Archive: July 2010

Embalming: a matter not of if but when

8 July 2010
Charles
4 Comments
Categories: DIY funeral, Embalming, funeral directors, home funerals

Nobody I can think of would dispute the assertion that it’s good for the bereaved to spend time with their dead, contemplating their absence – what I like to call their very present absence.

There is a debate about how dead a person should look. Some people want to spend time with an embalmed, cosmetised body; others reject this with some force, the more so when they find out what embalming entails. In the funeral industry itself there are two camps, the routine embalmers and the default refrigerators. When routine embalmers seek to make embalming a condition of viewing, they often do so from the best possible motives. Many of them rank among the industry’s best and most dedicated funeral directors. But that doesn’t necessarily make them right. At the same time, any holier-than-thou blanket rejection of embalming is going to fail those who would benefit from it. As Maggie Brinklow says, you can only make good decisions on a case-by-case basis. It may be mutilation to those who reject it, but it is not to those who do not. It is certainly not mutilation in the eyes of the best embalmers, whose gentleness confounds any such condemnation.

In an interesting article on AlterNet, Frankie Colman quotes Gary Laderman on the very high value of embalming skills as a professional attribute: “Without this procedure, funeral directors would have had a difficult time claiming that they were part of a professional guild, and therefore justified as the primary mediators between the living and the dead from the moment of death to the final disposition.” It is observable that in the UK, where the whole embalming-casketing-visitation caboodle never took off, the status and prosperity of funeral directors does not ride half as high as it does in the States.

When the funeral reform movement in the States took off in the 60s, with Jesscia Mitford as its most vocal spokesperson, Laderman observes:  “Funeral directors were arguing forcefully against charges that their mediation between the living and the dead translated into social obstruction that barred the stricken from facing death with maturity, realism and honesty.” But, Coleman asks funeral director Shaun Newburn, in what condition does the body need to be? “Newbern believes his clients don’t want any odor or leakage of body fluids during the wake and is concerned that it could happen if the deceased is kept at home.”

It is when funeral directors say things like that that you want to strangle them. It’s the sort of fright-thing some of them say in this country to clients interested in a cardboard coffin: “Oh, no, we can’t have one of those. Your Dad died of cancer, you see, there is likely to be considerable leakage…” leaving a picture in the mind’s eye of Dad falling through the sodden bottom.

Jerrigrace Lyons, the eminent US home funeralist, tackles this business of leakage and odours, and here I learned something I didn’t know about the properties of dry ice – and which you may well not know either: “For three-day wakes we generally use dry ice. It is extremely cold (minus 110 degrees Fahrenheit). We place it under the torso of the body and a small piece on top so it freezes the fluids in the lungs and stomach. We have rarely seen any fluids coming from the mouth or nose because of this. Even when the deceased has purged a little brownish fluid from the mouth (again rare) it has not upset anyone. Families often deal with far more fluids and other matter released from the body when their loved one is in the dying process.”

For Jerrigrace and her kind it’s the subtle changes that take place in a dead body over days that impart psychological and emotional value and underline the irrevocability of death. Others, though, are grateful for the unchangingness of the stabilised, embalmed body. It’s an effigy, if you like, a devotional object, and this is what they need.

Funeral directors are taught that they are the custodians of the bodies they look after. Actually, they are not: they are agents for the custodians, for the dead belong, by law, to their people. They can become very proprietorial about their role, act as gatekeepers to the body and forbiddingly dissuade people from spending time with their dead if they think they will be upset by what they see. These undertakers need to read the study Viewing the body after bereavement due to a traumatic death: qualitative study in the UK by A Chapple and S Ziegland, published on the BMJ website. Its conclusion is as follows:

Even after a traumatic death, relatives should have the opportunity to view the body, and time to decide which family member, if any, should identify remains. Officials should prepare relatives for what they might see, and explain any legal reasons why the body cannot be touched. Guidelines for professional practice must be sensitive to the needs and preferences of people bereaved by traumatic death. The way that relatives refer to the body can be a strong indication for professionals about whether the person who died retains a social identity for the bereaved.

Funeral directors as social entrepreneurs?

7 July 2010
Charles
7 Comments
Categories: funeral directors, funeral trends

Yesterday I wrote about the two problems that most bedevil funeral directors. First, in the public perception, they offer poor value for money, a charge of which they are, most of them, innocent. Second, they may feel that they occupy a marginalised position in society because people wonder what’s under their fingernails. As ever, it was the comments that yielded the best thoughts. If you missed them, read them.

