In a useful and instructive blog post, Bobbi Emel discusses what oldies need if they are to be able to adapt to the falling-to-bits process.
Archive: March 2012
Post mortem correspondence
If the Daily Mail didn’t exist, would the schtoopid things it reports ever happen? Probably not.
Here’s what we mean.
A Bristol woman opens a letter addressed to her newly dead brother. It is headed
claim ended: cl death
Your claim for benefit has ended with effect from the above date for the reason shown. If you wish to reclaim housing or council tax benefit, please do so without delay.
Normally benefit will be paid from the Monday following the date we receive your claim. You can obtain a claim form and advice by ringing the helpline service.
Please note – please return your completed application form immediately, even if you do not have all the required documentary evidence. You may lose benefit if you delay sending us your application form … you must tell us if your circumstances change
If you don’t believe us, click here.
How to feel at home
Posted by Kathryn Edwards
Delving again into Emily Post’s funeral etiquette produces another fascinating blast from the past: the bereaved need to decide whether to hold the funeral in church or at the house.
Emily suggests that a church funeral can be more trying, in that the family have to leave the seclusion of home and face a congregation. ‘Many people prefer a house funeral—it is simpler, more private, and obviates the necessity for those in sorrow to face people. The nearest relatives may stay apart in an adjoining room or even upon the upper floor, where they can hear the service but remain in unseen seclusion.’ (And as for guests: ‘Ladies keep their wraps on. Gentlemen wear their overcoats or carry them on their arms and hold their hats in their hands.’) On the other hand, the church funeral has its advantages: ‘many who find solemnity only in a church service with the added beauty of choir and organ, prefer to take their heartrending farewell in the House of God.’
Emily seems to have an ear for the transcendent through the blessing of music, and the instruments matter: ‘it is almost impossible to introduce orchestral music that does not sound either dangerously suggestive of the gaiety of entertainment or else thin and flat.’ In a domestic setting ‘a quartet or choral singing is beautiful and appropriate, if available, otherwise there is usually no music at a house funeral.’
This proposed choice between church and house funerals is predicated on readers’ having a reception room big enough to accommodate the desired number of mourners (not to mention the coffin on a stand, the floral tributes, and the quartet or choir). Nowadays, given most people’s much smaller houses, this idea may seem both appealing – how stress-free to be ‘at home’! – and yet unachievable. Could it be that we are missing out by limiting our choice to church-or-crem without thinking of alternatives?
A while ago I was at a very moving funeral for an older man that took place first of all in the drawing-room of a private house, and afterwards – for intimate family only – at the crem, in a move designed not to intimidate his young children. But the fact was that we all benefited from a pleasant, friendly, demotic environment. The room was generally used for workshops and yoga classes, and so was well-equipped with dozens of folding chairs, and looked out through french windows onto a lovely flower-filled garden.
This choice came about as a result of an enlightened funeral director’s enquiries. And yet it can be difficult and daunting to look into creative possibilities while tangled up in the specific busyness and sorrows of a death.
How can we expand the roster of spacious and uplifting funeral venues, so that we can feel ‘at home’ and in beauty as we engage in this solemnity?
Find Emily Post’s Etiquette in Society, in Business, in Politics and at Home here
* http://www.bartleby.com/95/
Feed Me To The Wind
Don’t pay any attention to the photo above. If you missed Feed Me To The Wind, a very good programme about ashes on R4 this morning, don’t despair; you can listen to it on the BBC website. Here’s the Beeb blurb:
Tens of thousands of ashes remain uncollected or unscattered. Amanda Mitchison looks at the choices, conflicts and absurdity in the new British ritual of ash scattering.
More of us than ever choose to take the ashes of the deceased away from a crematorium or funeral directors: but it’s what should happen then we can’t figure out. In fact, every undertaker has a whole room of unclaimed ashes – those whose next of kin either couldn’t decide, or agree, what to do with them. As a nation, we used to know which death rites were, well, right – but as more and more are cremated, we lawless Britons started improvising.
We speak to people who are yet to collect ashes – or have made the decision to keep them, at home – exploring the complex emotions these plastic containers provoke, even in modern ‘un-spiritual’ Britain. We’ll hear from people whose personal ceremonies did not go to plan, where uncertainty about bylaws and prevailing winds has led to farce instead of reverence. The practicalities always seem to fox our need for something ‘spiritual’, so perhaps we’re not adequately prepared for what we receive from undertakers.
We ask whether the whole process is a hangover of the industrial revolution – and look at the feelings that municipal buildings like crematoria can elicit. In the quest for something special and unique, those who are in the business of ash-scattering tell us about the more dramatic means of scattering – miniature Viking ships and all.
Perhaps we could take a lead from other traditions which have practiced cremation for thousands of years – what is the Hindu perspective on cremation? Should we let those around us know to ‘Feed Me To The Wind’ if that is what we would want?
Listen again here.
From God we come and to Him we return
A thought for the day from Richard Rawlinson
The trend for funerals conducted as celebrations of life must surely stem from society’s weakened belief in life after death. Even Christians now opt for the panegyric of the dead through tributes to the deceased instead of a ceremony combining natural grief for the loss and hope of the mercy of God.
In the days of the Hapsburg Empire there was a ritual to receive the body of a dead emperor into the cathedral in Vienna: attendants with the coffin would knock on the doors and a voice from within would ask: “Who demands entry?” Many grand titles would be read out. The doors would remain shut. The attendants would knock again and the same question would be asked. The response this time would simply be “A poor sinner”. The doors would be thrown open and the coffin would proceed inside.
Presswatch
The weekend yielded three newspaper articles about funerals.
