October 2009 – Page 2 – The Good Funeral Guide

Funeralcare screwupdate

8 October 2009

Charles

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Categories: Co-op

THE SCENE: An undertaker’s premises in a shopping centre in the middle of a council estate on the outskirts of Hull. ENTER three ten year-old children…

Before we resume the narrative, consider for a moment what a ten year-old is. It is a half-size version of an adult. It speaks as a child. It understands as a child. It thinks as a child. It looks like a child. Dammit, it is a child.

The children ask if they can see the body of Daniel Trott, a 22 year-old who died when his motorbike collided with a lamppost. They are, they explain, friends of Daniel. The undertaker nods and ushers them into the chapel of rest.

Picture the scene.

What happened next? The little lads later bumped into Daniel’s brother and told them all about it. Daniel’s brother told his Mum. His Mum hit the roof. She had expressly told the undertaker that no one was to visit Daniel except those she authorised. The undertaker had helpfully given her business cards so that these people could identify themselves when they arrived. A good system, but not, it seems, foolproof.

A spokeswoman for The Co-operative Funeralcare, said: “Our member of staff acted in good faith, believing the boys, who explained they were friends of the deceased, had been given permission by the deceased’s mother. This was an error, for which we have apologised to the family.”

Hmnn. Read the account in the Hull Daily Mail here.

Marching to the edge of eternity

7 October 2009

Charles

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Categories: Processions

The purpose of a funeral is to express and reaffirm beliefs that make sense of a death in terms of, both, the tenets of the dead person and those of the living. We don’t see a lot of common purpose in an age in which faith has fragmented. All funerals alienate to a greater or lesser extent.

As a result, there is a move to make them less offensive, more inclusive. Secularists draw disparate mourners together by finding common ground: by focussing on the dead person and celebrating their life. Sorrow is tempered by joy. Where spirituality is addressed, it is with fondness rather than fervour. Heaven is envisioned not as an exclusive venue of staggering magnificence but, rather, a nice place for a picnic. Where such a ceremony is bland and euphemistic, we are indulgent. It is the price of compromise. Where there are football shirts on the coffin, banal poetry, Henry Scott Holland and mawkish or sniggermaking songs, we redouble our indulgence. We’ve all done the diversity training. We bite our tongues behind arranged smiles.

The secular funeral is an evolving rite. If it bungles sometimes, we should not be surprised.

The benchmark against which secularists measure its progress is, of course, the poor, bloody Christian funeral, a rite which has much to answer for, especially when conducted with the disengaged perfunctoriness for which it has achieved especial notoriety. For all that, we can only pity all those priests who have ever presided at funerals at which the congregation has glowered back at them with hollow, hostile eyes, alienated by the very liturgy that they had called upon the priest to deliver.

Christians, too, are now moving towards a more conciliatory, secular way of doing things. And this is the subject of a very interesting essay by Thomas G Long. “These newer practices,” he says, “are attractive mainly because they seem to offer relief from the cosmeticized, sentimental, impersonal and often costly funerals that developed in the 1950s, which were themselves parodies of authentic Christian rituals.” And yet, he says: “Contemporary Christian funeral practices certainly need to be changed, but change should be more a matter of recovery and reformation than innovation and improvisation.”

Christian funeral rites, he says, need to be ‘pristinised’. We note, here, that almost every innovation in funerals draws its inspiration from the past. But what is interesting about Professor Long’s analysis is that it is, I think, equally instructive to secularists.

He identifies three elements in a funeral: preparation, processional, burial. “The funeral itself was deemed to be the last phase of a lifelong journey toward God, and the faithful carried the deceased along the way to the place of final departure with singing and a mixture of grief and joyful hope.”

The metaphor of life as a journey collapsed in theological uncertainties. The result? “Dead Christians have nowhere to go but to evaporate into the spiritual ether and into our frail memory banks. With heaven domesticated, the soul morphed into an immortal gas, the corpse become a shell and the cemetery moved out of sight, it was almost inevitable that the dead with their embarrassing bodies would be banned from their own funerals and the living would be condemned to sit motionless, contemplating the meaning of it all and pretending to celebrate life as the nephew of the deceased sings ‘When Irish Eyes Are Smiling.’”

So like a secular funeral, yes?

He concludes: “Surely our culture will eventually weary of such liturgical and spiritual thinness and be ready for more depth, for more truth—for our sake and for the sake of those we love. When we are, the great drama of the journey to God will be there, beckoning us to join the procession of the saints. We will travel toward eternity with those we have loved, singing as we go and calling out to the distant shore in words of confident hope.”

