The Good Funeral Guide

Posted by Vale

It’s natural to fear death and you might think that, just as naturally, religion would help you face and overcome your fears. But it ain’t necessarily so. In a recent book, Society Without God, Anne, a 43 year old Hospice nurse from Aarhus in Denmark is interviewed. The author, Robert Zuckerman records that:

She told me that in her many years of experience working with the dying, she found that it was generally the atheists who had an easier time calmly accepting their fate, while Christians had the hardest time facing death, often being racked with worry and anxiety.

The book is a fascinating read. Zuckerman spent months interviewing people in Denmark and Sweden – the least religious in the world – to find out how secularism on such a scale affects society. Throughout you hear the authentic voices of ordinary people. Leif, a 75 year old, is a Jew and a self designated atheist. Asked what he thinks happens after we die he answers:

‘Nothing.’

‘And how does that make you feel?’

‘Well, not very sorry. It is as it is. Really I don’t feel anything about it especially.’

‘You’re not worried or scared?’

‘No I’m not. I’m not very well in health anyway, but I’m not worried.’

Sometimes we hear the surprise of the author. Reflecting on the number of non-believers who show no fear of death at all, he says that, that:

when sociologist of religion William Sims Bainbridge asks ‘How can humans…deal with the crushing awareness of mortality’ I think he is committing a mistake that many scholars of religion commit: assuming that his own fears about death are universal, when clearly they aren’t.

The effect of the interviews – on every aspect of life and society – is to present a real challenge to the argument of the religious that, without belief, society descends into sin and despair. Is it a coincidence that Danes and Swedes are recorded as the most contented in the world?

Britain, you might want to note, is not far off Scandinavia in terms of our own lack of religion.

You can buy a copy here. And there’s a good review of the book in the New York Times here.

You may remember this post, The Chaos of Meaning, about the photographic essay which Jimmy Edmonds created in commemoration of his son Josh. If you missed it, click the link and go see it; it’s rare that we are lucky enough to post anything so extraordinary and beautiful.

Above is a trailer for a film Jimmy has made about Josh’s funeral. I went to see it earlier this week with; it really is marvellous.

And it complements what Rachel Wallace says in the previous post about the importance of making a record of a funeral.

The coffin, in case you wonder, was handmade by Jimmy with expert help. 

At the weekend we’ll post another film made by Jimmy about life, death, ageing and more. He’s a Bafta winner, is Jimmy. It shows. 

Below is some text from the BeyondGoodbye.co.uk website.

Joshua Harris-Edmonds 
23 May 1988 — 16 January 2011
Forever in our hearts and minds

On 16th January 2011 Joshua Amos Harris Edmonds was tragically killed in a road traffic accident in Vietnam. Joshua was 3 months into a trip of a lifetime travelling across South East Asia. 

He was 22 years of age.  

A life cut short, but a life lived well.

In honour of our Josh and as a memorial to his life, Beyond Goodybe, the website, will continue Josh’s inspiration on others and offer a place to remember, to pay tribute and share their love for Josh with others. 

This site also houses the book ‘Released’ and the film ‘Beyond Goodbye’, family tributes to our Josh and also perspectives on death and the grieving process. 

If you’d like to get in touch, please do: info@beyondgoodbye.co.uk

You wait and wait for a great book to come along. Unlike buses, great books don’t come along four at once. They are as single as they are singular. Today’s great book is Your Digital Afterlife.

There have been sporadic lightweight journalistic treatments of the growing importance of making provision for our virtual assets. I last had a look at some as far back, I am now ashamed to say, as November 2009. But, I have just learned, I belong to the nether end of the Boomer generation (46-64 yrs), and we Boomers are far from internet-savvy. Compared with the Millennial Generation (18-29 yrs), 80% of whom texted in the last 24 hrs and 20% of whom have posted videos of themselves online, just 35% of my crew texted in the last 24 hrs and but 2% of us have uploaded videos. Yikes the world is moving from physical to virtual very fast indeed.

Where all assets were once physical, except for lingering memories, now they are increasingly digital. The most obvious examples are letters, documents, music and photos. There’s more.

