The GFG sends its congratulations and very best wishes to Stroud funeral director Michael Gamble, his wife Clare and all of the team as they prepare for tomorrow’s ceremonial opening of their lovely new funeral home. There to do the honours and snip the tape will be… our own Richard Honeysett.
Archive: October 2012
Call it quits
From the Oxford Times:
The former owner of Oxford’s last independent funeral directors has spoken of the difficult decision she made in selling the business.
S & R Childs, which has four branches in the city, is now part of Dignity, the UK’s biggest provider of funeral services.
Sandra Homewood was one of the founders of the business in 1997 and said: “Selling a business that you have nurtured and developed over many years is not a task to be undertaken lightly.”
She said Dignity had assured her that it would be “business as usual” for the company, which will continue to trade in the same way.
Full story here.
News just in from Taunton: Thomas Brothers are in negotiation with Dignity plc.
Thoughts of a funeral-goer
Posted by Lyra Mollington
After last week’s trials and tribulations, I was looking forward to a week of rest and reflection. Mr M suggested a short break. Unfortunately, at our age, the stress of packing and travelling cancels out any benefits of getting away from it all. In any case, ‘it all’ is a centrally-heated home with all mod cons, a reclining chair and a bed with a memory foam mattress. Holiday cottages play havoc with my sciatica.
What I really needed was a week without death. However, this is easier said than done at my age. A few weeks ago, Daisy and I sat down to watch ‘Bargain Hunt’ only to discover that this was a tribute episode, shown in loving memory of one of the experts – our favourite, David Barby. We were distraught. We had no idea that he had died.
I’m embarrassed to admit that I watch rather a lot of TV. Would it be possible to watch television AND avoid death-related topics? Forward planning was the key. I decided that the programmes I could safely watch included ‘Hairy Bikers’; ‘Grand Designs’ and ‘Strictly Come Dancing’. I also decided that there were going to be a lot of programmes I’d have to avoid, like ‘Homeland’; ‘999: What’s Your Emergency?’ and ‘Emmerdale’.
For two days, my television diet was dull but death-free. Until I was tripped up by Mr M. We were watching ‘Dad’s Army’ because I was fairly certain no-one ever dies in that, although I was trying not to dwell on how many of the actors are no longer with us. As the credits rolled, Mr M began fiddling absent-mindedly with the remote control. We were now watching a show called ‘The X Factor’. It seemed harmless enough until one of the contestants buy cialis online safely burst into tears. Her nan had died.
On Monday evening, with the remote carefully hidden, I settled down to watch a BBC2 documentary called ‘Wonderland: Walking with Dogs’. I have a soft spot for dogs, especially my canine companion Colin. I named him after a certain good-looking and talented young actor. Farrell of course, not Firth.
As the remarkable ‘Walking with Dogs’ stories unfolded, I wondered if Colin (the dog, not the actor) and I might have had a tale worth telling. Not that we would ever have been in the running: Vanessa Engle filmed her documentary on Hampstead Heath, which isn’t our local park. This is just as well because, judging from the experiences of one set of dog-walking ladies, Colin and I have had a lucky escape. Apparently dog-walkers were often stumbling across dead bodies on the Heath. Indeed, whilst the camera crew were there, a dead body was discovered. Although to everyone’s disappointment, it turned out to be someone fast asleep in a bush.
At the mention of ‘dead bodies’ I should have changed channels but I was gripped. The most poignant story of all was about a couple whose son had died a few months previously. They referred to their pet as a ‘rescue dog’ because he had rescued them. Their advice to anyone who had suffered an unbearably painful bereavement? Get a dog. Whilst a dog can never replace the person you have lost, he or she is a wonderful distraction.
I held Colin a little tighter. It was at this point that I heard a snuffling noise. I looked across at Mr M who was dabbing his eyes with a handkerchief. After a minute or two he regained his composure and said, ‘Have you seen the remote?’
Outraged tweet
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 |
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.
GFG ‘Recommended By’ listing relaunch
We have relaunched our ‘Recommended By’ scheme for funeral directors with a radically remodelled accreditation framework designed to make it sustainable and authoritative nationwide.
As you know, we already have a limited listing of recommended funeral directors – a listing to which we have not added for some months. Why? Because of the very great difficulty of growing it sustainably. Lack of resources has restricted our ability to visit new or revisit existing recommended funeral directors. Some on the list have not been revisited for up to three years. Not good enough. That is why we have been on the verge of scrapping it altogether.
But rapidly increasing demand from both consumers and funeral directors has caused us to think again.
As we know, extremely negative perceptions of the funeral industry are widespread and intensifying. The fallout from this year’s television documentaries about Co-operative Funeralcare, Funeral Partners Limited and Dignity plc has resulted in grave reputational damage to the industry as a whole.
As a consequence, rising numbers of consumers ring and email, telling us they no longer know whom they can trust, and here at the GFG we now spend an increasing amount of time counselling and guiding them – a service we offer free of charge.
At the same time, rising numbers of funeral directors have approached us, as an independent, consumer-focussed body with an expert knowledge of the industry, asking for accreditation, anxiously (and understandably) seeking to distance themselves from inferior competitors in an increasingly crowded market.
How is the listing going to pay for itself?
Good question. Either bereaved people pay — which we are not happy about — or funeral directors pay. We’re going to charge funeral directors the rate for the job on the grounds that being listed is more than merely likely to benefit them commercially.
It’s something we have thought very hard about. Last year we appealed for voluntary donations from our listed FDs. We are very grateful to those who responded, but it wasn’t nearly enough to fund the project. The lesson we learned is that most people only really value something they pay for.
Won’t this affect the independence of the GFG?
Other independent guides, when they started to make information available online, lost their revenue from hard-copy editions of their guides, which ceased to sell, and they had to change their business model as a consequence. The Good Pub Guide is an example. From 2012 it has had to charge for inclusion, drawing accusations that it is no longer independent because it has simply become a guide to those pubs willing to pay. You may be interested in a response to this from a landlord. Do read the comments, too — here.
In the case of funeral service, FDs unwilling to pay will be those so well-known in their local areas (especially rural areas) that they won’t feel the need to. Funeral consumers in such areas do not need the Good Funeral Guide. However, in areas where consumers seek guidance and reassurance, it is perfectly proper that we serve them by enabling ourselves to accredit superb funeral directors.
The GFG will go on demonstrating its independence because its credibility depends on it. We look forward to exposing the first person to offer us any inducement. We’re not in it to make money, we’re in it to break even. Our independence is reliant on an income stream. We become dependent only when we let that corrupt our core values. Our record shows that this is the least likely thing to happen.
From time to time a funeral director will say to us, ‘But you hate all funeral directors, don’t you?’ It’s an odd thing to say to the people who delivered the first-ever industry Oscars, the Good Funeral Awards, celebrating the best people in funeral service. Of course we don’t hate all funeral directors. We talk about things as they seem to us to be, and we invite unmediated access to anyone who wants to comment. The focus of our work has always been hunting down the heroes of the funeral industry and putting them in touch with the bereaved.
That’s a win-win.
EDITOR’S NOTE: If you are a funeral director interested in being Recommended By The Good Funeral Guide, please click here. If you are already listed, you will need to be re-visited. Please click here.