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 Vale

This lovely jazz piece was actually a requiem for Charlie Parker – but at risk of offending purists I thought Frank O’Hara’s poem for Billie Holiday on the day she died fitted perfectly with the music.

The Day Lady Died

It is 12:20 in New York a Friday
three days after Bastille day, yes
it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine
because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton
at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner
and I don’t know the people who will feed me

I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun
and have a hamburger and a malted and buy
an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets
in Ghana are doing these days

I go on to the bank
and Miss Stillwagon (first name Linda I once heard)
doesn’t even look up my balance for once in her life
and in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I get a little Verlaine
for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do
think of Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore or
Brendan Behan’s new play or Le Balcon or Les Nègres
of Genet, but I don’t, I stick with Verlaine
after practically going to sleep with quandariness

and for Mike I just stroll into the PARK LANE
Liquor Store and ask for a bottle of Strega and
then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue
and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre and
casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton
of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with her face on it

and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of
leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT
while she whispered a song along the keyboard
to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing

And another regrettable thing about death
is the ceasing of your own brand of magic,
which took a whole life to develop and market—
the quips, the witticisms, the slant
adjusted to a few, those loved ones nearest
the lip of the stage, their soft faces blanched
in the footlight glow, their laughter close to tears,
their tears confused with their diamond earrings,
their warm pooled breath in and out with your heartbeat,
their response to your performance twinned.
The jokes over the phone. The memories packed
in the rapid-access file. The whole act.
Who will do it again? That’s it: no one;
imitators and descendants aren’t the same.

John Updike

RIP Hitch. UR a legend. 

I don’t know where you stand on literary criticism. I’ve never been a fan, largely because I don’t understand it. Many years ago I taught for a while, and I was charged with showing fifteen year-olds how to back-seat drive Shakespeare and other quite good writers. Despairing of my teaching methods, my students would resort to buying exam cribs so that they could teach themselves. They would come to class wanting to test me about themes and symbolism and other stuff that left me standing with my mouth open. They all did pretty well in their exams, though. The best things we learn at school are the things we find out for ourselves. Very bad teachers are especially inspiring in this respect. I ought to say inspirational, but I won’t.

I was much keener on literary celebration. I encouraged my students to clap and whoop when they encountered something they really liked – a great idea, a well-turned phrase, some yummy assonance. I hope they retained something of this spirit.

The critical faculty can go both ways. Lit crit teaches us what’s good and why. It teaches us taste. It teaches us to be discriminating. And here comes the downside: it teaches us to discriminate against. One measure of cleverness is its ability to demonstrate that something lots of people think is really rather good is, in actual fact, complete crap. I’ve always preferred open-eyed wonderment to narrow-eyed appraisal. I’m not saying I’m right. But I do think that schools teach clever kids to sneer.

If you take a lit crit yardstick to most of the poetry declaimed at funerals you’ll agree that most of it falls short of the highest rank. Try as they may to interest their clients in summat a bit posh, celebrants find it all but impossible to stop them from going downmarket, pouncing on some Poundland stuff about stairways to heaven and how God only takes the best, then asking the celebrant to read it. As practical jokes go, this is a pretty good one to play on an educated person.

Does the literary quality of funerals matter? Of course not. The only thing that matters is the testimony of hurting hearts (Tony Piper’s phrase). Celebrants can attach far too much value to a well-wrought script.

The iniquity of literary snobbery is well exposed by the poem young Ryan Mayes wrote for his murdered girlfriend Nikitta Grender:

My love for you runs so deep, it is hard for me to sleep.

I miss you both so much and I know all our plans and hopes are now in my dreams.

I never thought the Lord would take you both away from me so soon.

Just a thought of you makes me cry, I never had a chance to say goodbye.

I always smell your scent, it makes me think of all the times we’ve spent.

So many things I never got to say Babe, the day God took you a part of me died too.

But now I have to let you rest although my world’s a mess.

I miss you both and will love you ‘til the day I die.

Your heartbroken boyfriend Ryan XXX.

Account of the funeral here. Don’t miss the family member with the pink hair.

Oldie readers of this blog will know who I mean by Katharine Whitehorn. Journalist (Observer, mostly). Irreverent, no-nonsense, funny, nice. She’s now Saga magazine’s agony aunt.

