@GoodFunerals

Here’s a roundup of recent tweets. I was dressed down the other day for publishing too many all at once. It’s a good point. In future I shall post fewer oftener.

Falling murder rate hits gangsta funeral home – http://bit.ly/izyK2S

I see greenfuse have a new website. Something of a standard setter, I’d say – http://bit.ly/kY4HBd

Grief denied is grief delayed? Good piece here on direct cremation and emotional aftermaths – http://bit.ly/k65FnH

New natural burial ground, just opened –http://www.willowsnaturalburialgrounds.co.uk/

How would you like to approach natural burial with young people? Dr Hannah Rumble wants to know. It’s a good question –http://bit.ly/kOgNH1

Agree w/Kevorkian’s understanding of the magnitude of the problem but disagree w/his solution. New post on our blog: http://ht.ly/59S14

Shocking indictment of the L’pool Care Pathway – and I had thought it was all so good http://bit.ly/iGeOga

‘Rest in peace you wooley bastard.’ Massive outpouring of grief in NZ for dead sheep – http://on.fb.me/jD0rxl

Woman smitten in flagrante by outraged tombstone –http://tinyurl.com/6ax8k9p

Note to hacks: don’t seek quotes from undertakers about falling death rate, they’ll tell professional lies – http://bit.ly/jp7D3u

Voice of Daleks buried in a cardboard coffin – http://bit.ly/iKUaNX

 

Temple of Grief – there’s a good new name for a crem. Sanctuary of Sorrow? Basilica of Bereavement… Got me thinking –http://bit.ly/kkovAA

Very interesting piece in the NYT on doctors’ duty to eol counselling and not deserting their patients – http://nyti.ms/j5SxgJ

Honouring the moment of death – and getting the bag for belongings right. Brilliant piece, this, from Ireland – http://bit.ly/jge1Mx

Involving the family in the funeral. A laudably enlightened undertaker writes – http://bit.ly/lzaPlJ

A funeral in a garden. Perfect and wonderful – http://bit.ly/lEW7EH

“Their greatest gift was teaching us how to live and how to die.” Funeral for body donors. http://bit.ly/jnIZf5

“We cannot have a situation whereby people strip naked at funerals.” http://bit.ly/k7TXyD

cuttlefishpoet Digital Cuttlefish

The Digital Cuttlefish: Dance Naked At My Funeraldigitalcuttlefish.blogspot.com/2011/06/dance-… That’s right, you heard me.
 
Well well, the US govt has outlawed formaldehyde –http://bit.ly/jUylV4
Who’s the youngest undertaker of them all? Any advance on this?  http://bit.ly/lXt2MK
People who sing to you at your bedside while you’re dying. R4 for me, please. http://bit.ly/jR0a7o
Drop-off box at the end of the undertaker’s drive where people can leave their dead. http://yhoo.it/kZEHqD
He wanted no funeral and look what he got – http://bit.ly/lxEcwJ

Getting it

People look at the funeral industry and conclude that it can’t go on like this. You’ve probably done it. I have. Come on, we’ve left Victorian values behind (even the Tories), we have moved on from Victorian healthcare, no one reads Walter Scott any more, so how come the undertakers got left behind in that particular timewarp? The whole look of it is just so dated if not plug ugly (your take) and so out of kilter with the spirit of the times. I mean, if we want to celebrate Nan’s life in our gladrags do we really want these gloomy geezers garbed in grief waiting attendance with their carefully arranged faces?

Yes, actually, we do. Until we can think of something better that’s exactly what most of us want. But, by gum, we’re all thinking about it. The howling strategic error of the regrettably ineffectual Dying Matters Coalition was to lead with a stultifying negative: “Death is still a taboo subject for Brits.” No it’s not and don’t tell us we’re crap at talking about it. We’re getting better at it all the time.

Contemplating change, for Brits, means bearing in mind the heritage factor. We like to have our cake and eat it. We like to clutch our iPads as we watch Lancaster bombers fly over Beefeaters and bearskins and Buckingham Palace when thoroughly modern royals get spliced in a timeless way. Even those with mixed feelings about royals are reluctant to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Reinvention implies demolition. In Britain, always fearing something worse, we conserve, we list. And we do love a bit of ceremonial, don’t we?

So there’s nothing to be said for berating the poor bloody undertakers for serving up the same old same old. Dammit, it’s what they’re asked for.

At the same time, it is undeniable, is it, that we are at the very fag end of the Victorian funeral? Its elements of ostentation, pomp and very public procession, diminished as they are, don’t fit the modern mindset. It’s remarkable that it’s persisted. It’s remarkable it ever got invented. We’re not a show-offy people, after all, and look, there’s shy, private Nan stuck in traffic at the roundabout for all the world to see through the big windows of the hearse. There is so much that is anomalous.

So you can easily forgive those who have looked at the funeral industry with an entrepreneurial or a reforming eye and sought to set off a bit of kicking and screaming. The entrepreneurs have had a particularly bad time of it. Business orthodoxy, where it has prevailed, has only done so when it has camouflaged itself as its opposite. The consolidators have succeeded stealthily, patchily, and only ever by passing themselves off as same old same old. Deftly done, Dignity.

It was therefore in a spirit of low expectations that I set off for the third biennial funeral exhibition (it’s a trade fair) organised by the NAFD. I went as the GFG and wished I hadn’t, fearing I might be turned away at the door. By an apparent administrative oversight I was let in and, carefully wearing my badge back to front, went looking for the others of the underground who had also slipped under the wire, making my way as incognito as possible through displays of the usual glossy hearses and glinty coffins and stainless steel embalming tables and mortuary trolleys and rows and rows of severed heads where embalmers were having masterclasses in putting Humpty together again. The first time you see it all it makes your head swim, let me tell you. I’m used to it now.

Louise at Sentiment was swarmed. So was Jon at MuchLoved. Mike at Phoenix Diamonds had time just to swap a hasty joke. Liz at A Giving Tribute was mobbed. In the good old days they would all have been standing idle, we’d have had all day to ourselves (a long day). Innovators, lovely people with great products born in their hearts, were also rans.

Something was up.

And to cut a long story short, this was what was up. The funeral directors were getting it – emotionally. They weren’t just there to see what was in it for them (more of the same and a pint with some mates), they were seeing what was in it for us, people who buy funerals. They weren’t looking for what they could flog but what they could add – add to the experience of a funeral as an event which can do so much (if done well) to transmute grief into something more endurable, something even joyous. They kept all the innovators exhaustingly busy. (They enjoyed their pint too, of course.)

And far from finding myself a pariah figure (I remain so to some, I know) there was a startling welcome in the hillside from lots and lots of funeral directors. And I began to feel a bit bad about some of the mean and mischievous things I’ve said about them collectively. They didn’t mind, it was the others I was talking about, they said, they knew that. Truly, this has become an industry of two halves, and the forward-looking half has achieved critical mass. That’s more than half, isn’t it? Woop, as Louise would say, woop (I can’t, not at my age).

Until last Friday my fixed view was that the funeral industry is unaccustomed to consumer scrutiny and doesn’t like it. Well, my mind has done a volte face on that, let me tell you. By day three I was wearing my badge round the right way. I have never talked so much in my life or had so much serious fun with so many brilliant and lovely people.

I’m still taking it in. There’s been a sea change. Cue that Dylan song.

 

The Good Funeral Guide
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