The Good Funeral Guide

James Showers, sole proprietor of the Family Tree Funeral Company, undertaker to the discerning decendents of Gloucestershire, has been badgering me to rediscover something he lost on his computer. He thought it might be on mine, since I once sent it to him. It’s not. But by dint of indefatigable googling I have unearthed it. It’s far too good to keep between me and James. Here are some extracts which will send you galloping in a jostling, whooping horde to the blog whence it came. By jingo it’s wonderfully well written.

…perhaps you won’t mind if I recount the Funeral Parlor Affair … For lo, and it did come to pass that the sibling and I were obliged to saunter along to the Sparkman/Hillcrest Funeral Home, Mausoleum, and Memorial Park to pick up the patriarch’s ashes. For some reason — maybe because we’re not a couple of swooning Victorians — we’d expected to stroll in, palm the urn, and buzz along home.

…

But no. The consummate weirdness with which modern American death-angst imbues the mortuary biz turned what should have been a 5-minute transaction into a Gothic theatrical production that dragged on for half an hour.

…

I dare anybody to keep a straight face who darkens the stoop of the Sparkman/Hillcrest Funeral Home, Mausoleum, and Memorial Park. You wouldn’t believe this joint. It was like the set designers from Twin Peaks and Napoleon Dynamite had fused with Elvis Presley’s interior decorator and been reborn as Liberace’s angst-ridden evil twin, who then suffered a psychotic break, and bought up the world’s supply of harvest gold flocked wallpaper, brass upholstery tacks, and fake oak paneling, and ate it all with fava beans and a nice Chianti, and then puked it up all over the living room from Sartre’s No Exit.

…

But nothing in my education or upbringing could have prepared me for our encounter with the Funeral Director. I almost spontaneously combusted when this specimen materialized out of the Stygian mist. The dude was the ne plus ultra, the transcendental essence, the Platonic ideal of funeral directors. He was still. He was shadowy. He was bloodless. He was creepy. He wore an ill-fitting suit made of larceny and doom.

Here it is.

There are two ways of looking at it – aren’t there always? Either funerals, by loosening up, jettisoning the f-word and calling themselves celebrations of life, are becoming more meaningful, more expressive of what people want to express; or they have become merely conventions of gaudily-clad denialists engaged in an altogether silly and fruitless buck-u-uppo displacement activity.

Wherever the truth lies we have reached a pass – it’s a sign of progress – where certain folk are going to dig their heels in, wind back the clock and go for something retro.

Blogger Matt Archbold (thanks for this link, Pam Vetter) is a Catholic and he wants to restore the oft-dropped tradition of praying for souls in Purgatory (well, his soul, anyway). Active interventions by the living to ensure the wellbeing of their dead, practised to the max by the excellent Hmong, died out with the Churches’ downgrading of Purgatory and the Other Place. All sorts of theological reasons. They don’t seem to be consistent with a loving and merciful God, do they, Purgatory and Hell? As for Protestants, they are taught that salvation is down to whether or not you deserve it. No amount of cheering from the touchline can possibly sway a just and omniscient Supreme Being.

Archbold holds no truck with this revisionism: “Here’s what I want you guys to say at my funeral: Matt Archbold was fairly despicable at times. He was meaner than he was kind, proud of his humility, and not all that nice to his family or friends. Vain. Sarcastic. Selfish. While these may be qualities of a good blogger, they do not bode well for sainthood.

“We have no reason to suspect that Matt Archbold is in Heaven. In fact, I’d just about guarantee he’s not. If God in his infinite mercy somehow allowed Matthew to enter Purgatory it would be a reflection of His mercy rather than any attributes Matt evidenced throughout his life.

“Let us all assume, to be safe, that Matthew is in the bottom rung of Purgatory. Matthew’s fingernails are firmly dug into a cliff at the furthest edge of the Purgatory city limits and he’s hanging on there, his little feet dangling over Hell.

“And the only way you can get him out of there and nearer to Heaven is through your prayers. Pray now. Pray on the ride home. Pray when you get home. Pray. Pray. Pray for days, weeks, and years to come. Please pray.”

Sky News journalist Colin Brazier, who recently survived cancer, shares related retrogressive tastes in funerals:

“Do not go to Tesco and buy one of the supermarket’s tasteless In Sympathy cards. They come in a range of bright colours. Many of them display a lily – popular even before the death of Our Lady Of Versace – but even more so now.

