June 2012 – Page 3 – The Good Funeral Guide

Thoughts of a funeral-goer

22 June 2012

Charles

7 Comments

Categories: Thoughts of a funeralgoer

Posted by Lyra Mollington

With the ‘Funeral Services of the Christian Churches in England – New Edition’ tucked safely in my bag, I set off for the crematorium. I planned to go to the office and apologise for inadvertently taking it. I decided that this would be more dignified than replacing the book surreptitiously during a service. Also, I wanted to leave my options open. If the 12.30 funeral looked sparsely attended I would head home and catch the last 15 minutes of Bargain Hunt.

As I approached the gates, I spotted a police car in my rear view mirror. What are the chances? I told myself off for being silly. The police had far more important things to do than lie in wait for an OAP to return to the scene of her crime or, rather, to the scene of her momentary lapse of concentration.

Needless to say, the police car parked alongside me. I took great care when I opened my door. A few of my previous dealings with the police flitted through my mind…on one occasion I was stopped for going through a red light at two o’clock in the morning. One glance at Mr M snoring in the passenger seat and the lady police officer let me off with a sympathetic smile and a, ‘Be more careful next time.’ I wasn’t sure if she was talking about my choice of marriage partner or the traffic lights.

Having returned the book, I saw that a large crowd was gathering in front of the chapel doors. I joined the mourners and before long we were asked to ‘please take your seats in the chapel’. Yes, I thought, and that’s all I’ll be taking today. I’m not even going to risk a photograph. I held back as everyone began filing in knowing that, even if I was last in, I would find a seat near the front.

I had just ‘taken my seat’ when a short, stocky man off to my right started remonstrating with the funeral director. He sounded annoyed and I heard the words ‘dim-witted’ and ‘flowers’. However, after just a few words (inaudible to me) from the funeral director, Mr Short-and-Angry had retreated.

I must have been staring for slightly too long because the person next to me said, ‘Dave’s brother, Roy. Dave couldn’t stand him. Looks like he wants to play the grieving relative.’

I nodded and pretended to check the shelf in front for an order of service. My neighbour chuckled, ‘Nothing worth pinching here love!’

I could feel my cheeks redden. Then I smiled hoping that he wouldn’t ask me how I knew the deceased.

‘I’m Neil. We’ve met before haven’t we?’

I have found that, when in a potentially awkward situation, revealing as little as possible is usually the best option. I pretended to look thoughtful for a few seconds.

‘Waitrose?’ I suggested. Neil nodded and shook my hand, ‘Any friend of Carol’s is a friend of mine.’ I smiled again.

To my relief the chapel attendant’s voice boomed out, ‘Will you please stand.’ Unfortunately, my new friend continued talking over the music. (Something by Pink Floyd.)

‘57…no age is it? Lung cancer. Never smoked in his life. Ridiculous.’

As the vicar introduced the first hymn, Neil quipped, ‘Can’t beat a bit of Love Divine – as the actress said to the bishop!’

To his credit, Neil sang beautifully. But all too soon we were sitting down again and when we were invited to pray, he couldn’t resist another joke, ‘Eyes down, look in…’ And, after Reverend Roger had read from Revelations, Neil whispered, ‘No disrespect but, as Dave would’ve said, “What a load of old cobblers!”’

When Rev Roger spoke about Dave’s successful career as a builder, Neil’s commentary continued, ‘He couldn’t wait to retire – poor bugger! Be careful what you wish for.’

After a few words about Dave’s family and his beloved wife Carol, who had nursed him until the end, Roger completed the eulogy by saying, ‘Carol has asked me to tell you how much Dave valued his friends. He had known his best friend Neil since junior school – fifty years of loyal friendship and a lot of laughter along the way.’

Poor Neil let out an involuntary cry which he quickly stifled. I handed him a tissue – I always have a handy pack in my bag. He nodded but didn’t utter another word until the final piece of music began, ‘Your Song’.

‘Carol and Dave chose that together. It’s Ellie Goulding. Beautiful isn’t it?’

