Good Funeral Guide

Stand up, speak up, shut up

charles@goodfuneralguide.co.uk (Charles Cowling) — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 15:05:00 +0000

Here’s a nice, to-the-point eulogy:

My 91 year old Dad died on the morning of January 9th, 2010. Prior to his death, we had many discussions about the funeral arrangements, eulogy and his final interment. He wanted to be cremated and have his ashes scattered along the Charles River in Newton, but my Mother was very uncomfortable with that and preferred the more conventional path of a funeral service and burial. So it was to the 80 people gathered at the funeral home that I was able to deliver the last words that my father, Albert Kramer, wanted spoken on his behalf. He had told me..."Just tell them: To those of you that knew me, well, you knew me. To those of you that didn't, you missed something." I knew him, and I miss him.

From a Weekend Competition in the New York Times. See the rest of the entries here.

And what did you want?

charles@goodfuneralguide.co.uk (Charles Cowling) — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 12:19:00 +0000

There’s a sprightly piece about funerals in this week’s Spectator. Its content is not available free online, so I’ll transcribe the best bits and hope that I’m not infringing copyright but, rather, advertising the magazine.

It’s by James Delingpole.

If I’d written a film it would have been called Four Funerals and a Wedding, because personally I find funerals much more fun. Not all funerals, obviously. But the funeral of someone who’s not a close relative and who’s had a good innings can be a very splendid occasion.

...

God I hate weddings. The only one I’ve really enjoyed was my own, because I got to decide on the food and the music and all the speeches were about me ... It’s the trappedness I loathe and fear most ... At least with funerals you don’t go with any high expectations of fun and frivolity – whereas at weddings you do, setting yourself up for almost inevitable disappointment. And there’s an unspoken assumption at weddings that, as a guest, you’re privileged to be there and should be grateful to have made it onto the invitation list, which puts pressure on you to be on your best behaviour. At a funeral, on the other hand, you’re thought to be putting yourself out slightly. The family are touched and appreciative that you’ve made the effort. Also there’s no best man, no sit-down food ordeal, you don’t have to bring a present, and if you do behave badly no one minds or even notices because everyone’s on one of those weird, faintly hysterical, ‘it’s what he would have wanted’ post-funeral highs.

Then there’s death. I don’t think nearly enough of us think nearly often enough about this and what it means ... I think that we might all be inclined to live better, more fruitful lives. I thought of this as [the daughter of a man whose funeral he had attended] read out a homily attributed to RL Stevenson (though more likely to be a variant on something written in 1904 for a poetry competition by an American woman named Bessie Stanley). It goes: ‘That man is a success who has lived well, laughed often and loved much; who has gained the respect of intelligent men and the love of children; who has filled his niche and accomplished his task; who leaves the world better than he found it, whether by an improved poppy, a perfect poem or a rescued soul; who never lacked appreciation of earth’s beauty or failed to express it. Who looked for the best in others and gave the best he had...’ When spoken right next to the coffin containing the body of someone who’s course is run, those words have quite an impact.

On a similar note, this is the poem short story writer Raymond Carver had inscribed on his grave:

LATE FRAGMENT

And did you get what

you wanted from this life, even so?

I did.

And what did you want?

To call myself beloved, to feel myself

beloved on the earth.

Cosmic laughter

charles@goodfuneralguide.co.uk (Charles Cowling) — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 13:59:00 +0000

If people cry at weddings why should they not laugh at funerals? If the person who has died made them laugh when he/she was alive, then laughter is a very proper way of commemorating them.

We find all sorts of things funny because humour is not just a way of expressing jollity, it is also a way of dealing with pain and suffering. This is why the trenches of the first world war bred so many jokes. This is why the emancipated inhabitants of countries lately under the yoke of the Soviet empire have stopped laughing so much.

All sorts of things make us laugh. But do you ever laugh at the Cosmos? Why would you do that?

