26 March 2012 – The Good Funeral Guide

Cherry blossoms

Posted by Vale

Blossom bursting from bare wood,
old hearts crack open
spring sunshine.

There is something unlooked for in the pleasures of spring: light, warmth and the flush of blossom; a sudden generosity beyond expectation.

Japan marks this annual marvel by holding blossom viewing parties. It’s part of a culture which reverences nature by going out and actively celebrating it – moon gazing, listening to mountain streams and viewing flowers.

Springtime brings the most intense experience. A wave of cherry blossom festivals sweeps the islands of Japan starting in the south and following the sun northwards over two or three months. Picnics under the trees can be raucous and lively (older people often prefer more sedate plum blossom viewings), but winter is over and the sap is rising.

Underneath the joy there is, of course, a poignancy. It’s not as simple as reminding us that – like our lives – the blossoms’ beauty is brief and all too quickly ended, it’s also the sense that there could be no better time to leave than when the world around you is at its most lovely. Back in the 12^th Century Saigyo famously wrote:

I wish to die in spring
beneath the cherry blossoms
while the springtime moon is full

Of course the connection between the cherry blossom and time’s passing can be found much closer to home too. This from AE Housman’s A Shropshire Lad:

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.

How nice to imagine the time when you thought you had fifty blossom seasons more.

What price value?

Over at the Connnecting Directors website here there’s a rant by a funeral home consultant, Alan Creedy. In it, we see amusing similarities between the US funeral industry and our own:

Why do funeral professionals spend so much time fighting among themselves and never fighting for themselves? … Why is so much emotional energy spent on not-losing-a-call and none spent on getting 5 more calls?

Mr Creedy berates US undertakers for their passivity in hard times:

We are so addicted to our “Mr. Nice Guy” image and so afraid of offending just one person that we allow people like Jessica Mitford and Lisa Carlson and a plethora of ill informed journalists to tell our story for us. In fact, I have come to believe we no longer know what our story is.

Worse, it seems US funeral home profits have halved in the last 30 years. Mr Creedy wants undertakers to stand up for themselves:

WAKE UP! If you think people will like you because you are their doormat (which they don’t) they will like you a whole lot less when you are a public failure. Your livelihood is in jeopardy. Your wife and your family’s livelihood is in jeopardy…

…and so on. You can read it for yourself here.

Over here in the UK, times are also hard for undertakers. There are too many of them competing in a market where the death rate has never been so low.

Worse, there’s a recession on.

And to top it all, demand has never been higher for cut-price funerals. The undertakers who are doing best are the £995, bargain basement, pile em high and burn em cheap brigade. The number of people looking for direct cremation is becoming astonishing.

It is not all economic necessity which is driving this. Arguably, the significant factor is the failure of our undertakers, collectively, to make a case for the emotional and spiritual value of a funeral ceremony.

A funeral is, for many, no more than an invidious social ordeal.

And the trend is that it is becoming increasingly okay to opt out.