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You may have noticed that we’re trying to calm the blog down a bit. The daily magazine format of up to five or so posts daily is more, we reckon, than you want or can cope with. (Today was a throwback day.)

We recognise that there are many sources, now, from which you can gather your funeral news. 

We also recognise our own frailty. Keeping a blog going is hard work and we have lots of other things to do, all of which we are behind with. 

So we’re going to try to give you one a day, max, from now on, and post minor items on our Facebook page and Twitter. 

You are very welcome to use this blog to broach an idea, let off steam, reflect on an experience, proclaim a manifesto, ask a question… We are non-denominational. Anything goes. Get in touch: email us. 

You can ‘like’ our Facebook page here (and see Barack Obama moonlighting as the Grim Reaper). And you can find us on Twitter: @goodfunerals

Red River Valley

From this valley they say you are going
We will miss your bright eyes and sweet smile
For they say you are taking the sunshine
That has brightened our pathways awhile

CHORUS:
Come and sit by my side, if you love me
Do not hasten to bid me adieu
Just remember the Red River Valley
And the cowboy who loved you so true

I’ve been thinking a long time, my darling
Of the sweet words you never would say
Now, alas, must my fond hopes all vanish
For they say you are gong away

Do you think of the valley you’re leaving
O how lonely and how dreary it will be
And do you think of the kind hearts you’re breaking
And the pain you are causing to me

CHORUS
They will bury me where you have wandered
Near the hills where the daffodils grow
When you’re gone from the Red River Valley
For I can’t live without you I know

Do the math

Add all these up. What do you get? 

  • Phosphate 47.5%
  • Calcium 25.3%
  • Sulfate 11.00%
  • Potassium 3.69%
  • Sodium 1.12%
  • Chloride 1.00%
  • Silica 0.9%
  • Aluminum Oxide 0.72%
  • Magnesium 0.418%
  • Iron Oxide 0.118%
  • Zinc 0.0342%
  • Titanium Oxide 0.0260%
  • Barium 0.0066%
  • Antimony 0.0035%
  • Chromium 0.0018%
  • Copper 0.0017%
  • Manganese 0.0013%
  • Lead 0.0008%
  • Tin 0.0005%
  • Vanadium 0.0002%
  • Beryllium <0.0001%
  • Mercury <0.00001%

No, not Findus lasagne! 

Remains to be seen

So, a bad week, then, for dead heads of state. Hugo Chavez can’t after all be embalmed ‘like Lenin’. By the time the experts got there it was too late for the disembowelling and the deep marinade which would have made him, in death, the centre of a cult and an object of pilgrimage – as writer Edward Lucas has it:

‘at the centrepiece of a phoney religion where dead dictators brood over their subjects even in death. So long as they are unburied, their ideas still live.’

Meanwhile, here in the UK, the tug-of-war over the bones of Richard III has been lent intensity by the declared intention of the top chaps at Leicester to rebury him under a simple slab at the east end of the cathedral. Not good enough for a king, complain critics. “A king should not be buried under the floor,” said John Ashdown-Hill, leader of genealogical research for the Richard III Society. “He should have a tomb rather than being put back under the ground where he’s just been dug up.”

All of which focuses the mind on the significance we attach to dead bodies, the things we do to them and the reasons why we do them.

Different societies, different faiths do things differently. Some hurry their dead underground, the sooner that they might wake up in Paradise. Others, for a variety of reasons, proceed more slowly. Thanks to bureaucratic obstacles it can take up to three weeks to arrange a cremation in this country which, for the corpse, means a lot of time spent in fridges and cold rooms growing waxier and waxier.

Many undertakers reckon this to be no bad thing. ‘It’s okay, take your time,’ they say to bereaved people. So they can get their heads around it, they mean, and plan the sort of sendoff they need. And there’s a lot to be said for this. Most people don’t start thinking about this stuff til they absolutely have to.

Spending time with the dead body is reckoned also to be therapeutic. And this is why some undertakers are fans of embalming. It produces an emotionally valuable memory picture – a dead person at ease with their fate. It is the technological, artificial Good Death.

For reasons ranging from its invasiveness to the way it is reckoned to distance bereaved people from reality, embalming has its enemies among ‘ordinary’ people and also among the inhabitants of Funeralworld itself. The absolute sincerity of those at both poles of the argument is undoubtable.

Here is undertaker Caitlin Doughty:

“An embalmed body, … it is not an actual dead body in a way. It’s a strange wax effigy that the dead body has become. You’re not really seeing a dead person—you’re seeing an idea of a dead person, a metaphor for a dead person.”

But Doughty is no fan of direct cremation, either, which she sees as the legacy of the (very English) derision heaped by Jessica Mitford on the Great American Funeral:

“My main problem [with Jessica Mitford] is that she really brought on the direct cremation revolution. It is a valuable service. It is a less expensive service. It’s another way of saying, ‘Take the body away. … Don’t let it rot at all. Turn it to ash. … I don’t want to think about any of the processes that the body would actually go through in a natural way.'”

Doughty believes that the contemplation of an unembalmed dead body is important:

“The ecstasy of decay is … kind of like the idea of the sublime, in the sense that if you are really engaging with your mortality … it opens you up to a broader emotional spectrum than you normally have.”

We find these sentiments echoed by many thinking undertakers in this country. To observe the changes that take place in a dead person over a period of days enables the bereaved to comprehend what has happened and accept that it’s time, in the end, to let the dead person go.