I’ve just stumbled on the poem she wants to be read at her funeral. It’s by AE Housman and it’s called Parta Quies. I’d not come across it before.

Good-night; ensured release,

Imperishable peace,

Have these for yours,

While sea abides, and land,

And earth’s foundations stand,

And heaven endures.

When earth’s foundations flee,

Nor sky nor land nor sea

At all is found,

Content you, let them burn:

It is not your concern;

Sleep on, sleep sound.

What’s that shuckleuckle sound I hear? Ah, countless celebrants typing it into their funeral poem anthologies.

What music does Katharine Whitehorn want? I don’t know. But this is what she chose when she was on Desert Island Discs. (Note to US readers: this is the highest accolade that can be conferred upon a Brit. Forget lordships and sirdoms and damehoods, an invitation to appear on Desert Island Discs is the one that cuts the mustard.)

Follow Me – John Denver

Chopin’s grand waltz  – Brillante in A flat major, op.34 – Chopin

Je tire ma Révérence – Jean Sablon with Wal-Berg’s Orchestra. Composer Bastia

Part of Sibelius Finlandia

Every Time We Say Goodbye – Ella Fitzgerald

Slow movement of Bach’s Double Violin  Concerto

Slow movement of Mozart’s 3rd Violin Concerto

Impromptu No 4 in F Minor – Schubert

Her favourite: Bach’s Double Violin Concerto

Here’s a new poem by Wendy Cope published in the current Spectator. I hope she’ll forgive the flagrant breach of copyright and see this instead as a promo. Its sentiments are very contemporary.

My Funeral

I hope I can trust you, friends, not to use our relationship

As an excuse for an unsolicited ego-trip.

I have seen enough of them at funerals and they make me cross.

At this one, though deceased, I aim to be the boss.

If you are asked to talk about me for five minutes, please do not go on for eight

There is a strict timetable at the crematorium and nobody wants to be late

If invited to read a poem, just read the bloody poem. If requested

To sing a song, just sing it, as suggested,

And don’t say anything. Though I will not be there,

Glancing pointedly at my watch and fixing the speaker with a malevolent stare,

Remember that this was how I always reacted

When I felt that anybody’s speech, sermon or poetry reading was becoming too protracted.

Yes, I was intolerant, and not always polite

And if there aren’t many people at my funeral, it will serve me right.

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

It’s been a slow news day here at the GFG luxury penthouse suite in Thanatology Towers. So here’s a very good poem by Owen Sheers. If you like it, buy the collection. It’s called Skirrid Hill and it’s published by seren.

On Going

i. m. Jean Sheers

There were instruments, as there always are,

To measure, record and monitor,

windows into the soul’s temperature.

But you were disconnected from these.

and lay instead an ancient child,

fragile on your side,

your breath working at the skin of your cheek

like a blustery wind at a blind.

There was only one measurement

I needed anyway, which you gave,

triggered by the connection of my kiss

against your paper temple

and registered in the flicker of your open eyes,

in their half-second of recorded understanding

before they disengaged and you slipped back

into the sleep of their slow-closing.

The Tide Recedes

The tide recedes, but leaves behind

Bright seashells on the sand.

The sun goes down, but gentle warmth

Still lingers on the land.

The music stops, and yet it lingers

On in sweet refrain.

For every joy that passes

Something beautiful remains.

MD Hughes

What do you think of that little poem? Are you prepared to make a qualitative judgement? Yes, you probably are. We are taught to be critical, to rank things, to understand that there is good writing, bad writing, genres of writing, writing for Them, writing for Us. By the age of 14 we were backseat-driving Shakespeare, for heavens’ sake. It’s become a habit. We are all snobs, and snobs are not nice people.

I’ve used that little poem a few times at the close of a funeral. It’s been a good fit for families who like that sort of thing. Empathy, I flatter myself, guided me to pick it for them. And already I sound as if I am talking down. I don’t mean to, I really don’t. Yet if you were to get me in an armlock I’d confess that it wouldn’t do for me. If you were to advance on me with an electric cattle prod I’d whimper that I think it somewhat sentimental and mawkish. My shameful secret is that I know the difference between poetry, verse and doggerel. Once learned, never unlearned.