Undertakers need people to stand up for them and tell them as they are. And a very good suggestion comes from a comment on this blog in the Houston Press. The writer is talking about what bereaved people need most:

[O]ne thing that would have been really helpful would have been someone to answer the phone and the door, and keep the kitchen in some semblance of order. We had DOZENS of phone calls every day for over a week. Next time we’ll know that if someone asks, “Can I do something for you?” We’ll say, “Yes, would you mind coming over for a couple hours on Wednesday to help out.” I think there might even be a business opportunity in this for funeral homes to offer, and retired people — who know how to answer the phone, and have been through a few funerals — would be ideal for this sort of duty. My father-in-law and I have actually discussed starting a service like this.

I don’t go along with the business opp line. I think that would spoil it. But I do suspect that there are lots of people who would welcome the opportunity to do good voluntary work for the bereaved. Many people who have been bereaved want to use their understanding and experience for the benefit of others. Helping others helps them.

Some bereaved people don’t drive and need to get to the registrar, the bank. Some of them have never had anything to do with the household accounts; others have never cooked for themselves; some are skint; some have lawns that need mowing; some have never been alone before… Almost all are too blown away to think and act at anything like full effectiveness.

So there is a role for drivers, advisers, social fund form-fillers, cooks, hooverers, phone minders and listeners. And there are lots of people out there who would do this for the sake of it – who would, indeed, not do it if they were paid for it. They would also play an important part in joining up the funeral home to mainstream society. And they would become ambassadors for that funeral home, for they would testify to the excellence and humanity of the funeral director and his/her staff.

Few funeral directors are likely to find this proposal attractive. They are more defensively secretive than they think they are. And they are uncomfortable with any activity which might seem to subvert or subtract from their pre-eminence in the arrangement process.

But if they think about it, were they to have a little band of handpicked volunteers they would, by offering an enriched service, greatly enhance their prestige.

It takes confidence to relax the control freakery and embrace collaboration. But good funerals are created by communities, not martinets.

Rebranding the Dismal Trade

6 July 2010
Charles
8 Comments
Categories: Attitudes to dead bodies, Attitudes to death, funeral cost, perceptions of funeral directors

Funeral directors know that they are viewed with suspicion, aversion, distrust. It’s what they do that lies at the root of this – the dark art of dealing with dead bodies. Yuk.

How different they are from us. We don’t like people who are different from us. But most people express their feelings about funeral directors not in terms of their differentness (though a funeral director in a pub may well elicit a snigger), but of their avarice. They are skilled, too, it is supposed, in the dark art of exploiting people ‘at a difficult time’, filching fistfuls of the folding stuff from their sobbing wallets, the velveteen-voiced bastards.

Whenever people say to me they reckon funerals are too expensive, I ask, “What else could you get for that?” and leave a long silence. After we have listed some pretty untantalising consumer items that you can pick up for between £2500—3000, I ask what they reckon would be a fair price. Not having thought it through, they um a lot. “Fifty quid?” I prompt. “A tenner?” They search for a respectful figure. Hard to find one. It’s not easy to benchmark funeral costs. There’s nothing comparable. And before you say it, no, not weddings. Chalk and cheese.

All funeral directors are not so regarded. Where they are known in their community they are evaluated according to their personal qualities. In urban areas, where sense of community is seldom strong except among gang members, most people do not know their neighbourhood undertaker. In rural areas the undertaker is part of everybody’s daily lives. In the Somerset village of Henstridge, Donald Hinks and his daughters Lavinia and Mandy of Peter Jackson Funeral Services are known by everyone. They are much loved because they are incredibly nice people. And when Lavinia picks up her children from school, there’s scarcely another child whose nan or uncle or whoever has not been cared for in death by Lavinia and her family – and the kids know it. They must have a different attitude to death as a result. Much healthier, more accepting.

Some funeral directors work hard to enhance public perception of what they do. They give talks, hold open days, sponsor a youth football team or, more likely, a bowls match where they may be sure of a demographic receptive to the lure of a pay-now-die-later funeral plan. I am not sure that this goes to the heart of the perception problem.

