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!

Posted by Rupert Callender of the Green Funeral Company

Claire and I spent the last day of August At Torre Abbey on the seafront at Torquay, seeing an exhibition called Death and the Maiden, featuring the work of the painter Robert Lenkiewicz.

To the uninitiated, Robert was a flamboyant Plymouth based artist, instantly recognisable by his clichéd, spattered smock and leonine mane of hair and beard, a look it has to be said he could carry off well.

 A chronic self-mythologiser and an equally chronic womaniser – Plymouth is populated by swathes of his ethereal, largely unacknowledged children – Robert died in 2002, penniless due to his refusal to ever actually sell any of his work, but somehow managing to accumulate one of the finest if darkest libraries in the world. Whole shelves were devoted to suicide or masturbation, volumes bound with human skin, medieval grimoires, which he obtained through all sorts of nefarious means. Needless to say, death dominated.

He operated from a series of warehouses that he rented for next to nothing, right on the harbour front in the Barbican, the only part of Plymouth to escape the Nazi bombers, and it was here he could reliably be found, bathed in a hanging pool of light with a beauty draped across his lap not quite swathed in scarlet, always seemingly his own muse, the model as mere accessory. Frequently pretentious, endlessly priapic, sometimes fascinating, but often deeply predictable and annoying. An artist in other words. His main talent was for survival through infamy.

Having been raised in what amounted to a hostel for survivors of the holocaust, Robert was always drawn to the disenfranchised, and during the seventies, turned one of the warehouses he rented into a functioning doss house, offering the homeless and mad of Plymouth shelter in return for immortalisation by painting. He formed many deep friendships with these down and outs, mainly men, most of them professional post war gentlemen of the roads, seasonal, travelling alcoholics, not the teenage crack whore runaways that horrify our times. At times there were up to 200 in there. Places of simmering violence and laughter, drink and dance, skilfully lorded over by Lenkiewicz.

 One of these, Edwin Mackenzie, whom Robert christened Diogenes due to finding him living in a concrete pipe at Plymouth dump, became a close friend and he painted him over and over again. When Edwin died in 1984 he bequeathed his body to Robert to do with as he saw fit. He had him thoroughly embalmed in the style of Lenin, and due to some typically slippery evasiveness on his part (when asked by the registrar whether he was due to be buried or cremated, he replied “He is not to be buried”) managed to keep him quietly for a while somewhere in his studio.

 After a month or two, the authorities turned up asking why he had not been cremated. There followed a grand stand off involving the police, public health officials and of course the media, and a lengthy examination of some very interesting and pertinent questions, such as who owns a corpse, is it a ‘thing’ or a ‘possession’, and does a body actually have to be disposed of at all. 

The answer was no, it just has to not cause any health issues, and yes, it is a possession, in this case belonging to Robert. He successfully argued that there are something in the region of 1,500 corpses of varying antiquity exhibited around the UK in various museums; was it the freshness of Edwin that made him a body and not a mummy?  Good questions, art at its best, but it infuriated Plymouth City Council, whose history of dour puritanism had already had to deal with his louche image, not to mention the irritation caused by him faking his own death in 1981, and his highlighting of such uncomfortable civic issues with projects on things such as vagrancy, suicide and death.

Robert stubbornly hung onto Edwin’s body until his own untimely death aged 60 in 2002. It is a small irony that Edwin actually lived 11 years longer than Robert, seemingly on little more than air.

When Robert died in 2002, he had £12 in his possession, and owed his creditors over 2 million. 7 years later, lawyers valued his possessions at just over 7 million.

In the ensuing tidy up, literal and metaphorical, of his affairs, Edwin Mackenzie’s corpse was found in an artist’s drawer, still in remarkably good nick, and it was to see what the receptionist had described as ‘a pickled tramp’ that we had come for, rather than Robert’s somewhat predictable sexual paintings; skeletons humping girls from behind like dogs, bony fingers piercing amniotic bags of life, grinning skulls performing cunnilingus, wombs and breasts and ribcages.