Here’s an extract from Vedprakash Sharma’s blog. He’s a teacher in Delhi with a taste for music. He says:

You laugh at the whole situation as it is. The whole situation, as it is, is absurd -- no purpose in the future, no beginning in the beginning. The whole situation of Existence is such that if you can see the Whole -- such a great infinite vastness moving toward no fixed purpose, no goal -- laughter will arise. So much is going on without leading anywhere; nobody is there in the past to create it; nobody is there in the end to finish it. Such is whole Cosmos -- moving so beautifully, so systematically, so rationally. If you can see this whole Cosmos, then a laughter is inevitable.

He goes on to tell a very charming story about three Buddhist monks, and the funeral of one of them. Read it here.

FUNERIA

charles@goodfuneralguide.co.uk (Charles Cowling) — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 12:26:00 +0000

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.

More than just a matter of tone

charles@goodfuneralguide.co.uk (Charles Cowling) — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 10:48:00 +0000

This is an interesting blog post. Here's a taster:

What I hate most at funerals is the tone used by the officiant (almost wrote: the presiding officer). No matter what the religious faith may be, the person in front of the congregation speaks as if he knew ... I think it’s the tone of voice that does me in. As if the officiant had a direct line into whatever deity resides in that particular structure. I’d rather hang around with the person’s old buddies, whoever they may be ... We’d drink to his peace of mind and ours, then we’d start working his absence into the fabric of things.

Read all of it here.

Pets and people together forever

charles@goodfuneralguide.co.uk (Charles Cowling) — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 16:51:00 +0000

It’s intriguing to see what grabs the attention of people, especially when it’s something you don’t, yourself, reckon to be at all eyebrow-raising.

Down in Cornwall, Penny Lally at Penwith Woodland Burial Place is burying pets with their owners. So remarkable is this reckoned to be that the story has whizzed round the world in the last few days. People are needing to get their heads around it – but they’re doing that and they like it. Interesting to note that the Daily Mail ran the story in Femail. Ain't it a bloke ting too, huh?

You can also be “Rolled round in earth's diurnal course / With rocks, and stones, and trees” together with your dumb chums at Tarn Moor.

And at a natural burial ground near you, shortly, no doubt. Good oh!

(Love that memorial at Tarn Moor. See pic in the Mail story.)

Does mass burial horrify you?

charles@goodfuneralguide.co.uk (Charles Cowling) — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 12:00:00 +0000

Interesting piece in USA Today on mass graves in Haiti and the importance people attach to marking the spot where their dead are laid - a physical point of connection. "We are hard-wired to want to know where our dead are, whether we believe in a superior being or not," asserts Curtis Rostad, an Indiana funeral director. Even Neanderthals, he reminds us, buried their dead with flowers.

Curtis, we remind ourselves, has a commercial interest in burial. And when he uses that seductive metaphor ‘hard-wired’, is that how human brains really work?

We pride ourselves on having evolved somewhat since the days when Neanderthals roamed the earth. We’ve done that by suppressing many of our Neanderthal impulses. We value reason over instinct. It’s what makes us civilised.

Or does it?

Read it here. Don't miss the link to a sprightly piece on orphan-napping.

Letting go

charles@goodfuneralguide.co.uk (Charles Cowling) — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 13:46:00 +0000

Obachan Funeral 2008 from Steven S Friedman on Vimeo.

There’s a thought provoking post over at Mindfulness and Mortality about the role of the body at a funeral. Among many other interesting ideas, blogger Gloriamundi articulates this:

Somehow, people have to let a body go. It's very difficult to do, because the life of the person they knew was embodied - literally, in that body. The life and the body were the same thing. The body is now a different body, and the mourners have to move towards seeing it as different - something they must let go of. They have to leave with something non-physical, with an enhanced sense of the meaning of the life that is ended.

This is something we have to think through if we are to engage with the nature and the purpose of a funeral. It’s a terribly tough emotional and philosophical transition to make, from caring tenderly for the body of a dead person through to destroying it or permitting it to be destroyed. In the case of cremation, the destruction of the cherished body happens hardheartedly fast after the funeral ceremony. This is illustrated, I think, by the video above.

