“Families that live and purchased their homes there never once thought there would be a funeral home and the reminder of death on a daily basis.”
Mayor Dennis Michael speaks for the townspeople of Rancho Cucamonga, California, in opposition to plans to open a funeral home.
Plans for the Joy of Death Festival 2013 are cooking.
Of course, we want it to be even braver, bigger, brighter and more brilliant than last year’s, where we staged talks by leading lights of Funeralworld, held the funeral industry’s first-ever Oscars, the Good Funeral Awards, hosted a Sky TV documentary film crew dedicated to the event (it’s out in the spring, btw), attracted publicity worldwide, supplied two speakers for BBC Radio 4’s Saturday programme with the Rev Richard Cole — and enjoyed a weekend by the sea in Bournemouth, Britain’s closest rival to Copacabana.
If you have any brilliant ideas to throw into the ring, now is the time to do it. Please, please do. This event is massively collaborative.
If you would like to be kept in touch with developments, sign up to Brian Jenner’s e-newsletter.
Contact Brian: serenity@joyofdeath.co.uk
See you there!!
“The end of life can be big drama, that’s for sure. In nearly a decade of doing this work, I’ve witnessed momentous final decisions; conversations carried on with mysterious, unseen figures; visions of the afterlife; and eleventh-hour forgiveness. We release each other–one back to the seen, known world and one into the unseen, unknown–and are ourselves released.”
Dying got so protracted and difficult it became necessary to invent the living will — a list of opt-ins and opt-outs during the last days/weeks/months. If you haven’t made one, you know you should.
What a living will does not record, because it doesn’t need to, is something we also all need to decide for ourselves, preferably as far in advance as possible. It is: what will we do if the prognosis is terminal, but we are offered chemotherapy?
It’ll mean balancing side-effects against time bought. It’ll mean a very down-to-earth discussion with the doctor. And it’ll be vitally important that we don’t kid ourselves, the side-effects may not be worth it.
Most people, according to this article, do kid themselves. In a survey, over 1,100 patients with a recent diagnosis of stage IV lung or colon cancer who had opted to receive chemotherapy were asked what their expectations of their treatment were. 69% of patients with lung cancer and 81% of colon cancer patients reckoned that a cure was “very likely,” “somewhat likely” or “a little likely”.
In other words, they misunderstood why they were receiving chemotherapy. And they’re all dead.
Doctors know that people can be unrealistically optimistic in the face of an insuperable tumour. There’s this idiotic notion that cancer is a test of character, it can be defeated by willpower (and only losers surrender, presumably). Yes, we can easily delude ourselves.
The survey also reveals that patients who awarded their doctors best scores for communication were the ones with the most wildly optimistic expectations of their chemotherapy.
If you’ve never seen this little booklet you’ve missed something. It’s a brilliant, brief, warm, intelligent and helpful guide for anyone looking after a dying person — the sorts of things they might expect to have to cope with.
The contents contain insights into how a dying person may be feeling; how to talk about what’s happening with the dying person and how to listen to them; what the dying process looks like; end of life experiences…
You can download and read it for yourself free, online, here.
You can buy the just-out Kindle version here.
Highly recommended.
In an article in Saturday’s Times Nick Jowett, Vicar and Minister of St Andrew’s Psalter Lane Anglican-Methodist Church, Sheffield, proposes ways in which the Church might recover some of its lost share of the funeral market, in particular what he terms the ‘nominal Christian’ sector.
He concedes that the Church bears some responsibility for the way things are: “Some vicars today seem to regard funerals as unavoidable drudgery and one hears too many stories of funerals taken in an impersonal, routine manner.”
Increasingly taking the place of stipendiary clergy are “easily available freelance funeral celebrants or retired ministers boosting their income, who can offer customised services ranging from liturgical solemnity to chatty humanistic “celebrations” and every shade in between.”
Mr Jowett exhibits especial animus towards funeral directors: “These days, when you go to the funeral director about your dear departed’s exequies, it seems that almost the last thing you will be offered is the local vicar to take your service. There is a growing feeling that if the deceased were only a nominal Christian, a ceremony with the local minister would not be appropriate. It’s also because the overworked parish priest is often not available at the time desired by the family, if the undertaker can even get him or her on the phone soon enough.”
That’s not all that’s wrong with funeral directors. He thinks that there’s so much wrong with them that “there needs to be a movement to take back death from the funeral directors. Yes, they make things easy for families, but they are too powerful, managing every stage from hospital mortuary to casket of ashes; their charges are too little questioned; and the full range of options for a bereaved family are often not made clear.”
In order to fix this state of affairs, Jowett believes, that “every local authority should provide an independent one-stop funeral advisory service. This would be genuinely independent, offering the latest assessments of local undertakers and telling people the advantages — and pitfalls — of humanist funerals, woodland burials, church versus crematorium services, and all the rest.”
That word ‘independent’ gets bandied about a lot. Here at the GFG we describe ourselves as independent because we have no financial interests in the funeral industry. I can see now just how a hollow and meaningless a term it is, and we should renounce it. We view the industry through the lens of our values — as, inevitably, would any local authority advisor. There’ll be no disinterested advice available to anyone so long as human beings are the dispensers. Sorry, Mr Jowett, your idea is cuckoo.
As for funeral directors, it is true to say that many profess a startling contempt for C of E clergy based not on their own faith position but on their experience of how badly ministers can let bereaved people down. Their contempt is not indiscriminate. They reserve especial admiration for those who do a good job.
In addition to local authority advisors, Mr Jowett believes that the C of E’s offer to the bereaved can be improved in two ways.
First, “the training of clergy should encourage them to prioritise funerals and help them to understand how much a sensitively conducted preparation and ceremony can help even a not particularly religious family at a time of loss.”
Second, “the Church’s website needs to do much more to emphasise the ways in which, within the shape of the funeral liturgy, the service can be made personal with tributes, poetry, music and symbolic actions.”
Mr Jowett rejects the idea of providing “an illustrative breakdown of church fees … showing that they are an almost infinitesimally small part of the whole cost of a funeral.” I’d have thought, given that the combined work of funeral director and minister/celebrant crystallises in the funeral ceremony, there’s some mileage in highlighting the bargain-basement price of a good ceremony-maker. Dammit, ceremony-makers normally come in way under the cost of the flowers left abandoned when it’s all over.
Full article here (£)
The British are some of the most charitable people on Earth — if you measure their charitableness according to how much money they fork out for good causes.
Today marks BBC Children in Need Day. There will be the customary telethon, razzmatazz, fevered fundraising, spinning figures and, if all goes to carefully-laid plan, ta-da, a record sum of money amassed.
Children in Need is the perfect good cause. It has all the attributes. Brits are sentimental — they can’t resist a tug at the heartstrings. They’re suckers for sensation (expect lots of oohs and aahs). They buy cialis germany succumb to celebrity endorsement. They are bedazzled by glamour. It’s actually not all that difficult to whip up a lot of heightened emotion where sick children are concerned. Who could possibly doubt that this is an excellent cause?
Fundraising is a highly professionalised business. But fundraisers can only work their magic if a cause has all the magic ingredients: sentiment, sensation, celebrity and star quality. Compassion has its no-go areas. Where cancer is concerned, boobs will always trump balls.
What price, then, Oldies in Need Day?
From Wikipedia: Dia de los ñatitas (“Day of the Skulls”) is a festival celebrated in La Paz, Bolivia, on May 5. In pre–Columbian times, indigenous Andeans had a tradition of sharing a day with the bones of their ancestors on the third year after burial; however, only the skulls are used today. Traditionally, the skulls of family members are kept at home to watch over the family and protect them during the year. On November 9, the family crowns the skulls with fresh flowers, sometimes also dressing them in various garments, and making offerings of cigarettes, coca leaves, alcohol, and various other items in thanks for the year’s protection. The skulls are also sometimes taken to the central cemetery in La Paz for a special Mass and blessing.
Here’s another pay-up-or-else story — true but anonymised and deliberately undated.
A funeral director is refusing to hand over the ashes until the balance of the bill is settled — which it will be if the DSS claim is successful.
Does he have the right to do this?
You can’t arrest a corpse for debt because there is no property in a corpse. But what is the legal status of ashes? Are they property? This is something the 1902 Cremation Act didn’t think of, as we have seen in an earlier post. Briefly, they are and they aren’t. If they are, then the funeral director would seem to be justified in withholding them against payment.
Except that the client’s contract, in terms of cremating the body, was with the crematorium, and the fee to the crematorium was a third-party payment paid in full by the funeral director on behalf of the client. The crematorium fulfilled its contract and presumably has the right to expect the funeral director, as the appointed collector of the ashes, to hand them over to its client.
Other legal advice offered by solicitors in the locality favours the funeral director.
You are the referee. Is the funeral director legally and morally justified in his actions?
(We don’t know.)
The senior management team here at the GFG-Batesville Shard have spoken at some length to Sue White, above, about her new magazine venture, Farewell Magazine. We were impressed. Farewell Magazine is described below in a press release we have just had from her people:
Funerals and dying are taboo subjects in today’s society, but one woman has set about changing that, following the death of her own father.
Sue White has spent the last seven years in the wedding industry, but is now launching Farewell Magazine, a quarterly publication designed to demystify the funeral trade.
The 54-year-old from Chesterfield, in Derbyshire, is giving up her high-flying career as director of White Media, helping to organise 20 wedding fairs a year across the East Midlands and North of England.
Instead she plans to look death in the face and unveil the new magazine which will provide practical, emotional and professional advice for people grieving, preparing for death or simply intrigued by what the options are.
Sue said: “I have spent the majority of my planning career working in the weddings industry, which is very much about planning the happiest day of someone’s life. But when I lost my own dear dad I realized that as a nation we are totally unprepared for what can be the saddest day of our lives.
“Because we don’t talk about death, or funerals, when it comes to planning a loved one’s send-off often we have no idea what they might have wanted, or how to go about organizing it.
“I felt there was a total lack of information about palliative care, funeral planning and memorial ideas and that it was about time we started talking about dying, instead of pretending that it’s not going to happen. Death is inevitable, yet few of us consider it until confrontation is absolutely unavoidable.
“I also felt it was time to lift the lid on the funeral industry – let’s find out what’s changing, what’s innovative and above all what options are available to us when the time comes.”
Sue was inspired to make the move from weddings to funerals when her own father James Gault, an RAF war hero, passed away in August 2011.
The publication is not the first magazine Sue has published – she has spent five years producing a regional title, White Weddings Magazine which is sold at 370 independent outlets, including John Lewis and Debenhams.
Farewell Magazine, which comes out end of January, will be stocked at more than 120 branches of WH Smith and be available in more than 3,000 funeral homes, crematoriums and cemeteries, as well as hospitals, hospices and solicitors practices nationwide.
Each edition will feature inspiring real life stories of people who made a difference, take a look behind the scenes in the funeral industry, help readers create a meaningful and memorable funeral ceremony or memorial and profile innovative and pioneering new services.
The first issue looks at the process of turning ashes into diamonds, introduces motorcycle funerals, explains what to do when someone dies and pays tribute to an inspirational seven-year-old who touched the hearts of his whole community.
In an era when many long-standing publications are downsizing, Sue is passionate that there is a gap in the market for a title offering an advertising platform for the funeral trade.
Advertisers already signed up include Golden Leaves Funeral Plans, Cooperative Funerals and Colourful Coffins.
Sue added: “We firmly believe there is demand from both readers and advertisers and we’re in an unrivalled position to launch this magazine, with nothing else like it in the marketplace.
“We have been delighted by the positive response from the industry which has whole-heartedly bought into the concept of Farewell Magazine and supported the new publication by investing long term from issue one.
“There is a gap in the market for a publication that’s both inspirational and informative, something with substance, featuring engaging, well-written stories that our readers will identify with, particularly if they are looking for avenues of inspiration and guidance towards the end of their life.
“The time has come to start talking about death and put aside our own fears about dying. We’re all scared of the unknown, but death isthe one inevitable element of life.”
* Farewell Magazine has an initial circulation of 20,000 and a cover price of £3.95. It is also available for subscription at home and abroad via the website, www.farewell-magazine.co.uk