Over at Pat McNally’s blog there is an account of a good Irish funeral by the brother of the man who had died. Much better than an English funeral, he reckons. Why so? Because “in England our funerals have become sanitised – snatched from families and communities by undertakers who no doubt check their profit margins on Excel spreadsheets.”

There you go. The perception thing. And I can hear every funeral director who reads this blog thinking, How unfair!

Over in the US, where funeral scandals tend to be egregious, unlike in the UK where they tend to be wretched, James Patton, a funeral director, blames the media: “It seems like each day, over the past year, the media has been on the attack against the funeral industry. It is as if we have returned to the days of Jessica Mitford.”

I have a feeling that Tom Jokinen gets closer to the heart of the problem. The funeral director he is working for tells him: “We live in a caste system, where the Brahmins subcontract their problems to the unclean, the Dalit caste, the corpsehandlers.” In other words, what you do is what you are. Untouchable.

I was reflecting on this the other day, up at t’crem, waiting for the hearse. For all my exposure to death I am not reconciled with it, I hate it. And I could never be a corpsehandler. I speak for the vast majority of humankind. But because of my exposure to death, I deeply respect those who do it, and do it well.

It’s the perception of everyone else that needs attention. But how is that done?

David vs Goliath

5 July 2010
Charles
10 Comments
Categories: family funeral directors, independent funeral directors

This blog gets as tired of the sound of its own voice as, probably, you do. So it welcomes guest posts from whoever wishes to sound off, air a view, explore an idea — whatever. If you would like to make use of this platform, please feel free. Just send me what you want to say at charles@goodfuneralguide.co.uk and I shall be delighted to post it — subject to the obvious provisos: it mustn’t be libellous, gratuitously offensive, etc.

Today we welcome back David Barrington.

Over to you, David:

For a while now I have been amazed by the lack of compassion shown by some of my fellow professionals to prospective clients. In fact, some of the comments just had to be turned into a posting for Charles and all his readers.

First of all there is the funeral arranger who when the family would not accept the coffin he was trying to sell them said:

“Oh okay so you just want a bulk standard one then?”

Maybe that was the only one they could afford. Did he know them personally? Also, surely all of the coffins are of good quality so what difference does it make to him? Or maybe it’s because he has a target to meet? Should funerals be subject to sales targets?

Next there was another person who when the family called for an estimate said before anything else:-

“We’ll need a deposit, you know.”

Again, what bearing does this have on the family’s question at this point? They are asking for an estimate and the funeral company’s representative is assuming they have money problems because they are shopping around.

While visiting a family with a terminally ill relative (who was present at the meeting) I was told about another funeral director who had visited them to discuss funeral costs. The other funeral service representative worked for one of the larger funeral businesses.

Now obviously visiting somebody in this situation is uncomfortable at first, both for them and you and the first thing to do is put them at ease. Show you care, ask about their background, how long they’ve been ill etc.

The guy from the big company turned up dressed as a pallbearer (the family’s words).  When he came into the room where they were, he sat down, didn’t pass the time of day with them, plonked a copy of their brochure down on the table and said:

“Have a look through that and tell me what you want and I’ll let you know how much it is.”

That was pretty much it! For that service, for which the family would pay a premium of around £750 – £1000 more than me.

How can a funeral professional show such a lack of humanity and compassion? Did he think he was selling them a fridge or a washing machine? The lady going in the coffin was sitting there in front of him and he didn’t ask her how she would like to be remembered; what music she wants at her service; how she would like to be dressed; who she would want as the minister and whether she would want to meet him.

The person whose funeral it was to be told her family to tear up the brochure when he left.

One last incident that you should hear. Recently we had a funeral going to our local crematorium. We turned into the driveway and I got out of the hearse to walk the last 100 yards in front of the hearse. As I was walking slowly along, another funeral turned into the driveway and proceeded to go in the out lane, overtake us and pull into the crematorium chapel.  It transpired that they were late for their slot and wanted to get in first. I was absolutely speechless, however the funeral director had only been working for them for 6 months and had been let loose on the public so, I suppose, what do you expect? Again, a large company who charge about £1000 more than me.

These large companies say that they have the best training and development of their staff. Well, where is the evidence of this?

What can I say about these other guys except HOW DARE YOU treat our profession so shoddily and these families so thoughtlessly.

Going the extra mile feels so much better.

