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!

From the Taranaki Daily News, New Zealand:

Taranaki people say they are keen on “green burials” despite the Awanui Cemetery natural burial site sitting empty eight months after opening.

The Taranaki Daily News revealed yesterday that none of the 235 plots at the Awanui Cemetery natural burial site had been sold since it opened for business in April last year.

… … … 

New Plymouth’s W Abraham Funeral Directors’ manager, Mark Baker, said a regular coffin could cost as little as $700, but the natural coffins available cost at least $1800.

Source.

James Leedam, a good friend of the Good Funeral Guide, is collecting info about what people want at funeral, how they would find out about it, and what influences their choices. As the ceo of Natural Burial Grounds, James is especially keen to find out what influences those who go green when they die. 

He’d very much like you to fill in a survey for him. It’s one of those Survey Monkey surveys where you don’t have to spend ages entering personal details, etc. It’s completely anonymous, and it won’t take you more than two minutes.

Please do it. Find it here. 

Natural burial √

Biodegradable coffin √

Cycle to the burial ground? Well, maybe.

You’ve done all you can to tread lightly on the earth while you’re here and – like the diver who plunges cleanly into the water – you want to make as small a splash as possible when you leave.

But what can you do if you are the problem? What if your body – full of toxins, chemicals and all the detritus of 21st century living – is going to pollute whether you like it or not?

One answer might be decompiculture. We’ve blogged on this before but a recent video from TED gives a fresh insight into the way that mushrooms trained to digest your own body could help clean up the mess you don’t want to leave behind:

The artist involved suggests that this is a journey we should all consider making – not astronauts or aeronauts but decompinauts. Her website is here. What do you think?

Bringing Death to Life – 27^th August 2011

All Saints Arts and Youth Centre, Friars Walk, Lewes.

Free Entry

ARKA Original Funerals of Brighton opened its new office in Lansdown Place Lewes, in July this year, with the ceremonies and celebrant company, Light on Life. 

ARKA Original Funerals and Light on Life are recognised leading experts in natural death and green funerals and between them have many years of experience and insight. 

Bringing Death to Life is being held at All Saints Arts and Youth Centre, Friars Walk on the 27^th August. 

Their joint event – is a stimulating and vibrant look at death and dying, how it is an integral part of our community and how we all can manage the process with dignity for the families and friends involved and respect to our environment at the same time. 

ARKA Original Funeralsand Light on Life want to open up the mysterious world of funerals and give people the opportunity to get information, advice and, from this day in particular, take a look at how we can celebrate someone’s life through the empowerment of the friends and family who may be left behind. 

On the day we will be running workshops on: 

Please email info@arkafunerals.co.uk to book and guarantee your place on any the above workshops. For further details please visit the ARKA Original Funerals website, www.arkafunerals.co.uk 

Alternatively turn up as early as you can on the day to book your place and meet experts from the green funeral world who will be on hand to give information and advice. 

We will have demonstrations from a leading willow coffin manufacturer and we will also have lovely food and refreshments to buy. 

Free Entry and Doors are open from 12 noon until 6pm

You may have missed the comment below by Cynthia Beal on Bill Jordan’s piece about how he wants to be buried on the surface (when he dies) where he can be of most use. Read it here.

Cynthia is formidably bright and enterprising, not to mention generous and kind. She lives in Oregon. At a time when greener than green burialists over there are vying with each other in matters of purity of vision and impeccability of practice, Cynthia’s focus is sustainability and choice for all. She’s got a very exciting project under way at the moment, and I hope I’ll soon be able to tell you about it – or that Cynthia will tell us in her own words.

Here’s what Cynthia wrote:

Bill and I are going to have a go at seeing what we can come up with to accommodate his very natural wishes. We hope to cover all the bases and find some way to achieve his goals without creating any public health and safety issues in excess of those caused by conventional burials, nor caring over-much for what people think. Personally, I’ve got in mind an ornamental wrought-iron grill work to set on top of him as a sort of cage with some way to address the dirt-on-top legality. It would secure his body from large predators and let the insects he likes so well have full access. We’re going to arrange for him to have DNA tests on file in the county of his disposition, as I suggested that a drifting femur or metatarsul might give the local sheriff a headache. I’ll keep you posted!

Back to Bill, now. He wrote after his piece was published to express his appreciation of your comments. He added this:

I once wrote a piece for a now-defunct magazine called National Gardening about the compost heap in my back yard.  I likened it to an altar of energy on which the dead vegetation was piled, and the process of decomposition was pyre of renewed life.  I concluded that the process of life and death could not be separated, in contrast to the prevailing spiritualities of Western Civilization, which cling desperately to a separation of mind and body; and the attempt to propagate this belief revealed a deep, delusional denial.