On whose authority?

charles@goodfuneralguide.co.uk (Charles Cowling) — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 15:39:00 +0000

It’s an interesting fact that a funeral director can go to a hospital mortuary and collect a dead person to bring back to their funeral home on the verbal instruction of that dead person’s executor. That’ll be good enough for the mortuary. If a funeral director whom they’ve never seen before turns up, they may ask for proof that he or she actually is a funeral director. A letterhead will normally suffice. What the mortuary doesn’t ask for is written authorisation from the executor.

So far as I know, no one has ever collected from a mortuary a body to which they had no entitlement. Could a couple of Satanists in disguise go and get someone? I rather think they could. Please tell me I am wrong.

Teresa Evans runs a campaign whose object is to require public bodies to inform the public fully on all matters concerning bereavement. She wants their consumer rights and human rights to be properly respected.

She is presently researching this matter of authorisation, so I asked her to write something for this blog. If you want to respond, please do so in a comment below or direct to Teresa through her website.

A NHS Mortician unlawfully gave clothing worn by my son at his death to my contracted funeral undertaker who did not have my consent to collect these items.

The undertaker took it upon himself to bury the clothing, which he claimed was heavily blood stained, in a plastic bag beneath my son’s body in his coffin.

This experience has highlighted to me the necessity for funeral undertakers to produce a letter of authority that is specific to whatever personal property they might be collecting on behalf of their contracted party (the bereaved) from either a NHS Mortuary or a Public mortuary.

I seek to challenge that this practice be applied so to serve protection on public bodies within the NHS and the bereaved alike, and would welcome other people’s viewpoints.

Funeralcare screwupdate

charles@goodfuneralguide.co.uk (Charles Cowling) — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 09:51:00 +0000

Naughty scenes, it seems, recently shattered the reverent if gloomy atmosphere of George Pettit and Son, undertakers to the good people of Chester. At the staff Christmas party all manner of impropriety seems to have been committed. In an admirably tight-lipped and understated report, the Sunday People spells out in caps the words STRIPPING, THONG, BOOZED and KARAOKE. Gives you an idea. A sample sentence reads: “One video shot from the Christmas Eve party shows a worker with a nipple chain wearing only a thong with the slogan ‘Jingle My Bells’”.

Let not your indignation target the blameless Mr Pettit. It would never have happened in his day. The eminence grise behind the name above the door is none other than...

Co-operative Funeralcare.

Read the People report here.

Thomas G Long

charles@goodfuneralguide.co.uk (Charles Cowling) — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 09:43:00 +0000

An interview with Thomas G. Long, author of Accompany Them With Singing - The Christian Funeral. from Westminster John Knox Press on Vimeo.

Thomas G Long here, one of this blog's great heroes. Though he comes at funerals from a Christian viewpoint, most of his ideas have a universal application.

He talks about the growing practice in the US to have a funeral without a body (though with ashes, often). That's not happening to any great extent over here in the UK. But there is a conversation to be had about the role and purpose of a body at a funeral. In most UK crematoria it is set well apart from, and never in the body of, the audience. It is present, but not involved. There's a lack of conviction in this, a grudging acquiescence, you could say.

Great to hear Mr Long talk of funeral directors (and priests) who get it.

Worst funeral songs #1 - My Way

charles@goodfuneralguide.co.uk (Charles Cowling) — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 11:43:00 +0000

There was a little light larking at the Dead Interesting blog last week as we debated best funeral songs for atheists. Off the tops of our heads we came up with You Ain't Goin’ Nowhere - Bob Dylan, No God - Darkest Hour, Heaven is a Place on Earth - Belinda Carlisle, and, from Rupert, a variation on the famous Bob Marley song: No Jesus, No Cry. Perhaps you can think of others?