We walked to the courtyard together. Dave’s brother Roy was slightly ahead of us and speaking in an angry voice again. This time it was to the vicar. Something about the eulogy being an ‘absolute disgrace’. Sadly the vicar didn’t seem to be having quite the same calming influence as the funeral director earlier.

Neil grinned. ‘He’s upset because he didn’t get a proper mention. You know, he never visited or phoned when Dave was ill. And he was always jealous of Dave and how happy he and Carol were. Come on! Let’s see how Carol’s doing.’

I told Carol that Neil had been looking after me. She had no idea who I was of course but she put her arms around me and thanked me for coming. Neil beamed proudly. I thought about the words on the apron my son bought me for Mother’s Day: ‘Keep calm and carry on’.

Angry Roy was now kneeling next to the flowers reading all the cards. The unwanted guest being watched by the uninvited guest. I left before anyone noticed.

No, you can’t

21 June 2012

Charles

No comments

Categories: Uncategorised

Extracted from ThisIsLeicestershire:

Teaching assistant Pam Goodwin, 44, who worked at Highcliffe Primary, in Birstall, died at home in the village on June 6, of cancer. Head teacher Pauline Aveling said: “Pam was a wonderful character and a pillar of the community. She worked very hard to help the children in her care. She was loved by all the staff.

Staff were buy generic cialis in australia granted compassionate leave by governors to attend the funeral and an initial decision was made to close the primary for the day.

However, County Hall refused permission on the grounds it was not a standard request and not enough notice was given to parents.

Full article here

Great biz idea for somebody

21 June 2012

Charles

2 Comments

Categories: memorialisation

Why (oh why) has no one developed a waterproof teddy bear for child graves? Can’t be rocket science, surely? Come on, you budding entrepreneurs!

The order is rapidly fadin’

21 June 2012

Charles

4 Comments

Categories: alternative funerals, ashes, Attitudes to death, Body donation, ceremony, cremation, Formality vs informality, funeral customs, funeral directors, Religious funerals

Blog reader Kathryn Edwards has drawn our attention to an interesting article in the Guardian. Thanks, Kathryn.

In it, Rosanna Greenstreet tells how her aunt Molly donated her body for medical education or research, thereby denying everyone the benefit of a funeral. Greenstreet tells us what family and friends did instead:

Molly didn’t believe in God and hated funerals, but she loved a party. So on Saturday 12 May, on what would have been her 94th birthday weekend, Stephen and Prudence held one for her. The celebration lunch was in a private room at the Michelin-starred restaurant, Chez Bruce, in south London. All Molly’s nearest and dearest came. There were photos of her through the ages and letters of condolence from her friends. It was a lovely occasion: we drank champagne as we shared our memories of Molly, and there were no tears.

Greenstreet’s father also wants to donate his bodyto Cambridge university, both for the benefit that will confer and also because it will enable him to evade a funeral. He’s written down seven reasons:

1. Hopefully, to make some contribution to medical training

2. To spare relatives the trouble of organising a funeral.

3. To spare my estate the cost of a funeral (a “cheap” one might cost £3,000).

4. To spare possible “mourners” the trouble of attending a funeral.

5. To avoid the hypocrisy of troubling the Anglican church to participate in a service when I have attended so few other services since I left school.

6. There is nothing that could be said or sung at a church funeral service that would reflect my views (such as they are) on life, death and fate. Anyone curious about my life can be sufficiently informed by my detailed and intimate diaries (currently 76 volumes).

7. To avoid anyone having to trouble to say anything interesting or pleasant about a life distinguished only by its lack of significant distinction – or disgrace.

Typically self-deprecating and, perhaps, peculiarly British. Anthony Greenstreet may be 83 but he’s in tune with the zeitgeist. Like an ever-increasing number of people, he can’t see the point of a conventional funeral, and his daughter is catching on to the attractions of a funeral without a body.

Greenstreet concludes:

It’s hard to think about what we will do to remember my father when he has gone up to Cambridge for the last time. Fancy restaurants have never been his thing – he has always preferred home-cooking. Nor does he drink much – his preferred tipple is tea, taken without milk, harking back to the days when he started his career as a “humble clerk” in India. So, perhaps, when the time comes, we will sit around the kitchen table with a cuppa, make a start on those 76 diaries, and really find out what made the old man tick!

