The Good Funeral Guide

Romany funeral, Warwick, 2007. Source.

Posted by Charles

We’ve talked quite a lot on this blog recently about ritual. There have been times when a better and more accessible word might have been theatre.

For what is a funeral if it is not theatre?

The playscript for the drama we call a funeral, together with its delivery, is, for the most part, the responsibility of the ceremony leader. But funeral directors get to play a major part in act one, scene one, the procession, and, though they love dressing up for it, I think many of them have lost sight of the story they’re supposed to be telling and, therefore, the role they are supposed to be playing.

The story of a funeral procession is that of the last journey ever taken by a dead person here on Earth. The dead person is accompanied, as Thomas Long expresses it, with love and lamentation to the Edge of Eternity. The element of accompaniment is central. 

It’s a ritual journey, obviously. The dead person’s last actual journey was probably to the hospital by ambulance. There, on their deathbed, family and friends hopefully got a chance to say goodbye. A funeral re-enacts this ritually, theatrically: a ritualised final journey followed by a ritualised goodbye.

In the olden time a funeral procession could make its way to the place of farewell at a dramatically slow pace (there’s no practical reason for going slowly). Those whom the procession passed amongst would stop and doff their hats and bow and pay their ritual last respects. It was a good show.

That’s all been consigned to the past, borne away by traffic and indifference. Keeping a procession together now through traffic lights and roundabouts is wing-and-a-prayer stuff. The first 100 meters works well enough, the undertaker leading the hearse at a stately walking pace down the street. Like all good actors, s/he is in character. So are the understrappers. Splendid. Then we get to the main road and s/he dives in. The actors come out of character, most of them – all the while keeping up appearances. Heaven knows what talk they talk, what jokes they swap, let’s not speculate. This part of the journey is not about stately procession, it’s about getting to the crem on time. It’s a hiatus, an ellipsis. And there’s nothing we can do about it.

Which is why, in a film, unless it’s a satirical comedy, you’d jump cut to when the church or crematorium hoves into view and the occupants of the hearse get back in character. The funeral director hops out and carries on where s/he left off earlier for all of 200 metres max. And stops just short of the coffin’s destination.

If a playwright wrote it like that you’d shoot him. For this is the point at which the principal actors are joined by The Crowd. When you’ve got that many people on stage there must be ensemble action, a single focus of attention. We don’t get any of that. As the limousine doors are opened and the occupants unfurl under the indulgent but prurient gaze of The Crowd, the Men In Black Macs are, severally, easing the coffin out of the hearse and doing things with flowers.

The procession has entirely lost its momentum, not in itself fatal, but it can never regain a sense of purpose because, by the time it is ready to move on once more, it’s far too close to journey’s end. It falls over the finishing line. The Crowd was never part of a procession. The minister declaimed “I am the resurrection and the life” to empty air and an organist. The Men in Black Macs probably put the coffin on the catafalque before everyone was in and sitting. It can work out a bit better in a church, where everyone is in first, but this denies The Crowd any processional role.

Could it be staged better? In theory, yes. A procession — for those who want one — needs at least 80 metres, a decent run-up. Everyone out of cars, on foot, standing tall. Coffin out, too. People formed up in some sort of order of precedence, leader/s (optional) in front of the coffin, stepping out as one, everyone playing their part, understanding the part they are playing, and quite possibly singing, too.

In practice, no. To do all that you need a gathering-place. Most funeral venues don’t have one of those.

So we’re down to one person walking in front of a car. This does retain an element of theatre. But you can’t help feeling that the grandeur and much of the point of the narrative has been lost, and that’s a shame.

Too much me, funeral directors, not enough us. 

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Here in the UK we are all following, intently or wearily, the furore created by the declaration of intent by Anjem Choudary and Islam4UK to hold a procession through the streets of Wootton Basset “not in memory of the occupying and merciless British military, but rather the real war dead who have been shunned by the Western media and general public as they were and continue to be horrifically murdered in the name of Democracy and Freedom – the innocent Muslim men, women and children.”