Then I found this string over at Fluther in response to: What would be an inappropriate song to play at a funeral? Most of them are a little weak, but I have to declare a weakness for We’ve Only Just Begun - Carpenters, Stayin’ Alive - Bee Gees, and Who Wants To Live Forever? - Queen. Bitches Ain’t Shit by Dr Dre sounds a contemporaneously anarchic note much favoured at Brit funerals. But for me the clear winner is: Anything by ABBA. I don’t know that it’s possible to get inappropriater than that. Made me chuckle for the rest of the day. Oh, except that, now I think of it, Take A Chance On Me has got to be a pretty good way to go for an agnostic:

If you need me, let me know, gonna be around

If you've got no place to go, if you're feeling down

If you're all alone when the pretty birds have flown

Honey I'm still free

But. Seriously. Worst funeral song. It’s got to be My Way, surely? It’s clear in its renunciation of any divinity (otherwise you’d have done it God’s Way). Nothing wrong with that: it’s a defensible existential stance. But what about the message to spouse/partner, family, friends, work colleagues, neighbours – indeed, every else in the entire world? It’s perfectly clear. I didn’t need you. You meant nothing to me. I did it without you. Yes, and in case you were wondering, I was self-created, too.

For what is a man, what has he got?

If not himself, then he has naught

Could there be a more self-regarding, more narcissistic funeral song than this?

I hate it. Got anything worse?

Some conflict of interest, surely?

charles@goodfuneralguide.co.uk (Charles Cowling) — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 16:03:00 +0000

Michael Parkinson

HM Government Dignity Ambassador for old people, and...

...the face behind Sun Life funeral plans, which are...

...Co-operative funeral plans.

Tut tut.

Singers for Funerals

charles@goodfuneralguide.co.uk (Charles Cowling) — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 13:46:00 +0000

From their press release:

Singers for Funerals is the brainchild of two professional opera singers, mezzo soprano Kirsty Young and soprano Toni Nunn. Both have performer with professional opera companies across the UK and beyond, including Kirsty's own company, Hatstand Opera. Between them, the two ladies have sung in over 600 venues in the UK, from cathedrals to tiny parish churches, theatres to town halls, mansions to marquees.

Kirsty Young is keen to bring all that performing experience to provide quality singing for funerals:
"After singing at various funerals over the years, we realised how music could be a great comfort to family members at a difficult time, by celebrating what their loved one enjoyed in life. It is often very difficult for churches to provide a choir to sing at funerals or cremations. Many families therefore had no choice but to use recorded music, where they might have preferred a real 'live' singer. We give families back that option for live music, sung by an experienced professional, at an affordable price."

I like them. Check out their website and their voices here.

The D-Word

charles@goodfuneralguide.co.uk (Charles Cowling) — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 12:15:00 +0000

There’s a new book out about dying and death. It’s called, appropriately, The D-Word. Now, there’s a heap of books out there about long-term care of the very ill; there’s another heap about bereavement. We don’t urgently need more of them. But there’s hardly anything out there about grim D. We do urgently need more D-books.

I didn’t feverishly tear it free from its Amazon packaging. Two reasons. I know the author, Sue Brayne, slightly. On a personal level I like her a lot. She’s absolutely not one of these too-nice-to-be-true people you can meet too many of in the death industry. She tells it as it is. We met at a conference of conjoined quangos which has now re-badged as Dying Matters. I blogged about it intemperately at the time. I sounded off in the street afterwards as I walked with Sue to the station. She made no objection to the f-word, either. I honour her for that. I very, very much don’t want to not like her book.

Second reason? The father of a good friend went to hospital a fortnight ago. After conducting batteries of tests, the people who work miracles, the doctors, had that conversation with the family where they make it gently clear that, this time, there’s no cure, just care. He’s going to die. Probably quite soon. Unthinkable? No, they all knew it would happen sometime; he’s been getting old fast recently. But thought about? Not much. Some things you don’t think about till you have to.

So what my friend, and his family, and his dad all need is somewhere to go where they can find out about this business of dying. They need information. And because news like this can make you feel very lonely, very disconnected, they need to know how it felt for others, too, so that they can set their experience in a broader context. And for all the well-meaning advice I have been able to offer them, and not very much at that, it’d be so much better to have a book to recommend.

Come to think of it, I need some advice, too, on how to conduct myself towards this dying man and his family. I like them all very much. I’ve known them for years. They are good people. It’s going to be really hard.

