The Good Funeral Guide

I enjoyed this blog post from an American woman living in Paraguay. Her husband is some sort of religious minister. Here’s the custom out there:

In the jungle, among the Ye’kwana tribe, burials also had to be done quickly. If the family was christian, the dying person would be allowed to remain in his hammock and home to die. If not believers, the ailing one would be taken off and left alone in the jungle to perish, away from the community, so as not to bring evil spirits into the village. Once known, or hoped, to be dead, another tribe would be paid to retrieve the body and bury it in a place unknown to the Ye’kwanas.

And here is a Paraguayan open-air cremation. This delight Richard Martin over at Scattering Ashes:

The first time I experienced this was at the invitation of the family of a Sanema woman. I walked across the log which was the foot bridge between our two villages, I climbed a muddy bank and was led to the clearing in the center of their small village where a large pyre of wood had been laid.

The elderly women were already writhing in grief, moaning and swaying to and fro. It was as if their hearts were ripping open and a wounded animal sound was gushing out from their very soul. The children roamed around confused and bewildered, the men stood stoically by, and the shaman was painted and covered by a jaguar skin making inhuman sounds and growls.

I sat on a bit of log taking in the sights and sounds around me. I felt the despair, I heard the anguish, I was chilled to the bone by the actions of the shaman as he danced and waved his rattle fiercely, seemingly, in my direction. Do not judge me, for you were not there!

Then, the body, wrapped in a tattered old hammock was slung onto the fire. A new sound emerged, a cracking, popping sounds, and a new smell filled the air. It takes a long time to burn a body. More logs needed to be added to the fire every so often. People fainted. Others went into drug induced dazes. Some wept until they had no more tears.

When the fire was allowed to extinguish itself and was left to cool, the entire tribe seemed to have been given new energy. I watched in amazement as the women ran to the cooling embers and began frantically digging with their hands and sifting through the ashes. I noticed they were placing things into a blackened cooking pot. Finally, the shaman came over and prodded the dying fire with his big toe and then nodded to the women who ran off with the pot and its contents.

I saw as they began to use a simple mortar and pestle to grind the fragments in the pot. I saw as they added this fine powder to a prepared banana drink. I saw the family members of the deceased line up.

I saw them drink the bones.

There was much excitement when Davender Ghai won his case for open-air cremation at the Court of Appeal in February 2010.

It established the legality of the principle of open-air cremation but, as Rupert Callender noted at the time:

“this is only a battle that has been won, not the war. The next impenetrable ring of defence, our Orwellian and inscrutable planning system and our perversely selective Environmental Health department will no doubt dig in for a long siege. For those of us who dream of blazing hilltops lighting up the night sky and illuminating dancing crowds, we still have miles to go before we sleep.” [Source]

In court, the battle raged around the legal definition of a crematorium. Baba Ghai’s lawyers argued: “The expression crematorium should mean any building fitted with appliances for the burning of human remains. ‘Building’ is not defined. We say it should be given a broad meaning.”

When the judgement was delivered, everyone noted the difficulties which could be thrown up by planning and public health legislation should an application be submitted.

Over in India a new, eco-friendly pyre is catching on – the Mokshda green cremation system, a simple heat-retaining and combustion- efficient technology. The Mokshda crematorium is a high-grade, stainless steel and man-sized bier with a hood and sidewall slates that can withstand temperatures of up to 800 degrees Celsius.

It’s a building, all right. That’s encouraging.

But it doesn’t solve the vapourised mercury problem…

Read more here and here. Read other blog posts on this: click on a category below to bring up the archive.

Two really nice stories here.

First, a marvellous and extraordinary insight into funerals in Gaza — community, ritual and politics. Here.

Second, the ten most loathsome lunacies of the Westboro Baptist Church (the GOD HATES people), who are so biblecrazy they once protested outside a shop selling Swedish vacuum cleaners after a Swedish pastor was prosecuted for being horrible about homosexuals. Now they’re going to protest at Elizabeth Edwards’ funeral on the grounds that she did not praise God enough while dying of breast cancer. Here.

Have a lovely weekend!

Have you been following Gail Rubin’s 30 funerals in 30 days? I hope so. If you haven’t,  you can easily catch up. Go over to her site as soon as you’ve read this and take up where you left off.

The cultural differences are intriguing. The preaching at religious funerals in the US is hotter. More friends and family stand up and talk. Photo and video montages are much, much more common — as are tables with photos and memorabilia. And I like the custom of giving people rubber wristbands — over there they’re the new armbands. My overall impression so far is that Americans do it better. Not that we do it well, of course, we’ve got a long way to go.

Today Gail attended the funeral of a young man — he was 24. Among the songs played at his funeral was When I Get Where I’m Going by Brad Paisley. Here’s one for you celebrants (a good day, this, for celebrants). Another was If Die Young by the Band Perry, which even I’ve heard so I guess everyone has. Again, a good one for a funeral like this.