Silly stunt, you may say. Politicians of all hues have condemned him. Many would ban him. Sir Hugh Orde, president of the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo), says he would be “surprised” if senior officers in Wiltshire seek to block the protest because any group has a right to march even if their views are “unpleasant and offensive … Our view is we will have to deal with it, people have a right to march. People might not like it but that is the law.”

Whichever side you’re on, it’s worth looking at this in the light of the ritual which now attends the repatriation of dead service people. That’s what I want to focus on: this new ritual.

It’s a recent thing, this bringing home our dead, only made possible by skilful morticians, refrigeration and aeroplanes. It’s a novelty. It’s also a curiosity. These processions through Wootton Bassett look like funeral processions, but they’re not. They are journeys to the coroner. When dead civilians go to the coroner they go, not in a hearse, but in a low key van of some sort (call it a private ambulance if you like) in everyday traffic. It’s a non-event and none the poorer for that. The funeral to come is the thing, after all.

It’s as if these dead service people are being given a sort of pre-funeral. Why? Don’t people have the opportunity to honour them (or protest about them) after the coroner has handed them back to their families at their funeral proper? Of course they do. So why?

It’s an invention of the Ministry of Defence. PR? It’s your call. These processions are well regarded. And bringing home the dead in this way certainly gives the country a way of counting the cost of the war in Afghanistan.

But while these processions offer ordinary people the chance to pay their respects to the dead, they have also become expressions of patriotism and militarism. Wootton Bassett is no place for pacifists or dissenters. It’s Daily Mail country. It’s got political. So it’s no surprise to see the political Mr Choudary requiring the right, in his own way, to drive home the cost of the war to Afghan civilians.

If Wootton Bassett has become a political battleground, the invention of this about-to-be-hijacked ritual is something the MoD may now regret.

No death threats, please. Use a comments box to put me right.

‘Loveable’ and ‘funeral director’ aren’t words that sidle up to each other and make friends. I can think of a little handful of hugely loveable funeral directors, but that’s only because I hang out with a heck of a lot.

Up in Newcastle, Carl Marlow is one such. And what makes him loveable is not so much his warmth and zest, though he’s brimming with these. No, what makes your affections for Carl go the extra mile is his sheer naughtiness. It’s a very humane and serious species of naughtiness and it impels him to do things others would never think of.

Is he a genius? Yes, he is. Half saint, half scamp. The very best sort of saint.

He’s made it to today’s Sun with the story of a funeral only he could have suggested. All the mourners set off for the crem in a 49-seater coach with their dead person in the boot. Cheerful. And (don’t overlook this) cheap. Everyone together, not dispersed in ones and twos in cars and buses.

Read the story in the Sun here. See Carl on YouTube here.

The purpose of a funeral is to express and reaffirm beliefs that make sense of a death in terms of, both, the tenets of the dead person and those of the living. We don’t see a lot of common purpose in an age in which faith has fragmented. All funerals alienate to a greater or lesser extent.

As a result, there is a move to make them less offensive, more inclusive. Secularists draw disparate mourners together by finding common ground: by focussing on the dead person and celebrating their life. Sorrow is tempered by joy. Where spirituality is addressed, it is with fondness rather than fervour. Heaven is envisioned not as an exclusive venue of staggering magnificence but, rather, a nice place for a picnic. Where such a ceremony is bland and euphemistic, we are indulgent. It is the price of compromise. Where there are football shirts on the coffin, banal poetry, Henry Scott Holland and mawkish or sniggermaking songs, we redouble our indulgence. We’ve all done the diversity training. We bite our tongues behind arranged smiles.

The secular funeral is an evolving rite. If it bungles sometimes, we should not be surprised.

The benchmark against which secularists measure its progress is, of course, the poor, bloody Christian funeral, a rite which has much to answer for, especially when conducted with the disengaged perfunctoriness for which it has achieved especial notoriety. For all that, we can only pity all those priests who have ever presided at funerals at which the congregation has glowered back at them with hollow, hostile eyes, alienated by the very liturgy that they had called upon the priest to deliver.

