November 2011 – Page 2 – The Good Funeral Guide

Cremains of the day

23 November 2011

Charles

5 Comments

Categories: ashes

We’ve always liked Daisy coffins. They’re a quality product and use a range of lovely looking, renewable materials: water hyacinth, banana leaf, wicker — imported, of course. The people at Daisy are nice, too.

Daisy don’t just make nice coffins, they also thoroughly understand design. They present themselves beautifully. They use an excellent graphic designer; their ads would look great in any glossy lifestyle magazine. And it’s all a bit wasted on their target audience, funeral directors, who are, of course, much more interested in things like price and whether they leak and creak. Funeral directors have a thing about creaky coffins.

Daisy don’t sell direct to the public. A great pity; they’d shift a few.

But they have just started selling urns direct to folk like us. We liked the look of them and asked us to send us one. They did — with a return postage sticker. We took it out to lunch to test reactions. Nobody reckoned it was an ashes container; one person thought it was a box of chocolates — encouraging for anyone wanting to transport ashes in a container which doesn’t shout Dead Man’s Dust at innocent bystanders.

The urn pictured above is from their leaf range. They do them in a variety of shapes and colours. They are made of cardboard decorated with dried leaves. They’re biodegradable, of course, if you want to bury — and reusable as a memory box, or whatever, if you want to scatter. At £35 they are nicely priced.

Check out the Daisy Memories website. They do other urns in all sorts of materials. Click here.

Note to cynics: no, they’re not paying us a penny to say this. We say what we like.

Stoned

22 November 2011

Charles

4 Comments

Categories: Co-operative Funeralcare

The dolts at The Co-operative Funeralcare have quarried another groundbreaking wheeze. Undistracted by the implosion of Thomas Cook, with which Co-op Travel ill-advisedly merged earlier this year, the blue-skies thinkers at Effcare have cooked up a… wait for it… headstone plan (which they inflatedly call a memorial masonry plan).

Yes, now you can buy tomorrow’s gravestone at today’s prices. More than that, you can compose your own epitaph and choose the style in which the lettering will be gritblasted by an indifferent machine.

This is a thoughtful thing to do. When we die the cognitive powers of our nearest and dearest will, as you know, be paralysed by grief or summick and they’ll find it impossible to express a preference for any hideous shade of imported Chinese or Indian granite let alone be able to come up with something to say on it. In the words of The Co-operative, “The plan ensures family members are not left with the emotional and financial burden of making these decisions at a very difficult time.”

Asked why the service thought people would want to write their own epitaphs rather than leave it to their loved ones, a spokeswoman said people were increasingly wanting to make personal additions to their own funerals.

She said: “The feedback we are getting is that people want more specific things and they want it to be a celebration of their life. We are getting people to take that one step further … making it more personal and more about you.”

So there you have it. Left to our descendants, our epitaphs will lack both a personal and a celebratory touch.

The thinking is obviously flawed and illogical. Taken with pre-need plans, this gravestone plan is just another way of shutting out the bereaved from creating fitting memorial events for their dead.

A word to the dying. Say what you’d like, write them a cheque, then butt out; you’ll be dead. This does not apply if there will be nobody close to you looking after things when you’re gone.

Will anyone, we wonder, explain to those who take out one of these prescriptive plans that the wishes of the living are not legally enforceable after they’re dead? What will the Co-op be saying to people who say ‘We don’t like it; we want something else’?

Dismal press release here.

Marvellous!

22 November 2011

Charles

4 Comments

Categories: funeral directors

Muriel Grimmett, Coventry’s first female funeral director, is still going strong at the grand old age of 80. She reckons to keep going for as long as her faculties will allow.

She headed up Grimmett and Timms until 1996, when the firm was sold. She now works with the independent firm AJ Lloyd (recommended by the GFG), where proprietor Darren Lloyd has told us that it’s Muriel’s formidable principles, standards and example which most inform ethos and practice.

An Instinct for Kindness

21 November 2011

Charles

1 Comment

Categories: Assisted suicide, self-deliverance

From the review in the Guardian:

Last year Chris Larner took his ex-wife Allyson – with whom he had remained good friends – to the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland where she ended her life. It was a life that had become unbearable because of the constant pain, indignities and limits imposed upon her by multiple sclerosis, a condition she had lived with for more than 25 years. Allyson decided that enough was enough.

It is its total lack of sentimentality that makes it so moving, and half the audience is in pieces long before the end. That, and because the redoubtable Allyson is so fully present in the show. Planning her own funeral, she declares: “I don’t want any stiff upper lip. I want weeping and wailing and inconsolable.” This was not a woman to go gently into that good night, and this is a show that reminds us that how we die is as important as how we live.

Useful advice for senior citizens

21 November 2011

Charles

1 Comment

Categories: Humour

Ever wondered about what to look for in a nursing home?

We know. It’s a pre-need question and just like funeral planning we all like to think we wont need it. Or maybe we’ll get lucky and die first.

But life expectancy is only another way to say hanging around. Street corners are too chilly (and there are no toilets) and the libraries are all closing so maybe the nursing home is all that’ll be left to us.

In which case it’s worth checking this site out. Packed with top tips it’s as indispensible as – dare we say it – the Good Funeral Guide itself.