So: reviewing Sue’s book isn’t an exercise in judicious objectivity. Bluntly, it had better be very good or I’m going to feel badly let down.

And the good news is that it is superb.

Sue sets out her stall: “The D-Word is based on the lived, felt, human response of what it’s like to die.” Her method? To tell it “through the personal narratives of relatives, friends and carers”. Sue draws conclusions from these stories. She also gives us lots of useful information and, by doing so, a language of dying. Literally. A vocabulary. So that we can talk about it and understand the hazards of not talking about it – and the hazards of talking about it in treacherous euphemisms.

Sue covers the ground. A little potted history tells us how we got to be so death denying. She examines the value of an existential explanation – a faith (though she doesn’t cover atheism). She examines how professional carers regard dying. There’s an excellent chapter about survivors of violent or sudden death, what helped and what didn’t. She talks about both where to find support and how to give it. She tells us how to support the dying. And she tells us what dying feels like, much of which is the fruit of her years of research with Peter Fenwick. She does all this in just 165 pages. She has interviewed the best possible people, and must be congratulated on finding them. She has even tracked down one of the UK’s best and nicest undertakers, James Showers, whose definition of a funeral is, I think, both moving and brilliant. A funeral, he says, transforms “a fact – that someone has died – into a ritual that is authentic and relevant to those who were close to that person, to help them say goodbye in public and with meaning ... to turn their grief into something beautiful.”

I don’t know how many copies Sue has sold yet – it’s early days. She’s just sold another. I am sending one to my friend as soon as I have posted this. Thank you, Sue.

You can buy the book from Amazon. As recommended as it gets. Find it here.

Burial depth

charles@goodfuneralguide.co.uk (Charles Cowling) — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 15:50:00 +0000

Dave Matthews here, supporting my campaign for shallower burial.

Want the lyric? Find it here.

Still, small voice of calm

charles@goodfuneralguide.co.uk (Charles Cowling) — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 16:50:00 +0000

The novelist Martin Amis has called for euthanasia booths on street corners, where elderly people can end their lives with “a martini and a medal”.

The author of Time’s Arrow and London Fields even predicts a Britain torn by internal strife in the 2020s if the demographic timebomb of the ageing population is not tackled head-on.

“How is society going to support this silver tsunami?” he asks in an interview in The Sunday Times Magazine today.

“There’ll be a population of demented very old people, like an invasion of terrible immigrants, stinking out the restaurants and cafes and shops. I can imagine a sort of civil war between the old and the young in 10 or 15 years’ time.”

Read the Sunday Times account here. And the Independent account here.

Conspicuous combustion

charles@goodfuneralguide.co.uk (Charles Cowling) — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 15:22:00 +0000

No new technology devised for the improved disposal of dead bodies has managed to achieve both efficiency and spectacle. There’s a perfectly good reason for this: the brains behind cremation and cryomation and resomation never reckoned spectacle to be a selling point. After all, funerals in the UK are private events, most of them. When they aren’t, it’s the processional that’s spectacular, not the disposal. Where’s the climax point in such a funeral? I’m not at all sure that there is one. Ought there to be? I don’t know. What do you think?

Over in Pattaya, Thailand, there’s a foreigner who records his assorted ramblings in a blog. When I say ramblings, I’m using his word. I’d have gone one better. It’s a good blog, an interesting read, and our rambling foreigner is a good photographer.

He recently witnessed the spectacular funeral pyre of a local Buddhist monk. So long did the construction of the pyre take, the monk had been dead for a year before being able to check out on it. At the top, a pic of the pyre. According to our rambler: “the pyre was an impressive sight, and they had even built in a degree of animation. Yellow tapes extended out on both sides into temple buildings, and unseen hands were pulling them to flap the wings and move the elephant head and trunk.”

Below is a photo of the pyre in its full glory. Read the blog post and see more photos here.

German way of death

charles@goodfuneralguide.co.uk (Charles Cowling) — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 11:43:00 +0000

Interesting piece in the Earth Times on how Germans are doing funerals differently:

Germany is experiencing a new type of culture of bereavement. People are moving away from the classic funeral with a priest and familiar rituals to one that confronts grief and death in a more personal way.

