The Good Funeral Guide

We must hope that spending cuts will result in the excision of not just waste but also the sort of local authority insensitivity which manifests as brainless heartlessness.

Here’s an example from Somerset as told by the Daily Mail:

Liz Maggs placed a 26-inch high wooden cross bearing a personal inscription on Rosemary Maggs’ burial plot at the Ebdon Road cemetery in Weston-super-Mare, while the family waited for a headstone to be made. But when Mrs Maggs, 43, returned to visit the grave … just a few days later she found the cross had disappeared … The authority said that because the cross stood about 2ft up from the ground it was a health and safety risk.

But it turns out that, though this was the pretext the council used, this wasn’t what they actually meant. It didn’t mean they they thought the cross presented a hazard to life, limb and the pursuit of happiness. No, what they were trying to get across was that this is a lawn cemetery; everything must be laid flat.

Ms Maggs was poorly advised by those with a duty to advise her. And by the example of many other wooden crosses in the same cemetery. Perhaps an example of belated, retrospective enforcement of regulations?

Whatever, a sorry mess. If you haven’t heard enough, find the whole sorry story here.

Hat-tip to Tony Piper for this.

From the Nameless Dead blog:

A 10-meter magnolia tree is planted in the center of Chile’s National Stadium where dictator Pinochet in 1973 imprisoned thousands of political prisoners who were tortured and killed. After planting the tree, the stadium doors are open to the public as a park; offering a space to stop, look again, and remember. An impossible, cathartic soccer match played before 20.000 people, closes the project after a week of activity.

See the amazing sequence of photos here.

Hat-tip to Tony Piper for this. Wonderful, isn’t it?

Most people think of a memorial as a sole-purpose ‘something’, there to do exactly what the shot-blast lettering says it’s there to do. A headstone, for example.

Headstones are self-absorbed, stand-alone symbols. They add nothing to their surrounding headstones, neither do they detract from them. They do not beautify the landscape; they may uglify it. They are contextualised only by their massed-ness in an area decommissioned and set aside for the burial of the dead.

A memorial doesn’t have to be such. It can be architectural, like the mausoleum at Castle Howard, above. It can take its place in what James Leedam likes to call ‘the vernacular landscape’, so it can be an obelisk, a shrine, a tree, a cairn. Or a bunch of flowers at the roadside.

We are not confined to just one memorial, either. We can, both, mark the spot where the dead person lies and also keep the memory alive at another location or in other ways, privately or publicly. When I was writing the GFG I came up with: “A memorial can also be a folly, a charitable trust, a web page, a campaign, a horse-race, a half-marathon or a drop-in centre.”

My list was far from exhaustive. For, as Pat McNally made me aware in his post the other day about the Memo Project, “Public memorials can take the form of libraries, concert halls, schools, endowments, and even airports and battleships.” He makes reference also to heroic equestrian statues which “interest pigeons more than people”, and to memorials to the many, not just the one: the Vietnam Memorial, the Holocaust Memorial.

Reading Pat’s post I wondered what we’d missed, what’s new, what’d be appropriate and what wouldn’t.

Veuve Cliquot champagne commemorates Barbe-Nicole Ponsardin very aptly. So the world of food and drink offers opportunities for memorialisation – though it’s unlikely that this could be appropriately accomplished by a new pasta sauce.

What else? What memorialisation opportunity can you think of? What have we missed? Think, think, think! Then hit the comments’ box below.

Thank you!

A very good programme on BBC Radio 4 about online memorialisation on Facebook, dedicated memorial websites and YouTube. Features MuchLoved‘s Jon Davies, a GFG Hero.

Well worth half an hour of your time. Catch it on Listen Again — but be sure to do so within the next seven days. Click!

Here’s the story condensed from a Guardian report, 27 September ’07:

John Joe “Ash” Amador, a 30-year-old American, was executed for the 1994 murder of a San Antonio taxi driver. He went to his death, still protesting his innocence, with an armful of lethal sodium pentathol and the words, “God forgive them, for they know not what they do. After all these years, our people are still lost in hatred and anger. Give them peace, God, for people seeking revenge toward me.” To which he added, as he slipped away: “Freedom … I’m ready,” and, finally, “Wow.”

