7 September 2012 – The Good Funeral Guide

Thoughts of a funeral-goer

7 September 2012

Charles

5 Comments

Categories: Thoughts of a funeralgoer

Posted by Lyra Mollington

I was fascinated to read about the Good Funeral Guide Awards ceremony. What a wonderful idea! To all the finalists: well done and my very best wishes. And if you win one of the awards, try not to look too elated or smug: just a serene acceptance that your brilliance has at last been recognised.

Here are my thoughts on each of the awards.

Most Promising New Funeral Director: she or he should be as far removed as possible from Del Boy or Uriah Heep (the Charles Dickens character not the English rock band). Sincerity and an ability to listen are paramount.
Embalmer of the Year: everyone who embalms for a living deserves an award. Shortly after my neighbour Keith died, his wife Doreen was inconsolable when she saw his grey face seemingly contorted in agony. A few days later, she visited him at the funeral home and he looked serene and peaceful. In fact she had never seen him looking so relaxed.
Coffin Supplier of the Year: I am sure that anyone who reliably offers a large choice (and who supplies the correct design and the right size at short notice) is in with a chance here. Valerie’s mum’s coffin looked lovely – pale blue with a meadow-flower design.
Most Significant Contribution to the Understanding of Death in the Media. I don’t envy the judges on this one. But the winner should definitely not be the producer of Midsomer Murders.
Crematorium Attendant of the Year. This person should be like the young lady I met at Joyce’s funeral: smartly dressed, caring, calm, discreet and tactful. With a friendly smile.
Best Internet Bereavement Resource: another tricky one. Apart from Barry, very few of my friends, bereaved or otherwise, use the internet. But then there’s Jeremy – he loves the internet. Three weeks after his wife’s funeral, he was using an online dating agency. But that probably doesn’t count as an internet bereavement resource.
Funeral Floristry Award: as someone who is incapable of arranging even the smallest bunch flowers, I admire anyone who can create floral displays. However, I’m a traditionalist when it comes to flowers. Some of the designs I have buy cialis manchester seen have not been to my taste but I have to admit that they were eye-catching and thought-provoking: a witch, a giant cigarette and a kangaroo spring to mind.
Funeral Celebrant of the Year: looking back at all the funerals I have been to, the celebrant at cousin Trevor’s funeral has been the best so far. She barely batted an eyelid when that mobile phone went off with the ring-tone that asks, ‘Who let the dogs out’? Also, she had carefully listened to Trevor’s wife Marjorie. The ceremony was a perfect balance of laughter and solemnity.
Cemetery of the Year: I’m a little old-fashioned when it comes to cemeteries. A cemetery is no place for helium balloons, wind-chimes, nodding dogs, flags or windmills. In fact anything wind-related should be banned.
Gravedigger of the Year: these people deserve a medal. I arrived early for a burial once and to my surprise a tall and handsome man appeared out of the ground. He had just finished digging out a double-depth grave by hand. Not only was it extremely hot, the earth was solid clay. When one of the mourners threw in some ‘soil’ it landed on the coffin like a paving slab.
Funeral Director of the Year: this person must surely be a tried and tested version of the ‘Most Promising New Funeral Director’. See my comments above.
Best Alternative to a Hearse: this is an easy one. Your own, or a borrowed, estate car. Although I am still certain that with the seats down and the boot lid slightly raised I could fit Mr M’s body into the back of my Ford Fiesta.
Book of the Year (published after 1 May 2011). Not Dead Yet by Peter James. I love crime novels. However these authors need to do their research on funerals more thoroughly. Which is what I told Mr James when I met him last year.
Lifetime Achievement Award: I assume that this person will be fairly old and experienced with a good sense of humour. Which could be me of course – although, sadly, six months of writing about funerals probably doesn’t count as a lifetime’s achievement.