“Will future generations have less attachment to physical objects?” What an interesting idea. Physical objects are unique, but “one of the unique features of digital things is that two exact copies can exist or one copy can be accessed in multiple places at one time.” Had we only physical assets, they’d be divvied up, some thrown away, and our identity fragmented. Digital assets can be bequeathed complete – to more than just one person.

The law presently regards assets only as physical assets. How do we make sure these endure?

Your Digital Afterlife wants to persuade us of the necessity so, first, it makes the case. Our digital assets are identity-defining: “All this content forms a rich collection that reflects who you are and what you think.” Much of this content may be interactive – comments on your Facebook status “reflecting on your identity”; your comments on others. Future generations will be able to see us as we saw ourselves and as others saw us.

So rich is this content that there’s now “a huge opportunity that’s never been available to ordinary people – a permanent archive of your life that could exist beyond your physical life.” So great is the amount of our content that the authors call on us to curate it. With photos, for example, don’t just leave 10,000 – no one will know where to start. Whittle them down, grade them and tag them.

This is all so new that “as a society we have not thought through the ramifications or considered what will happen to this digital content.”

What’s more, a great deal of this digital content does not reside in our devices (computer, phone, etc), it is stored by businesses which can deny others access – or go bust. What’s more, most of these companies’ terms of service do not make provision for our content on our death. They never thought of it. Here is a matter which needs urgently to be addressed: “Ideally services that host digital content would have an industry-standard or legally enforced way to deal with the death of their members.” It will happen.

In the meantime, we need to appoint a digital executor with the technical nous to enable them to gather up and pass on our digital legacy – having, perhaps, got rid of specified content we’d rather others knew nothing of.

To enable our digital executor to do his or her work, we need to make an inventory of our devices and accounts – on a spreadsheet we can download from the YourDigitalAfterlife website. Meticulous instructions are given.

The book concludes with a speculative look into the future. Is it possible, they wonder, if, one day, artificial intelligence will become so sophisticated that it will be possible to process our store of digital content and create a humanoid robot in our own image?

Your Digital Afterlife is beautifully written – clear, jargon-free, accessible. Its tone is just right, too, companionable, not jokey and joshing nor loftily authoritative. It is both philosophical and practical. It has opened up a new and important field to me.

I have given you but a taster. I urge you to buy it.

And don’t hold your breath for the next book review on this blog.

The Digital Cuttlefish is the online alias of a person who, in his/her own words, is a “skeptic and atheist versifier”. DC has self-pseudonymised as such because:

The cuttlefish will use its ink
To hide itself – and so, I think
Will I…

The Digital Cuttlefish is a very skilful versifier indeed — stunning rhymes; dizzying rhythms – DC is a dactyl tamer, an anapaest whisperer. All DC’s verse has that insouciant unforcedness which is the hallmark of the master craftsperson. You might like to spend some time at the blog (link at the end of this).

The Digital Cuttlefish has written about death, of course, and those of you who are more than half in love with that easeful subject (why else would you be here?), want me now to cut to the chase and do the verse. That I am in a position so to do, I must tell you first, is down to tense and protracted negotiations with The Digital Cuttlefish (‘DC, would you mind if?’ ‘My dear fellow, fill your boots.’) The point: I reproduce with permission

Two choice pieces here for you. Because the Digital Cuttlefish doesn’t use titles, I must explain that the first is a reflection sparked by a funeral and other topical events:

You can die in bits and pieces; you can die in one quick flash
Die the ancient voice of wisdom, or die early, young and brash
Tuck your body in a coffin; pick an urn to hold your ash
Your survivors will remember you and cry
In the stories of your childhood, of your young and reckless past
How you fiercely burned your candle—who could think it would not last?
You could live to be a hundred; it would still be gone too fast
Life is never seen so brief as when we die

The second is a response to a retort by a Christian that  ”… I reckon I’d be a pretty miserable, angry person with a chip on my shoulder if I also believed that I was no more than worm meat at the end of the day.“

One of The Digital Cuttlefish’s fans has asked to have this read at his funeral:

When we are dead, we’ll feed the worms
And other stuff that writhes and squirms
And if you cannot come to terms
With that—well, use your head!
There are no ifs nor ands nor buts:
Bacteria within our guts
Will start to eat us; that is what’s
In store, once we are dead.