"Germany's funeral culture is experiencing fundamental change at the moment," says Professor Norbert Fischer, a historian at Hamburg University. Fischer says a growing number of people want to decide what happens to their bodies after their death. The bereaved also want a less tense and cramped approach to the funeral ceremony.

This change is expressing itself in a number of very different ways. "On the one hand there is rapid growth in the number of anonymous burials. There is also growth in the type of place where funerals and memorial ceremonies are taking place," says Fischer. In Germany there are over 80 forested areas, for example, where ecologically friendly urns can be buried beside trees.

There is also an increasing number of common graves. Fans of Hamburg soccer club can now find their final resting place at a plot close to the club's grounds in Altona district. Members of the club "Garden of Women" can be buried alongside former famous Hamburg residents in Ohlsdorf graveyard.

Read the whole article here. The pic at the top is by Mike Egan.

No Grey Suits

charles@goodfuneralguide.co.uk (Charles Cowling) — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 11:53:00 +0000

Another home funeral story today. It’s beautiful. And the account was written by a man. So much of what read about home funerals is by women, so it’s good to have this balance.

It’s called No Grey Suits. Grey Suits = funeral home staff. You can download it as a pdf (all 52 pages of it). Very well written and illustrated. Very empowering. Here’s how its author, Jack Manning, begins:

This book is a love story, or more correctly, a story of love. And how a bunch of friends and family came together to celebrate the end of life and help each other get through the loss of their friend, mother, wife, daughter, sister and colleague.

Download the book here.

Earth, wind and pyre

charles@goodfuneralguide.co.uk (Charles Cowling) — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 10:51:00 +0000

The be-wigged hair-splitters are having a sprightly time of it in the Appeal Court, where Davender Ghai is demanding the right to be burned, when he’s dead, on an open air funeral pyre.

This is a matter of concern not just to those Hindus who want what Baba Ghai wants, but to anyone who wants to be burned on a pyre. There’s nothing exclusively Hindu about a pyre. The Natural Death Centre is right behind Davender Ghai’s appeal, and Rupert Callender has written in support of him:

It is a mistake to see this legal challenge as coming from a minority group seeking a religious right that is alien to us, it is actually part of a wider demand for social change and as the recent excavations at Stonehenge are revealing, a part of our own indigenous cultural heritage. Rituals involving fire for purification, celebration and seasonal marking abound all over this country. The revived Beltane celebrations in Edinburgh are attended by over 12 thousand people. Up Helly Aa, the Viking fire festival in Lerwick in Shetland is the largest such ritual in Europe. The town of Lewes in Sussex has retained an extraordinary and enviable continuation of culture and identity based entirely around the bonfire celebrations of November The 5th, and let us not forget the public outdoor burning of the druid Dr Price in front of a crowd of twenty thousand, whose challenge was influential in legalising cremation in the first place.

In court yesterday the arguments swirled around what constitutes a building. Ramby de Mello, representing Davender Ghai, offered this definition:

“The expression crematorium should mean any building fitted with appliances for the burning of human remains. ‘Building’ is not defined. We say it should be given a broad meaning.”

At close of play yesterday, the mood in the Ghai camp was upbeat. Given their mood at the start of proceedings, this is encouraging. Today should be interesting.

Read the account in the Times here.

Should she or shouldn't she?

charles@goodfuneralguide.co.uk (Charles Cowling) — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 13:06:00 +0000

When Charlotte Raven was diagnosed with Huntington's, an incurable degenerative disease, there seemed only one option: suicide. But would deciding how and when to die really give her back the control she desperately craved? And what about the consequences for her husband and young daughter?

In 2006, 18 months after the birth of my baby, I tested positive for Huntington's disease. The nurse who delivered the news hugged me consolingly and left me with my husband and a mug of sweet tea to cry. In the days that followed, I began to realise why so few of the people at risk of inheriting this incurable neurodegenerative disorder chose to find out.