What Robert himself said about Edwin’s body is what has struck anyone who has spent time with one: “ the total presence of the corpse and the total absence of the person,” the reason as undertakers we encourage people to return again and again to the body of those they love, to get it to sink in: they are not there. Somewhere, nowhere, everywhere maybe, but definitely not here.

He saw him as the ultimate memento mori, and now, here in a former monastery on The English Riviera as the rather low key centre piece to the exhibition, was the extremely rare chance to see the old boy. 

He has been dead a while now but the embalming was done thoroughly. He was a small, undernourished withered tramp to begin with; Edwin said his life on the road began at three and a half, but his yellowing, emaciated hairy body still fascinates and provokes awe, even for people like us who spend our days with the dead. 

We don’t embalm. Partly for environmental reasons, though I fear more for the embalmers than the water table, but really for psychological reasons. We think that the natural changes that a body goes through, the drawing back of the features, the sinking eyes, the thinning and discolouration of the fingertips, are things that the family can deal with, and if told honestly about what they are to see it not only fails to horrify, but actually helps. 

People unfurl in the presence of the truth, and the truth of what happens to a body in the liminal time between death and disposal is not always what horror films have led us to believe. It is gentler, perhaps even in Walt Whitman’s words, “and luckier.” Refrigeration between visits is of course essential, but the unstoppable, inevitable series of small changes that accompany most bodies’ early move from life to dead, are slight but profound, and are what can take the living to the brink of the furnace or the grave. It is a chance to say, again and again, “Okay, I get it. They really are gone. Let’s do what needs to be done.” 

So, despite the fact that he was embalmed, Edwin to us was a familiar if exaggerated sight; withered, crackled almost like canvas, each hair standing erect. And as he has now been dead well over twenty years, the absence of the personality was more pronounced than I have ever seen, but the thought that struck me as I gazed at his naked body was how much of his humanity still clung to him in a way which Gunther Von Hagens’s ‘plastinated’ mannequins don’t. 

But why? Both have been chemically preserved in a way I instinctively reject, yet one was filled with a fragile beauty which made me feel part of a bigger picture, and the other made me feel afraid for the road we have taken in the name of infotainment. 

Von Hagens’ plastinated people are undoubtedly educating, titillating and clever too, there of their own free will and most definitely art, but are they still in anyway remotely human? 

Something, perhaps not even in the technique but in the intention, has stripped them of more than their skin. They are Ridley Scott’s replicants awaiting animation, viscera bizarrely frozen in time, whereas Edwin, all creases and stitching and patina, is absolutely human. He is our future, what our outside bodies will look like when what was once within has gone. 

Age continues to wither him, as it should, as it does us all, but he strangely lives on, not posed as an athlete, or jauntily holding his entrails, or stripping off his muscles like body armour, but dead, dignified, still.

Posted by Kathryn Edwards

Serbia’s been generating news of late, featuring the Old Carnivore and the Young Herbivore (as one local commentator has characterised the players).  While Djokovic nibbles the Wimbledon lawn and Mladic huffs and postures in the Hague court, there’s been a lot of grave-digging taking place in a former meadow just outside the east Bosnian town of Srebrenica.

This once charming little place comprises both a main centre and a sprinkling of hamlets and smallholdings in the surrounding mountains.  In the old days there was a healing spa, the iron-rich water being thought useful for various complaints.  Along the cobbled path up to the source of the river Guber, which emerges from a rockface above the town, there are extra springs and pools that are reputed to offer remedies for various complaints and for general beautification.  The 1990s genocide attempt put paid to all that.  The chalets were torched, the woodlands mined – the mosques blown up, too, and the rubble barrowed away – and on a boiling hot July day in 1995, most of the locals were bussed out of town, to be deposited in ‘free’ Bosnia (women and little children) or slaughtered (lads and men).  Sensing what was coming, many men and boys fled through the woods and mountains, aiming for freedom; about half of them perished through murder or misadventure on the journey.

