31 January 2011 – The Good Funeral Guide

Resurrecting Six Feet Under

I’m delighted to host a post by Brian Jenner. Brian is a words-for-hire person (I know how that feels) who does everything from gilding the tongues of politicians to writing terrifically good books. This summer he is holding a Six Feet Under convention in Bournemouth. As soon as I heard about this I fired off emails to him. Obligingly he has come up with what he does best — some words for this blog. Not that he isn’t a dab hand at organising events, mind. He’s done quite a bit of that, too.

Those who enjoyed Six Feet Under unanimously agree that it was the best telly ever. It had the breadth of War and Peace and the psychological acuity of a louche Henry James. It is amongst the finest dramatic achievements of all time (eat your heart out, Homer).

Enough of me. Here’s Brian. Oh, before he starts — one moment, Brian — let me endorse what he says about Bournemouth. Once the only UK cemetery with traffic lights, it is now the sort of place that hip Europeans fly to for a weekend of clubbing. It is all sorts of vibrant these days.

IT’s five years since the quirky American TV series Six Feet Under came to an end and I’ve missed it terribly. Tender, intelligent, funny, mystical and beautiful, these are not epithets you often apply to TV drama, but Six Feet Under was all of those things.

I live in Bournemouth, a popular beach resort on the South Coast of England. A few years ago, I was walking through a cemetery and I remembered how the character Nate would go jogging on a path through the gravestones. It gave me two ideas. Here was a place to go jogging and wouldn’t it be fun to have a Six Feet Under convention?

I never did go jogging, but last year, having organised a couple of conferences, I put my morbid imagination to work and devised the ultimate weekend break.

It would be like a Star Trek convention, but a lot more classy. We’d host lectures about embalming, green funerals and obituaries. We’d have a Thomas Newman concert and a talk about the music we’d like to accompany our departure. We’d have an audience with one of the stars from the series, go for a picnic in our equivalent of Forest Lawn and offer the chance to sit in a real hearse.

When posted to my blog, I was sure it was all too weird. Within 24 hours someone had responded: ‘Sounds fascinating, put me down for two tickets.’

Bournemouth has a reputation for gerontocratic torpor, but we’re also keen to promote its more creative and hedonistic side. Six Feet Under embraces both. We’ve picked 12-14 August – the height of summer – with our pine trees, sandy beaches and boulevards we can give the town the best chance of being mistaken for California.

Can you have a weekend devoted to celebrating the grim reaper? Isn’t it going to be crass and insensitive? Well, here’s the paradox. Works like Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One, Hal Ashby’s Harold & Maude, Jessica Mitford’s The American Way of Death Revisited don’t fill you with gloom, they give you a spring in your step.

Six Feet Under was great because it wrestled with religion, sexuality, family, drugs and work in raw ways. I want to hang out with sensitive and intelligent people who want to be honest about life. We need to club together. Sadness, fear, joy, uproarious laughter – the weekend will elicit all those things. And we’ll go home reminded how great it is to be alive.

The Six Feet Under Convention, Bournemouth, 12-14 August 2011. For more details go to http://www.sixfeetunderconvention.co.uk

Crestone End-of-Life Project

Crestone Colorado is a bit like Totnes on steroids. It is home to all manner of nice folk and all sorts of religious communities. Alternative. (To capitalism on steroids).

Crestone is home to one of only two legal open-air cremation sites in the US. That’s two better than the UK, where open-air cremation was declared legal on 10 Feb 2010 – but that doesn’t mean to say it’s going to be easily legalisable. There are very few campaigners for it. Chief of them are Carl Marlow (who actually performed an outdoor cremation in 2007), and Rupert and Claire Callender.

The Crestone site could well be instructive to those who would like to create an open-air cremation site in the UK.

If you’ve ever wondered how you’d feel if someone you were close to was cremated in this way, hear this from Tessa Bielecki:

My father, Dr. Casimir Bielecki, was cremated on July 19, 2008 at the Crestone End-of-Life Project’s open-air site. This was my first open-air cremation, and I was so profoundly moved, I’m already working on the documents that will enable me to choose this kind of cremation for myself.

CEOLP supports simple, natural and humanizing end-of-life choices. We were able to bring Dad’s body directly home for the hospital in our own car only two hours after he died and put him back in his own bed, giving us ample time to complete our farewells. He wasn’t whisked away from us to some gloomy funeral “parlor” and polluted with smelly embalming chemicals. He wasn’t confined, as poet Emily Dickinson pur it, “Safe in [his] Alabaster Chamber – Untouched by Morning – And untouched by Noon [under] – Rafter of Satin – And Roof of Stone.” Instead, he was consumed cleanly and purley out in the open air by what Carmelite mystic John of the Cross called the “Living Flame of Love.”

Everyone present laid green boughs of pinon pine and bright red and yellow carnations of over Dad’s body on the pyre, and as an afterthought, we added his old straw golf hat. Thick dark smoke billowed out to the west towards the full moon setting over the San Juan Mountains, then cleared, whitened, and rose heavenward, a symbol of Dad’s rising from the dead, as we Christian’s believe.

The cremation was no abstract theology or philosophy about death, but a profound existential experience of it: a falling away of the flesh and soaring of the spirit in roaring flames and sparks spinning into the sky. Gathering the ashes and bits of bone 24 hours later continued our family’s deep meditation on passing from this world to the next. As St. Paul wrote to the Corinthians, “Behold, I tell you a mystery. We shall not all fall asleep, but we will all be changed, in an instant, in the blink of an eye.” The fire took more than the blinking of an eye to burn, and that was part of its beauty and healing.

All the Abrahamic traditions were represented, and Buddhism as well. My sister Connie sang the splendid Exsultet from the Roman Catholic liturgy for Easter Sunday. We said traditional Christian prayers for the dead. Shahna Lax prayed the Jewish Kaddish. Roshi Steve Allen and his wife Angelique chanted the Buddhis Heart Sutra. And then William Howell faced east and cried out the Muslim Call to Prayer as the sun rose of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. There were long reverent periods of silence and, quiet loving exchanges between family and friends. The fire tenders went about their tasks unobtrusively. Fireman Steve Anderson stood by, tall and stalwart, in case the surrounded desert might beckon an unwanted spark. All our senses engaged. And all the elements were there: earth, air, fire and water.

Everything about the cremation was personal, intimate and meaningful. We took care of Dad’s body ourselves. We cut the evergreen boughs from our own land. We created our own altar to express the uniqueness of Dad’s life and included his black medical bag and stethoscope, his wedding portrait, and the last photo taken of him four weeks earlier with the nephews (and lobsters!) he loved. We chose his shroud, one I’d brought for him a year ago from the ancient city of Jerusalem. (It’s traditional for Orthodox Christians to bring their own shrouds home after making pilgrimage to the Holy Land.)

This whole experience was a gift for our family and friends, for the earth, which is left undisturbed, and for Dad himself, who knew we were going to do this and liked the idea. We are blessed to have open-air cremation here in Crestone. Many thanks to the Crestone End-of-Life Project for helping to make the experience of death so natural, human, reverent and, above all, sacred.

There are some superb photos of open-air cremations at Crestone here.

Washington Post article here.