Good with grief

2 July 2010
Charles
4 Comments
Categories: Co-op, Co-operative Funeralcare

The banner on The Co-operative website proclaims that it is “good for everyone.” This accords with the long-held and passionate belief of all who toil at GFG HQ. To us, it’s a resounding statement of the obvious. We thought it was common knowledge.

It looks, though, as if Co-op’s marketing creatives have stalled in their efforts to transfer variants of this this little strapline to its manyother services. The Co-operative is “good with money” and it is “good with food” — but there it stops. They are probably beavering away, torturing their brains to generate “good with” straplines for travel, electricals, farms, cars and the rest. They are not “good for nothing”. They’ll come up with the mots justes, they will.

But it looks as if they need some help, and we think that the learned readership of this blog can rally round. Come on, everybody. “The Co-operative Funeralcare — good with ______________ .”

Suggestions in a comment box, please.

Dying inside (2)

2 July 2010
Charles
No comments
Categories: prisons

A few days ago I blogged about death and dying inside prison. If it’s the sort of thing that interests you at all, you’ll be interested in a post over at Jailhouselawyer’s blog.

In most British prisons there are old men in their late sixties and seventies, at least three-quarters of them very ill and years over tariff. They could never re-offend and the vast majority would not want to.

At least a third of Wakefield residents come under the category of the ‘body bag club’. They are well over tariff, very ill and disabled. Lots are in wheelchairs and it’s costing the government a small fortune to keep them in prison. A hell of a lot more than it costs to keep a normal healthy inmate.

It costs a little over £40,000 a year to keep someone in prison. It depends how you calculate it, of course. If you build in the capital cost that figure rises steeply.

John’s post also details the procedure when someone dies in prison.

Read it here.

Something for the weekend

2 July 2010
Charles
No comments
Categories: funeral directors, funerals in other cultures

An insight here into the Nigerian way of death.

For mankind, death is an inevitable end. Whenever it comes, no matter the age of the dead, pains, sorrow and unquantifiable anguish are its accomplices. Ironically, this is simply not so for those in the business of coffin making and funeral management. While their patrons mourn and lament over the loss of their dear ones, the coffin makers and funeral managers smile very broadly to their various banks. This then makes real the adages that ‘it is different strokes for different folks’ and ‘one man’s meat is another man’s poison.’ Odd and startling as it may sound, it is a confirmed fact that the undertaking business in Nigeria, is a booming one that permits only the bold and the liberal hearted. YEMISI ADENIRAN takes you to the world of the undertakers, as they reveal the peculiarities of their ‘calling,’ why many are favouring it all of a sudden and the challenges of the business.

The business of funeral management, as far as Dehinde Harrison, the Managing Director of Ebony Funeral Home, is concerned, is one business just like any other business … Describing the basics for the success of those in the business, he said it is all about destiny. “Ori ti yoo su’po ko ni je kalaare o gbadun. This means that when a man is destined to inherit another man’s wife, his luck will never grant the former his utmost wish of recovering from his illness. Relating this to his profession, he explained that since he has been designed to care for the dead, it is simple and normal for somebody to die.

Harrison had a query to answer: But do undertakers then pray for people to die? His prompt response, “Yes and no. We pray for the old and the aged only to die and not the young ones. When an aged person dies, it is fun and we would be free to make good charges and display all that we have at our disposal to entertain everyone. But if it is the other way round, everyone will be sober as they will be mourning. And in that wise or condition, we would not be chanced to even charge as much as we would have loved to.”

Read the entire article in Nigerian Compass here.

Death and hunger

1 July 2010
Charles
4 Comments
Categories: funeral food

Funerals in Britain are customarily followed by eating and drinking. Are there any time-honoured foods served at funerals? Are there traditional regional variants? Are there any funeral-specific favourites — the sorts of food people associate most strongly with funerals? I’m not talking generic sausage rolls and eggy sandwiches here.

Is the custom of taking food to the bereaved still going strong? I’m not aware that it is. An Englishman’s home is his castle, after all, an English family a very private affair.

I ask because every time I read a piece in an American paper about funeral food I reflect that they seem to do it so much better than us, and in far greater quantities. If you are interested in pondering further, there’s a good piece which illustrates what I’m getting at in the Houston Press here. Do read the blog to which it links, too.

Is that we just eat anything after a funeral nowadays? Is it the case that we very rarely sit down to do it, except on soft furnishings? Anything in that?

Any views? Is this a matter of any importance whatsoever? (What a lot of questions!)

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