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!

There’s an engaging little story in January’s Funeral Service Journal describing the custom at Norwich Great Hospital, back in the medieval day, requiring those who had fallen into indigent, aged decrepitude (50+ female BBC presenters, for example) to bring with them, as their entry pass, a coffin. Not so different perhaps from today when you would be well advised to do just that were you unfortunate enough to be borne to Stafford Hospital, the sort of place that undertakers toast at Christmas parties.

But it turned out that the doddering ancients in Norwich Great Hospital thoughtlessly used their coffins as cupboards. Some of these coffins, when the time came to use them for their proper purpose, were found to be worn out. So the hospital changed the custom. Instead of a coffin, prospective entrants were required to bring £1 to pay for a shroud when their time came.

Roof boss at the Great Hospital, Norwich, depicting the Ascension. Dig the soles of Christ’s feet as he ascends.

The words that follow are by Thomas Lynch, a hero to so many of us in the UK. (In the US there are those who reckon him paternalistic, but we don’t need to go into that. It’s complicated.)

Funerals are about the living and the dead — the talk and the traffic between them … in the face of mortality we need to stand and look, watch and wonder, listen and remember … This is what we do funerals for — not only to dispose of our dead, but to bear witness to their lives and times among us, to affirm the difference their living and dying makes among kin and community, and to provide a vehicle for the healthy expression of grief and faith, hope and wonder. The value of a funeral proceeds neither from how much we spend nor from how little. A death in the family is an existential event, not only or entirely a medical, emotional, religious or retail one.

“An act of sacred community theater,” Thomas Long calls the funeral — this “transporting” of the dead from this life to the next. “We move them to a further shore. Everyone has a part in this drama.” Long — theologian, writer, thinker and minister — speaks about the need for “a sacred text, sacred community and sacred space,” to process the deaths of “sacred persons.” The dead get to the grave or fire or tomb while the living get to the edge of a life they must learn to live without those loved ones. The transport is ritual, ceremonial, an amalgam of metaphor and reality, image and imagination, process and procession, text and scene set, script and silence, witness and participation — theater, “sacred theater,” indeed.

“Once you put a dead body in the room, you can talk about anything,” Alan Ball [creator of the HBO show Six Feet Under] wrote to me once in a note.

Source

The body of Yuli Somme’s mother is borne away for burial in a Devon field, February, 2010. The shroud was made by Yuli. You can have one, too. Visit her website.

A beautiful, beautiful photo.

I wonder what people who visit graves think their loved one looks like now—or whether they think about it at all. I was talking last week to Ken West, the man who gave us natural burial, and he opined that they think of them as uncorrupted.

People shut their eyes to decomposition, whether violent and accelerated in a cremator or slow and buggy underground. My big bone of contention with many green burialists is that they babble happily about bluebells and bluebirds but bury at six feet. They know perfectly well that people who opt for natural burial fondly suppose they will nourish the earth and push up daisies (or bluebells). They also know perfectly well that at six feet they will turn into methane and sludge. So they keep schtumm about it.

Thus is death prettified and an elemental event made into a sentimental event.

Perhaps the ultimate reality of death is not the extinction of life but the return of the
body to the earth. And perhaps the death cannot fully be comprehended until folk get their heads around the body’s dissolution, both the stink of it and the buggy merriment.

It makes best sense to return a body to the earth naked. Yet we like to dress up beautifully for big occasions. Well, so long as a corpse is clad in beautiful biodegradables, can we not both nod at the vanity and justifiably refuse to apologise for it?

Which brings me to my third and last greatest hit of the National Funeral Exhibition, a product which is both beautiful and elemental: the leaf shroud created by Yuli Somme and Anne Belgrave at Bellacouche.

It’s not a winding sheet, it’s an alternative to a coffin. While a conventional shroud can seem stark because its wrappings reveal (starkly) the outline of the body, the leaf shroud, with its five layers of felted wool, softens and rounds it. The top layer, decorated with felted leaves, can be detached at the point of burial and kept.

It’s a marvellous piece of making. The body, wrapped in a wool cocoon, is fastened to a frame with gorsewood toggles.

The leaf shroud is archetypal in a Jungian sense. There’s a connection with pre-history and a timeless way of burying our dead. It strikes the same chord and exerts the same hold on the imagination as open-air cremation or a Viking funeral. Isn’t this what Beowulf might have been buried in?

Even if, to you, the leaf shroud is none of these things, I’m sure you’ll agree that it’s undeniably lovely.