Yes, life is short and full of toil,
And when we’ve shuffled off this coil
Our carcasses will start to spoil—
There’s nothing wrong with that.
Our share of fish or pigs or cows,
And all the chicken time allows,
Is done. It’s only fair that now’s
The worms’ turn to get fat.

Should we die young, or old and gray,
The laws of nature we’ll obey
And spend our heat in mere decay,
Replenishing the Earth;
“Three score and twelve” may be our years
For love and laughter, hope and fears
And then—mere smoke—life disappears;
No heaven, no rebirth.

And with no heaven up above
Nor hell we ought be frightened of
It’s best we fill our lives with love,
With learning, and with fun!
Don’t waste a lifetime while you wait
For halo, wings, and pearly gate—
This is your life, so get it straight:
You only get the one!

I’ll have no moment lost to prayer,
To cleanse my soul and thus prepare
For passage to… THERE’S NOTHING THERE!
Those moments, all, are wasted!
I’m only here a little time
Before it’s bugs and worms and slime;
I’ll eat and drink my life so I’m
Delicious when I’m tasted!

Find The Digital Cuttlefish here.

Buy The Digital Cuttlefish’s books here and here.

The Digital Cuttlefish is on Facebook.

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…”

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

Gail Rubin is a writer and blogger in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I’ve just looked up Albuquerque on google maps. It’s a long way from a decent beach.

Gail has written a book, A Good Goodbye: Funeral Planning for Those Who Don’t Plan to Die, which will be published at the end of this month. She also does some outreach work for an excellent funeral planning website, Funeralwise.com. It’s full of good advice; it’s well written and intelligent.

I’ve ordered her book already, and I urge you to do the same. Here’s what Gail says about it:

“Just as talking about sex won’t make you pregnant, talking about funerals won’t make you dead – and your family will benefit from the conversation. A Good Goodbye provides the information, inspiration and tools to plan and implement creative, meaningful and memorable end-of-life rituals for people, and their pets, too.”

Joe Sehee, executive director of the Green Burial Council, says: “Gail Rubin takes on society’s last taboo in a readable, practical manner with a light touch. It’s a great read for anyone who isn’t sure about this ‘death thing’ and how to best prepare for it.”

I’m looking forward to getting my copy. You can order yours here.

When Gail was in college thirty years ago, in an enterprise which prefigured her later immersion in the logistics of mortality, she made the short spoof  (above) of gloomy old Ingmar Bergman’s Seventh Seal. It made me chuckle and I hope it has the same effect on you.

There’s a good, long piece in the Huffington Post by Lloyd I Sederer, a doctor, describing his mother’s decline and death. He describes a problem which is going to become more and more common.

Longevity is not all it’s cracked up to be. If we are lucky enough live into ripe old age, our dying may well be a protracted and unbearable ordeal prolonged beyond humanity and reason by attentive medics. That’s why more and more people are going to Switzerland to swallow hemlock.

It’s something society needs to address with some urgency. The problem is already big and it’s going to get huge.

Here are some extracts from the Huffington piece. I’m sure they’ll impel you to read the whole thing.

My mother died on a Monday a few weeks ago. We buried her, in the Jewish tradition, the next day. But we lost her more than a year before when a cardiac event she survived robbed her brain of the oxygen that sustains it and ushered in a dementia that took her away well in advance of her death.

The mental torment of dementia is what gives it its unique cruelty. As horrific as the psychic pain of dementia is, I wonder if it gets the recognition it warrants. Medical care has come to appreciate the crucial importance of mitigating physical pain but mental pain, no less agonizing, has yet to receive its proper due. Psychic pain is equally distressing as physical pain, and to make things worse, for dementia it has few good remedies.

I know death was a relief for my mother — a desired end … She also had made her wishes perfectly clear years before in her health care proxy and power of attorney. She understood, though never used the term, what dying with dignity meant.

