The Good Funeral Guide

The personation and responsibilities of a funeral supervisor has evolved over the eld from someone who precooked the someone for interment to the bodoni funeral directors of today, who accomplish umpteen remaining duties to helpfulness the home finished their ambitious measure of expiration. Funeral and monument accommodation duties that were formerly handled by friends, bloodline or clergy quite often prettify the musician’’s area.

More of this delicious nonsense here.

And an alternative translation here:

The persona and responsibilities of a funeral musician has evolved over the age from someone who spread the human for inhumation to the moderne funeral directors of today, who action numerous different duties to ply the family through their baffling reading of red … A funeral director oversees every crew in the intellection and provision of a funeral … All the info are handled by this someone so the soul’’s association and friends can suffer funeral directors without having to accumulation with paperwork and another legalities.

At an hour and forty minutes, this full version of Jimmy Reid’s memorial service held me spellbound. As befitted him, there was some splendid oratory. If you like a good funeral, you’ll thoroughly enjoy this.

I can’t embed it. Click the link here.

It’s time to introduce you to my friend CrabbyOldFart. He’s a silver blogger in the US whose beef is with young people (he loathes them). He posts weekly, on Mondays, and brings much merriment to a day which can so often have the feel of an ordeal about it.

This week, he brings his no-nonsense mind to bear on how to plan your own memorial service.  Here are some extracts:

Last week I attended a service comprised of 3 old people, a rented minister and 600 egg salad sandwiches. It was a damned sad turnout and a waste of good egg salad too. If you do nothing else you need to ensure that you attract a crowd – it’s the last party you’ll attend and you don’t want it to be an unmitigated flop.

I recommend providing incentives…

…

I don’t know how many times I’ve gone to a service and been subjected to some barefoot, hippie minister with a pony tail rattling on about a senior he’s never even met … I’ve pre-selected my minister and you can rest assured that he’ll be an aged, wrinkly white man with a scowl on his lips and an Old Testament in his hand. And if he doesn’t know me personally – that’s fine, I’ve already written the sermon for him.

…

There won’t be any music at my service. This is a memorial not a rock concert for Christ’s sake. I don’t need people waving lighters in the air or doing super-tokes to the strains of “Knocking on Heaven’s Door” or “Only the Good Die Young.”

If there must be background noise, I want a Halloween sound effects tape full of chain rattling, howling wind and unsettled moaning – it’s dramatic and much more in keeping with the occasion.

…

I’ve selected who will speak, instructed them on what I expect them to say and have provided them with amusing but largely fictional stories from my past.  As a condition of speaking, I’ve made it clear that they need to submit their eulogies to me now for review, editing and final script approval.

Read the entire post here at The Problem With Young People Today Is…

Thank you, all those of you who expressed solicitude during my little illness. I am very touched. I can see now why it is that women outlive men. It is because they sensibly enlist medical science to deal with symptoms as they occur, they don’t impatiently wait for them to go away. And when they do see the doctor they don’t downplay those symptoms because they don’t want to make a fuss or give trouble, thereby rendering diagnosis more or less impossible. I have learnt my lesson.

I hope the little song in praise of organ donation (above) will make you smile.

PLEASE DON’T BURY ME

John Prine

Woke up this morning

Put on my slippers

Walked in the kitchen and died

And oh what a feeling!

When my soul Went thru the ceiling

And on up into heaven I did ride

When I got there they did say

John, it happened this way

You slipped upon the floor

And hit your head

And all the angels say

Just before you passed away

These were the very last words That you said:

Please don’t bury me

Down in that cold cold ground

No, I’d druther have “em” cut me up

And pass me all around

Throw my brain in a hurricane

And the blind can have my eyes

And the deaf can take both of my ears

If they don’t mind the size

Give my stomach to Milwaukee

If they run out of beer

Put my socks in a cedar box

Just get “em” out of here

Venus de Milo can have my arms

Look out! I’ve got your nose

Sell my heart to the junkman

And give my love to Rose

Give my feet to the footloose

Careless, fancy free

Give my knees to the needy

Don’t pull that stuff on me

Hand me down my walking cane

It’s a sin to tell a lie

Send my mouth way down south

And kiss my ass goodbye

There was a nice piece in yesterday’s Mirror about Richard Coles. In the eighties he was one half of the Communards; now he’s a Church of England priest.

In an age in which churchpeople are customarily pelted with derision, it’s worth calling to mind some of the virtuous deeds that Coles and his kind perform daily. Whatever you think of the theology, there has to be admiration for the heroic humility. And recognition.

“For example, this morning a naked man turned up at my door. He’s a regular caller and sometimes forgets to put his clothes on. I barely blink when I see him in the buff now. Welcoming him into the church is part of my job.

“As a priest I offer something to anyone who knocks at my door. A listening ear, some food, a sleeping bag or, in this man’s case, trousers.

“And that, in a nutshell, is why clergymen and women matter. We offer people something everyone needs and no one else gives.

“Ok, many get by without ever beating a path to our door. But we’re still here, trying our best to look after the weak and vulnerable.”