Christians, too, are now moving towards a more conciliatory, secular way of doing things. And this is the subject of a very interesting essay by Thomas G Long. “These newer practices,” he says, “are attractive mainly because they seem to offer relief from the cosmeticized, sentimental, impersonal and often costly funerals that developed in the 1950s, which were themselves parodies of authentic Christian rituals.” And yet, he says: “Contemporary Christian funeral practices certainly need to be changed, but change should be more a matter of recovery and reformation than innovation and improvisation.”

Christian funeral rites, he says, need to be ‘pristinised’. We note, here, that almost every innovation in funerals draws its inspiration from the past. But what is interesting about Professor Long’s analysis is that it is, I think, equally instructive to secularists.

He identifies three elements in a funeral: preparation, processional, burial. “The funeral itself was deemed to be the last phase of a lifelong journey toward God, and the faithful carried the deceased along the way to the place of final departure with singing and a mixture of grief and joyful hope.”

The metaphor of life as a journey collapsed in theological uncertainties. The result? “Dead Christians have nowhere to go but to evaporate into the spiritual ether and into our frail memory banks. With heaven domesticated, the soul morphed into an immortal gas, the corpse become a shell and the cemetery moved out of sight, it was almost inevitable that the dead with their embarrassing bodies would be banned from their own funerals and the living would be condemned to sit motionless, contemplating the meaning of it all and pretending to celebrate life as the nephew of the deceased sings ‘When Irish Eyes Are Smiling.’”

So like a secular funeral, yes?

He concludes: “Surely our culture will eventually weary of such liturgical and spiritual thinness and be ready for more depth, for more truth—for our sake and for the sake of those we love. When we are, the great drama of the journey to God will be there, beckoning us to join the procession of the saints. We will travel toward eternity with those we have loved, singing as we go and calling out to the distant shore in words of confident hope.”

It’s heady stuff, imbued with a sense of certainty unattainable by secularists with at best a fuzzy spirituality.

Yet the metaphor of life as a journey is just as strong and relevant to secularists, just as much of an inspiration, as is Professor Long’s metaphor of “the cosmic drama … of marching to the edge of eternity.”

Secular funerals are beginning to find words and music with which to celebrate a life and even expound a fuzzy spirituality. What they have yet to find is the actions, the rituals. But do they not, also, enact the cosmic drama of marching to the edge of eternity—even if that is an eternity of nonexistence?

Yes, they do. The element of processional is indispensable.

Read Professor Long’s essay in full here.

Hear him speak here: http://wjkbooks.typepad.com/files/wjk-radio-8_-thomas-g.-long-on-the-christian-funeral.mp3

Elmer Johanning, of Douglas County, Kansas, sold tractors for 35 years. He died at the age of 91 ten days ago. He was borne to the cemetery on a tractor-drawn trailer, and followed there by nine other tractors.

Now that’s what I call a procession.

Watch it here.

I don’t suppose anyone is left unmoved by news coverage of the repatriation of dead soldiers from Afghanistan and their subsequent solemn processions through Wootton Bassett. Everyone has an opinion, as is their entitlement. These soldiers are members of that group of people who have both a public role and a separate personal life, so, like dead firefighters and policemen, many will have a dual funeral.

People’s feelings run the full gamut, of course, from pride to despondency. These deaths are glorious or they are terrible waste of young men’s lives.

To be sure, they take some justifying in the public arena. It was halfway through the last century that Britain conceded that that it is futile folly to foist its values on people who don’t want them. “Lesser breeds without the law”, as Kipling described them, have every right to misgovern themselves—or just govern themselves differently.

Britain gave away its empire but forgot the lesson it had learned. Subsequent adventures in nation building as ill-equipped junior partners of the US have led to defeat in Basra and a losing fight in Afghanistan. Liberal democracy doesn’t grow well in all sorts of soils. Dammit, the Italians have been toying with it since 500 BC and they’ve still got no further than Berlusconi.

So, these deaths. They affect us all. Those processions through Wootton Bassett, they focus our feelings, whatever they are.

My own feelings scapegoat the undertaker leading the procession. What’s he doing there? What’s his purpose? Why hearses? Don’t these dead soldiers still inhabit their public role? Why has the Army handed them over to civilians? Can’t the Army see it through with them and convey them in suitable military vehicles?

I picked up the phone.