It’s heady stuff, imbued with a sense of certainty unattainable by secularists with at best a fuzzy spirituality.

Yet the metaphor of life as a journey is just as strong and relevant to secularists, just as much of an inspiration, as is Professor Long’s metaphor of “the cosmic drama … of marching to the edge of eternity.”

Secular funerals are beginning to find words and music with which to celebrate a life and even expound a fuzzy spirituality. What they have yet to find is the actions, the rituals. But do they not, also, enact the cosmic drama of marching to the edge of eternity—even if that is an eternity of nonexistence?

Yes, they do. The element of processional is indispensable.

Read Professor Long’s essay in full here.

Hear him speak here: http://wjkbooks.typepad.com/files/wjk-radio-8_-thomas-g.-long-on-the-christian-funeral.mp3

Going back for the – er, erm…?

6 October 2009

Charles

1 Comment

Categories: funeral food

There isn’t a name we all use for the gathering after a funeral, is there?

Once upon a time there was the funeral feast, with bakemeats and all the booze you could drink—a good way of ensuring the dead person would be remembered fondly. But the feast petered out and became a bleak little tea. And now we don’t really know what to call it. Not a party, for sure—far too jolly, for all that many gatherings after a funeral evolve into something indistinguishable. Refreshments? A wake? A reception? A ‘do’?

None of these is entirely satisfactory, least of all ‘wake’. Waking a body is spending time with it between death and burial; it means watching over. Sorry, it’s too late for a wake.

There ought to be a word. A very specific word. It’s a very specific event, and a very important one. It is part of the funeral ceremony—the coda. It is a test of any resolutions we may have made in the presence of the coffin, summed up, perhaps, in the concluding lines of that popular funeral poem He/She is Gone: “smile, open your eyes, love and go on.”

After the emotional intensity of the funeral, the ‘do’ afterwards usually comes as a relief and a release. It depends on the circumstances, of course, but even the saddest funerals tend to be followed by a significant lightening up. There are other factors at work. When it comes to pulling power, only a dead person can reunite so many people—distant relatives, old friends. We gather for our dead in a way we never would if they were still alive. We gather for each other, too. At a time like this we want to be with each other, there for each other.

So there we are, raising our glasses and and nibbling quiche even as our dead person burns.

The longer a funeral party goes on, the more it begins to resemble a wedding. There may be everything to be said for letting it go on as long as it wants—days, if necessary.

But what should we call it? Zinnia Cyclamen comes down in favour of ‘do’. Lot to be said for that.

Have you got a better word?

Feeding the elderly

5 October 2009

Charles

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Categories: Uncategorised

Here are some extracts from Nigel Slater’s essay Feeding the Elderly, taken from Eating for England.

It is December 2004, and I am sitting in an old people’s home just outside Birmingham. I am holding my aunt’s hand. My aunt is ninety-nine, my eldest surviving relative on my father’s side of the family, and probably the person I am closest to. The home was chosen not for its convenient location, or even for its price, but simply because it was the only one I could find that didn’t smell of pee.

A woman moves past us pushing a Zimmer frame. As she gets level with us she starts to fart, a sound that goes on for what seems like eternity as she continues to move along in her bumpy, caterpillar fashion. My aunt, who has much the same schoolboy sense of humour as me, starts to giggle.

‘What is it about Zimmer frames that makes people trump?’ I ask, having heard her parp her way round the communal lounge on several occasions.

‘It’s all the pushing,’ she says. ‘Those things take a lot of pushing.’ Her giggle becomes a helpless, stuttering cough. ‘They just come out. You can’t stop them. You’ll be like that one day. And sooner than you think. Anyway, they give us too much cabbage in here. We had it three times last week.’

…

Many of the residents have their food put through the mincer, so the only difference between meals is the smell. It’s like baby food without the bright colours … It must be interminably dispiriting to cook in an old people’s home, to watch your careful cooking, a neatly peeled vegetable or a delicately filleted piece of fish, being pushed through the mincer, but that is the long and short of it. The advert in the Caterer and Hotelkeeper will insist that applicants must have passed their catering exams, should have the requisite experience and a love of cooking for other people, but it is unlikely to point out that everything the successful interviewee cooks will end up as a puree. One can only imagine they know that easily-swallowed food goes with the territory. Like having no hair or teeth and filling your pants, eating purees is what you do when you come into this world, and again when you go out of it.

Going Out Green

2 October 2009

Charles

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Categories: green funeral, natural burial

Rupert Callender made this observation of Dan Cruickshank’s The Art of Dying:

I was surprised by how little thought Dan had apparently given the matter. I thought everyone mused endlessly about their own deaths.