Most of the victims of the mass killings were buried, the perpetrators’ motive being disposal rather than mourning ritual.  They were buried more than once, as often as not, in an attempt to hide the bodies or confound the search for them.  The quest in that post-conflict, partitioned country is to find the mass graves, exhume the bodies, and identify them using DNA analysis, inform the relatives, and bury the dead in identified plots and with due rites.  Each year, new mass graves are revealed; each year the burials number hundreds.  A dedicated burial-ground has been created on some land just outside the town.  Known by official decree as the Srebrenica-Potocari Memorial and Cemetery for the Victims of the 1995 Genocide, it was inaugurated by US President Bill Clinton in September 2003.  Since then, July 11^th – the anniversary of the final capture of the town – has been the day chosen for the burials.

Momentum builds from the day before the ceremony.  The coffins, wooden trays with uniform green canvas stretched over a wooden frame, arrive on trucks.  Each one will weigh very little, the contents being merely bones (the dismal circumstances even having required a fatwa on the quantity of remains that can legitimise an individual’s funeral).  The precious cargoes are laid out in rows, each coffin named and numbered.  Members of the Bosnian diaspora will have arrived from all over the world, and the atmosphere is like a fairground of grief: people stare at the ranks of coffins, they weep quietly, they pray and read the Qur’an, they gossip and exchange news.  Some stay all night.  Before the dew falls, the coffins are covered in enormous sheets of polythene.

Next day, yet more people arrive, by car, by bus, and some – greeted with waves and cheers – are the last few of the thousands who have completed the March of Peace, that traces in reverse the so-called March of Death from Srebrenica out to the west and north that had been attempted by those fleeing the 1995 disaster.  On the route to the Memorial Centre opportunistic hucksters sell knick-knacks at the side of the road.  By mid-morning the field is a mass of tens of thousands of people, many of wielding umbrellas against the searing sun or teeming rain, according to the vagaries of this changeable mountain climate.  Latecomers hurrying along the valley will hear the sound of singing as the ceremony begins.

Dignitaries send substantial floral tributes.  There is a reading of the names of the dead, and.  It will take a while this year: 614 are being buried.  An imam speaks – with too much focus on politics for some people’s tastes – and also leads the prayers, men and women stretching in long lines where there’s open space, or squeezing in with whatever decorum can be managed in the tighter corners.  Suddenly the invocations are over and it’s time to act.  Scores of men move forward to shoulder the coffins and hurry them through the crowds, like ants carrying foraged treasure, to their designated sites.  People stretch out to touch the passing coffins for a blessing; in the manner of their deaths these dead are perceived as ‘shahid’ or ‘witnesses’ for their religion.

The ground has been thoroughly prepared: each grave is marked, with the traditional wooden planks hard by.  Mourners cluster by their dead men’s graves, faces tense.  The coffins are manhandled into place, then covered with the planks, and the graves become a frenzy of mass shovelling of soil – or mud or dust, as the climate disposes.  And all of a sudden, it seems, it’s over.  People pour out of the gates and away, the business of burials completed for another year.  Meanwhile, the earth will settle, and the green wooden markers will be replaced by pillars of white marble in a stylised version of the traditional turban-top gravestone.

Hostile elements of Serb society assert that the Potocari memorial site will foment vengeance.  The Srebrenica prayer, engraved in stone in Bosnian, Arabic and slightly wobbly English, suggests otherwise:

In the Name of God the Most Merciful,

the Most Compassionate

We pray to Almighty God,

May grievance become hope!

May revenge become justice!

May mothers’ tears become prayers

That Srebrenica never happens again

To no one and nowhere!

There’s an interesting review in the London Review of Books (14 April) of After We Die: The Life and Times of the Human Cadaver by Norman Cantor. Here are just a few snapshots from the review by Steven Shapin. It’s not available online unless you hand over a wad at the subscription roadblock.