For example here it is on what to look for when assessing amenities in the home:

Don’t be drawn in by fancy extras like craft rooms, massage pools, visitor parking or other amenities that are never likely to be used.

Focus on the basics and make sure that they have the small creature comforts like heat, running water and around the clock electricity.

Top advice. Read more here.

Plumbline and square – the Masonic funeral

21 November 2011

Charles

No comments

Categories: alternative funerals, Attitudes to death, death and funerals, funeral customs

Some Masons call their funeral ceremony an Orientation, but these days the service itself can be like a secular ceremony – apart, of course, from the Masonic ‘paraphernalia’.

Masons are a great deal more open about their ceremonies than they used to be, but much of what they do still seems esoteric and mysterious. Borderzine magazine has an interesting article about 93 year old Norman Miller, resident of El Paso, who bebelieves that since he began in 1964 he has carried out well over a thousand Masonic funerals.

In the interview he explains the process:

“We get word from the families of the the funeral director that the family desires to have a gravesite [sic] service. We don our Masonic aprons, our paraphernalia…some of the lodge officers have their jewels on. We form the group and I do the Masonic orientation.

The full article can be found here.

If you are interested Masons in Maryland have provided a video reenactment of the Masonic funeral:

Of course this is America. Is anyone prepared to say whether it is different here in Britain?

Death Cafe

19 November 2011

Charles

No comments

Categories: Attitudes to death, Grief

Do you follow Death Cafe?

If you don’t, you really ought to pop across and check it out; it’s brilliant.

It doesn’t have have an agenda or a campaigning platform; it doesn’t address itself to a particular constituency or type or sect. It believes, I hope I’m right in surmising, that death should be part of general discourse. So it stages pop-up death cafes where anyone can drop in, have a nice cup of tea and some cake, and chat about death. It’s not morbid or Goth or weird, it’s completely normal — that’s the point.

Jon, the host, is posting some great stuff on his blog. Eclectic’s the word, quality’s the name.

Go see. Here.

Pauper funeral

18 November 2011

Charles

1 Comment

Categories: music, Pauper funerals

From the Toronto Globe and Mail:

I was standing in the parlour of a Toronto funeral home, waiting for the friends of the homeless man we were about to bury. The funeral director was supposed to be retired, but he had stayed on to see the business through the transition to a new owner. Together, we looked through the stately front window toward the strip club across the street offering “the finest in adult entertainment.”

In Toronto, the city pays funeral costs for those without assets. But the stipend for clergy is so paltry that the funeral director had trouble finding a minister who would agree to perform the service.

I had said yes, but on one condition: I wanted to meet the family of the deceased. I was not willing to perform a cold and impersonal service for a man I knew nothing about.

The only contacts he had were other homeless men and women. I arranged to meet some of them at a coffee shop to discuss their friend. Our conversation was rich and heartfelt, and I was honoured to be a part of it. Together, we planned an informal, simple, yet personal service to honour the deceased.

Just as I prepared to begin the service, a woman stood up and said that a medicine man had called. He was coming, but was stuck in traffic. Could I wait?

I could.

Twenty-five minutes later, a first nations healer walked into the room. He performed a sacred smudging ceremony to open the service. The next 30 minutes included readings from Leonard Cohen and Ecclesiastes, several eulogies, a toast to a friend and the rosary.

Then the funeral director stood up and said he would play the CD of Sanctus and Benedictus conducted by Eugene Stewart and the St. Matthew’s Choir, recorded live at the funeral of President John F. Kennedy. I still remember his exact words as he pushed the CD into the slot: “It is my firm belief that every person deserves such a sending off.”

Whole article here.

Signs of the times – undertakers as event managers

17 November 2011

Charles

No comments

Categories: funeral customs, funeral directors, funeral trends, funerals in other cultures

Funerary customs are on the move in Germany, which seems to be emerging as the country to watch at the moment.

Undertakers are becoming a little like event managers. People who are not religious and don’t go to church expect undertakers to organize a ritual for the funeral.

In recent years the culture of mourning has changed in Germany. Funerals have become more personal, often more colourful.

‘As private business people, funeral directors are usually better able to cater for individual needs. A priest, on the other hand, is confined to certain structures,’ says Alexander Helbach, spokesman for the consumer funeral watchdog association in Germany. Helbach believes morticians are profiting from the change in attitudes by extending their services into organizing funeral orators or funeral halls for families of the dead.

As German undertakers move to meet consumer expectations by extending their service into ceremony-making, we note that most British undertakers have been very slow to exploit the opportunity.

Following recent discussion on this blog about who is responsible if a grave is dug too small, it is delightful to note that Germans, noted for thoroughness in all things, train their undertakers to cope with all contingencies:

In the central German town of Munnerstadt there is even a special graveyard where young morticians can practice burials – the only one of its kind in Europe.

Read the whole article here.

Death Row

17 November 2011

Charles

9 Comments

Categories: prisons

On Texas’s death row, there are no contact visits at all– no hand-holding, no embraces.

There is a strange little ritual when a Texas prisoner who still has family and friends is executed: his or her loved ones rush to the Huntsville funeral home which holds the contract with the prison, to touch the dead body while warmth remains in it. Normally, it will have been over five years since it was possible to touch the prisoner at all.

[Source]