But mind arose from stuff and stuff lived on in the eternal processes of life.  There was no such thing as birth I death, I concluded, only molecular assembly and disassembly, and so long at the earth lived, so live us all.  To which the editor, who was an old friend, replied in the author’s byline:  ”William Jordan is a collection of molecules currently living and writing in Culver City, California”  I never have been skewered before or since with such gleeful appreciation.

One thing I forgot to mention; I hope this is appropriate on another man’s blog–but could you mention that I am the author of the books, Divorce Among the Gulls and  A Cat Named Darwin?

I am currently working on what I hope will become the culmination of my life’s work–what the writer, Edward Abbey referred to as his Fat Masterpiece–a fat masterpiece with the working title of The Book of Jake.  It is built on the true story of a duck I rescued from what is known in LA as a “flood control channel”–flood control channels are almost invariably former streams, creaks and their tributaries which have been paved with concrete.  Their purpose is to lead away the lakes of water heavy rains leave behind, and they work with spectacular efficiency. They are also a sentence of death for the stream.  Or so it might seem.  The stream bed is now a street bed, a flat plane without any impediments to obstruct the flow of water.  When the weather is sunny, as it usually is in southern California, the flood control channels serve to lead the runnoff from yards and streets, with their toxic loads of pesticides, oils, heavy metals, and whatever else our civilization bleeds into water.  Yet it’s remarkable how life rises up in these polluted channels, with algae growing into great, streaming mats of life, which support midges and other aquatic insects, which support swallows and ducks and all sorts of migratory wading birds.

It was from this foul sump of life that I rescued Jake.  It turns out, however, that Jake is no mere duck.  He is the voice of nature–an oracle duck–and he allows me to say things about our species that could not be said without some sort of literary shape shifting.  This is crucially important, because I contend that in order to understand the ecological mess we humans have made of the world—to understand the human being in proper context with nature–any meaningful assessment must begin in misanthropy.  This is necessary to disable the innate species narcissism that wells up from the human genome, along with an obsessive-compulsive species allegiance.  If you cannot get beyond these traits, you can do little except praise and admire us and spin our transgressions as some form of good, usually with the help of God.

You can buy Divorce Among the Gulls here

You can buy A Cat Named Darwin here

Bill’s photos of flood control channels below

Here is the best post this blog will ever publish, so don’t glance at its length and give up. Read on!

Today is all about Bill Jordan. I first heard from Bill back in December 2010. This is what he said:

I am an aging reformed biologist, now more or less a writer, but more accurately a philosopher-poet-canary-priest, and I have come upon some uncommon conclusions on the proper relationship between man and nature in the course of my time on this remarkable planet. These will be set forth in more detail in a book I am writing, presuming I have the time to complete it. But considering my age (66) and heart condition, I must be realistic and plan for my return to the liberated molecules.

I have found my own spirituality in biology and this now sustains me with remarkable equanimity. It is based on how the natural world functions–how it lives–and I wish my remains to return to the living molecular plasma that the surface of the earth nurtures and maintains. Consequently, I am almost obsessed with having my corpse laid out upon the surface, to fulfill the needs of the natural world. I am attaching a short musing on the subject.

Anyhow, such a disposition is simply blasphemous to normal, traditional societies, and I will have to work hard to fulfill my wishes. My question to you is simply to ask your initial reaction to such an odd request. Of course if you have any notions of how my wishes could be carried out, I would be most grateful to hear them. I live in California, USA.

I suspect my body would be willing to travel.

I directed Bill’s attention to the example of Bernd Heinrich and William Hamilton here, and I touched on the difficulty of finding unpeopled wilderness on our crowded planet. I suggested the body farm in Tennessee. All the while, I chuckled at Bill’s developed rationale, which he attached as a Word document. I asked him if I might post it. He told me he wanted to redraft it first. He’s just sent it back to me. He also sent me photos of his cat, Brutus, his duck, Jacqi, his neighbour, Polistes exclamans (a paper wasp) and his back yard (garden, we’d say in Britain) unmown for four years because “I was interested see what the poor, craven, downtrodden grasses of a typical yard would become, if liberated from the obsessive-compulsive human urge to manipulate and control all that which surround them.”  These photos illustrate his text.

Green Departures — Das Lied zu der Erde

William Jordan

Having come to a point much closer to the end of life than the beginning, having survived a close call with my mortality, age having its inevitable way, it seems time to get my affairs in order….. Or more specifically, to make my bed. If you know your bed is waiting, the sheets turned down, climbing in is a formality, maybe even a pleasant one.