…decisions abound during the process of first declining then dying. Not to mention the often tortuous decisions about money, there are decisions about treatments: how should someone be treated for their illness as well as the cascade of complications that frequently befall someone as their immunity diminishes and their infirmity increases. There are decisions about care taking … the most well known decision is whether to DNR (Do Not Resuscitate), but the questions are far more nuanced, as a rule. Here is where a living will or health care proxy is a blessing.

My mother’s time was ushered in after she fractured her hip trying to climb out of bed during a night of terror we could only infer was from her distress. But here is a story about American medicine that needs to be told.

The fracture was discovered some days after it occurred when she was rushed to the hospital with trouble breathing. I received a call from the physician’s assistant to the chief of orthopedic surgery. My mom had a hip fracture but the bone had not been displaced from its socket … She was in no pain. The PA said they wanted to operate, to place a set of screws in her hip … I called back to say no and soon received a call from the surgeon himself to urge me to proceed with the surgery.

That moment was a wake up call for our family. We asked ourselves what would give mom the best moments of life and experience in the time she had left? We realized that goal would be best achieved if we placed her in hospice care. This may sound oxymoronic, but when the time comes give it a try. Fundamental to hospice, contrary to common understanding, is how to make the most out of what time remains, not how to deny care or bring life to a rapid conclusion.

Fighting death and disability at the end too often steals what few moments of actual life remain for someone facing imminent passing. For my family, it was human kindness and eschewing aggressive and dubious treatments that enabled our mother to savor at least a few good moments while still on this earth. But thankful as I am for that I still wonder, until we have more miracles in medical care, is there a better way than the path we are so stubbornly now on?

Find the entire article here.

Tom Jokinen is a radio journalist and producer in Canada. In 2006 he took time off from his job to train as what we in the UK might call a funeral service operative. Why did he do it? Part curiosity: “There’s a time, from when someone dies to when they magically pop up at the funeral or the cemetery or as a bag of ashes that remains a black hole, invisible to the rest of the world, and everyone’s happy with the arrangement.” He wants to find out about that. The other component of his motivation (if it can really be analysed) is temperamental: Tom is of Finnish descent and “Folklore says the only time a Finn ever feels joy is when he’s imagining his own funeral.”

He’s written a book about it: Curtains – Adventures of an undertaker-in-training. It is intelligent and humane. It is full of interesting behind-the-scenes information – the what really goes on – together with thoughts and reflections on life and death (you can’t have one without the other).

He critiques Mitford: “To me, the heart of the debate she left behind is a nagging question: what is the body anyway? Is it charged, mystical, something to be marked and honoured with ceremony and balm, or is it “discarded clothing”?”

He talks about Richard, one of the funeral directors at the funeral home: “he views the undertaker’s role as grief therapist this way: grief therapy is bullshit. The only therapy he provides is to make sure the limo turns up when it’s supposed to, the right hole is opened at the cemetery and the right music is played at the service … There’s no false sympathy and hand-holding, which is how the corporate undertakers mostly play it. They want to be your friend. He wants to be your funeral director.”

He considers the “illusion of vitality” achieved by embalming: “It’s a paradox that Japanese robot builders have been trying to solve. They keep building human replicas that look more and more lifelike … they find that the closer they get to perfection the more frightening the end product appears … The embalmed corpse is an in-between: both a person and an object to fear.”

Tom talks about his own fear of handling dead bodies. His boss “told me to be patient, that my natural fear would evolve into something deeper: respect and awe for the body. We live in a caste system, where the Brahmins subcontract their problems to the unclean, the Dalit caste, the corpse-handlers. In time I’d get used to my social role.” Later, “During a cremation, Glenn shows me how to open up the skull with a iron hook to expose the soft tissue to the open flame, thereby getting a cleaner burn.” Another funeral director tells him “You should respect death and respect the dead, not out of fear, but because it’s the proper human thing to do. He says hospitals have made us ashamed of death. When we die we should all be allowed to leave through the front door, same way we went in.”