I guess a lot of celebrants feel this way about stuff they read at funerals. Arguably it doesn’t matter if it doesn’t show. Celebrants are role-players, after all.

Or does it matter? Does it? When a celebrant recites a prayer she doesn’t believe a word of, does that matter? Or ‘Do not stand at my grave and weep’, which she despises? Is this suspension of self? Or is it insincerity? I don’t know the answer to that. Do you?

Poetry at funerals tends to be, according to critical measurements, clichéd, corny or worse. So what? Isn’t the important thing that we like it? Why do we like it? We like it because at times of great grief poetry’s what we turn to. Why? It’s something very deepseated that makes us do this. And we don’t just read it, either, we write it. Look at the cards left at roadside shrines. We like it, dammit,  for its own sake.

We like poetry rich in sound-effects: rhyme, rhythm, assonance. We like poetry which paints pictures – what posh folk call ‘imagery’. We like poems we can easily understand at one hearing even though we are not at our cognitive best. The right poem is a good ride.

It goes to the heart. It enables emotional release—catharsis. We feel better for it. Does it change anything for good? Does it deepen insights? Can bad poetry work as effectively as good poetry? Can it lead us on, only to cheat us? Can it wear off quickly and leave a bad taste, a hangover, a void?

Poetry reaches the parts reason can’t get anywhere near. It is psychotropic. It is verbal MDMA. And interestingly enough, the therapeutic benefits of MDMA are attested in cases of post-traumatic stress and high anxiety in both terminal cancer sufferers and their partners. So you can see where I am going, can’t you? I won’t, because I think you don’t want me to. For today, that is. I’ll be back.

Here instead is a poem by David Harsent. It is called Elegy.

On the day of your death there were leaves drifting

Down to English lawns as season

Drifted into season, winter coming; rooks were pouring

Across the sky, thick as falling leaves and giving

Their hoarse Kyrie Eleison,

The best of the day now fading, you yourself fading

For no good reason, it seemed, for no good reason.

And in every part of the garden dark doors closing.

There’s a sprightly piece about funerals in this week’s Spectator. Its content is not available free online, so I’ll transcribe the best bits and hope that I’m not infringing copyright but, rather, advertising the magazine.

It’s by James Delingpole.

If I’d written a film it would have been called Four Funerals and a Wedding, because personally I find funerals much more fun. Not all funerals, obviously. But the funeral of someone who’s not a close relative and who’s had a good innings can be a very splendid occasion.

…

God I hate weddings. The only one I’ve really enjoyed was my own, because I got to decide on the food and the music and all the speeches were about me … It’s the trappedness I loathe and fear most … At least with funerals you don’t go with any high expectations of fun and frivolity – whereas at weddings you do, setting yourself up for almost inevitable disappointment. And there’s an unspoken assumption at weddings that, as a guest, you’re privileged to be there and should be grateful to have made it onto the invitation list, which puts pressure on you to be on your best behaviour. At a funeral, on the other hand, you’re thought to be putting yourself out slightly. The family are touched and appreciative that you’ve made the effort. Also there’s no best man, no sit-down food ordeal, you don’t have to bring a present, and if you do behave badly no one minds or even notices because everyone’s on one of those weird, faintly hysterical, ‘it’s what he would have wanted’ post-funeral highs.

Then there’s death. I don’t think nearly enough of us think nearly often enough about this and what it means … I think that we might all be inclined to live better, more fruitful lives. I thought of this as [the daughter of a man whose funeral he had attended] read out a homily attributed to RL Stevenson (though more likely to be a variant on something written in 1904 for a poetry competition by an American woman named Bessie Stanley). It goes: ‘That man is a success who has lived well, laughed often and loved much; who has gained the respect of intelligent men and the love of children; who has filled his niche and accomplished his task; who leaves the world better than he found it, whether by an improved poppy, a perfect poem or a rescued soul; who never lacked appreciation of earth’s beauty or failed to express it. Who looked for the best in others and gave the best he had…’ When spoken right next to the coffin containing the body of someone who’s course is run, those words have quite an impact.

On a similar note, this is the poem short story writer Raymond Carver had inscribed on his grave:

LATE FRAGMENT

And did you get what

you wanted from this life, even so?

I did.

And what did you want?

To call myself beloved, to feel myself

beloved on the earth.