The comments under the article are worth reading. Here are some:

Mrs PunkAs

When my father in law passed away recently we respected his wishes not to have a funeral – he was non religious and wanted no public gathering so instead we hired a room at the crematorium and gave the four grandchildren an assortment of multi coloured vivid markers each. They spent a lovely half an hour drawing all sorts of stuff all over his coffin, pictures, words, memories etc. It was really good for them. It was the best send-off I’ve been to.

Mykeff

I’d like to be stripped of all useable parts and then squashed into an old cardboard receptacle and ploughed under at a random beauty spot.
Reduce. Reuse. Recycle.

Sandyr9 (whose father donated his body)

For my father, we reserved a chapel, placed an obituary with time and location of service, called distant friends and relatives, and had a lovely service: A minister friend presided, biblical passages were preached and discussed, and traditional hymns were played. After the service, there was a reception wherein attendees met and conversed with family. To my thinking, we had a funeral for my father.

These sentiments are as common among Guardian readers as they are among the readers of any other paper. Each inspires the others to do something minimal or creative or alternative or all of the above. And of course, the more people exchange these sorts of views, the more they empower themselves, so that when the time comes, the more likely they are to have the clarity of mind to reject a funeral director’s conventional offer.

The message to funeral directors is one that Bob Dylan set to music all those years ago: better start swimming.

Full Guardian article here.

Quote of the day

20 June 2012

Charles

2 Comments

Categories: Attitudes to death, funeral, Reasons to go to a funeral

“It is costly to our society in general, quite beyond the church, not to observe the death of a person in a way that witnesses to the dignity of the person and the meaning of life and death.”

Thomas G Long

Source

Can you help?

20 June 2012

Charles

2 Comments

Categories: ashes, memorialisation

Space burial is about sending a portion of cremation ashes into space, then releasing them so that they can orbit the Earth.

Up in Glasgow, Tom Walkinshaw is developing his own space burial programme. It’s ambitious stuff. He’s won an award from Glasgow Caledonian University and he has the support of the Prince’s Scottish Youth Business Trust.

Tom is carrying out a survey to find out more about what people want, and he has appealed to the readers of the GFG to tell him what they think.

We very much hope you’ll help him out. You can do that by going over to the survey — it’s very short — here.

Find Tom’s website here.

Thank you!

Different cultures, different customs

20 June 2012

Charles

1 Comment

Categories: cremation, funeral customs, funeral pyres, open-air cremation

Very interesting photo-essay here about the ghats at Varanasi. Good text, too.

Sometimes poorer people cannot afford enough wood to completely burn a body. In this case charred body parts are simply flung into the river with the ashes. Certain people, such as small children, pregnant women and holy men, are not cremated at all, but instead simply have their bodies weighted down with stones and are dropped into the Ganges. Not too pleasant for the many bathers around the ghats.

As a solution to the problem of human remains clogging up the Ganges, snapping turtles were bred and released into the river specifically to eat the corpses and bones. A good idea, maybe, but since bodies and body parts are still seen floating around the river today, perhaps not as effective as originally hoped.

Doctors need to grieve, too

20 June 2012

Charles

5 Comments

Categories: Attitudes to death, Grief, medical interventions in dying

There’s an interesting piece in the New York Times here about the emotional difficulties doctors experience when working with people who are going to die. People often characterise doctors as cold and uncaring when, in fact, they may simply not be coping:

We found that oncologists struggled to manage their feelings of grief with the detachment they felt was necessary to do their job. More than half of our participants reported feelings of failure, self-doubt, sadness and powerlessness as part of their grief experience, and a third talked about feelings of guilt, loss of sleep and crying.

Our study indicated that grief in the medical context is considered shameful and unprofessional. Even though participants wrestled with feelings of grief, they hid them from others because showing emotion was considered a sign of weakness. In fact, many remarked that our interview was the first time they had been asked these questions or spoken about these emotions at all.