In the modern secular idiom the dead human body is just rapidly decaying meat, gristle, bone, fat and fluid. It has no consciousness of its circumstances … and can have no interest in its fate … The only value to be assigned to the corpse is its break-up value.

But those who affect this hard-headedness are rarely consistent in maintaining it. In one version of soft-headedness we seem to set a zero or even negative value on the corpse, since few of us try to realise its cash potential and most of us set aside significant sums just to dispose of it.

Secular modernists many of us may be, but we inhabit a culture whose institutionalised practices of death and the disposal of dead bodies have been shaped by beliefs that are neither modern nor secular.

[Rights of the corpse] proceed from the incoherence of our cultural attitudes to the corpse. We don’t think of it as a living agent, and we don’t think of it simply as a sack of chemicals, but as something which still has a measure of agency associated with it … Culturally we recognise the recently dead body of a friend or relative as some version of them: death does not immediately detach their personhood from their remains.

Cantor invites secularists who affect indifference as to what is done with their corpse to imagine how they’d feel if told their dead bodies would be dragged naked through the streets with a sign bearing their name and then fed to the pigs.

It’s a good point. But I find it very easy to get my head around the idea of direct cremation – sans violation, flames not pigs – followed by a corpse-free commemorative event, and so do an increasing number of other people, especially in the US. I’m very surprised that a modern secular country like Britain hasn’t taken to it far more readily.

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

Me and the missus are getting down to some serious death planning. There’s no best time of life for doing this, of course, so long as you get it done afore ye croak. And the more I think about it, the more clearly I can see that it’s not an activity whose end result is, phew, done it. No, I think that once you start you need to, want to, keep at it, continuously revising, adding, elaborating. Which is why I’d now have all children start making death plans at the age of 8, and do something useful in their PSHE lessons. When’s too soon to introduce Mortality to the curriculum?

The process is going to be interesting and tedious. We are impelled by necessity mostly, of course, or thoughtfulness to put a positive spin on it: we don’t want to be remembered by higgledepiggledness and fly-blown filing systems. So there are the who-gets-what decisions to make, the legal stuff, and also the horrible physical phase towards the end to strategise – the advance decision to refuse treatment, powers of attorney, then, when we’re done, organs, tissues and carcass disposal. And that’s not all.

Our relicts will want to commemorate us, we reckon, in their own way, and we shall encourage them to think about the myriad ways they can do that, giving not a fig for convention. I really don’t know that any of those ‘what he/she would have wanted’ considerations apply when you’re dead, bar the religious/superstitious ones, and we don’t have any of those.

So we’ll leave it to our relicts to decide if they want or need to have funerals for us. That’ll probably depend a lot on the nature and duration of our separate demises and how they feel about us after we’ve been wheeled away with a sheet over our heads – a matter, for us, of just deserts.

What, after all, is the value of a formal secular funeral shorn of all theological rationale? It is but a symbolic farewell event and also a commemorative event. Well, there are lots of ways of saying a one-off last goodbye, just as there are uncountable ways of commemorating someone. In any case, commemoration is ongoing, lifelong, both solitary and communal. It is about contemplation and recollection with added celebration or denunciation. We start doing that when people who mean something to us are still alive. When they’re dead it’s the type and degree of missing that makes all the difference – or the type and degree of animosity.

It’s a tendency of secular funerals to try to get too much done. Done, I suspect, and dusted. Some funerals resemble holiday suitcases, bulging, straining at the zip, bursting with biography and favourite tunes. Secular funerals are best when they’re not busy, when they’re not trying to get everything tidily, comprehensively bundled; when they’re reflective and contemplative and touch on the essence of somebody. Most of them need to leave more out.

Having in mind that when the history of the world is written neither my wife nor I will get a mention, not even in a footnote, we don’t feel a great debt to posterity. It’ll be nice, though, to leave behind letters to people. Nice and necessary.