“Do not buy one of the Hallmark cards which could easily be mistaken for an invitation to a child’s birthday party. Contrary to the message these cards are trying to communicate – death is actually grim, frequently bleak, and my (hopefully) grieving family will not be comforted by mass produced frivolity.

“Do not, if you are invited to my funeral, turn up wearing colours of a celebratory hue. I deplore the fashion for “wearing bright colours” – a trend in danger of becoming every bit as obligatory as the rigid absurdities of Victorian widow’s weeds were a century ago. There is nothing starchy and stuffy about wearing black. Dignified dark clothing is not an expression of despair. It is a way of stopping other people bathing in the attention which should be reserved for the deceased and his or her close family. I want my life to be remembered, not celebrated. I do not want my faults airbrushing from history.”

More Matt Archbold here.

More Colin Brazier here.

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.

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.

Death Ref got there first

Time was when I could tuck a story away for a slow news day and not give a thought to any other death blogger getting there first. Can’t do that any more. The story I had been saving up for today has, I see, already been aired on the excellent Death Reference Desk blog, so I suggest you pop over and read it. It’s a very good blog, DRD, run by brainy people.

Find it here.

Having found it and enjoyed it, test your powers of enjoyment by reading their latest post. Here.

Time to remember

Yup, it’s a mixed bag today. You might like to go over to Dying Matters now and see what they’re saying about Brits and remembrancing:

A survey released today has revealed that three out of four (75%) people in England do not set aside time with friends and family around this time of year to remember loved ones who have died.

Commenting on this Professor Mayur Lakhani, GP, Chair of the Dying Matters Coalition and the National Council for Palliative Care (NCPC), said:

“It is shocking that the vast majority of people in England don’t take time to remember dead loved ones. This is further compelling evidence of the wall of silence our society’s built around dying and death.”

It’s an interesting point, if not well made. Of course Brits set time aside to remember their dead, they just don’t have rituals to accompany their remembrancing, that’s the point. Actually, I’m amazed that as many as one in four do something with friends and family. What do they do, I wonder? They can’t all be grave tenders.

Full survey results here.

Gail’s marathon

I hope you’re keeping up with Gail Rubin over at her blog as she covers 31 funerals in 31 days. I thought at the outset that it would amount to a fascinating and valuable social document and that’s just how it’s panning out. She’s on #10 already.

Start here.

Bear necessities

Here’s a story I’ve been sitting on for far too long. The aftermath of Russia’s long, hot summer has left bears very hungry, it seems. So hungry that they have started wandering into graveyards and eating the tenants. “In Karelia one bear learned how to do it [open a coffin]. He then taught the others,” she added, suggesting: “They are pretty quick learners.”

Find the full story here.

Dark art

Finally, over in Dublin the painter known as Rasher is holding an exhibition entitled Womb to Tomb.

Womb to Tomb shows his darker side, which emerged when his mother Sheila was diagnosed with cancer. She died two years ago at the age of 62. Watching his mother’s health deteriorate caused a shift in his world view. “It made me think about life in a way I hadn’t before. I remember saying to myself, before this, I can’t be a controversial painter because I don’t think that’s who I am but in some ways I’ve been pushed into this.”

The first painting visible in the cramped studio is a huge work called Dead Man’s Bells . The colours, brilliant blues and pinks, and the swirling endless sky is pure Rasher. The skeleton curled in a foetal position underneath the soaring foxglove or Dead Man’s Bells as they are known in America, is something of a departure. “I like the idea that when we go to our tomb we go back into the earth and when we decompose we feed new life, flowers bloom and then bees feed off the pollen and repollinate,” he says. “I find that cycle of life very comforting.”

Just to the right of this is an alarmingly authentic pig’s head with a bunch of flowers in a glass box, a work called Embalm and Calm . Another painting on the wall is a picture of his mother who used to tell him that self-praise was no praise, all the while quietly supporting her son’s dreams. “I probably wouldn’t have had the courage to do it if it wasn’t for my mother’s death because I’d have been afraid what people would think. I don’t care any more, it’s about expressing how I feel.”

Since she died, Rasher has been preoccupied with the ephemeral, the quicksand of life, the “here today, gone tomorrow” of existence. In this exhibition, the beautiful and the rancid sit side by side, like a disgusting perfume presented in exquisite packaging. “I just see beauty and tragedy hand in hand in everything I look at,” he says. “I see flowers and I just think in the next couple of weeks they are going to die. Everything I do now seems to be a reflection of that.”

Full story in the Irish Times here.