Coles has, of course, performed many funerals, not all of them noneventful:

“At another funeral, minutes before the service, the widow of the deceased handed me a note she had found among her dead husband’s belongings. She said he had wanted it to be read out.

“I had a brief glance at it beforehand, but when I started reading it I realised his note was apportioning blame for the things that had gone wrong in his life to people who were in the congregation. I had to hastily edit as I went along. It was ghastly.

“But nothing is as bad as my colleague’s disastrous first burial. The gravediggers forgot to dig the grave and he didn’t know what to do – so ended up covering the coffin with a sheet of artificial grass.

“Then there are the nearly-but-not quite funerals. I was called out to visit an old lady in a nursing home because she was dying. I was shown to her room and she was sleeping.

“As I anointed her, she opened one eye and said: “You’re a bit early, me duck.” She made a full recovery.”

Read it all here.

Throughout Funeralland, bothered undertakers, exasperated priests, weathervane secular celebrants, opportunistic accessorisers and furrow-browed academics are inserting their fingers into their mouths, holding them aloft, seeking to determine where the wind of change is blowing from.

Funeral consumers give them little to go on. They don’t talk about funerals until they have to arrange one. When they do they evince all manner of contradictoriness, their funeral ceremonies all manner of incoherence and half-bakedness. They allow themselves to be guided by funeral directors in most ceremonial respects – hearse, lims, bearers, the customary palaver – then subvert the contrived decorum by wearing football shirts and playing rude music. Acquiescence gives way to assertiveness. For funeral directors the job is becoming one of control and surrender. Unsatisfactorily so. By a malign conjuring trick the Master of Ceremonies is turned into a wallflower, the twit who turned up in the wrong fancy dress.

Funeral futurists scan the horizon with powerful binoculars, babbling about baby boomers. Funeral directors agonise over how to market themselves. Only the pre-need planners are stuck in Groundhog Day, selling the funeral equivalent of this year’s Punto, the very same model, in 10, 20, 50 years’ time. Wake up, chaps, we won’t have 2010 Puntos in 5, let alone 50 years’ time. We probably won’t have internal combustion engines.

People buy these plans, though. My (underworked) financial adviser recently announced that she has just bought a Co-op plan. Terribly proud of it. I bit my lip. All the way through.

The horizon is no place to find the future. Where to look, then? Children at pantomimes have the answer. “Behind you!!”

Today’s incoherent funerals are the product of a people who know they don’t want any more of the time-honoured bleak-and-meaningless. That’s why they’ve substituted the f-word with ‘celebration’. Even though they’re feeling sad. But break free as they try, they dangle all manner of cultural baggage. It is this baggage which the futurists need to identify and evaluate.

Much of this baggage is the legacy of history and culture. Part of it may be DNA. Celts do things differently. So do immigrant communities. Englishness is being altered by multiculturalism. How?

A pervasive propensity of the English is to find the funny side of everything. Even death. Especially death. It blunts the sting, sticks up the finger, turns the grave’s victory into a booby prize. This is a culture which will not keep humour in its place.

I don’t know that playing a risqué song at a funeral actually makes anyone feel any better, though it may have a certain cathartic fuck-you value. But I suspect that those who can offer the bereaved informed and intelligent guidance as to how they might most usefully incorporate humour into their farewell ceremonies will serve a very valuable purpose.

Not just the bereaved, either. All of us. How is it done? Where does it belong? Tell us, please!

England’s World Cup 1-1 draw against USA was brought about by the butterfingered England goalkeeper Robert Green.

By way of neat symmetry, it’s worth recalling that when the USA achieved a shock win over England at the 1950 World Cup, the star on the day was the USA goalkeeper, Frank Borghi.

And the point of especial interest for all members of the dismal trade who read this blog is that Frank Borghi was a hearse driver.

Over in Austria an undertaker, urged by his PR people, parks his hearse at a blackspot in order to deter sloppy driving. The hearse bears the gloating message: ‘We’re always ready for you.’ The object? Driver sees it, thinks ‘That’s jolly clever,’ slows down and uses that undertaker next time she needs one. Win-win. Read the story in our own dear Daily Mail here.

Over in the US, advertising man Dan Katz damns the initiative: ‘Whenever humor is chosen as an attention-getter, the question always has to be: is it directly relevant to the selling message, or just a gimmick … I’d argue that it falls short of the real goal, which is to strongly, indelibly link a meaningful benefit (not just death) to the advertiser’s brand … Creepy for its own sale doesn’t sell, even if it does get top-of-mind awareness. The basics of marketing still apply, including the requirement of having a compelling reason why someone should consider you over your competition.’

To position death as macabre and avoidable is dumb. To use a hearse to strike terror is dumb. That’s so obvious it needs no elaboration. We’re too frightened of death as it is.

So if you were an undertaker in the UK (perhaps you are?), would you accede to the wishes of a dead person aged just 85 and display this message on your hearse: “Smoking killed me – please give up!“?

Personal afterthought: I never see a dead person without feeling slightly envious. I often think of that line from Shakespeare: “After life’s fitful fever, he sleeps well.”