12 January 2012 – The Good Funeral Guide

Jazz requiem

12 January 2012

Charles

2 Comments

Categories: Art and death, bereavement, funeral music, funeral poetry

Posted by Vale

This lovely jazz piece was actually a requiem for Charlie Parker – but at risk of offending purists I thought Frank O’Hara’s poem for Billie Holiday on the day she died fitted perfectly with the music.

The Day Lady Died

It is 12:20 in New York a Friday
three days after Bastille day, yes
it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine
because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton
at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner
and I don’t know the people who will feed me

I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun
and have a hamburger and a malted and buy
an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets
in Ghana are doing these days

I go on to the bank
and Miss Stillwagon (first name Linda I once heard)
doesn’t even look up my balance for once in her life
and in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I get a little Verlaine
for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do
think of Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore or
Brendan Behan’s new play or Le Balcon or Les Nègres
of Genet, but I don’t, I stick with Verlaine
after practically going to sleep with quandariness

and for Mike I just stroll into the PARK LANE
Liquor Store and ask for a bottle of Strega and
then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue
and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre and
casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton
of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with her face on it

and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of
leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT
while she whispered a song along the keyboard
to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing

Atheism and the fear of death

12 January 2012

Charles

9 Comments

Categories: Atheism, Attitudes to death, Death; Good death, Good books

Posted by Vale

It’s natural to fear death and you might think that, just as naturally, religion would help you face and overcome your fears. But it ain’t necessarily so. In a recent book, Society Without God, Anne, a 43 year old Hospice nurse from Aarhus in Denmark is interviewed. The author, Robert Zuckerman records that:

She told me that in her many years of experience working with the dying, she found that it was generally the atheists who had an easier time calmly accepting their fate, while Christians had the hardest time facing death, often being racked with worry and anxiety.

The book is a fascinating read. Zuckerman spent months interviewing people in Denmark and Sweden – the least religious in the world – to find out how secularism on such a scale affects society. Throughout you hear the authentic voices of ordinary people. Leif, a 75 year old, is a Jew and a self designated atheist. Asked what he thinks happens after we die he answers:

‘Nothing.’

‘And how does that make you feel?’

‘Well, not very sorry. It is as it is. Really I don’t feel anything about it especially.’

‘You’re not worried or scared?’

‘No I’m not. I’m not very well in health anyway, but I’m not worried.’

Sometimes we hear the surprise of the author. Reflecting on the number of non-believers who show no fear of death at all, he says that, that:

when sociologist of religion William Sims Bainbridge asks ‘How can humans…deal with the crushing awareness of mortality’ I think he is committing a mistake that many scholars of religion commit: assuming that his own fears about death are universal, when clearly they aren’t.

The effect of the interviews – on every aspect of life and society – is to present a real challenge to the argument of the religious that, without belief, society descends into sin and despair. Is it a coincidence that Danes and Swedes are recorded as the most contented in the world?

Britain, you might want to note, is not far off Scandinavia in terms of our own lack of religion.

You can buy a copy here. And there’s a good review of the book in the New York Times here.

Remembering

12 January 2012

Charles

23 Comments

Categories: bereavement, Memorialising

Posted by Vale

One evening last month we lit some candles, sat by the fire with an old book of photographs and reminisced about my wife’s mother who had died just over ten years before.

It was the first time we had done anything like this, but, over the last ten years, we have lost three of our four parents and are having to learn for ourselves how best to remember. The idea of the quiet time and the candles was our first attempt.

Then, a few days ago, with enormous pleasure and surprise, I came across this from the Gail Rubin in her book A Good Goodbye:

Every January 10, March 16, May 4, and November 2, I light a candle in memory of Grandma Dot, Grandma Min, Grandpa Ben, and Grandpa Phil. I put a picture on my kitchen table, and light a candle next to it the evening before. For that day, I imagine that particular grandparent sitting in with my husband and me as we go about our business and talk about our day.

It’s as if they get a glimpse into our current lives and I feel their presence for that day…

Remembering is about continuity and wholeness. It is restorative. In secular funeral services we tell people that the only afterlife we are certain of is in the stories we tell, the memories we share and the influence we feel in our lives. In the early days remembering is easy but In our fast forward world we have few traditions and no habits of personal and individual remembrance. Life rushes us along and too often the person you have lost feels as though they have been left behind.

Gail lists lots of ways that we could make space in our lives for remembering: cemetery visits of course, but how about memorial obituaries in the newspaper, placing photographs in the room at family get-togethers like Christmas, even household shrines.

We need something – a time or a place, an action, a personal ritual – to make remembering real again. Maybe it’s about tangible memorials and those glorious crafted containers. Maybe its something more private and personal. I know that in March and April I will be lighting candles for my own mother and father. What will you be doing?

By the way we’ve blogged about Gail’s book before. It’s worth reading not least because it led to a great discussion about shrines in the home. You can find our original review – and a link to Amazon if you’d like to buy a copy – here