15 July 2011 – The Good Funeral Guide

Top Ten Tips for arranging a funeral

Posted by Moss

At the risk of seeming rather tabloid, especially during a difficult period for the press, we recently produced a list of tips for people who are arranging or planning a funeral. I presented this to a group of hospice workers and bereavement professionals who had a number of good suggestions to make, so I am hoping that others will be able to add to the list so that we can make it a TOP TWENTY or more…

1. Don’t panic – there’s no need to be rushed into any decisions. S l o w things down and allow yourself to take stock of what has happened.

2. Carry on caring for the person who has died and take time to say goodbye.

3. Don’t waste money on things that don’t matter; concentrate on what really counts.

4. Sing songs at the funeral to help people to join in with the ceremony; ask someone to lead the singing.

5. Keep things simple and natural – this can bring beautiful results and can highlight the importance of small individual things.

6. Ask for and accept help – many people would love to help, so give them permission to do so.

7. Consider poems – they can often put into words what we find hard to say.

8. Don’t be a spectator – bear the coffin, decide on music, poems, and memories for the service.

9. Make it personal – include a favourite perfume or flower, photographs or paintings, vehicle, sport, club or hobby – take the children and the dog too.

10. Start now – Don’t wait until it’s hard to talk about it; write down your latest thoughts.

Please help us add to and improve this list…

Timing your exit

Posted by Charles Cowling

Extracted from an article in yesterday’s New York Times:

I hope you had the chance to read and reread Dudley Clendinen’s splendid essay, “The Good Short Life”. Clendinen is dying of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or A.L.S. If he uses all the available medical technology, it will leave him, in a few years’ time, “a conscious but motionless, mute, withered, incontinent mummy of my former self.”

Clendinen’s article is worth reading for the way he defines what life is. Life is not just breathing and existing as a self-enclosed skin bag. It’s doing the activities with others you were put on earth to do.

But it’s also valuable as a backdrop to the current budget mess. This fiscal crisis is about many things, but one of them is our inability to face death — our willingness to spend our nation into bankruptcy to extend life for a few more sickly months.

Years ago, people hoped that science could delay the onset of morbidity. We would live longer, healthier lives and then die quickly. This is not happening. Most of us will still suffer from chronic diseases for years near the end of life, and then die slowly.

Obviously, we are never going to cut off Alzheimer’s patients and leave them out on a hillside. We are never coercively going to give up on the old and ailing. But it is hard to see us reducing health care inflation seriously unless people and their families are willing to do what Clendinen is doing — confront death and their obligations to the living.

My only point today is that we think the budget mess is a squabble between partisans in Washington. But in large measure it’s about our inability to face death and our willingness as a nation to spend whatever it takes to push it just slightly over the horizon.

Lessons applicable to the UK, obviously. Read the whole article in the NYT here. If you missed Dudley Cleninden’s piece, read it; it’s brilliant and important. Here.