Should she or shouldn’t she?

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?

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 order cialis with mastercardthere 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.

Why do atheists have dead bodies at funerals?

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.

Brilliant new website for grievers and undertakers

Welcome

This site is dedicated to supporting
the bereaved and paying tribute to the loved ones we have lost. It is designed to assist you with funeral planning, sharing memories and coping with grief.

We are here to help you to:

Learn more about Absent Friends

I like this website. It’s new. It’s a one stop shop for mourning people and dismal traders. One of the services it offers is ‘complimentary obituaries’. Well, we all want one of those. You can scrawl on a wall. You can come to it in the throes of grief and, look, you get to console (or something) yourself by viewing global tragedies. What else could they offer in this line? I dare not let my imagination loose. But you do not operate under my constraints.

Why do atheists believe in heaven?

 

All faith groups have sects to be ashamed of, the ones who want to string up gays, stone women taken in adultery, that sort of nonsense. Let’s not get into one of those complacent debates about how it could be that faiths based in love can spawn such hatred. We might, though, consider drawing the line against outlawing fundamentalists by using anti-terrorism laws. Did you see that the edict issued by free speech-loving Mr Johnson against Islam4UK extends to a proscription against insignia and clothes. Clothes??!! Talk about taking a sledgehammer to crack a nutter.

Rectitude breeds contempt, that we can say. But in one faith group it breeds anger to an intriguing degree. Atheists. The Dawkinistas.Terrifically cross lot. No one is safe from their yelling, even old maids cycling to church through the morning mist. Is there something essentially silly about preaching a negative, getting all hot under the collar about Nothing? I don’t have a view on this myself. I am a bystander, merely; a quizzical commentator.

Anyone who believes anything has problems with the doctrine. Those who don’t are the ones to watch. How many atheists fervently believe in Nothing? Not that many when the chips come down to it. When you shine the interrogator’s light into the eyes of their faith you’ll more often than not elicit this anomaly: “I don’t believe in god…but I do believe in heaven.” This is the point when my friend Richard, an exuberantly faulty Catholic, quotes Chesterton: “When people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing – they believe in anything.”

This is a problem for humanist funeral celebrants – an acute embarrassment. Members of their flock are always wanting to sing from a hymn sheet and lift their eyes to a hereafter. It’s not so much an aspiration as a supposition. Belief in a heaven of some sort seems to be ineradicable from the mind of humankind, a heaven which needs no whitebeard concierge.

Lifestyle gurus are always telling us to live in the present. Ever tried it? People with a death sentence can do it, and some meditators, perhaps, but most of us are too busy using the present to assess our past or plan our future. In our heads, the future is where most of us do most of our living. We defer a lot of pleasure in the sure and certain hope of that future. This is why we have pension plans. And this is why the death of a young person is so much more painful to us than the death of a very old person: the young person has been denied so much more future.

Even a completely clapped out body cannot rid most of us of the habit of living in the future. Sure, we can at this stage easily see that an earthly future is out of the question. That’s when our minds leap lightly into the hereafter. And that’s why atheists believe in heaven.

Finding Valhalla

 

A friend writes. She is to be interviewed for the talking wireless. They’re going to want her take on Viking funerals. What, she wonders, are my views on Viking funerals? Can you, I wonder, help?

Interesting territory. We think of the classic Viking funeral as a blazing longship, bearing the corpse of a chieftain, drifting slowly and spectacularly across the sea. This is mostly myth. Where immolation took place in a longship it normally happened on dry land. The ship would customarily contain grave goods of all sorts, of course, we’re comfy with that, but it would also contain, often, slaughtered horses and servants. We’re not quite so comfy with that, and not just because we read the Guardian or suffer from servant envy.

And while that was one way the Vikings did funerals, the blazing longship, they weren’t one-trick ponies, they had others besides, and I’ve blogged about them. Here.

History be damned. There’s nothing more subversive of mystery and wonder than party pooper facts. What’s interesting is what survives: the glorious myth. And what’s interesting about the glorious myth is that it continues to exert such a strong hold on our twenty-first century imagination.

Why?

Because it meets so many of the needs of the living. Those needs are timeless, of course. They are aesthetic, emotional, spiritual and practical.

