“The burnt ashes are put into a cremulator that grinds them fine and grinds the bits. Some funeral homes prefer not to grind all the bits out, so that you can see it’s the remains. It’s a bit like peanut butter. Some prefer chunky. Some prefer smooth.”
From an online Q and A with an American funeral director here.
There’s an interesting article about grieving in the New York Times. The writer describes an accidental discovery of the value of secular shiva.
First, what’s shiva?
Named after the Hebrew word for “seven,” shiva is a weeklong mourning period, dating back to biblical times, in which immediate family members welcome visitors to their home to help fortify the soul of the deceased and comfort the survivors. Though many contemporary Jews shorten the prescribed length, the custom is still widely practiced.
The writer continues:
The “secular shivas” we organized had a number of notable differences that proved crucial to their success. First, we organized them for Jews and non-Jews alike. Second, no prayers or other religious rituals were offered. Third, we held them away from the home of the griever, to reduce the burden. And finally, we offered the grieving party the option of speaking about the deceased, something not customary under Jewish tradition.
The writer lists lessons learned:
* Don’t wait for the griever to plan.
* Invite rxmeds hub order cialis super active online only those people that the bereaved person will feel comfortable with.
* Ask the bereaved person to share a few stories.
* There is comfort to be taken from a gathering of people, but here’s a caveat: “Introverts need to grieve, too. For some, a gathering of this kind might be a particular kind of torture.”
The writer concludes:
What I’ve taken away from the experience is a reminder of what I’ve seen often in looking at contemporary religion. Rather than chuck aside time-tested customs in favor of whiz-bang digital solutions, a freshening of those rituals is often more effective. Our “secular shivas” took some advantages of the Internet (e-mail organizing, ordering food online); coupled them with some oft-forgotten benefits of slowing down and reuniting; and created a nondenominational, one-size-doesn’t-fit-all tradition that can be tinkered to fit countless situations.
Like all such traditions, they may not soften the blow of a loss, but they had the unmistakable boon of reaffirming the community itself.
Whole article here
I’ve attended both a religious and a … civil? funeral recently, and the similarities – the sadness of the person’s departure, the commemoration of a life well spent, humour, grief and the gathering together of people who might not otherwise have seen each other in a long time – were far more obvious to me than the differences.
Guardian commenter Jehenna here.
Posted by Charles
If any group of people in a local community wished to establish a funeral service inspired and informed by the principles and ideals of co-operativism, what would their position be with regard to the sixth Rochdale Principle if they found themselves in the circumstance of potentially competing with an established co-op funeral home belonging either to Co-operative Funeralcare or to an independent regional co-operative society?
6th Principle: Co-operation Among Co-operatives
Co-operatives serve their members most effectively and strengthen the Co-operative Movement by working together through local, national, regional and international structures.
First, a little history. According to a Monopolies and Mergers Commission report dated, I think, 1986, this was the position until midway through the twentieth century:
Each [co-operative] retail society … was formed by local people to serve the interests of their locality and consequently each of them was rooted in and traded in the community from which it originally sprang. Until 1960 boundary agreements existed between individual retail societies which, in effect, restricted them to trading within their particular recognised trading areas. The Co-operative Union, formed in 1869 to establish and organise Co-operative societies, acted as an ‘arbiter’, according to its rules, in ‘boundary’ disputes between societies.
In terms of the sixth principle, this makes perfect sense: co-operatives co-operate, therefore they do not compete against each other.
All this came to an end with the passage of the Restrictive Trade Practices Act 1956:
The Restrictive Trade Practices Act 1956 was aimed at preventing traders from entering into anti-competitive arrangements against the public interest.
At first there was no change:
Following the passage of the Act, some 200 such ‘boundary’ agreements between Co-operative societies were registered under the Act.
But in 1960 these boundary agreements were found to be illegal:
In 1960 the Restrictive Practices Court adjudicated on a boundary agreement between the adjacentDoncasterand Retford Co-operative Societies and declared that the agreement had not overcome the burden of demonstrating that it was in the public interest and that the relevant restrictions on trading outside their respective areas were void. Societies were subsequently advised by the Co-operative Union to terminate any boundary agreements to which they were parties.
This is why, in case you ever wondered, Funeralcare competes with the funeral businesses of our last remaining independent regional co-ops.
The Co-operative Funeralcare also has a peculiar habit of advertising the funeral homes of those societies it competes with. It’s been at it for a while. Back in 1986 the Competition Commission noted:
CWS [Co-operative Wholesale Society, now The Co-operative Group] advertises in newspapers local toClydebank(eg the Glasgow Guardian and Milngavie and Bearsden Herald). CWS also told us that a ‘combined advert’ under which Clydebank was listed as a ‘branch’ of CWS was placed by CWS, without reference to senior management, in the Glasgow Yellow Pages as a favour toClydebank, as that Society could not afford to advertise separately.
