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The Free Funeral Service Society was founded by Kyaw Thu, a Burmese film actor and film director. One of the top leading men of Burmese cinema in the 1980s and 1990s, Kyaw Thu continues to star in films and has directed several successful films. Since the early 2000s, Kyaw Thu has devoted much time to do social work for the poor. He is founder and vice president (now President) of the Free Funeral Services Society (FFSS), which provides free funeral services to the poor.

According to a Buddhist monk, “The rising popularity and influence of the FFSS, which relies on private donations among the Burmese public, has worried the junta so much so that in February 2008 it ordered several Rangoon journals not to publish information about the group’s activities, while the year before, its registration renewal was refused by the government until an appeal met with success.” [Source] 

Click the icon in the bottom right-hand corner to bring the film up to full size. 

Kyaw Thu with Aung San Suu Kyi at the 10th anniversary celebration of the founding of the Free Funeral Service Society.

We’re taking a break from Gambo this evening and posting some of the most ravishing and poignant farewell music ever written. This is on the prompting of one of our leading commenters, Gloria Mundi, who has always loved it best, and was prompted to scale the walls of the heavily defended GFG-Batesville Tower and deliver her request by means of a cleft stick having just heard David Attenborough choose it as one of his Desert Island Discs (because David is a serial fareweller on account of constantly setting off on close encounters with exotic brutes). You’ll be pleased to know that we offered Gloria a little sit-down and a nice cup of tea before ejecting her into the gathering dusk and the rush-hour traffic.

“I’ve just learned about his illness. Let’s hope it’s nothing trivial.”

Irvin S. Cobb

“I didn’t attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it.” 

Mark Twain

“His mother should have thrown him away and kept the stork.”

Mae West

“Some cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go..”

Oscar Wilde

“I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure.”  

Clarence Darrow

Hat tip to James Showers

Friday is competition day here at the GFG, and we’re giving a cigar to the first person correctly to fill in the blank. The story is recent, and comes from a regional newspaper.We”ll give you the rest of the story as soon as we have a winner. 

A GRIEVING family struggling to raise burial fees say they were advised by a funeral director: “Pool your resources and stick it on your credit card.”

Lillian Wilson, 88, died on January 13 and grandson, Andrzey said the family were not dealt with compassionately by funeral directors Moisters.

Andrzey said they used the firm as they had organised his father Ian’s funeral four years ago in a “sympathetic and professional manner.” But this time, he said the family were subjected to “aggressive pressure sales” at a time when they felt “vulnerable.”

Since Ian Wilson’s funeral, the family firm has been taken over by _____________________. 

Southport MP John Pugh said families must be kept informed when undertakers change hands.

He said: “The Co-op have a good reputation for funeral care but that being said, people should always be made clear who they are dealing with.

“At a time of crisis, families who have used the same undertakers over generations need to be told when things have changed.”

A spokesman from the funeral directors apologised to the family, added they pride themselves on “providing customer service of the highest possible quality.”

Andrzey said the family were “pressed from the outset” about fees.“There was no compassion for a grieving family,” he said.

“We were talking about how to pay the fees and the gentleman said to us; ‘why don’t you pool your resources and stick it on a credit card.’“

Andrzey, 29, who lives in Droitwich Spa in the Midlands said the family “sat around in shock” at the way they were treated.

As well as up front fees of £1,000, they must pay a “non-resident fee” because they don’t live locally.

But they were later told by another director that they did not need to pay as Mrs Wilson lived in Southport.

The spokesman from Moisters said: “A funeral director briefly discussed the funeral with a family member and the fees imposed by Sefton Council.

“These are £547 for re-opening a grave for a resident or £1,003 for a non-resident. We explained that we would have to take advice as to which fee applied because the owner of the plot (grandson Andrzey) lived out of the area.

“During the meeting we explained the requirement for a deposit payment to cover the cost of the council burial fees and other third party costs.

“If this could be met from the estate then we would not require the deposit but could directly invoice the bank or solicitor handling probate.”

The spokesman said the funeral director offered to meet the family again, but that they made alternative arrangements.

He added: “We pride ourselves on providing customer service of the highest quality and apologise if the family felt that they had not been treated in this manner.”

Find the story here

Mr Mensah a retired head teacher in Kwahu-Tafo, died in 1995 in Accra, where he was receiving medical treatment. His body was deposited in a mortuary for about a month. During that period, his children organized a full facelift of the house to prepare it for a worthy funeral: the roof and other parts of the house were repaired, the large courtyard was cemented, the house was painted, electricity was brought to the house and the road leading to the house was improved. Many of the things the old man had wanted to do during his life were done for him after his life, while his body was waiting in limbo. His children, one of whom lived in the USA, took care of the (re)construction work.

This is how they do it in Ghana, a country whose funeral rituals are little known beyond those groovy coffins we all love. Let’s not overlook the fact that Ghana incorporates many peoples and religions, each of which does its own thing. The Ghanaian funeral that we all know a little about is the Akan funeral.

