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!

On Texas’s death row, there are no contact visits at all– no hand-holding, no embraces.

There is a strange little ritual when a Texas prisoner who still has family and friends is executed: his or her loved ones rush to the Huntsville funeral home which holds the contract with the prison, to touch the dead body while warmth remains in it. Normally, it will have been over five years since it was possible to touch the prisoner at all.

[Source]

Prison Terminal is a moving cinema verité documentary that breaks through the walls of one of America’s oldest maximum security prisons to tell the story of the final months in the life of a terminally ill prisoner and the trained hospice volunteers—they themselves prisoners—who care for him.

The film draws from footage shot over a six-month period behind the walls of the Iowa State Penitentiary entering the personal lives of the prisoners as they build a prison-based, prisoner-staffed hospice program from the ground up.

Prison Terminal demonstrates the fragility, as well as the holistic benefits, of a prison-based, prisoner-staffed hospice program and provides a fascinatingand often poignant account of how the hospice experience can profoundly touch even the forsaken lives of the incarcerated.

Very good website accompanying this. The Essays page is full of good things. Click here.

If we live long enough, our dying will be punctuated by lasts which we may even be able to mark off, one by one — last time in the garden; last time I’ll see so-and-so. Even if we don’t mark off our lasts, our nearest and dearest probably will, retrospectively.

Our most memorable last ought to be our last words. There’s almost an expectation on us that we will say something memorable, just like they do in the movies. Do you ever rehearse your last words? Even if you do, you know you’ll probably disappoint. Timing is all. How will you be certain that this is the moment to let them go?

No, this is a luxury reserved for very few. Suicides get to choose their last words. So do those about to be executed. There’s pressure here. People hope you’ll utter something very special , and that’s not an easy thing to do if there are executioners in the offing. As to suicides, I wonder how many never went through with the deed because they couldn’t get the wording right first?

Here are some last words by US prisoners in Texas. There’s a website full of them, address at the end.

‘Yes, first I want to tell the victim’s family, Wendy’s family, I am sorry for taking something so precious to you and to my kids. I wish I could take it all back and change it, but I know I can’t. I hope you can find it in your heart to forgive me. Please tell Robert and Eric, I love them. I hope they forgive me.

‘To my family, thanks for being beside me, Sabrina, you are a wonderful daughter, I am proud of you. Jr., John, you turned out to be a great young man. Hector, you too. Amy, thank you for always being there. Tell your family I love them. To my family, I appreciate you always standing by me and everything ya’ll have done. Tell, everyone I love them. I’ll be OK. You will too. Remember what asked you. Give my love to the grandchildren. Tell Jake and Mia, Papa Alba loves them. Okay Warden, let’s do it, I love yall. I can taste it already. I am starting to go.’ John Alba

‘Uh, I don’t know, Um, I don’t know what to say.  I don’t know.  (pauses)  I didn’t know anybody was there.  Howdy.’ James Clark

Profanity directed toward staff. Joseph Nichols

‘Yes sir, to my family and children, I love you very much.  Dianne, Virginia, Toby and Irene I love all of you.  I apologize for not being the man you wanted me to be.  I am going to be free, I am going to Heaven.  Please be strong and I love you all.

‘To the Wright family, I pray for you, please find peace in your heart.  I know you may hate me for whatever reason, the Lord says hate no one.  I hope you find peace in your heart.  I know my words cannot help you, I truly mean what I say.  God Bless you all.  I love you Dianne, Mary Virginia.

‘Kick the tires and light the fire, I am going home to see my son and my mom, I love you and God Bless you.’ Richard Hinojosa

‘Only the sky and the green grass goes on forever and today is a good day to die.’ David Martinez

‘Yes sir, Warden Okay I’ve been hanging around this popsicle stand way too long.  Before I leave, I want to tell you all.  When I die, bury me deep, lay two speakers at my feet, put some headphones on my head and rock and roll me when I’m dead.  I’ll see you in Heaven someday.  That’s all Warden.’ Douglas Roberts

‘I did have [any last words], but now I see my family here and everything – all I want to say is I love you all so much. I am innocent. I love you all so much. You are beautiful. Okay Warden, I am through.’ Richard Duncan

‘I’m ready to be released. Release me.’  Kenneth McDuff

‘Let’s do it, man. Lock and load. Ain’t life a [expletive deleted]?’  GW Green

‘I’m going to a beautiful place. O.K., Warden, roll ‘em. ‘ Ignacio Cuevas

Find the Texas Department of Criminal Justice here. More about death by lethal injection here.

As you read this Big Rinty is dying in Shepton Mallet prison. Big Rinty? You wouldn’t know of him unless you’d read Erwin James’ columns in the Guardian or his books. Big Rinty is one of the long-term prisoners with whom James became friends during the twenty years of his life sentence. Here’s James:

Rinty was sentenced to life in 1976. He served 18 years and was released in 1994. After three years, during which he worked and lived an honest, industrious life, he was arrested and charged with assault.