Funeralcare persists in this eccentric practice, listing, for example, four out of eight Scotmid funeral homes here.
We asked Scotmid if they knew about this. They didn’t. We asked if they knew why Funeralcare was doing this. They didn’t. We asked why only four out of eight funeral homes were advertised. They had no idea.
For anyone out there wanting to establish their own funeral co-op, the way is clear. Go for it. You may even get some free advertising from the mother ship.
Monopolies and Mergers Commission report here.
For many years, my father was a hairbrush. He, that is the hairbrush, was improbably made of perspex. The real thing died before I got to know him, so I carried this perspex hairbrush around, and it became for me the real thing. I used to kid my disbelieving schoolchums that it was wrought out of the cockpit of a Spitfire, since I had read that these things were made of the same material, and Spitfires were honorific objects on the 50s schoolboy totem. Ever since then I have been interested in ancestries, in authenticity, and in reality. I’ve also had a longstanding sympathy for perspex, which I like as a word, as well as a plastic.
John Hartley here
In the aftermath of Kim Jong-il’s funeral in North Korea, we learn that those of his subjects who didn’t cry hard enough or convincingly enough, together with those who did not attend official mourning events, are being rounded up and herded into labour camps. Sentences start at six months. More in the Daily Mail here.
Meanwhile, the dead dictator is, we hear, to be disembowelled and embalmed for the lasting enjoyment of his people. It is rumoured that the work will be carried out by the Russian corpse-preservation team which looks after Lenin.
In order to keep him in mid-season form, Lenin, whose afterlife now numbers 87 years, has to have a month-long restorative formaldehyde bath every eighteen months. While being gazed at by his adoring public a little pump in his chest cavity maintains the correct order cialis viagra online humidity in his insides.
Woe betide any dead dictator who doesn’t get the Russians in to do it. The Chinese did it their way for Chairman Mao and, working from text books, cocked it up. They pumped in so much formaldehyde ‘n’ stuff that Mao swelled up most remarkably and embalming fluid was seen to seep through his pores.
A worse fate awaited Klement Gottwald, president of Czechoslovakia, who died in 1953. They didn’t get the experts in for him, either. First his legs rotted and had to be replaced with prostheses. By 1962 the whole of him was in a dreadful state, so they cremated him.
Moral of the story: don’t try this at home.
“Death can only be profitable: there’s no need to eat, drink, pay taxes, offend people, and since a person lies in a grave for hundreds or thousands of years, if you count it up the profit turns out to be enormous.”
Anton Chekov, 1894
Posted by Charles
So badly has the image of the co-operative movement been damaged by Co-operative Funeralcare it’s easy to forget that, actually, the model of co-operation retains both its beauty and its potency.
A bunch of people come together “to meet their common economic, social, and cultural needs and aspirations through jointly owned and democratically controlled enterprise,” in the words of the International Co-operative Alliance here. It’s an old and resilient idea characterised by periodic renewal and resurgence. Look at the growth of, both, credit unions in recent times, and the community-owned village shop movement supported by the Plunkett Foundation here. Burial societies probably originated in England. The most notable now are the burial societies of Jewish communities — the chevra kadisha — here.
In some commercial sectors co-operation doesn’t seem to work at all any more. Supermarkets, for example. On the Isle of Portland, The Co-operative Food enjoyed for years the nearest thing to a monopoly. When Tesco opened in competition last summer it was marvellous to behold the good, working people of the island blinking in delight at the vaster range of choice and far lower prices – before deserting the Co-op in droves; our two Co-op stores now stand shunned and empty. Moral: when you can no longer enable working people to buy things they would not otherwise be able to afford you render yourself, if you’re a co-operative, pointless. Butt out.
The Co-operative Group is a disappointment. And we look for things to celebrate here at the GFG, so we are pleased to recommend the small, Edinburgh-based Scotmid Co-op Society’s funeral service, admirably run and entirely ethical, here, and we have our eye on Clydebank Co-op which, in a sideswipe at The Co-operative Group, we understand, describes itself as a ‘real co-op’ here.
No, there’s nothing wrong with the model of co-operation. But applied to funerals in an altogether more radical way than it is now, it seems to me, it could actually cause a beautiful revolution in attitudes to death and bereavement. In order to bolster this theory I set off in search of examples and inspiration before testing it on you.
I visited the US. There are very few funeral proper co-ops over there, but there’s one you might like to check out here.