Something for the weekend

7 September 2012

Charles

3 Comments

Categories: music, Poetry

Posted by Vale

I was at a service a little while ago that included this lovely tribute from a wife to a husband:

To My Dear Loving Husband – Anne Bradstreet

If ever two were one, then surely we.
If ever man were lov’d by wife, then thee.
If ever wife was happy in a man,
Compare with me, ye woman, if you can.
Prise thy love more than whole mines of gold,
Or all riches that the East doth hold.
My love is such that rivers cannot quench,
Nor aught but love from thee give recompense.
Thy love is such I can no way repay.
The heavens reward thee manifold, I pray.
Then while we live, in love let’s so persever
That when we live no more, we may live ever

Complicated and moving, we were hardly prepared for the husband’s favorite song that followed, though the mischief on the face of the widow might have warned us.

Quotes of the day

7 September 2012

Charles

1 Comment

Categories: Quotes

Posted by Vale

The book of the week on Radio 4 this week has been the Winter Journal by Paul Auster. I was struck by two quotes from Joseph Joubert included in today’s excerpt. Joubert, who was living in the early 1800s, published nothing in his lifetime but a book of Pensees was culled from his note books and papers. Auster reports that this jotting was found amongst them:

‘The end of life is bitter’

But, written about a year later this was found:

‘One must die lovable (if one can).

Now, there’s a challenge!

When in doubt

7 September 2012

Charles

20 Comments

Categories: Uncategorised

Posted by Richard Rawlinson

Doubt: a short, meaning-packed, medieval, Anglo-French word (origin douter) which I doubt many foreigners could pronounce if only seen in written form. Adapted as a verb, noun, adjective and adverb (to doubt, a doubt/doubter, doubtable, doubtably) it, of course, means to be uncertain, consider questionable, hesitate to believe.

None of us being omniscient, we all have doubts about a lot of things from life choices (relationships, jobs, homes) to metaphysical ideas. ‘Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards,’ said Soren Kierkegaard.

And if physical reality is unpredictable and error-prone, then existential meaning is unknowable. Faith—another short, meaning-rich word—is belief that doesn’t rest on material evidence. Even Richard Dawkins concedes, as a scientist, that he’s effectively agnostic as he cannot logically prove beyond doubt that atheism is true.

Philosophers have divided us into physicalists and dualists. The former claim we’re just a body, with the brain being the sophisticated organ that makes us a ‘person’ capable of complex thought, emotion and action. If we’re shot in the heart, our brain dies—we continue to be a body but cease to be a person. Just as a smile is created by muscle reflexes moving our lips to reveal our teeth, a mind, which gives us our unique persona, is an abstract term to describe the brain function’s cause and effect.

Dualism is an older school of thought that’s been developed in various forms by philosophers from Plato and Descartes to the Bhuddist teacher Dharmakirti. Putting aside the separate yin-and-yang, good-and-evil deliberations, dualism, in simple terms, separates mind from matter. It gives birth to an immaterial soul which, like a smile, mind, persona or self, is distinct from the body, although somehow interacting with the brain.

Though increasingly unfashionable among secular academics, modern agnostic and religious thinkers continue to argue that the gap between objective and subjective experience cannot be bridged by reductionism because consciousness is autonomous of physical properties. Philosopher Frank Jackson talks of a non-corporeal form of reality, and claims that functions of the mind/soul are so internal they cannot be observed by science. In comparison, we can know about a bat’s echolocation facility but we can’t know how the bat experiences it because it’s not a physical fact but a conscious one.

We can only have unscholarly hunches about whether or not we have souls, and indeed the nature of our souls. A shaman might believe he has a ‘free-soul’ that can undertake spiritual journeys. Others see the difference between soul and mind as mere semantics, and doubt a ‘soul’ has life beyond the body, let alone eternal life with its Creator/Saviour.

‘It is so hard to believe because it is so hard to obey,’ said Kierkegaard. He also said: ‘If I am capable of grasping God objectively, I do not believe, but precisely because I cannot do this I must believe’.

Religion as man-made psychological crutch for weak mortals, say the Freudians. And while we’re at it, why does this so-called God not make his loving presence evident in this world full of misery? But if, like God, our souls are not tangible things, surely it’s down to us to recognise we do not live by bread alone in order to develop an attitude capable of providing bread for all.