Proxy grievers

Presently serving the bereaved of Essex and Suffolk we have a new concept in funeral service, the professional mourner. They’re called Rent a Mourner, we wish them every possible success, and you can find them here.

Did we say new? There’s nothing new in Funeralworld. Every innovation is an act of necromancy. In our scholarly and vigilant way we have covered this business of rentasob before, here and here.

And because our curiosity, like yours, is global, you may be interested to know what the market looks like in China.

One can make a decent amount of money being a proxy mourner … Wailers actually belong to an ancient profession that now keeps a low profile thanks to its singular characteristics. InChongqingandChengdu, wailers and their special bands have, over the course of more than a decade, developed into a professional, competitive market … wailers are predominantly laid-off workers.

Wailing is an ancient funeral custom. Texts show that dirges began to be used in ceremonies during the time of Emperor Wu of Han and became commonplace during the Northern and Southern Dynasties. Customs varied across ethnicities and regions. During the Cultural Revolution, wailing was viewed a pernicious feudal poison and went silent. In the reform era, it was revived in a number of areas.

Hu Xinglian’s hair is tied into pigtails pointing up in opposite directions. Her stage name means “Dragonfly” … and the two pigtails, which resemble dragonfly wings, are her trademark. She is fifty-two years old, and she is a professional wailer.

Before the ceremony begins, she asks the family of the deceased about the situation. She must do this every time. She says that wailers usually put on some makeup and wear white mourning clothes. Some of them are more elaborate, with white stage costumes and “jeweled” headdresses.

Hu calls the family of the deceased into the mourning hall and begins to read the eulogy. There is a formula to the eulogy that is adapted to the particular circumstances of the deceased. Most of these say how hard-working and beloved the deceased was, and how much they loved their children. The eulogy requires a sorrowful tone and a rhythmic cadence. As Hu reads, she sometimes howls “dad” or “mom.” And then the bereaved begin to cry as they kneel before the coffin.

After the eulogy comes the wailing, a song sung in a crying voice to the accompaniment of mournful music. Hu says that the purpose of this part is mainly to create a melancholy atmosphere which will allow the family to release their sadness through tears.

Hu says that more time is devoted to wailing in the countryside. In video recordings, Hu can be seen howling, weeping with her eyes covered, and at times crawling on the ground in front of the coffin in an display of sorrow. At some funerals, she crawls for several meters as she weeps. This never fails to move the mourners. As she wails, the family of the deceased sob, and some of them weep uncontrollably.

After the wailing is done, the second part of the funeral performance begins. Hu says that a funeral performance is usually sad in the beginning and happy at the end. Once sorrow has been released through tears, then the bereaved can temporarily forget their sorrow through skits and songs.

She says that the performance is draining to both mind and body. When she wails, she says, “My hands and feed twitch, my heart aches, and my eyes go dim.” Wailing has more lasting effects, too: Hu says that her hands have gone numb from time to time over the past year.

Like many wailers, Hu also performs at weddings. She says that because of the transitions between such high-intensity work, wailers are liable to make mistakes. For example, if the line “Would the new couple please enter the mourning hall” is let slip at a wedding, that mistake would mean the forfeiture of the fee, and a beating as well. [Source]

Back to Rent a Mourner, we can’t help thinking that, in preference to bringing another separate specialism to the grief market, it might make more sense for secular celebrants to offer a joined up service here.

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High profile life, low key death

Posted by Richard Rawlinson

I know, I know, 120 years is not a significant anniversary like a centenary, but can we spare a thought for Cole Porter, born in 1891? Two of the great American composer’s many classics, I’ve Got You Under My Skin and Just One Of Those Things, are popular secular choices at funerals. His own funeral instructions are quite interesting too.

The son of wealthy Indiana parents, he learned to ride on the family ranch at the age of six, a leisure pursuit that was to be his ultimate undoing. Attending prestigious educational establishments including the Harvard School of Music, his talent was clear early on.

After serving in the First World War, he stayed in Paris with his new wife, Linda, where they enjoyed lavish parties. Returning to the US, he fell from his horse, smashing his legs and making him wheelchair bound for five years, and enduring buy generic tadalafil online cheap many operations during the next two decades.

But it was during these years when he wrote wonderful songs from Every Time We Say Goodbye; Night And Day; Miss Otis Regrets, You Do Something To Me, and many more.

Then his wife died and his right leg was eventually amputated, after which he wrote no more as his health declined, and he fell into deep depression. He became a reclusive drunk in his apartment in the Waldorf Astoria in New York, refusing to attend a ‘Salute to Cole Porter’ night at the Metropolitan Opera House.

He died in 1964, and instructed for no funeral or memorial. He has a simple gravestone at home in Indiana where he’s buried next to his wife and father. His legacy lives on. He composed over 1,000 songs, and his hit musicals include High Society and Kiss Me Kate. He’s playing on my iTunes as I write. 

Frightfully common

The English interior designer David Hicks created the signature look of the Swinging Sixties. Those strong colours and geometrical designs — they’re his. 

He seems to have been a man at ease with his mortality, a mindset informed, perhaps, by his daily ritual of chain-smoking cigarettes. At his flat in Albany he “created a crimson drawing room and bedroom with a bed lavishly draped in red damask, which he described as ‘a bed to receive one’s doctors from, a bed to die in.’ 

“Hicks did not die in that bed but rather in his bed at the Grove, surrounded by beloved objects and gazing at the landscape. He orchestrated his own funeral, spelling out the arrangements in a book that he made called “The Demise of David Hicks.” His coffin was carried to its final resting place on an ivy-covered trailer attached to Hicks’s Range Rover. He was wearing a David Hicks tie, and his pockets were stuffed with his obituaries and press clippings.” [Source

Hicks designed his own coffin, of course. When lung cancer claimed him at the age of 69 he lay in state in it, at his own instructions, in his garden pavilion. Made of sycamore, it was, at his command, handle-less.

Coffin handles, he said, are “frightfully common”. 

The Good Funeral Guide
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