The structure of Akan society is matrilinear. Akans place low value on marriage, so weddings are no big deal. Throughout their lives Akans cleave, not unto their spouse, but unto  the abusua, the matrilineal family. Akans divorce freely and easily. A woman will often walk away from her marriage once she’s had children. A man is expected to favour his sister’s children over his own. This has an effect on the way old people are looked after. You look less to your children, more to your abusua, to look after you when you get shaky. [Source]

If Akans don’t do weddings, boy do they do funerals. A funeral is a time for the abusua to celebrate itself publicly and assert its status. It is a social event. Much loved family members are given wonderful send-offs. So too are undeserving family members who may have been despised. Come one, come all. And a notable peculiarity of some of these lavish funerals is that they afford the deceased a lot more care when they’re dead than when they were alive and most in need of it. Some small social stigma attaches to those who don’t look after ailing family members, but no abusua could ever live down the disgrace of failing to give them a proper funeral. This stimulates lifelong funeral-going. In order to ensure the attendance and donations of others at your funeral you must have first attended and donated to as many of theirs as you could — every Saturday for many Ghanaians. If you don’t go to theirs, they won’t come to yours. 

Eighty per cent of Ghanaians live on around $2 a day. A funeral costs an average $2,500–£3,000. 

People dress up and travel to visit a funeral in another town or village. In turn, they expect the bereaved family to entertain them with show, music, dance, drinks, and sometimes food. In the evening it can be hard to find transport back to town, when trotros (minibuses for public transport) are stuffed with funeral guests going home. And every Saturday night people dressed in black and red funeral cloth flock together in Hotel de Kingsway to end the day’s funeral by dancing to the tunes of highlife music. Funerals are at the heart of Asante culture and social life. Asante funerals are also the terrain of great creativity, where various forms of expression and art come together. Cultural groups perform traditional drumming or songs; people show their dancing skills; highlife musicians compose popular songs on the deep sorrow caused by death; pieces of poetic oratory praise the life of the deceased; portrait paintings and sculptures are put on the grave; photographs are enlarged, framed and exhibited or printed on T-shirts; video shots are taken and edited into a beautiful document; people dress up in the latest funeral fashion; and sometimes scenes from the life of the deceased are acted out in theatre. Death, more than any other life event, seems to inspire people to artistic creations.

One could expect a traditional ritual, centred around the extended family and around beliefs about death and ancestorship, to reduce in importance under the influence of individualisation, urbanisation, the market economy, and Christianity. The opposite scenario is taking place in Ghana. Funerals are, more than any other ceremony, increasingly gaining in scale and importance. [Source]

One technological innovation above all others is responsible for this. The refrigerated mortuary. The longer a corpse remains in the morgue, the more prestige is attached to the funeral. This is not only because a longer period allows the family to make more preparations for a successful funeral; the mere duration of the corpse’s stay in the mortuary commands respect. People know the high prices of mortuaries and can estimate the amount of money the family spent.

The mortuary also gives the abusua  more time to get the money together for something really spectacular. Only a few selected people are able to see the dead body during its stay in the mortuary. It is ‘nowhere’ for some time. The person has died, but not yet socially. Almost secretly his body has been transferred to a technological limbo, where it waits its ‘rise’ to death, the social recognition of having died … The quality of the corpse constitutes an important element in the success of the funeral … after its reappearance from the morgue, the corpse is dressed, decorated, perfumed and laid out to be admired by large crowds of mourners. It will be filmed, if the family’s finances permit, and the camera will zoom in, revealing the smallest details of the dead face. It is no wonder that relatives do their utmost to assure that their corpses are well maintained, and tip the attendants at the mortuary for that purpose. In the brilliant Vimeo film below you can see that freezing the corpse makes it possible to stand it up at the wake. Please watch it.  

The upshot is that a hospital mortuary can become a major generator of income. In Nkawkaw the private Agyarkwa hospital accommodates 20 patients. Its mortuary hosts 60 corpses waiting for their funeral.

Some Ghanaians would like to reverse the trend towards ever more elaborate funerals, regarding them as a social problem and a bar to economic progress: 

One of the most serious attitudinal problems to have crept into the Ghanaian society is the insatiable desire to invest in the dead rather than the living. We go to bizarre extents to try to outdo each other in the grandeur of the funerals we organise. We take to task our compatriots who for better sanity or lack of resources try to organise relatively modest funerals, describing their efforts as “burying their loved ones like fowls”! … How can a people that hope to develop their impoverished nation become so obsessed with investment in the dead rather than the living? [Source]

In Britain we don’t have this problem. Our problem is too little, not too much.

More reading here, here, here, here and here.

How very much more appropriate for a funeral than My Way. Hats off to the Professor of Pop! Also to celebrant Karen Imms, who helped a family find this excellent song.

When somebody loves you
It’s no good unless he loves you all the way
Happy to be near you
When you need someone to cheer you all the way

[Chorus:]
Taller than the tallest tree is
That’s how it’s got to feel
Deeper than the deep blue sea is
That’s how deep it goes if it’s real

When somebody needs you
It’s no good unless he needs you all the way
Through the good or lean years
And for all the in-between years come what may

[Bridge:]
Who knows where the road will lead us
Only a fool would say
But if you’ll let me love you
It’s for sure I’m gonna love you all the way all the way

Scipio Africanus (1702 – 21 December 1720) was a slave born to unknown parents from West Africa. Very little is known of his life. He was the servant of  Charles William Howard, 7th Earl of Suffolk. Scipio lived in the Great House in Henbury, near Bristol. He died there aged, according to his headstone, eighteen.

I who was Born a PAGAN and a SLAVE
Now sweetly sleep a CHRISTIAN in my Grave
What tho’ my hue was dark my SAVIOR’S sight
Shall Change this darkness into radiant Light
Such grace to me my Lord on earth has given
To recommend me to my Lord in heaven
Whose glorious second coming here I wait
With saints and Angels him to celebrate

Bristol-based reggae band Black Roots, sang about him: