“I suppose it’s a cliché to say you’re glad to be alive, that life is short, but to say you’re glad to be not dead requires a specific intimacy with loss that comes only with age or deep experience. One has to know not simply what dying is like, but to know death itself, in all its absoluteness.”
Archive: November 2012
Free the Ison Four!!
What on earth is going on, we ask ourselves, at Henry Ison and Sons, Coventry?
Laurel Funerals has suspended four members of staff, including two funeral directors and a hearse driver.
We have fearlessly hunted down two of the accused and… well, we wonder, we really do. They have no objection to being highlighted here.
In a state of some bewilderment, we asked for a statement from Laurel ceo Deborah Kemp. She tells us, quite properly:
To protect the privacy of our employees, it is Laurel’s company policy never to talk about individual staff members or discuss internal personnel-related processes. I trust you understand and respect our stance in such matters.
Of course we do.
And we shall remain alert to future developments.
Participation is transformative
From an article by Cassandra Yonder, home funeral guide and death midwife:
The difference between home and “traditional” funerals is subtle yet significant. When families choose to stay present to care for their loved ones in death they come to understand in a real and meaningful way that the physical relationship they had with the person who died is ending. While this can be a painful transition, it offers grieving people an opportunity for adaptation which is difficult to grasp when post death care is handled entirely by professionals. Participation is transformative. Those who stay involved seem to have an easier time locating the continuing bond they still http://laparkan.com/buy-vardenafil/ share with the one who has died, and utilize those aspects of the relationship which survive death to move forward in their own lives.
Above all, home funerals bring dying and post death care back to the intimate setting of home. Families who choose to care for their own are usually those who accept that death is a normal and natural part of life that does not necessitate professional intervention. The intimacy of providing post death care for loved ones (as has been done throughout history) is a final act of love which can be surprisingly life affirming.
Join Cassandra’s Facebook group here. Find her website here.
In Memory
Andras Schram, the maker, says: 7 years ago I lost my grand father, I was unable to make it to his funeral as I was travelling. The first moment I had a chance I visited his grave. It was late fall in Hungary and as I looked around I saw how beautiful the light was in the cemetery..I wondered deeper and deeper and started taking photos. I made this slideshow than but never shared it to just a select few. I have than lost the photos for a long time and found them recently, since than my grand mother has joined with my grand father and I am dedicating this slideshow to them.
I found the head stones, the cemetery to be a book about stories never told, just a few names a few sculptures, yet after taking over a thousand photos the stories started to come alive and I in an interesting way found peace in this place.
The music is from Nawang Kechog, from the album “Music as Medicine” Nawang is an incredible artist and I could not find any other music that would compliment these photos in such an incredible way!
The austerity effect
In austerity-hit, cash-strapped Spain, body donation is up, funeral costs are down and people can no longer afford to pay the rent on family graves.
At Son Valenti cemetery, in Palma, Majorca, 6,200 grave owners have defaulted on their annual rent of €10.50 per body, forcing the local municipality to evict entire families from their niches.
Spaniards are also selling their family graves, arguing that it is better to use their money in the here and now. One family from Andalusia said they had recently exhumed more than a dozen relatives going back several generations and cremated them rather than pay thousands of euros in annual upkeep for their graves. They declined to give their name for fear of being ostracized by neighbors.
No more faking it
A fine feminist manifesto here from Grace Mutandwa in the Zimbabwe Standard:
A group of my female friends are tired of being stuck in the house during funerals while their boys hang out at the shops and do fun things.
The girls want to know why it is cool for the boys to visit the local bottle store and swap war stories while the girls alternate between cooking, serving food and wailing like banshees. And they do not want the usual spiel about tradition this or tradition that!
Why is it all cool and dandy for the guys to stroll around in controlled emotion while women are expected to wail in show of pain and grief?
If a woman does not cry, she is labelled cold or a witch. And if tradition is so important, why is it that men who lose wives can remarry as soon as they can no longer bear living without a moving cooking, laundry and cuddling machine while women are expected to grieve for a year?
Is it really necessary to have a bunch of women thrashing about in feigned grief while the men get on with their lives?
Why do widows have to be stuck at the head of the corpse, but when a woman dies the husband gets to sit outside with his buddies? For all we know the reason why most men quickly remarry might be because while all the women are stuck in the house wailing, the widowed man and his buddies are busy going through their little black books trying to hook up the “grieving” hubby with some hot mama!
I get grief, but what I do not get is the need for whole extended families to hurl themselves into group mourning therapy even when they hated the guts of the dead relative.
Wouldn’t life be easier if we were a bit more honest? I am not saying that you should insult someone or say nasty things about the dead, but do we really have to lie? If someone is dead, they are dead — period!
There are films that bring tears to my eyes but I really find it difficult to cry at every funeral I attend. If I am not close to the person, I just feel faking it is the worst thing I could do at someone’s funeral. I get faking orgasms — many women play that card once-in-a-while (and it is a humane act, it protects men’s egos) — but faking tears is really beyond me.
When the husband dies, the tears might represent real grief or great relief and pure joy that they are free at last!
I am a ruddy realist and will be the first one to face up to the simple fact that by the time one spouse dies, most couples will have been transformed into two strangers sharing bills and helping each other raise children. So if you catch my drift — it really would be hard to shed tears for a stranger, even one that you occasionally shared body heat with.
I know apart from pretending to be a nice person, we sometimes have this uncontrollable urge to attend a particular funeral just to make sure the person is really dead.
More here
Piece of mind for the man with the plan
There’s an unsparing piece in The Times, 11 November, on financial products associated with funeral planning:
Hundreds of thousands of the poorest pensioners are losing thousands of pounds by buying into poor-value funeral planning products offered by some of the most trusted high street names.
Funeral benefit plans offered as add-ons to over-50s life insurance promise to help those aged between 50 and 80 to set aside a pot of money for their families to pay for their funeral … First, the majority of people who invest in over-50s plans end up paying in much more money than their relatives receive in the cash lump sum. Second, in many cases the funeral plan add-ons are assigned to particularly expensive funeral directors, and, finally, the lump sum payouts are not protected against inflation or linked to specific funeral costs so they are likely to cover only a small proportion of the cost of a future funeral.
Sales of over-50s policies rose 25 per cent between 2008 and 2010, with 346,128 people buying policies last year alone. Sun Life Direct, for example, has 750,000 such customers … This type of insurance policy does not have a “cash-in value” so policyholders often find themselves facing the dilemma of whether to continue to lose money paying premiums until they die or close the account and forfeit the cash lump sum.
The funeral benefit option on these products effectively assigns the cash lump sum to a funeral provider with whom it has a commercial deal, usually Dignity or the Co-operative.
Insurers are also pushing policyholders’ families towards funeral directors that charge the highest fees. The two main providers that arrange funerals as part of a funeral benefit add-on are Dignity and the Co-operative.
Dignity and the Co-operative argue that it is worth paying more for their service … A spokesman for Dignity says: “Dignity provides an allinclusive service with no hidden extras.” A spokesman for the Co-operative says: “The Co-operative provides customers, and their families, with the invaluable peace of mind afforded by planning for their funeral in advance. We believe that, when compared on a like-for- like basis our charges are fair and reasonable and highly competitive for the standard of service that we provide.”
Age UK, an organisation that helps the elderly, has been accused of exploiting its reputation to sell unnecessarily costly funeral plans. A former senior employee of Age Concern is critical of these plans. He believes that Age UK is trading on its good name to sell overpriced products to vulnerable pensioners. He says: “Age UK uses its local branches as a route to a market where it can sell its branded products. Very often it is the less well-off pensioners using day care centres that are sold these products. Age UK funeral plans are particularly poor value because they encourage families to use expensive funeral directors rather than a cheaper local director.”
Age UK’s unholy alliance with Dignity brings in something like £9 million a year.
The last point the article makes is that funeral plan funds are not regulated by the FSA. Did you know that? Ah, you always assumed they must be. Well, they’re not; they’re regulated by the Funeral Planning Authority — whose shareholders are trade associations for pre-paid funeral plan companies, creating a conflict of interest.
Coming soon: more thoughts about the ticking time bomb of the pre-paid funeral plan. In the meantime, stash it under the mattress.
Eat up your greens
GFG hero Thomas Long questions the value of happy funerals.
“To start at the end – to start at the celebration … without processing the sadness, jumps over steps and in effect paralyses us … If one really wants to be sure that one will remain sadder for longer than necessary, then pretend to be too happy too soon.”
Intolerant of intolerance
Posted by Richard Rawlinson
The picketing of military funerals in the US by the Westboro Baptist cult is well-documented.
