The Good Funeral Guide

Posted by Vale

A young girl went missing. A body was found. A young man went to the police and said that she might be his sister. They said that was not possible; her age is wrong. That was how it happened back in 1994.

Today, police are looking for this man. The man who said that the young unidentified girl found in Pogonip Park was his sister. She still might not be his sister, but they need to find him to make sure.

The young girl was murdered in an area of the park where homeless people stayed. Now new tests have shown that she might have been younger than the police first thought…

I was an African American Male, about 50 years old, I stood about 5’8 and I wore a gold loop earring in my left ear. Now you know what they know. What they don’t know and maybe you do is my name.

Let me back up for a minute.

On July 23, 2006, a man and his son were crossing Mosquito Lake (Cortland, Ohio – Trumbull County) in the swampy area. While they were crossing they saw what they believed to be human remains. The authorities were contacted. Tests were run, they figured out my general description, the one I gave you above; but they couldn’t match me to any of their records on file, missing persons, etc. In time, the phone stopped ringing and all leads simply dried up.

The unknown victim is one of many whose stories are told on an American blog called Can You Identify Me? In its own words:

The site was started in 2007 as a blog dedicated to America’s Unidentified. It brings these individuals back to life if only for a brief moment to share some invaluable information along with their forensic reconstructions. Can You Identify Me gives the victim a first-person narrative and temporary Doe name until someone out there recognizes them. Once they are identified, they can be reunited with their families and the victims can rest in peace with a tombstone shining with their given name.

As one of their readers says ‘Not many blogs make me stop and read almost all their current posts. Topics like these bring be extreme sadness. Its a great thing you are doing. It saddens me to see how many lives go off without any closure.’

You can find the site here.

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!

ObituariesToday.com is national obituary service, with funeral home listings, pre-planning information, a resource section for funeral information, as well as obituaries and memorial announcements. In other words it’s one of those online memorial websites. There are lots and lots of them. 

If you want to find the page on ObituariesToday which commemorates, shall we say, David Victor Regier, you go straight to it by clicking this link — here. 

Yes, whoops.

We can’t find out what’s happened to Obituariestoday.com. It looks as if it might have gone down with all decedents and everybody’s memories of them. It wouldn’t be the first online memorial site to have suffered this fate.

Caveat online memorialiser bigtime.

Here at the GFG we only endorse (and hugely admire) MuchLoved.com

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.

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!

It’s all up with EternalSpace. Even as we slept it went gentle into that good night, taking with it millions of $ of venture capital. After life’s fitful fever it sleeps well.

Investors, it seems, screamed STOP when, just 30 days after its launch, they already saw it going nowhere. They blame feet-dragging undertakers and the glacial pace of change in the death trade.

I am sad about this in a by no means worthy way. I got off on its towering awfulness. Million-dollar awfulness is the best it gets. If you missed it, I’m sorry. I did try to tell you.

And yet online memorial sites have a future. They are places to go and talk and share. The sad news for grieving people is that it is difficult at this stage in their evolution to determine which sites will thrive and which will founder with the loss of all memories on board — as so many already have.

Where’s your quality assurance?

Three factors will ensure the survival of the fittest: ethics, functionality and a stable financial foundation.

Over at MuchLoved, Jonathan Davies is doing his best. He has developed an ethical code of conduct which has respect for privacy at its heart. But one of its signatories, The Last Respect, seems already to have bellied. He has set up a not-for-profit, the Data Trust, to ensure the maintenance of digitally stored information. Not many takers so far, and GaGaGa.com, a site for baby snaps, has failed to launch.

Assessing functionality is partly a subjective thing—do you like the look of the site? But there are objective criteria. How does it drive? How fast does it go? Is it well-equipped? On all these counts, MuchLoved objectively excels.

Financial foundations clearly matter most. And the message to anyone out there hoping to make money from an online memorial site is: forget it—unless you’ve a different and a better vision from that of market leader MuchLoved, which is free. How does MuchLoved do that? Here I declare an interest: partly from people like me who admire it and donate. Partly, too, I guess, from charities which stand to benefit from donations made in memory. And partly ( a big partly) from Jonathan himself, who has poured heaps of his own time and money into the site in memory of his brother Philip. It’s a labour, you see, of love.

What, then, do we make of GoneTooSoon, MuchLoved’s biggest competitor? It lacks the functionality of MuchLoved. It’s free, but only because it has already been scandal-hit. It now makes money from Interflora and virtual gifts (ugh!).

Ethically, it has question marks buzzing round it like bluebottles. It says it’s a not-for-profit but it’s not a registered charity so far as I can see. When it comes to respecting the privacy of the family of the dead person what do you make of this:

Don’t think it’s not your place to set up a site. You would not be encroaching on other family members territory.

Or this?

Maybe you lost your loved one in a sudden or violent way? … Or perhaps your story is one of true love against the odds? Whatever your story, we’d love to hear from you. Womens magazines are looking for stories of your love and, sadly, loss. If your story is printed, you could receive a payment of around £500 from the magazine.

A glance at the tributes at GoneTooSoon reveals a voyeuristic audience. The same sad people visit every tribute and mark the territory with a mawkish poem or message.

I’d like to contact GoneTooSoon and tell them I’ve posted this blog. I can’t do that by email, only by ringing an 0845 number. No probs with MuchLoved.

And, as ever, I hope someone out there will subvert my analysis.

In the meantime, anyone fancy setting up a memorial site for memorial sites which have gone too soon?

In November I blogged about EternalSpace, a “meaningful online destination that creates a personal connection with a loved one.” Back then it was at an early stage of development.

It’s up and running. You can now see examples of virtual monuments in what its developers call an “immersive, multidimensional landscape where well-wishers may sign the guestbook or use the journal to record experiences, thoughts, poems, and stories … Personal memorials at EternalSpace.com are peaceful, serene online environments for sharing thoughts or uploading photos and videos that celebrate a life for the days, months and years to come.”

You can choose your own tranquil landscape “that can be customized to reflect and honor an individual’s life and legacy”. You can buy “virtual tribute gifts, selecting from a diverse range of items including flowers, trees, candles, hobby and sports memorabilia, and other unique gifts that reflect the personality, interests and life of each individual … EternalSpace memorials enable family and friends, near and far, to have 24/7 access to a central place to share and preserve memories about the deceased from anywhere in the world, and to keep those memories accessible to others in the days, months, years and even generations after the funeral.”

Is it tasteful? Well, we don’t discuss things like that on this blog. Is it going to make a lot of dough for US funeral directors? We’ll see. Play with it here. It’s a delight.

EternalSpace is going to provide a bit of hot competition for MuchLoved. Or will it? On reflection, probably not. MuchLoved is free, ethical, technically wonderful and, simply, the best online memorial site in known cyberspace, to which no other memorial site can hold a candle. If you don’t know it, check it out. If you are a funeral director, tell your families about it – as the estimable Mr Armstrong does.