The Indy’s is a way-to-go survey. It begins by reflecting the current morbid fascination with the demise of enormous people and the consequent indignities of going out big, making play of wardrobe-size coffins and cranes used to lower them. Health is the new morality, of course, so going to your grave in a JCB amounts to judgement. For the rest, we’re not at all sure that the article tells anyone anything they didn’t already know. The writers talk of caskets, not coffins. They quote the average funeral cost as £7,248. They display the customary media attraction to wackiness — Crazy Coffins, for example. Oh and promession, in development since 1999 and yet, as far as we know, to render anyone to biodegrable powder. Verdict: dull. Score: 3/10. Find it here.
There’s a much better piece in the Guardian by Amanda Mitchison and Caleb Parkin about ashes and what people do with them. Richard Martin over at Scattering Ashes was thrilled that his Viking longship got a mention, though no name-check for him. Or for the GFG, which begat the concept. 8/10 for this and, at the time of typing, we are waiting for Ms Mitchison to take to the air on R4 and talk to us about ashes. Listen-again link later. Find the Guardian article here.
Finally, the Daily Mail plays to the zeitgeist with a shamelessly sensational piece about a man too large to fit into a mortuary refrigerator and ‘left to rot’… ‘Plans for an open casket funeral have been scrapped because his body is too decayed.’ What’s all this casket talk we’re getting these days? Score for this piece 0/10 or 10/10 depending on the altitude of your brow. Find it here.
Have your say
Happy Monday, everyone.
If you come to this blog wondering what’s kicking off, chances are you’ve got something to say yourself.
If so, we’d like you to.
The GFG’s a talking shop. We don’t have an editorial line, we don’t have a manifesto. Come one, come all; we’re Funeralworld’s Speakers’ Corner.
If you’d like to sound off about anything at all, do get in touch.
Undertakers — what are they really like?
“In numberless instances the interment of the dead is in the hands of miscreants, whom it is almost flattery to compare to the vulture, or the foulest carrion bird.”
Writer in Leisure Hour, 1862
Hurrah for Dignity!
Announcement by the Press Association:
The UK’s largest provider of funeral-related services has reported higher profits after its strongest year for the number of families planning ahead for a death.
Dignity, which has 600 funeral locations including 35 crematoria, said the number of pre-arranged funeral plans on its books and yet to take place increased to 265,000 in 2011, from 238,000 the previous year.
The group, which last year held 62,300 funerals, allows customers to plan a funeral in advance and make provisions towards the cost through its Dignity Guaranteed Funeral Plan.
Dignity said underlying pre-tax profits increased by 3% to £41.6 million in the year to December 30, as it increased its location portfolio by 33 in the year.
Sebastien Jantet, analyst at broker Investec, said Dignity had delivered “yet another set of strong results”. He added: “The highlights were a strong performance from the pre-arranged funerals division.”
The Sutton Coldfield-based group said its funeral services division, which brings in the largest proportion of profits, had received investment of around £9.5 million, with roughly half of this funding the replacement of its hearses and limousines.
The group’s crematoria division saw operating profits increase 7% to £21.3 million as it conducted 47,600 cremations, compared with 45,200 the previous year.
The group completed the construction of two crematoria in Somerset and Worcestershire in the period, while work continues on a new crematorium in Essex. The group is also the preferred bidder to operate Haringey Council’s crematorium in north London.
Looking ahead, Mike McCollum, Dignity chief executive, said: “While 2012 has started more quietly than 2011, the board remains confident in the group’s prospects and its expectations for 2012 remain positive and unchanged.”
Here at the GFG-Batesville Tower we celebrated this marvellous news by announcing a half day holiday (unpaid, of course) and shooting an intern.
Blazing indignation
The infantile superficiality of the media’s treatment of issues around death and funerals is something we’ve deplored frequently on this blog — and today’s news is that things haven’t got any better.
Instead of giving serious consideration to what a crematorium might do with the heat it is compelled to capture from its waste gases, a necessary precondition for mercury scrubbing, the Daily Mail prefers to target its readers’ susceptibility to righteous indignation. So we get this:
A council’s cost-saving plans to heat a chapel where mourners go to grieve with energy from the burning of dead bodies has outraged residents.
‘I think it’s outrageous. Relatives will be sitting in the chapel remembering their loved ones and knowing their bodies are being used to cut energy bills,’ said James Sanderson, 43. ‘I would not like to be sitting there thinking my dead gran was heating up the room. It’s sick and an insult to our loved ones.’
What the clever journalist, who surely knows better, has hidden from the readers and the combustible Mr Sanderson, who seems to like going off on one if it means getting in the paper, is that human corpses make very poor fuel. This may be down to them being 72 per cent water. Try and heat your living room by chucking another nan on the fire and you’ll find that out soon enough.
Rentagob is never far from a hack’s mic or notebook at a time like this. In the same article Tory twat councillor Tom Wootton said:
‘The Conservative group is quite shocked by this proposal and we want more information and figures as to how cost-effective this would be.
‘The Liberals have insisted they will not burn rubbish to make energy but here they are proposing to use the heat from burning dead people, which I think is a little strange.”
Here in Redditch this debate has been had and put to bed. A union official raged and an undertaker spluttered, but the good ordinary people of this lovely old moss-covered market town simply thought about it quietly then gave their thumbs up to heating the swimming pool with a little help from the crem.
For they understand that the heat given off by a burning body is negligible, and that their swimming pool will in fact be heated by the heat used to burn bodies.
The British, it seems, are a reassuringly pragmatic people, an impression reinforced by the fact that, when we last looked, no one had bothered to comment on the Mail’s inflammatory nonsense.
Read the whole article, if you can be bothered, here.