomb turned out to be empty.

Read the rest of it here.