There’s a group of funeral co-ops in the west of Canada dedicated to enabling people to have funerals which are ‘simple, dignified and affordable’. From what I can see, none of these co-ops does more than contract with local funeral homes to provide such funerals, and they set great store by having no business relationships with the funeral industry, as you can see here (click About). There’s a consumer activist element to these co-op societies– here. And there’s an idealistic element, of course. But the financial benefit seems, disappointingly, to be the big attraction – here. Members get the best deal, non-members pay more. Check out the Memorial Societies of Canada here.
In a different league is the Prince Edward Island Co-operative Funeral Homes group in the east of Canada. Here we have seven funeral homes, each belonging to its own society with its own membership, board of directors and history. The big difference? Each society employs its own staff in its own funeral home. Here’s a typical story, from Hillsboro:
In September of 1992 the funeral coop held its first funeral and the second followed in November. As well in the fall of 1992 the first space was rented in the Bunbury Mall and from there the Hillsboro Funeral Cooperative continued to grow.
In 1993 a ten year old hearse was purchased and in 1994 a van was purchased. As well in 1994 the negotiation for the current site were completed and in the fall of 1997 a sod turning ceremony took place with the completion of the building in January of 1998.
In 1999 a position of General Manager was created and on August 27, 1999 Vince J Murnaghan commenced employment. In 2000 a 1987 hearse was purchased and an additional 1.02 acres of land was purchased to allow for further expansion.
Find the Prince Edward Island Co-operative Funeral Homes here.
There is some advice from the Fédération des Coopératives Funéraires du Québec on how to start a funeral co-op here.
It is good to see communities take responsibility for the funerals of their members in this way. And it points up a difficulty that conventional funeral directors have in this country. They all want to demonstrate communitarian values, but that’s hard to do if you’re an undertaker, which is why so many of their community enterprises consist of little more than writing cheques. Sure, this is good news for lots of deserving causes, and it would be harsh, though in some cases accurate, to describe this community activity as nothing more than stigma-dispersal and ingratiation. We reflect, here, that while in all cultures those who deal with the dead are to a greater or lesser extent sidestepped, in Britain they are relatively well integrated. But, here’s the point, do any of these community initiatives actually involve communities in helping the bereaved in a way I once proposed they might, here? I still think they could. This is part of what I wrote:
I suspect that there are lots of people who would welcome the opportunity to do good voluntary work for the bereaved. Many people who have been bereaved want to use their understanding and experience for the benefit of others. Helping others helps them.
Some bereaved people don’t drive and need to get to the registrar, the bank. Some of them have never had anything to do with the household accounts; others have never cooked for themselves; some are skint; some have lawns that need mowing; some have never been alone before… Almost all are too blown away to think and act at anything like full effectiveness.
So there is a role for drivers, advisers, social fund form-fillers, cooks, hooverers, phone minders and listeners. And there are lots of people out there who would do this for the sake of it – who would, indeed, not do it if they were paid for it. They would also play an important part in joining up the funeral home to mainstream society.
A real funeral co-op could do all this. There isn’t one, anywhere, that does – yet.
Here in Britain we retain one huge advantage over our transatlantic cousins: ours is an unregulated industry; there’s no requirement for a co-op to employ a licensed specialist funeral director. An ‘anti-social’ characteristic of funeral directors is that they deal only in death, and this marginalises them. Far more loveable is the undertaker who does something else, professionally, as well – a bit of building, writing and broadcasting, landscape gardening, organ playing, waiting at table, accountancy, craft pottery – whatever. A funeral co-op could employ part-timers on a rota and train willing members of the community to look after dead people – which is not that hard. There are masses of people presently looking for work in the funeral industry. Salaried staff are a must, staffing no problem at all. Celebrants could be better integrated into the process.
A funeral co-op, with its volunteer army, might adopt a policy of encouraging family participation in all aspects of arranging the funeral. This might include saying to a family, ‘Right, you need to take these papers up to the crematorium with a cheque,’ and, best of all, ‘When are you coming down to wash the hearse?’
Finding premises is never going to be a problem. But here’s an idea: in both urban and rural areas pubs are striving to broaden their appeal by becoming community resources. Well, here’s something else they can do.
A funeral co-op can bring death back into a community in a most enriching way. A knotty problem is that, although the co-operative movement was started by working people, it appeals mostly, now (when done effectively), to middle-class folk, especially those of a liberal outlook. So from where I sit, in working class Redditch, I contemplate an uphill struggle. Yet were I to travel 20 mins up the road to Brum’s egghead boho quarter, Moseley, I reckon I could get this up and running in about an hour and a half. A funeral co-operative is something that all sectors of the community must feel they want to buy into (literally). It mustn’t become a nice little hobby for ‘our sort of people’.
Enough for now. Some of this is almost certainly nuts, none of it offensive, I hope. I’d be interested to know what you think, of course.
Hey, wouldn’t it be good to get those Rochdale Pioneers grinning in their graves?
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
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.