Having tested positive for HD, I was told it was inevitable that I would develop the disease at some point – but that it was not possible to know when. HD typically strikes in midlife. A fortunate few like my father suffer no symptoms until as late as their 60s, but for most it begins in their late 30s to mid-40s. I am 40 years old.

My first suicidal thought was a kind of epiphany – like Batman figuring out his escape from the Joker's death trap. It seemed very "me" to choose death over self-delusion. Ah ha, I thought. For the first time since the diagnosis, I slept through the night.

Very interesting article on self-deliverance/suicide in the Guardian. Long, but well worth it. Read it all here.

Thing or person?

charles@goodfuneralguide.co.uk (Charles Cowling) — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 11:04:00 +0000

I was called to perform an emergency Taharah – the ritual cleansing and preparation of a body for burial. I was the rabbi of a large congregation, and although I had participated in Taharot in this funeral home, I had never been summoned for an "emergency Taharah."

The manager of the funeral home, a friend, walked me to the door of the Taharah room but refused to enter with me. I peeked in and saw that there was a tiny body under the sheet, and assumed that the man, who had suffered the terrible loss of a son-in-law and grandchild in an auto accident, could not bear to see a dead baby.

I prepared everything I would need and uncovered the body. Whatever it was under the sheet barely appeared to be human. I was horrified by what I saw.

Read the rest of this remarkable and incredibly heartwarming story here.

Different cultures, different customs

charles@goodfuneralguide.co.uk (Charles Cowling) — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 09:17:00 +0000

Phero Tran Tieu's Funeral from Joseph Pham on Vimeo.

Why do atheists have dead bodies at funerals?

charles@goodfuneralguide.co.uk (Charles Cowling) — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 13:58:00 +0000

The question Can you have a funeral without a body? is not as useful as the question Why would you have a dead body at a funeral? Yes, yes, you can’t have a wedding or a civil partnership without the happy couple, and you can’t have a baby naming without a baby, so how can you have a funeral without a corpse? But are these events equivalent to a funeral? A corpse is a passive, insensate participant, that’s the difference. Yes, a baby is not an active participant at its naming, but it has to live with the consequences. What difference does a funeral make to a corpse?

That’s the nub of it. And the answer is that for some people a funeral does make a difference to the corpse and for others it does not.

There are, I think, three ways you can view a dead body. Think, now, of your own body when it’s dead. Which of the following will apply?

1. My body and my soul belong together (I am not dead, I am sleeping).

2. I had a body. Now I am a spirit (my body is old clothes).

3. I had a body. That was me (ditto).

Each describes a specific bodily status. Number 1 is explicitly Christian; you are sort of sleeping, awaiting resurrection in your earthly body. Number 2 is broadly spiritual. Number 3 is explicitly atheist. If you are a number 1 or 2 you are going somewhere; you are in a state of transition, the difference being that 2s leave their bodies behind. If you are a number 3 everything stopped when you took your last breath. Every minute that passes thereafter leaves you further and further in the past.

In order to mark the transition of a dead body number 1 it makes good sense to demonstrate its continuing dynamic by physically bringing it to a departure ceremony and wish it safe journey.

For a number 2 body I’d have thought a departure ceremony optional. John Lennon was a 2. Yoko One had his body burnt unattended and held a memorial ceremony instead, to take place everywhere and anywhere. “Pray for his soul from wherever you are,” she said. But inasmuch as the flight of a soul is about movement and transition and endurance, a farewell ceremony for the body is an appropriately symbolic alternative.

As for the number 3s, I’m not sure that they’ve thought this through. Ask an atheist if he or she wants to be cremated or buried. Chances are you’ll be made aware of a strong preference, arrived at in the consideration of a strong revulsion for one or the other. Wrong answer. The right answer is that it doesn’t matter a bit.

So, for number 3s, atheists, to bring a dead body, outworn carcass and so much deadweight, to a farewell ceremony would seem to be illogical and unnecessary. For atheists, surely, it’s got to be a memorial service every time?

My argument is not nearly as cut and dried as it seems.