First, who are the undertakers? Kathryn has a hunch they’re Barry Albin’s men. I rang to confirm. No, I was told, these are Kenyon’s men. Kenyon’s, if you didn’t know, is a branch of Dignity. This is their repatriation arm—in which, Albin’s conceded, they have a sizeable financial stake.

Next, I rang the Ministry of Defence press office. Why hearses? Because they’re appropriate, dignified; we couldn’t put them in the back of a 10-ton truck. I’m not suggesting that; haven’t you got anything else that would do? No, we haven’t. Okay then, what about the undertaker? What’s he doing there? I thought you guys were world leaders in ceremonial? Why not a military figure? After this the conversation came apart somewhat. I asked, These soldiers are going to the coroner, right? So why hearses? We use hearses for funerals, not removals. The reply: I think you’ll find that those who witness these processions consider them to be very moving and dignified. Yes, okay, but couldn’t you do it better? I put it to you, here’s another way of looking at it, it’s a possible point of view, couldn’t you do better than have these brave young men and women led by a mincing popinjay twirling a stick?

No. The overwhelming majority of people would wholly disagree with me.

It’s possible that my animus is simply displaced anger; that these blameless men in cod-Victorian clobber are not proper objects of my wrath. Yes, I concede that.

But I can’t shed a strong sense that it could all be done much better.

There’s nothing like a good funeral procession, a walking funeral procession. It’s a much underestimated component of a good funeral. Regrettably, most people do not bother to have one at all, these days. Only the famous and those who stand for something get proper cortege. And Romanies, of course; they still know how to do a proper funeral.

Poor PC Carroll probably wouldn’t have earned a cortege in his own right, but the circumstances of his death, and its context, accorded him one. It gave an opportunity for the community visibly to close its ranks and, by honouring him, to assert its values. His funeral was about him and about much more besides, and this is something any cortege will register. A funeral is about a dead person, yes. It is also about bonds of family, ties of friendship, the strength of professional relationships and an enduring sense of community. A funeral asserts that these are interdependent and they matter. The verticality of the mourners, in contrast with the dead person’s horizontality, demonstrates that the living go defiantly on. Death has no dominion.

A day-to-day funeral procession in the UK normally features an undertaker walking in front of a hearse followed by one or more limousines filled with those closest to the dead person. Everybody else, whether family, friends or community, precedes the procession and waits outside the crematorium or inside the church. Why don’t they walk either in front of or behind the hearse? Today’s impatiently parping traffic only makes that impossible up to a point. It would be good to see mourners at least gather at the gates of the crematorium and follow the hearse on foot.

Who should walk in front of the hearse? You will have your own ideas about that. How did it come about that undertakers walk in front? Haven’t a clue. Don’t know why that should be. And given how badly it is often done, I’m surprised it hasn’t been done away with.

Some funeral directors unquestionably put on a magnificent show and create a particular sense of occasion. They bear themselves well, wear their fancy dress with elan and create a spectacle. I can see why that would appeal. Female undertakers can put on as good a show as the men. They can look marvellous, dead sexy, in full fig, and don’t they know it. There’s a dominatrix aspect to female funeral directors which they are decidedly not unaware of.

But far too many an undertaker cuts a dowdy sight, hair bad, shoulders wrong, feet flat, face arranged in an unconvincing rictus. Their fancy dress is costume hire quality and their footwear is nowhere near parade ground standard.

The undertaker at PC Carroll’s funeral was a pretty good example. Displaced from the front of the cortege, he walked, asymmetrically, alongside his vehicle. He carried, of all things, an umbrella. Why? Maybe it’s a local custom. It doesn’t work. You can’t walk that slowly and swing a brolly. What should he have done with it instead? Answers on a postcard,please. Look at the clip and you will see that his face displays no sense of what he’s doing there. What use is he? I don’t think he knows.

What is a funeral director’s role at a funeral? Apart from noting that the presence of any stranger is anomalous, I shrink from prescription. Each to their own, that’s what I think.

But it’s something, I hope, that every funeral director negotiates with each family in the light of all the possible options.

This next clip, of Michael Collins’s funeral, bears little relevance to the foregoing. My excuse is that it shows a funeral procession; my reason is that I always enjoy the dog in it.