He quotes all manner of interesting people: “According to the anthropologist Nigel Barley, the Toraja of Sulawesi wrap their dead tightly in absorbent cloth to preserve them until the next stage of the ritual, which may not come for years. He met a man who kept his dead grandmother in his house as a storage shelf for his collection of alphabetically organized cassette tapes.”

He’s an acute observer. In one funeral home he notices that the pictures on the wall, “like every painting I’ve ever seen in a funeral home, have no people in them.”

He attends a Mennonite funeral: “It’s the same ritual that sent their grandparents and great-grandparents to the sweet home of the happy and free, and when they die, and their kids die, someone will dig a hole and bury them too. There’s a symmetry that’s also oddly liberating in its lack of choice.”

He talks about home funerals. “BT Hathaway, the Massachusetts undertaker … told me it was fine, the home funeral, for the 5 per cent who have money, time, resources, education and political and emotional will. ‘But the average consumer is not so well equipped,’ he said. ‘It’s poetic, but the truth is, I don’t know that many poetic families.’ This of course is the same argument for why people eat at Pizza Hut instead of milling their own wheat and breeding their own pepperoni cattle: why make it hard on yourself?”

He asks his boss: What’s the right thing to do when someone dies? “He thought about it, then said, ‘I don’t know.’ Not the answer I wanted, but after a moment he added, ‘I think you have to struggle with it.’”

Tom’s own conclusion is similar: “A simple act, without the artifice of embalming or baroque funerary product. Just a direct application of body to ground where it’s left to contribute to the great cycle: ashes to ashes and all that, back to Mother Nature in a shroud and a plain wooden box. Instead of deflecting a confrontation of death through commerce, you face it, fill the hole by hand, and then get on with the hard work of mourning, knowing that instead of passively choosing an object from a catalogue and subcontracting the ritual to someone else, you’ve acted, taken a stand, not against dirt but in favour of it. An act with meaning.” In the evening he meets his wife for supper. “I have seen the future,” I tell her. “And it’s Jewish.”

This is a very, very good book. Amazon will gladly send you a copy in exchange for just £9.99. Money well spent. Subsequently, time well spent.

Paul Sinclair is best known in the world of funerals as the man who heads up Motorcycle Funerals and offers what, with characteristic self-deprecation, he describes as “the most professional, thrilling and coveted motorcycle hearse in the world.” A coldly objective appraisal shows this claim shows to be an understatement. Paul is the best by three laps of the Isle of Man TT course.

He’s not only the world’s best motorcycle-and-sidehearse provider, he’s also one of the warmest, nicest people you’ll ever meet. And he doesn’t just rev up his bikes, he revs up the faithful, too, for he is a fully qualified Rev in the Elim Pentecostal Church, a denomination which likes its preaching hot. The Faster Pastor, they call Paul. A non-conformist in all senses who has dedicated his life to “an adventurous walk with God.” Before he started conveying the dead on their final journeys, he spent nine years as a minister in wildest Willesden, the most violent place in the UK. Now he’s written a book about it, Now Open Sundays!

It’s a great picaresque account of insuperable hardships faced and, by reckless faith, overcome. In one of his first sermons he illustrates his point with a Sex Pistols track. Surveying his congregation afterwards he concludes “It was time to pack my bags before I was thrown out.” But they like him. He lives to tell of adventures which bring him into contact with the Queen, Ken Livingstone and Clint Eastwood.

Paul’s story is woven round the signs he displayed outside his church. We’ve all seen these wayside pulpits and, most often, groaned. But Paul’s messages had a topicality and humour which make them all-time classics of the genre.

Paul is one of the funniest people in the known universe. He has a particular gift for celebrating the absurd. Here’s an example. I was keen to promote a healing service at the first opportunity I could once I had become a minister, but on the day of the first service the healing evangelist called in sick! I tried again with another one and he couldn’t make it because his wife was ill!

In twelve years I can only remember one critic of our Wayside Pulpit in the whole of Brent – an atheist! When we posted our ‘International Atheist Day – April 1st’ sign he was so unhappy he even reported me to Willesden Green Police station. God bless him, I was so delighted with his reaction I kept it up another month!

This book is a great read. Buy it.