Michael Sadgrove (@Sadgrovem)At funeral undertakers push coffin in & out of Cathedral in procession on a trolley. Don’t deceased deserve dignity of pallbearers any more?
Michael Sadgrove is the Dean of Durham Cathedral. Hat-tip: Tony Piper |
Archive: 18 October 2012
Bring on the best
The US version of the NAFD is the NFDA. The NFDA has a Pursuit of Excellence Program. Here’s what they say about it:
Pursuit of Excellence is the premiere recognition program for funeral service, setting standards of excellence that motivate funeral home staff, inspire innovation and sustain consumer confidence in the funeral profession.
NFDA’s Pursuit of Excellence program recognizes funeral homes that are committed to providing outstanding service to the families and communities they order cialis 20mg serve and are dedicated to achieving the highest professional and ethical standards.
Pursuit of Excellence encourages funeral homes to further the educational and professional development of their staffs, create innovative ideas to better serve families and the community, and consistently strive for excellence.
Flexible and affordable application process makes international recognition possible for any size firm.
Presumably our own NAFD has considered such a scheme. If it hasn’t, it might do well to.
Looking out for your own
Bradford undertaker David Birch, who died last weekend aged 74, will be borne into church by six undertakers at his funeral tomorrow.
It’s a touching tribute to a man who was described as a ‘perfectionist’. The Bradford Telegraph and Argus adds:
Although Mr Birch had retired in his sixties, he never let go of the business that celebrated its centenary in 2003 and was started by his grandfather Herbert Henry. “He kept a watchful eye over everything. He couldn’t let go. It had been his life forever,” said Mrs Birch.
What to say at the really difficult ones?
It was an extraordinary business. You may have read about it. Back in May of this year, a grandmother shot dead her 17 year-old grandson in leafy suburb of Detroit. She’s in prison now, awaiting trial. Goodness knows what really went on. She looks harmless enough, and her grandson, Jonathan, doesn’t necessarily seem to have been the type to make people murderous. Read about it in the Mail here.
It was bound to be a difficult funeral. Celebrants do quite a few difficult funerals and it can be very hard to find words worth saying at them. For this reason, all celebrants are interested to know what other celebrants say at the really tough ones.
What was said at Jonathan’s funeral? By good fortune, the funeral was filmed. It was a Jewish funeral, so it’s worth watching for all sorts of reasons if you’ve never seen a Jewish funeral before.
These were the opening words:
Friends, as we gather today, we each come to this moment seeking answers, trying to find understanding about the unthinkable, the unimaginable. And in this moment our focus cannot be on those answers which we will never find. We cannot dwell on that which has passed, for even the answers that may come to mind are unacceptable, they challenge who we are as a community, as a people. So rather than turn to those answers, we turn to our own personal sense of hope. The life lost was not for nothing. We pray that this moment of gathering with friends and family brings us healing of some kind, understanding that this moment is the beginning for the rest of us of the next moments of our lives.
See the whole funeral here. Listen to Jonathan’s last, desperate 911 call here.
Bristol’s First Death Cafe!
Bristol’s First Death Café
2nd November 2012
at 40 Alfred Place, Kingsdown, BS2 8DH
2.00 – 4.30pm
Paula & Simon of Heaven on Earth Green Bespoke Funerals are holding a Death Café to coincide with the Mexican Day of the Dead.
We will be providing a safe, relaxed space in which fears and joys of death and mortality can be freely shared. All this in confidence and enjoyed with tea and scrumptious cakes.
The event is non-profit making but donations to cover expenses welcomed.
If you would like to come and indulge please RSVP by email: heaven.earth@virgin.
We need to know how many cakes to bake!
To cure sometimes, to relieve often, to comfort always
This post is about psychoactive drugs, so you may want to look away now.
There’s a lot of talk about them just now. Think David Nutt, the man who recently dosed people with MDMA (ecstasy) on television. He thinks ecstasy could be useful in treating depression and (ta-ra!) post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). He’s no fool. If a party drug can be used to restore Heroes to health, people are going to sit up and listen.
Good for him. Back in the 1950s psychologists were keen to see whether hallucinogens and other conscious-altering drugs, like recently synthesised LSD, could benefit humankind. Then the hippies hijacked them, they got denounced and outlawed – and research stalled.
Psychoactive drugs are still recovering from disrepute, so much so that it now takes a person with an especially open and enquiring mind to see them for what they are.
Psychoactive drugs can be useful in palliative care. Palliative care recognises the importance of spiritual and emotional needs of patients, but is not good at addressing them. Here’s an example of that from the NHS:
The staff in hospital or hospices or care homes will try to find out what is appropriate for people of different cultures in their final hours … This will allow them to make arrangements for your spiritual or religious adviser to visit, if you feel that this is helpful, and to make sure that your body is treated in the appropriate way after death.
Can do better, must do better. There is much to be said for making dying, in Aldous Huxley’s words, more a spiritual, less a physiological process.
So please let me introduce you to the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) website, where you can consider for yourself what more might be done for the emotional and spiritual needs of the dying.
The following is an example from MAPS of some proper, scientific research conducted by proper, dispassionate scientists. It’s extracted from a much longer article by Stephen Ross, MD, so it’s just a taster.
The sicker patients get, the more they want their physicians to talk to them about spirituality, meaning, and beliefs. The problem is that physicians aren’t educated to have these discussions.
Spiritual distress follows when a sudden crisis leaves a person unable to find sources of hope, love, meaning, value, comfort, or connection.
If you look at the prevalence of psychiatric distress in advanced and terminal cancer patients, it’s incredibly high … very few doctors are trained to deal with it.
[In a recent] study, significant correlations were found between spiritual well-being and decreased hopelessness. All this suggests that we need to come up with psychotherapies and pharmacological modalities that address end-of-life distress by increasing spiritual states.
There are 180 species of psilocybin, also known as psychedelic mushrooms … Psychiatric textbooks focus on the negative, frightening, horrible things that can happen under the influence of psychedelic agents … Other facets of mystical states include a transcendence of time and space, a deeply felt positive mood, and a sense of sacredness.
So what happens when someone takes psilocybin? There have been no case reports of human death from psilocybin. We know that it reliably causes mild elevations in blood pressure, but this is not known to be dangerous. Neither is psilocybin addictive. The problem with psilocybin is that people can experience anxiety, fear, panic, and dysphoria.
We have had seven subjects enroll [in a research study]. These subjects are not hippies from the sixties who think it’s groovy to do this again; they are patients who are dying in distress, people in their sixties and seventies facing serious end-of-life phenomena.
The first is a 59-year-old woman. At the end of the session, she said, “I feel light. I don’t know what’s going on, but something has passed from me. I feel so much better.” The next day we asked her how she was doing, and she reported feeling great. When asked about her cancer, she said, “I don’t connect with it anymore.” Two weeks later, two months later, six months later, every single day for her is like Groundhog Day: How are you doing? I feel great. She went back to gardening. She went back to listening to music. She reconnected with meaningful aspects of her life. Although I found it hard to believe at first, I’ve seen it again and again since.
Full article here. MAPS website here. The best way to research the MAPS website is by typing a search term (eg, end-of-life anxiety) into the searchbox top right.