Less so are increasing incidents in Holland of Muslim youths disrupting non-Muslim funerals. One undertaker says youths on bikes stop processions and bang on the roof of the hearse, shouting ‘One dog less’ or ‘Jews, Jews’.
The gangs are school age. The response of the police to complaints has been that the Islamic schools need protection, and that the yobs are too young to understand their behaviour is wrong. It makes you wonder what social responsibility they’re being taught in the classroom, and at home for that matter.
It also makes you wonder why liberal society is so tolerant when it comes to such disdain for our democratic values. Enter the British Muslims for Secular Democracy (BMSD). This courageous group of men and women have protested in London against a pro-Sharia march by fundamentalist group Islam4UK. To counter banners such as ‘Islam will dominate the world: Freedom can go to Hell’, the BMSD has retorted with slogans such as ‘Freedom of speech will rule the world’.
As Muslims condemning radical Islamist sexism, racism and homophobia, they risk becoming targets of violence but, unlike non-Muslim liberals, they are less concerned about being accused of ‘Islamophobia’ or some other form of political incorrectness.
And there lies the reason for our silence and hesitation to condemn extremism. Ironically, there was another group of protesters against the Islam4UK. A few members of the English Defence League were making their stand, too. When interviewed by a journalist, they leapt at the opportunity to claim they were not neo-Nazi football hooligans, that they supported women’s rights and gay rights, and that they just wanted to protest against radical Islamists whose supporters bombed London, and attacked the funeral processions of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.
It might be true that the EDL does not have its origins in the Hitler cults, but they are certainly not to be trusted as true allies of the good folk of the BMSD. EDL members have attacked Muslims because they are Muslims, and indeed anyone Muslim, Sikh, Hindu or atheist with a brown skin. They pick on anyone they see as being in the ‘wrong’ team.
It’s groups such as EDL that make non-racists reluctant to criticise Islamic hate. We should stand up to both by spporting the British Muslims for Secular Democracy (see here http://www.bmsd.org.uk/index.
What makes for a ‘bad’ funeral celebrant?
Posted by Carole Renshaw, a civil celebrant
The market of Humanists and Celebrants seems to be growing!
I’m sure more are spilling out of the training programmes……….than they are withdrawing or giving up the cause! The plethora of new websites……new training provider logos………new leaflets………gives us some confidence that numbers in the profession are on the up!
Now if we take the economical and market driven debate – it would say that competition drives up service quality. I have no argument with that. But I do want to raise that thorny question – not what makes a good Funeral Celebrant………..there are plenty of books on that………….but What makes for a ‘bad’ Funeral Celebrant?
And my take on this is simple! I don’t believe that any Celebrant would be labelled as a ‘bad’ one in the eyes of mourners. That’s not to say they don’t exist. Funeral Directors will also have their own views on this. After all, they’re privileged to have that helicopter view of Celebrants as they sit and compare our styles, our words and our prices.
But so long as people leave their service feeling the send off was just what ‘Joan would have loved……’ then these same individuals who are at their lowest ebb and at one of the most vulnerable times of their lives, are happy – if happy is the right word!
I wonder if people who have lost someone special, really want to have to make that rational informed decision between good and bad. Don’t they just want someone to support them through it? It’s not until people have been to a few of these types of services, that they begin to make informed decisions of what’s available in the market. That leads to competition. And competition leads to better services.
I worked in health care for many years and I’ve seen people’s lives saved by poor and atrocious medical care. The very fact that lives had been saved was enough for the judgment call – not how they got there. That journey wasn’t relevant enough to be the point of discussion.
Funerals are no different. If Celebrants can help mourners to leave a service happy, comfortable and contented that their loved ones had a good send off ……then they’ve hit the right button! A fellow Celebrant once asked me if I sent out questionnaires for feedback after a service. My answer was short and sweet – No! And when I asked them if they had ever received poor feedback – their answer was short and sweet – No! I rest my case.
I was guided by a family member recently who very clearly told me that ‘….it has to be a good funeral…’. It wasn’t until I delved further and asked him ‘…what does a good funeral look like?’ that I got to the heart of the debate. Good……Bad……….we use these words too freely for them to have any real meaning.
I think it’s far easier to ask ‘What makes a good Celebrant’ from the mourners perspective. But what makes for a bad Funeral Celebrant – well that has far more reaching consequences for the profession and the funeral industry.
But the industry is informed enough to know the answer. And as competition increases, that answer will keep changing!