In terms of practicality, a holocaust is a good way of disposing of a dead body. Beyond that, it is spectacular. The flames rise (vertically) to the heavens as the wind fills the longboat’s sails and it journeys (horizontally) to the horizon in a way which mirrors the words of the Christian prayer: “But as thou didst not lose them in the giving, so we do not lose them by their return. For not as the world giveth, givest thou, O Lord of souls: that which thou givest thou takest away: for life is eternal, and love is immortal, and death is only the horizon, and the horizon is nothing save the limit of our sight.”

There is compelling emotional and spiritual appeal in this imagery, of journeying, transition, transfiguration and consummation (deliberate pun). The spirit rises as the craft moves over the face of the waters; that which is earthly is subsumed by the sea. All the elements are present: earth, air, fire, water. And there is an inexorable dynamic.

Is it that we yearn for Viking funerals because modern funerals fall so dismally short on all fronts? They do. don’t they? Above all, they lack movement, and we especially need to rediscover that. Burial still meets lots of needs if there is a strong element of processional. Cremation, on the other hand…

So perhaps we should apply a Viking test to all funerary rites. This would produce interesting results, especially at a time when we are looking for an alternative to cremating dead people in incinerators. What do you think a Viking would say if you tried to interest him or her in cryomation? Sorry, I don’t know the ancient Norse for the predictable expletive, but you know its translation.

All of which leads to the conclusion that instead of looking for smart technology to dispose of our dead we need something altogether more retro. The solution to the problem of the dismal industrial cremator suddenly becomes crystal clear.

The open air funeral pyre.

Please add your helpful thoughts about Viking funerals in a comments box below. 

FOOTNOTE: Read about the Viking funeral of Tal Stoneheart, brother of the Lib Dem MP Lembit Opik, here.

Too good to be real

I have tried, in the Good Funeral Guide, not to cover topics already dealt with by others. Instead, I have incorporated lots of signposts to best sources of information and best archives of resources – poems, music, ceremony ideas.

There’s lots of stuff out there about eulogies, most of it guff. But TheFuneralSite has some really good advice about eulogy writing. I especially like the following (mostly, let’s be honest, because I fervently agree with it):

A eulogy composed and delivered by someone who loved the deceased is the key component of a meaningful memorial gathering.

Think about the funerals you’ve attended. What do you most remember? Wasn’t it the daughter’s speech about her mom’s life or the nephew’s series of stories about his Uncle? These speak directly to our hearts. We relate immediately to the speaker. They may make us cry, but this group experience will draw us together as a community and help us to acknowledge the life of our relative, friend or associate that has ended.

Often the eulogy is given by a clergy or celebrant who has never met the decedent let alone loved them. Although the clergy or celebrant may do an excellent job of interviewing family and friends and presenting an accurate and interesting eulogy, the intimacy of first hand knowledge and heart-felt attachment will be missing and can lead to disappointment.

It almost doesn’t matter what is said, the experience of someone who loved the decedent standing up and speaking on behalf of the departed is a powerful experience for both the speaker and the audience.

The personal eulogy is a gift to the departed and to those in the audience.

Don’t miss out on this extraordinary life experience.

I also like the Top Five Reasons to Give a Eulogy, especially number 5: It’s the right thing to do.

If a funeral is too good it risks being no good. Seamless scheduling + slick stage management + faultless timings + superb performances + splendid merchandise = too good to be real.

Here’s a moving example of what I mean, the conclusion of two posts written by a US blogger about his father’s funeral.

The funeral was almost over. The funeral director was clearly wrapping things up and this man came forward asking for a chance to say one last thing. He was a short man and was of East Indian descent. I recognized him only because he had introduced himself to me before the funeral. With apparent nervousness and a heavy accent, he began to speak.

“I work for Chip for six year. When I look for a job he interview me and he is very nice. When I work for him I never see anything on his face but a smile. In six year he never say a thing to hurt my feeling. He help me and my whole family. He is a good man to work for. When he leave (company) we walk out the door with him and he gave me his book to help me understand some things. There were some tears on my face. Thank you.”

This was the most moving of all of the speakers, in my opinion. Despite the fact that the service was ending, he felt compelled to speak, knowing he would never get another chance to say those things in that forum. Despite his obviously difficulties with the language, he stood up and told this story and blew away those assembled with his simple story of how with nothing more than a little kindness and decency, my father had made an immense impact on his life.

Be sure to read both posts. Find them here.

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.
The Good Funeral Guide
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