During his final weeks as a resident of Texas’s death row, he had been in touch with Baroness Von Carrie Reichardt, a ceramicist who operates out of a studio called the Treatment Rooms in Chiswick.

“The Baroness”, as everyone seems to know her, has long been campaigning against the death penalty in the US and has been in correspondence with Amador for the past year or so. When it became clear that all his appeals were likely to be turned down, Amador asked her if she would join his wife and family as one of his five witnesses when he took the long walk.

The Baroness is a friend of Nick Reynolds, a sculptor who specialises in death masks. So when she said she was going out to witness Amador’s death and make a film about it, he suggested coming along and making a mask, so that the person whom the Texas justice system was about to snuff out would have a sort of life after death.

“It is very hard to put into words what it’s like,” she says of the execution. “It is totally surreal. You have to try to smile for them and he was trying to smile for us. It’s very hard and it took him nine minutes to die, but when he said ‘Wow’, he was looking so serene, it was as if he was looking at the angels.”

Once Amador had been certified dead, his body was taken to the local undertakers, but they were not too receptive to the idea of a cadaverous Englishman making a death mask on their premises, despite the wishes of the family … So Reynolds and the family carried the still warm body out and placed it in the back of a hired car for a one-hour trip to the woods near a town called Livingston, where Amador’s widow, Linda, had a small cabin. “We just put him on the back seat, unzipped the body-bag and took his arm out so that his wife could hold his hand,” says Reynolds.

At the cabin, Reynolds set to work. “It only took about two hours because we were paranoid that the police would arrive and ask what we were doing with the body,” he says. “So there we were, hiding out in this little wooden bungalow in the middle of the woods, like a Friday the 13th movie. I don’t normally talk to the bodies, but I did on this occasion. He looked so young because, although he was 30, he had hardly been outside for the past 12 years.”

Read the entire article here.

Here’s the film. I can’t embed it, so click here.

Hat-tip to Rupert Callender for this.

Marvellous, isn’t it, the feats of ingenuity those of an entrepreneurial bent are capable of in dreaming up schemes to part the bereaved from a pretty penny?

I love Eternal Voicemail. They transfer a dead person’s mobile phone voicemail message to a voicemail box. Anyone who’s got the dead person’s phone number can call, listen to the dead person’s message, and leave one of their own.

Just don’t expect a call back any time soon.

Check out the website here. Any takers?

Anubis urn by Jack Thompson for FUNERIA

Tattoo Urn (Goldfish) by Susan Bach for FUNERIA

Aesthetics. Taste. What’s naff, what’s ravishing? We’ve been there before in this blog and we’ll go there again. Bandit country.

The clothing, merchandise and interior decor of death is dignified, is magnificent, is horrible. It’s whatever you think it is. Undertakers’ frock coats.Traditional coffins with their sonorous names: Arundel, Chatsworth, Montacute. Chapels of rest. Hearses. ‘Floral tributes’. Headstones. ‘Memorial items’. Ashes urns. Cremation jewellery.

Coffins have become a lot more eye-friendly. What of the rest? It is notable that, in the matter of memorialising, some Brits, rather than be seen dead in a conventional cemetery, take themselves off to natural burial grounds where they can be sure to have none of it. That’s a strong reaction.

I’ll declare my own position on all the ashes urns I’ve ever seen: With the exception of the ARKA Acorn Urn I don’t like them. This one in particular.

But I really like these, above, from a group of artists based in California. They’ve even made me rethink the desirability of keeping ashes at home.

They’re called FUNERIA. Click through and see what your eyes think.

Interesting piece in USA Today on mass graves in Haiti and the importance people attach to marking the spot where their dead are laid – a physical point of connection. “We are hard-wired to want to know where our dead are, whether we believe in a superior being or not,” asserts Curtis Rostad, an Indiana funeral director. Even Neanderthals, he reminds us, buried their dead with flowers.

Curtis, we remind ourselves, has a commercial interest in burial. And when he uses that seductive metaphor ‘hard-wired’, is that how human brains really work?

We pride ourselves on having evolved somewhat since the days when Neanderthals roamed the earth. We’ve done that by suppressing many of our Neanderthal impulses. We value reason over instinct. It’s what makes us civilised.

Or does it?

Read it here. Don’t miss the link to a sprightly piece on orphan-napping.