Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don’t know. I got a telegram from the home: ‘Mother deceased. Funeral tomorrow. Faithfully yours.’ That doesn’t mean anything. Maybe it was yesterday.
Albert Camus, The Outsider
Hat tip Richard Rawlinson
Archive: 27 July 2012
Good to go
DEAD GOOD GUIDES
Autumn School 22-25 October in Frome
Gilly Adams & Sue Gill
The intensive 4 day course will examine the Hows and Whys of ceremony and celebration in a practical and experiential way. We will investigate how both positive and negative life events can be distilled into myth and poetry and create meaningful rituals to contain them. In particular, we explore how ceremony and celebration has and does play out in our own lives in order to feel empowered to facilitate these processes in the lives of others in an imaginative and creative way.
This is not a nuts and bolts course; instead the week will be shaped to fulfill the needs and aspirations of participants so there will be plenty of opportunities to learn and practise many aspects of the craft of creating ceremony – both public and private – in a safe environment. Gilly Adams and Sue Gill have been working together for many years; they will offer insights into the cognitively rich world of the secular celebrant, sharing their experience, offering theory, information, and – they hope – inspiration.
Food is always a key element in ceremony and celebration, and since we will be eating lunch and supper together, feasting will be a special theme. The working day will be 10am – 9pm, finishing at 2pm on the last day. The venue is East Woodlands Village Hall, near Frome BA11 5LQ, on the edge of the Longleat Estate and has a very particular rural character.
There are 12 places on each course at a range of fees. 4 places left at £375. Fees include tuition, all materials, and lunch and supper throughout. To secure a place, the full fee needs to be paid to SUE GILL by cheque or BACS.
To express interest and/or for further information please contact Gilly or Sue:
Sue Gill foxandgill@btinternet.com 01229 869769
Gilly Adams gillyadams@tiscali.co.uk 02920 552389
……… hoping to gain greater depth, clarity and complexity of knowledge …. by learning from pre-eminent pioneers and leaders in this field. The experience fulfilled and surpassed my hopes: you were welcoming and wise, the venue was magnificent; the food was delectable. Content blended the practical, personal, professional and theoretical and the form shifted from discussion and presentation to hands-on creativity ….. I carry away with me a bounty of thoughts, questions and ideas that will enrich my own arts practice.
Ruth Howard, Canada – participant Spring School, June 2012 Cumbria
Let’s hear it for extravagant funerals
Posted by Richard Rawlinson
Since the Dispatches exposé, we’re all sounding like Jessica Mitford, the ‘red sheep’ of an aristocratic British clan who naively embraced wretched communism while settling in comfortably capitalist California, and wrote The American Way of Death (1963), which accuses the US funeral trade of exploiting vulnerable grievers.
First, let me say I’m certainly not about to defend undertakers who hoodwink financially-challenged bereaved folk into paying embalming fees for ‘hygienic reasons’, or who falsely imply DIY funerals are ‘illegal’. Undertakers should not be viewed like doctors bound by professional ethics, but as salesmen of the death business, to be approached with the caution extended to double glazing peddlers. Those who withhold price lists should indeed be exposed to public humiliation, especially if this helps educate those who, due to ignorance, sentiment and taboo, are conned into spending beyond their means.
It’s also noone else’s business if an affluent person, like Mitford, chooses a cheap, no-frills funeral because their aesthetic of simplicity turns them away from ‘pomposity, complication and expense’.
By the same token, there’s nothing unethical about choosing to splash out on an opulent send-off either. Buying the best coffins, flowers, tombstones and mourning attire, and hiring limousines, printers, choirs, musicians, caterers and wine waiters help the economy and society by making employers profitable. It’s churlish to admonish spenders for not giving those thousands spent on a funeral to their favoured charity, or leaving it in their will for the benefit of living family and friends.
Those who say funereal showiness is vulgar are often demonstrating their middle class snobbery toward the nouveau-riche, or their socialist philosophy of envy. There are plenty of people who, in life, have given time and money to good causes, and recycled their waste and conserved energy out of concern for the environment of future generations, and then want a no-expenses-spared funeral. It sounds like a Bond film but ‘We Only Die Once’.