Listen to Brad (I can’t embed him, I’m not allowed). Then go straight over to Gail.

It was a deepseated thing, this duty we felt we owed our dead. A sacred duty – literally. It goes back to the beginning of time. Throughout human history the dead body has always been treated in accordance with sacred diktat, its valedictory hullabaloos performed by shaman or sorcerer, soothsayer or priest. For the full extent of human memory the bodies of the dead have been disposed of in places held sacred – demarcated patches of ground, rivers.

We’re getting much too evolved for all that rannygazoo and mystery-making juju now. Too sensible, too pragmatic. Oh yes, we can see a dead body for what it is. A dead body. A waste disposal matter after it’s had its corneas and other useful stuff taken out. The growth of cremation may well have hastened this thinking. Brutal. Rapid. Get your head around that and you’ll get your head around anything.

Well, that’s one way of looking at it. It’s the way of unemployed librarian and blogger Amy Campbell in the US.

It set me thinking. We don’t yet dispose of our dead by direct cremation as they increasingly do in the States. But what of our secular rituals, the ones performed by those possessed of no shamanic attributes – everyday unsanctified civvies like our own dear Gloriamundi? Are these ceremonies mere sentimental vestiges ripe for replacement by less formal, body-free celebrations of memory in restaurants, at tea parties, on picnics, over a couple of beers?

I wonder where we’re going. Take away the sacred and… Does that make all the difference?

Handprints at the entrance Lohapol, or Iron Gate. They are from the hands of the wives of Maharaja Man Singh, made before they committed ritual suicide on his funeral pyre in 1843.

Source

This put a spring in my step. It is extracted from a letter to the Irish Times:

I never cease to be amazed at how we Irish continue to celebrate and embrace death so excellently.

The morgue is now giving way to families’ increasing desire to bring the body home for a wake, not just for a few hours but overnight, so that neighbours and friends can gather as a community for lashings of tea, cakes, sandwiches, etc, all prepared by the neighbours as genuine gestures of friendship and community.

The importance of the community wake is also to be seen in the new development of taking the body directly from home to church, not on the evening before burial but on the morning of the service, with the community present in full support to the bereaved.

We Irish celebrate and embrace death so well that a good funeral is still a more social event than a good wedding.

The whole letter is worth reading here. It is a response to this article here.

Here’s how they do it in Swaziland:

EZULWINI – The funeral of Ziggy Carvalho was turned into a ‘mini rally’ as mourners watched his friends showing off with their cars.

This happened at KaBhelina yesterday morning during a short prayer held at his home.

This was before his body was taken to the burial site at Nyonyane, about 500 metres from KaMchoza Bar, past Calabash Restaurant.

Carvalho attended the Simunye Fair last weekend but was stabbed in the stomach by one of the revellers just as he and his family members were preparing to go back home.

Yesterday’s service started just before 7am and only lasted 15 minutes.

While the service proceeded, mourners who were waiting outside watched some of Carvalho’s friends bidding farewell to their friend in a rather unique way.

Carvalho’s friends, mostly those who were driving BMWs, revved the vehicles so loud that all those who had gone to pay their last respects came out to watch. While the drivers played with their accelerators, some of the mourners, especially those who spent most of their lives with Carvalho, began to celebrate.

They jumped up and down, encouraging the drivers to continue revving the cars until the casket was taken into the hearse.

At one point in time, one of the mourners asked the driver of one of the three BMWs to spin his car but could not because there was no space.

Whole story here.

The words that follow are by Thomas Lynch, a hero to so many of us in the UK. (In the US there are those who reckon him paternalistic, but we don’t need to go into that. It’s complicated.)

Funerals are about the living and the dead — the talk and the traffic between them … in the face of mortality we need to stand and look, watch and wonder, listen and remember … This is what we do funerals for — not only to dispose of our dead, but to bear witness to their lives and times among us, to affirm the difference their living and dying makes among kin and community, and to provide a vehicle for the healthy expression of grief and faith, hope and wonder. The value of a funeral proceeds neither from how much we spend nor from how little. A death in the family is an existential event, not only or entirely a medical, emotional, religious or retail one.

“An act of sacred community theater,” Thomas Long calls the funeral — this “transporting” of the dead from this life to the next. “We move them to a further shore. Everyone has a part in this drama.” Long — theologian, writer, thinker and minister — speaks about the need for “a sacred text, sacred community and sacred space,” to process the deaths of “sacred persons.” The dead get to the grave or fire or tomb while the living get to the edge of a life they must learn to live without those loved ones. The transport is ritual, ceremonial, an amalgam of metaphor and reality, image and imagination, process and procession, text and scene set, script and silence, witness and participation — theater, “sacred theater,” indeed.

“Once you put a dead body in the room, you can talk about anything,” Alan Ball [creator of the HBO show Six Feet Under] wrote to me once in a note.

Source