Desert flowers

Why do people go to funerals? After all, the dead person won’t be there—not in spirit.

I always think, when I survey a crowd at a funeral, that these people are being as unselfish as people can possibly be—and what a very rare thing that is.

What’s the motivation? To be there for the dead person. To be there for their family. Ask them what they feel about the dead person. They say “She’ll be much missed.” Note the use of the passive tense. They don’t say “I’ll miss her very much.” Self-interest doesn’t come into it. Do they come looking for comfort? They will certainly be comforted if the funeral is any good: if it does justice to the dead person But no, they do not come looking for comfort. Comfort is an unlooked for by-product. They are not there for I.

I’ve read two accounts of funerals this week, both on this theme. Both of them were for people who were unsuccessful in a worldly sense, but just happened to be incredibly nice human beings. Both accounts give us grounds for believing that, however horrible the human race can be, people are essentially good.

The first is told by a funeral director. He concludes: The feeling of love that poured out of these people for him was immense. The recurring theme was that he truly loved everyone he came in contact with, and that the feeling was reciprocated by all he met … You see, you don’t have to be a well-known politician to have a positive affect on the lives of others. You don’t have to be magnate of industry or a famous actor to make the world a better place.

The second is told by journalist Matthew Parris. His conclusion: People do detect goodness in others. They do respond. Nobility of soul does find its echo from other souls. Was Thomas Gray, in his ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’, right to say that ‘Full many a gem of purest ray serene/ The dark, unfathom’d caves of ocean bear/ Full many a flower is born to blush unseen/ And waste its sweetness on the desert air?’ No. We speak carelessly of the ingratitude of others, and the loneliness of virtue; but I think that when in some way a person rings true, many can hear it and they respond.

It’s only a rehearsal

Here’s an interesting practice. In South Korea, where rapid industrialisation has generated societal angst and personal dysfunction—things capitalism taught us here in the UK ages ago—a Mr Ko Min-su has devised a training course in which participants rehearse their own death. The purpose is to teach them to re-evaluate their priorities and value their lives. The goal is to cut the soaring suicide rate.

Participants are led to a dark room where they are told to sit at candlelit desks and write their wills and leave last messages to their families and loved ones.

Next they collect their funeral portraits, then make their way to the “death experience room”, a room full of open coffins, decorated with pictures of celeb dead people.

Mr Ko instructs his trainees to choose a coffin, put on a traditional hemp death robe and read out their wills one by one.

Next, they are buried. Trainees lie down in their coffins, while a man wearing the outfit of a traditional Korean death messenger places a flower on each person’s chest. Funeral attendants place lids on the coffins, banging each corner several times with a mallet. Dirt is thrown, rat-a-tat-tat, on the lid. The attendants then leave the hall for five minutes – but it seems like 30 minutes to those in the coffins.

Once the lids are lifted, Mr Ko asks the trainees how they felt. “When they were nailing the coffin and sprinkling the dirt, it felt like I was really dead,” says one. “I thought death was far away but now that I have experienced it, I feel like I have to live a better life.”

Mr Ko’s course is very popular, and he’s got patents to run the course in 17 other countries. How would it go down in our own dear UK?

Responses would point up the differences between the two cultures. Brits would not be so acquiescent, would they? They’d rage against the dying of the light with everything from uproariousness to bitter rage. They wouldn’t go gentle, no way, most of them.

What does this tell us, I wonder?

Read the whole story here. See a slideshow here.

No match for m’lud

M’learned friends have spoken. Davender Ghai’s appeal to the high court to overturn Newcastle City Council’s ban on open-air cremation has been turned down like a bedspread. The 1902 Cremation Act was used in evidence against him. Funny, that. I thought the Act applied only to cremations in a crematorium. Well, that was the thinking when the Act was drawn up. They weren’t thinking of funeral pyres at all when they wrote it.

Public reaction has been a) predictable and b) manipulated. If you want to get people to get behind this sort of thing, play the race card. Associate it in some way with outlandish practices like wife beating and honour killing and the cutting off of hands. Touch a xenophobic chord. Elicit the customary spittle-flecked rant: “Send ‘em back, for god’s sake. They can’t do that sort of thing over here, ‘course they can’t. This is a civilised society. Fair play and decency, that’s what we stand for. Bloody hell, they’ll be wanting towers of silence, next. And sati, for christssake. The floodgates’ll open …”

Our Justice Secretary, Jack Straw, understands this very well. He did it deftly and cunningly in 2006 when he asked his constituents to remove their niqab before talking to him. On funeral pyres, his message is that non-Hindus would be “upset and offended” by them. They’d “find it abhorrent that human remains were being burned in this way”.

There’s one in the eye for a practice which has endured for thousands of years. The inference is that it’s barbaric, as are the 800 million Hindus who practise it. And, yes, come to think of it, isn’t it just the antithesis of our own enlightened and aesthetically advanced methods of disposing of dead bodies? We either place our corpses so deep in the ground that they rot horribly and resolve themselves into methane and sludge, or we place them in a retort and burn them aggressively with gas jets, just as farmers do with dead livestock.

The debate about open-air cremation has centred on the cultural practices of certain Hindus. This has been and continues to be a distraction.

The truth of the matter is that a certain number of people of all faiths and none at all would like to be burned on a pyre. It is a very small number. It will not become a mass movement. They won’t want to do it in city-centre parks or beauty spots but on private land, in privacy.

And, do you know, there’s actually very little to stop you—if you are prepared to practise a little light deception. Simply send the paperwork, signed by two doctors, to the crematorium, where it will be scrutinised by the medical referee, who will approve cremation. That’s your green flag.

Cancel the crem at the last minute. Do not offer an explanation. Mumble, if necessary, about alternative arrangements.

You are now free to take your dead person to a remote location and have yourself a merry pyre, holding in mind all the while the inspiring consideration that our word ‘bonfire’ derives from the Old English ‘banefire’—literally, a bone fire.

Tell the registrar you buried the body on private land.

Note: you did not read this here first. If they come to get you, you’ve never heard of me. My purpose is only to helpfully point out a loophole to our lawmakers.

The Good Funeral Guide
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