FUNERIA

Anubis urn by Jack Thompson for FUNERIA

Tattoo Urn (Goldfish) by Susan Bach for FUNERIA

Aesthetics. Taste. What’s naff, what’s ravishing? We’ve been there before in this blog and we’ll go there again. Bandit country.

The clothing, merchandise and interior decor of death is dignified, is magnificent, is horrible. It’s whatever you think it is. Undertakers’ frock coats.Traditional coffins with their sonorous names: Arundel, Chatsworth, Montacute. Chapels of rest. Hearses. ‘Floral tributes’. Headstones. ‘Memorial items’. Ashes urns. Cremation jewellery.

Coffins have become a lot more eye-friendly. What of the rest? It is notable that, in the matter of memorialising, some Brits, rather than be seen dead in a conventional cemetery, take themselves off to natural burial grounds where they can be sure to have none of it. That’s a strong reaction.

I’ll declare my own position on all the ashes urns I’ve ever seen: With the exception of the ARKA Acorn Urn I don’t like them. This one in particular.

But I really like these, above, from a group of artists based in California. They’ve even made me rethink the desirability of keeping ashes at home.

They’re called FUNERIA. Click through and see what your eyes think.

Adventurous ashes

When Ralph B White died two years ago his friends at the Adventurers Club of Los Angeles set about taking portions of his ashes to all manner of furthest flung parts of the globe.

"Rather than have people mourn him, he wanted to give people incentive to go have adventures," said Rosaly Lopes, who was engaged to White when he died and is the keeper of the ashes.

Though White covered a lot of the Earth during his life, said Krista Few, his daughter, most of these scatterings have delivered his ashes to new territory. "The competition is what is the most bizarre place we can take Ralph?"

It's a nice story. Read it here.

Haunting presence

Is there a psychologically satisfactory way of disposing of a dead person’s body? That’s a judgement only you can make. If you buy into a belief system you’ll probably have no difficulty because faith renders what must be done, the burning, the burying, the dissolution and the nature of it, rational and purposeful. Rational, that is, in the context of faith, not of objective reason, so you can call it kidology if you like just as one faith will denounce another faith’s practices as superstition. Until we can feel sure about what happens next, when we die, we’ll never be clear of unease and puzzlement. Because what we have to do is to get our heads around horror.

The beauty of burial is that it results in the permanent relocation of the complete body. You think it’s all over as the soil rattles down on the coffin. It is. Your hands are now empty.

Not so with cremation. You get a version of the body back. You haven’t necessarily conducted a full imaginative rehearsal for this. Suddenly, there it is. Now get your head around what it has become, its composition, its dimensions, its divisibility, its ludicrous portability, the way it haunts. What to do with these pulverised bone fragments we call ashes? In the words of one blogger diarist in the US, “I'm not really sure how I feel about all this urn-as-dad stuff. Or dad-as-urn.”

She starts her post: “I never thought we'd be the type of family who would refer to an urn of ashes by name. And yet, here I was, a day after my father's funeral, reading over my mom's list of what to pack for our trip down to the Outer Banks and right after "beach towels" and "fishing rods" was "Jim."”

Read the rest here.

Don't trash the ash

http://www.flickr.com/photos/siobhanbyrne/798944733/page2/

There – just over there. See them? That conspiratorial huddle, furtive, watchful. Burglars? Satanists? What are they up to?

Chances are they’re only bereaved people waiting for the coast to clear before they can scatter some cremated remains.

It’s difficult to do that in public, openly. It might distress people. It’s not yet a socially okay thing to do.

But the impulse to scatter ashes in a place beloved of the personification of those ashes is strong and it is growing. And the chances are that the dead person’s favourite place was, at any given time, a favourite place of lots of other people, too.

The scattering of ashes is a ceremony often marked by awkwardness and secrecy. A pity.

It is also often done shamefacedly, in the wrong place. The adverse effect of ashes on the ecology of uplands is well attested, yet people go on doing it. Staff at Jane Austen’s cottage in Hampshire regularly encounter piles of ashes around the writer’s home and garden. This puts ash scattering right up there with dog fouling. It’s a poor way to commemorate someone, turning them into a bio-hazard. It's not the sort of thing you're going to feel good about.

There’s probably a very straightforward rule of thumb for choosing an appropriate location: if you can’t do it safely, openly and vocally, don’t.

The Observer ran a piece on this on Sunday. Read it here.

Absence from whom we love is worse than death

Ask a hardline atheist if they want to be buried or cremated. Their response ought to be a predictable “I don’t care, my dead body won’t be me any more, I’ll have gone from being a me to an it.” But I’ve never met an atheist who didn’t express a preference, an insistence, even, and talk about their dead body as a me, as in “I don’t want to lie in a hole rotting away full of maggots,” etc.

It’s illogical but it’s the sort of thing you tend to notice only once it’s pointed out. Illogic pervades everything to do with death and funerals, we accept this easily, unthinkingly, particularly in the matter of letting go of the body. Religious people are no less illogical.

Once you've let go of the body, what’s left? Plenty. Feelings. Memories. Admiration. Gratitude. Example. Values. You don’t have to let go of any of them. You can still see the dead person in your mind’s eye; you can still hear them in your mind’s ear. You could argue that most of the most important things are left, together either with the joyful reassurance of the dead person’s present non-existence or their blissful afterlife on the Other Side.

It’s not the dead person’s body we miss but everything their body embodied. It’s the black hole of absence we grieve for, the loss of continuing presence of all those things we don’t have to let go of, that we haven't lost. Nothing can compensate for that.

So we cling to their bodies in ways which are, to paraphrase Tom Lynch, sacred and silly. Claire Seeber, writing in the Guardian, keeps her grandmother’s ashes in the glove compartment of her car; Keith Richard famously snorted his dad’s; Patsy Kensit slept beside her mother’s for years. One man, Stanley, brought his wife’s ashes home. “There was no plan,” he says, “so I put her in the wardrobe … Now I find it comforting to know she is there safe and, most important to me, warm. It might sound irrational -- as a scientist I know there’s no logic in it, and I’m not religious or superstitious -- but … I’m just reassured to know that she’s not out there in the cold … she’s still with me when I’m sleeping.” Read the whole article here.

Ashes in the wardrobe, a little shrine on the mantelpiece -- sacred and silly; silly but sacred.

Where do you draw the line?

The recent picture at the top shows Lenin having a restorative bath. Sacred? Silly?

Your call.