Where my two nieces are concerned my exemplar is going to be Richard Hoggart’s Memoir for our Grandchildren, published in Between Two Worlds. It’s not a grandiloquent memoir. Far from it. It is an account by a working class orphan of those members of his family that he knew in childhood. It’s family history. It tells his grandchildren where and who they came from – it’s genetic geography. And it’s important, because what we learn about blood relatives tells us a lot about ourselves and it’s necessary knowledge, as any adopted person will attest. Hoggart writes beautifully in a plain, objective style and I recommend this book to you.

Hoggart writes formally and chronologically. This morning I stumbled on a less formal sort of memoir, the nang seu ngam sop. Nang seu ngam sop? The traditional Thai funeral ceremony book. In the words of the Wall Street Journal:

In Thai funeral tradition, books about the deceased are printed and distributed to people who come to pay their respects. Some are thin pamphlets, others, large volumes. The practice, mostly for those in the middle or upper classes, gained popularity in the 1880s and reached its peak in the mid 1900s. Within its pages are poems, personal writings — and recipes.

I really like the idea of this sort of ragbag miscellany. A fine commemorative and biographical item easily bashed out on a home printer. Greatly to be preferred to the sound of a celebrant revving up to 180 words a minute then blurting “XXXX was born on…”

There’s a report just out from Demos on death and dying (why don’t we get chronological and say dying and death?). It’s by Charles Leadbeater, somewhat of a hero of mine, and Jake Garber. It’s called Dying for Change. It comes out at the same time as the National Council of Palliative Care’s The Missing Piece: Meeting People’s Spiritual Needs in End of Life Care. I’ll talk about the latter another time. I would only make the observation now that the 136pp Demos report is free to download; the 20pp NCPC report costs a bloody tenner.

Here are some extracts from the Demos study to whet your appetite. The scope of the full report is wider and, of course, fuller. It also offers radical alternatives to the way we do things now. Leadbetter begins by describing the death of his father:

Bill’s death was not a tragedy. He lived a long, happy and healthy life. Some of that life he owed to interventions by the medical profession: operations to fix his knees and sight.

Without modern medicine he would not have been alive at the age of 86. Yet the medical profession that had extended his life was unable to provide him with a good way to die.

Around threequarters of deaths in the UK are ‘predictable’ and follow a period of chronic illness. Dying has become protracted,complex and painful.

Unless we can devise ways to get people to talk about how they want to live while they are dying, our efforts to improve services will be like groping in the dark. It should become standard for people reaching the end of life to create advanced care plans with

the help of friends, family members, trained peers or professionals. Evidence from the USA suggests this can dramatically reduce unnecessary admissions to hospital and

improve care.

· Training in palliative care needs to be much more widespread among doctors, nurses and care home staff at large. Too few doctors, nurses and care home staff are ready to have open conversations with people about the prospect of death and how they want to die.

· We should draw on the models of federated schools to link hospices to groups of care homes, so that hospice skills and values can migrate into care homes.

· Services should be commissioned by end of life trusts in an integrated way that bring together public, private and voluntary providers within a community.  – £500 million pa

Our challenge is to help people to achieve what is most important to them at the end of life. That will require the creation of a network of health and social supports so that people can die at and closer to home, with the support of their family and friends, as well as professionals.

If we do not create this social network, then in the decades to come many hundreds of thousands of people will experience unnecessarily distressing deaths. We will die badly in places not of our choosing, with services that are often impersonal, in systems that are unyielding, struggling to find meaning in death because we are cut off from the relationships which count most to us.

Communities and families have coped cooperatively with death for centuries. Only very recently have we become heavily reliant on institutional, professional solutions – care homes and hospitals. There is mounting evidence that the services these institutions offer are costly and inappropriate. A lot of money is spent on public services that people do not want as they are currently delivered, and which are poorly designed to meet their needs.

Download the complete report free here.

Many American funerary practices are so barking mad I don’t bother writing about them. This blog is Britcentric not because it is xenophobic or incurious but simply because it confines itself to goings-on of relevance to Brits.

Sure, we’ve picked up one or two bad habits from the US. Embalming may or may not be one of them. And we have a good deal to learn from their home funeralists and those who are pioneering natural burial.

Once in a while I see Americans doing things that make me relieved to be British. Here, we pride ourselves on our tolerance and sense of fair play. It’s the positive spin we put on our disposition to shrug and acquiesce. Over there they can be far more clamorous in the way they express themselves.

One long-running story I have shunned concerns the activities of the Westboro Baptist Church. Claiming the right of free speech granted by the First Amendment of the US Constitution, members of the church picket the funerals of soldiers in the belief that their death is God’s punishment on America for tolerating homosexuality. More here.

And now we learn that funerals have, in certain milieux, become a revenge-opp. Read all about it here.

Sort of puts a perspective on things, doesn’t it?

Once upon a time people dreaded dying. They couldn’t be sure it would be painless. They dreaded being dead, too. Some feared the unknown. Others lamented the end of their existence.

A very few people had no fear whatever of being dead because they trusted in a joy-drenched afterlife. But even these people dreaded dying.

Death was a big deal.

In those days, people affected by the death of someone were called ‘the bereaved’. They experienced grief. Even people who were certain that their dead person had gone to paradise were sad because they missed them. So funerals were sad occasions. There was no way round this. It was because everyone was sad.

Because dying could be such a horrible thing, people didn’t talk about it. When they were dead, this made life difficult for everyone. The undertaker would gently say to the bereaved, “What do you want to do?” and the bereaved would reply, “What she would have wanted.” The undertaker would gently ask, “What was it she wanted?” and the bereaved would reply, “We don’t know.”

The pre-need funeral plan people gazed sadly at their unsold pre-need funeral plans and said, “What hope for us when everyone’s in denial?”

People who know what’s best for people saw that what death needed was an image makeover. “It’s not so bad when you talk about it,” they said. And they had a point – up to a point. “It has been said,” they said, “that what we fear most about dying is the associated loss of control. By empowering patients to express their wishes, that control can be restored.” “Does it bollocks,” said the people with neurodegenerative diseases.

The pre-need funeral plan people proved, with smoke and mirrors, that grief can be bypassed by partying. And because no one wants anyone to be sad when they die, everyone flocked to buy their very own pre-need, knees-up party plan.

So now when relicts go to the undertaker, the undertaker says, “Hello.” And the relicts say, “What’s next?” And the undertaker says, “This, this is what’s next. This is what you’ll do, this is what you’ll wear, this is what you’ll listen to, this is how you’ll feel. It’s all laid down and it’s all paid up.”

And the relicts say, “Sorry, we feel too sad, we miss her.” Or, “Are you joking, mate? We couldn’t stand him.”

And Death says, “Right. You’ll do it my way.”

Jonathan Taylor, the mercurial genius who from time to time gilds this dull little blog with his inspired intelligence, glorious whimsy and beauty of spirit, once observed that the time between death and the funeral gives people the time to get the heads around the difference between ‘you and it’ – between a living person and a dead thing from which the spirit (if any) has flown.

For many professionals working at the interface between life and death, ‘it-ness’ can happen pretty fast. “That’s not a person, it’s a thing.” There’s nothing necessarily wrong with that – so long as it isn’t attended by a coarsening of the emotions which manifests as cruelty or carelessness.

It can happen. This is from yesterday’s Birmingham Post.

Birmingham’s largest hospital trust has launched an investigation into its private porter services after dead bodies were left for hours on wards.

Lung patient Sarah Stevenson, from Small Heath, described in March the “horrendous stench” she was forced to endure on Ward 9 at Heartlands after three patients died on the same day and they were not removed for hours.

Whistleblower David Whitsey, a porter at the hospital for nine years … claimed lack of training led to the body of patient Dora Parker, aged 81, from Kitts Green, being dropped while lifted on to a trolley shortly after she died in 2003, causing a gash on her head to the shock of daughter-in-law Patricia Parker.

Read the whole sorry story here. (Hat-tip to Tony Piper for this)