Even more distressing, half our participants reported that their discomfort with their grief over patient loss could affect their treatment decisions with subsequent patients — leading them, for instance, to provide more aggressive chemotherapy, to put a patient in a clinical trial, or to recommend further surgery when palliative care might be a better option.

Unease with losing patients also affected the doctors’ ability to communicate about end-of-life issues with patients and their families. Half of our participants said they distanced themselves and withdrew from patients as the patients got closer to dying. This meant fewer visits in the hospital, fewer bedside visits and less overall effort directed toward the dying patient.

Oncologists are not trained to deal with their own grief, and they need to be. In addition to providing such training, we need to normalize death and grief as a natural part of life, especially in medical settings.

To improve the quality of end-of-life care for patients and their families, we also need to improve the quality of life of their physicians, by making space for them to grieve like everyone else.

What do Quakers and atheists have in common?

19 June 2012

Charles

2 Comments

Categories: funeral customs, Religious funerals

Posted by our religious correspondent, Richard Rawlinson

You’d think Quakers and atheists were poles apart but I’ve been pondering a similarity. On the surface, Quaker funerals are very different from humanist funerals, and that’s aside from faith in God. The former involves silent reflection and prayer, the latter tends to be dominated by words and music celebrating the life of the deceased. What they share in common is the emphasis on individuality.

Quaker founder George Fox was an earnest Leicestershire lad who rejected parental pressure to become a ‘hireling minister’, as neither the Church of England nor any of the dissenting sects of the 17^th century matched his perception of how the Almighty should be worshipped and obeyed.

In response to a dream in which he was told to take a lonely journey in search of the light, he left home with nothing but his Bible, and wandered the country for a few years. Finding no consolations in organised religion, he began accepting his own idiosyncratic imaginings as revelations.

Founding his opinions on isolated Bible texts, he gradually evolved a system at variance with every existing form of Christianity. His central dogma was that of the ‘inner light’, communicated directly to the individual soul by Christ.

Creeds and churches, rites and sacraments were discarded as outward things. Carrying the Protestant doctrine of private judgment to its logical conclusion, even the Scriptures were to be interpreted by the inner light. Inconvenient passages, such as those establishing Baptism and the Eucharist, were interpreted in an allegorical sense, while other passages were insisted upon with a literalness previously unknown.

From the text ‘Swear not at all’, Fox drew the illicitness of oaths, even when demanded by the magistrate. War, even if defensive, was declared unlawful. Art, music, drama, sports, dancing and ornamental attire and interiors were rejected as unbecoming the gravity of a Christian.

As Fox began public preaching, his ideas gained numerous converts. The Society of Friends was born, later called Quakers as a derogatory term. As a growing army of missionaries spread Fox’s word around the world, they made enemies with the establishment and dissenters alike. During the reign of Charles II, thousands of ‘Quakers’ were imprisoned in England. They fared worse in the Puritan colonies in Massachusetts, where members were hanged for heresy.

Due to the excesses of some of his followers, Fox was later compelled to introduce a code of discipline to guide the ‘inner light’. The early Quakers, and those around today, often admit the so-called external, fundamental dogmas of Christianity, as expounded in the Apostle’s Creed. They may reject as non-Scriptural the term Trinity but they confess the Godhead of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, plus the doctrine of the Redemption and salvation through Christ.

And though Fox dismissed ‘steeple-houses’, he was forced to gather his followers into congregations in meeting houses. They worship without liturgy and in silence until someone is moved by the Spirit to ‘give testimony’, the value of which is gauged by the common sense of the assembly.

In this respect, they certainly differ both from faiths using liturgy-based ceremony, and from secularists, whose services–though individualised–tend to rely on crafted scripts for their structure.

Channel 4’s Dispatches set to rumble the undertakers

18 June 2012

Charles

90 Comments

Categories: funeral directors, scandals

“Dispatches lifts the lid on the funeral industry. Using undercover filming, Jackie Long investigates what really happens to our loved ones when they die.”

Monday June 25 at 8.00pm. Channel 4.

In certain districts of Funeralworld, fear stalks the streets.

Cancel all other appointments.