The jury at his ensuing trial returned from their deliberations after eight minutes. “Not guilty,” said the foreman. Any other defendant would have walked free. But Rinty, on “life-licence”, was recalled to prison, requiring “psychological assessment”, said the official blurb on the paperwork. He played the game for a while, completed a couple of “offending behaviour” courses. But eventually grew tired of the dishonesty of it all.

“That psychologist is nuts,” he proclaimed after several consultations. Finally, he withdrew from co-operating with her schemes and programmes. [Source]

And now he’s dying.

I went to see him at the time in the hospital where they had put him in his own little room. He was a pathetic sight. He was laid on his back with tubes in his mouth and up his nose attached to bags of liquid hanging from a frame above his bed. Most pathetic of all was the chain attaching his wrist to the wrist of the prison officer who was sat next to him engrossed in a dog-eared copy of Hello! magazine. Another prison officer sat on the other side of the bed twiddling his thumbs and thinking about the overtime money this extra guard duty was earning him. The Gambler was already there when I arrived. We shook hands and then I leaned over and held my poorly friend’s hand tight. He smiled a painful smile and said, “For fuck’s sake don’t make me laugh…” I think he thought I was smiling, but I turned away and looked at the Gambler – we had both welled up. ”Hey,” Rinty said, “it’s me that should be crying.”  … A few weeks ago he was taken out to the outside hospital again for “tests.” He calls me once a week [from prison]. The past couple of calls started with the same question. “Any news on the test results?” The medics seemed to be taking their time. Yesterday I had a message on my answer machine. “Rinty here, just checking in. I need to speak to you.” The tone of his voice was ominous. I phoned the prison and asked the chaplain to go and tell Rinty I was waiting for his call. Half an hour later the phone rang. “It’s not good mate,” he said. “I’ve got pancreatic cancer – inoperable.” [Source]

I asked him about chemotherapy. “What, so I can live longer in here?” he said. He said he has decided he is not going to have chemo – but then when he asked about compassionate release he was told he couldn’t have that if he refused chemo as he might get out, undertake chemo and end up living more than the prescribed three months maximum allowed. [Source]

Find other GFG posts about death and dying in prisons here, here and here.

A few days ago I blogged about death and dying inside prison. If it’s the sort of thing that interests you at all, you’ll be interested in a post over at Jailhouselawyer’s blog.

In most British prisons there are old men in their late sixties and seventies, at least three-quarters of them very ill and years over tariff. They could never re-offend and the vast majority would not want to.

At least a third of Wakefield residents come under the category of the ‘body bag club’. They are well over tariff, very ill and disabled. Lots are in wheelchairs and it’s costing the government a small fortune to keep them in prison. A hell of a lot more than it costs to keep a normal healthy inmate.

It costs a little over £40,000 a year to keep someone in prison. It depends how you calculate it, of course. If you build in the capital cost that figure rises steeply.

John’s post also details the procedure when someone dies in prison.

Read it here.

Our prison system is a seldom explored area of death and dying. In fact, little is known about what goes on in our prisons, mostly because people don’t care enough about those inside to be remotely interested in what happens to them. This doesn’t surprise me. Crime angers people. But I’ve spent time in prisons and I met lots of people almost all of whom would benefit from a programme which made a real and earnest effort to rehabilitate them.

If you’re interested to find out what prison is like, have a look at Ben’s Prison Blog. Ben was imprisoned at the age of 14 for killing  a friend in a fight. He’s still there 30 years later. He is the UK’s first and only prison blogger.

If you want to know what extreme old age in prison looks like, here’s a film from the US. It is only partially descriptive of what happens in UK prisons because Americans lock up more people for longer than we do. But it shows you the consequences of the throw-away-the-key approach.

My thanks to John Hirst for pointing this film out to me.

Prisons are places where people are defined by the worst thing they’ve ever done. The stigma sticks for the rest of their lives.

We, free people define ourselves by the best we can be. If we hate sinners it is because we are not as they.

But we are. There is darkness in all of us. It is only its unenactedness that separates us, and it’s only self-restraint or inhibition or luck that has held us back. That’s not a firewall, it’s a skein. All wickedness is weakness. There, but for the grace…

Our hatred of sinners is a species of self-loathing born of fear. We are all the same, the best and the worst of us, brothers and sisters under the skin. Our natures comprise beauty and ugliness, a potential for admirable aspiration and for grievous self-betrayal.

So we shouldn’t be surprised to see the beauty of the human spirit manifest itself in the worst of people, neither should we be surprised at its loveliness, for it is born of suffering.

The photo above of prisoners massaging a terminally ill inmate was shot in the Louisiana State Penitentiary, where 85 per cent of the inmates will die in jail. See the rest of this extraordinary sequence here.