I don’t know that they do, Rupert. When, over in the US, Bob Butz was asked by his publisher to write a book about green funerals in three months, this was his response:

“Three months?” I said, incredulous. “That’s some deadline. Har. Har. But seriously, what do I know about planning a green burial? I’m no expert.”

For all his ignorance, Bob is predisposed to a green funeral:

Green burials came to interest me because, frankly, all the traditional ones I’ve seen over the years were a real drag. They left me thinking that there had to be a better way.

He’s a realist:

Although a reviewer once called me a nature writer, I’ve never been accused of being an environmentalist. I do what I can where the planet is concerned … At this point, I doubt very seriously that “going out green” will come anywhere close to rectifying the environmental mayhem I’ve wrought simply by virtue of being born

Bob embarks on his researches:

Only three weeks into this project and I’m beginning to wonder if I’m cut out for thinking about being buried all the time. For one thing, and I know this is going to come as a shock, it’s depressing.

He tracks down the Natural Burial Company, which is run by a good friend of the Good Funeral Guide, Cynthia Beal, with whom he tangles. He is withering about Ecopods:

…the Ecopod seemed to run contrary to the fundamental tenets of the natural burial movement … In the words of Jim Nicolow, “shipping a $3000 recycled coffin 5000+ miles to reduce burial’s environmental impact feels a bit like selecting the rapidly-renewable bamboo trim package to reduce the environmental impact of your Hummer.”

Bob digs his own grave—to see what it feels like. He reflects on the way people don’t discuss funerals:

I found this odd given that every other life-defining decision up to that point—getting married, having children, where to school those children—involved long and careful deliberation

He researches home funerals and embalming. He goes to see his father’s grave for the first time in years, to see how it makes him feel. He concludes:

For three months I thought about death more intensely than I think the average person should have to.But in an odd sort of way that was also the best part, too—that maybe in trying to die and be buried green I may now live my life a little bit better, too.

I hope this has whetted your appetite. This is an unpretentious and informative blunder through some of the mysteries of death and dying written by, this is important, an industry outsider. It is serious, funny and highly readable. At £11.25 it is a tad pricey—but heck, you can’t take it with you.

The Art of Dying

1 October 2009

Charles

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Categories: Attitudes to death

Is death really a taboo in our society? It’s a strong word, taboo, and I don’t know that it’s the right one. If there is a reluctance to confront death it is just as likely that it is because we are all having such fun being alive and feeling healthy. Reaper G is a spoilsport. If we turn our faces from the old curmudgeon, I don’t know that that isn’t an entirely natural thing to do.

For all that, we owe it to ourselves to get our heads around it. It’s all about taking responsibility. We have to rehearse the deaths of those we love in our imagination if we are ever to be able to cope with them. And we have to rehearse our own death, work out how we feel about it and imagine how others will feel about it—and, yes, talk about it, prepare them.

We owe it to ourselves to preserve ourselves from helplessness and hopelessness and dependency (not to mention the well intentioned ministrations of a Cruse volunteer).

So I liked Dan Cruickshank’s encounter with death on the BBC, and I applaud another programme which, however imperfectly, deals with the subject seriously and contemplatively—with what Sister Wendy called “a breathless, a fearful wonder and joy at what will happen after death.”

There’s no definitive take on this. It’s all well beyond the grasp of reason, so let’s just clear the deck of academics. To blunder about for a bit is the best it gets.

Watch Dan blundering about here.

Prison hospice

1 October 2009

Charles

1 Comment

Categories: prisons

Prisons are places where people are defined by the worst thing they’ve ever done. The stigma sticks for the rest of their lives.

We, free people define ourselves by the best we can be. If we hate sinners it is because we are not as they.

But we are. There is darkness in all of us. It is only its unenactedness that separates us, and it’s only self-restraint or inhibition or luck that has held us back. That’s not a firewall, it’s a skein. All wickedness is weakness. There, but for the grace…

Our hatred of sinners is a species of self-loathing born of fear. We are all the same, the best and the worst of us, brothers and sisters under the skin. Our natures comprise beauty and ugliness, a potential for admirable aspiration and for grievous self-betrayal.

So we shouldn’t be surprised to see the beauty of the human spirit manifest itself in the worst of people, neither should we be surprised at its loveliness, for it is born of suffering.

The photo above of prisoners massaging a terminally ill inmate was shot in the Louisiana State Penitentiary, where 85 per cent of the inmates will die in jail. See the rest of this extraordinary sequence here.