And what did you want?

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

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

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

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

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 http://www.honeytraveler.com/pharmacy/ 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?

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

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?

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

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.

The Good Funeral Guide
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