When I go, I want my body laid out on the ground, so the insects and other small scavengers can participate in their rightful and overdue feast. Human civilization is based on the deepest, most cardinal of ecological sins–burial–because for the vast majority of terrestrial life you lie where you die, and the entire ecology depends on the unfettered redistribution of nutrients. This means there can be no such thing as “green” burial, because in nature there is no burial at all. The corpse is the groceries of a living system; a corpse represents a health-food supermarket stocking the nutrients, minerals, etc., that we have gathered and assembled in our bodies during the course of living. When we die, nature wants the ingredients back, because they are only on loan, and all living things excepting the human being, are happy to oblige. The custom of burial, however, seals the nutrients off, slowing the redistribution, if not outright arresting it. But, because of the incalculable stench of a decomposing human corpse, particularly that of a right-wing conservative, we simply cannot obey the normal, physiological ways of nature. Civilization –which requires existence in one place–also requires us to stuff our cadavers under its synthetic rug, starving the world that nurtures us through life. The same principles hold true for the turd. A turd is a vital repository of essential vitamins, minerals, proteins, fats, oils that represent the expenditure of much time and energy to concentrate–but civilization cannot long endure without the nihilistic practice of burial and sewage disposal–or at least that’s the way its values are currently structured.

I would offer myself back. My god is in nature, although I don’t think of it as a god, just a vast, all-pervasive, incomprehensibly nuanced reality from which I have bubbled up like hot-springs mud and will subside back, only to bubble up again in some other molecular form. So for me, to know I’ll be going back into the air, the soil, the rain, the mist, the snow–back to the ecstasy I feel while walking–these experiences are so comforting that I almost look forward to being laid out on the festive table of a Sierra Nevada meadow, or the large rocks in the Australian Alice, or the sagebrush scrub of the Great Basin. I would like to delay my departure, of course, because the essence of life is procrastination. Those live longest, who procrastinate best. But, like everyone else, I suppose I’ll just have to wait and see how much I can delay things.

Such a disposition would require preparation–some kind of cage or enclosure to keep bears and other large omnivores from scattering bones about. That wouldn’t bother me. My tolerance would be infinite–besides, there’s nothing wrong with a little flinging of the feast. But law enforcement would pitch a fit, and Forensic Files would produce a 2-hour special. It’s a bizarre sign of the times that when a human body is found in some natural place like a field or a forest, people treat it with horror, because most never have, and never will encounter one. If a world of 6.9 billion people were self-sustaining (impossible given the current nature of nature), bones would lie scattered everywhere, like styrofoam; you could not find an uncluttered landscape. But society stuffs its cadavers under the ecological rug, so the land shows no evidence of the human hordes that dominate it. Nevertheless, in my ideal world, all I’d need would be enough time for the soft parts to be carried off in the bodies of the flies and ants, which are the first-line distributors of the invertebrate world. The bones, cartilage, mummified skin, hair–I’m fine with burying those, but directly in the soil, not sealed in some sort of unholy canister.

The challenge becomes finding some remote land, protected, if necessary, by remote people for several summer months while the feast proceeded. At this point I am open to any and all suggestions.

Perhaps the best way to sum up my thesis is to consider the diametrical opposite of a green disposition: The ex coronation of Pope John Paul, preceded by an undertaking to make the Pharaohs weep.

First, they embalmed the Pope’s corpse, rendering him inedible. Then they placed his body inside a hand-crafted black-walnut coffin. Then, they placed that coffin inside a larger coffin made of lead and soldered it shut. Then, they placed the body-inside-the-coffin-inside-the-leaden-box inside a huge stone sarcophagus, and finally, maybe to make sure the Pope didn’t rise up like his Boss, they placed the body-inside-the-coffin-inside-the-leaden-box-inside-the-sarcophagus into a crypt, and there the pope’s remains remain, sealed off from the living earth like an old reactor with a half-life of eternity. I cannot imagine a more horrifying, claustrophobic limbo-hell. Like that of all other creatures, my distribution would cost nothing and give back to nature the nutrients essential to a living world.

Aside from all that, well, I figured it was about time for something to show up. It’s been a wonderful existence; the molecules have treated me well; there is nothing to regret….well…. maybe a little to envy in those dealt an even better hand….

Jae Rhim Lee, Mushroom Burial Site (Bridgeville, CA), Infinity Burial Project

“Decompiculture is the growing or culturing of decomposer organisms by humans. The term is intended to establish a contrast with the term agriculture. Agriculture encompasses the production systems based on the culture of herbaceous plants and herbivore animals. In effect, agriculture is human symbiosis with select organisms of the herb-herbivore-carnivore food chains comprising the live plant food web. Decompiculture, in contrast, human symbiosis with organisms of the decomposer food chains comprising the dead plant-based, or plant cell wall-based detrital food web. I believe that decompiculture is equivalent in importance to agriculture and perhaps more important in terms of integrating human activities in a sustainable way with the biosphere. I also believe that just as the origin of agriculture initiated the dawn of civilization, decompiculture may now initiate the dawn of a new leap forward in human evolution.”–Timothy Myles

Infinity Burial Project website here.

Infinity Burial Suit, Seamless Fashion Show, Museum of Science, Boston, MA

Last Orders: Compost from Jason Hendriksen on Vimeo.

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.

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