The contemplation of the corpse also, to use the words of Jonathan Taylor, enables bereaved people to reconcile themselves to the new reality: that he or she is now an it; that whatever spirit or life force the corpse once embodied has gone. Elvis has left the building.

But even the let’s-get-real school of undertaking baulks at presenting the corpse as it really, actually is: gape-jawed, staring-eyed, aghast. These undertakers are prettifiers, too. Television mirrors this denial of reality. On a death porn programme like Silent Witness we are invited to gloat over hideous injuries… but all those mutilated corpses have perfectly closed mouths and eyes. Real, gape-jawed death is, it seems, an unbearable reality, a squirm too far.

How most living people feel dead people should be cared for, or not, and to what purpose, is mostly subjective, based in local cultural and/or faith norms. They tend not to ask why; they just go with what they feel to be, or are told is, right. And that may be perfectly okay. There’s no rational route through this.

What people understand about death is unlikely to stand still as they experience the deaths of friends and become aware of their own one-way journey as evidenced by irrevocable signs of ageing – except in the case of extreme deniers.

And for all of us it just got more complicated.

In the US, Sam Parnia, who has worked with Peter Fenwick to research continuing consciousness, or life after death, has been pioneering a technique for reviving the dead by cooling them in order to reverse the cellular processes that take place after death.

In this way, he was able to revive a woman who had been technically dead for up to 16 hours.

Parnia says:

In view of the rapidly evolving progress in the field of resuscitation science and the ever-expanding gray-zone period after death, I believe it is important to include what we would refer to as human consciousness, psyche or soul in future definitions and considerations regarding death. It would also perhaps be wise to concentrate some of our future research efforts on understanding the state of human consciousness after death has started, since the evidence currently suggests that it is not lost immediately after death but continues to exist for at least some time afterward.

In other words, if our mind continues to exist after death, how long does it exist for? And why?

This may give our contemplation of the dead a whole new lease of life.

Sit-up-straight or laid back?

Pictured above, the arranging room at Holmes and Family before and after its makeover. 

The GFG strongly encouraged this makeover. We acknowledge that our point of view is not shared by everyone, to the point that we’re not so sure, now, either.  

The role of the funeral arranger is to be both 1) an empathetic fellow human being; and 2) a properly detached professional. Getting the proportions right is the important thing — and to some extent this is determined by the evident needs of the client. Some clients like to keep the chat brief and businesslike; others are stunned by grief and need someone to listen and gently guide them. An arranger has to be able to switch between the two — and all the others in between. An arrangements interview can last between 15 mins and several hours. There’s no Standard Operating Procedure — though there’s plenty of anecdotal evidence that some firms are impatient of arrangers who take buy cialis nz more than 30-40 minutes. 

A desk-and-chairs setup asserts and reinforces the professional standing of the arranger. Some feel that this is helpful in defining their status and, therefore, the nature of the relationship (arrangers are not grief counsellors). The barrier marks a boundary. It also determines and defines the agenda: we’re here to conduct business.

By the same token, a sofas-and-coffee-table setup can blur the focus of the interview or even distract from it. That’s one way of looking at it. Another way of looking at it is say that it promotes a collaborative, creative approach to planning a funeral; it is far better suited to the age of the bespoke funeral. 

Midway between the two is a round table, which is the preferred style of a funeral director we admire very much. 

Is it a matter of either or? Should a well-equipped arrangements room contain both a table or desk and sofas, and clients asked which they prefer? 

Is Dignity overvalued, over-leveraged and operationally insecure?

A couple of copies of the Investors Intelligence have come to our attention. In them, financial analyst Aubrey Brocklebank entertains doubts about the viability of Dignity plc. 

He expresses himself very technically, so some of his argument and most of the graphs go somewhat over the heads of Team GFG. We’d be interested to know what they say to you.

Here are extracts from Brocklebank:

The bull-case on Dignity is very simple. It is a very safe, stable, and predictable business. People will keep on dying, despite any recession, and they will need to be buried or cremated. Dignity is also a very cash generative business and that has been exploited to use leverage to generate significant returns for shareholders.

It is a very simple and convincing argument, and it is one that has won over many institutional holders.

This argument is however seriously flawed.

The number of funerals or cremations per unit is dropping (as expected) though the only means that Dignity have been able to use to increase revenues is by price increases and acquisitions.

The cost of a basic funeral has risen 6.2% per annum since 2004. However it is the cost of burials, up 9.9%, that has caused much of this increase. Thus the 5.7% increase in prices posted by Dignity is above market average once one has stripped away the increased cost of burial.

This gives Dignity very little room to increase prices and remain competitive with the competition. It is also possible given the scale of Dignity’s price in comparison with the competition that prices could soon come down. This may not necessarily be due to like-for-like prices having to be reduced but customers opting for less expensive offerings … By cutting the amount spent per funeral Dignity could suffer a significant fall in earnings.

Whilst it may take some bravery to short this stock the low volatility of the share price, the low growth estimates, and the low implied returns, do mean that there is very little upside to Dignity even if all goes well for them, and they certainly lack the safety that the story would suggest!

Concerning Dignity’s acquisition of Yew Holdings at the beginning of the year, Brocklebank observes:

It is curious that the average price per funeral charged by Yew is £1565 compared to Dignity’s £2,350 when Yew have an EBITDA margin of 46% comparative to Dignity’s 34.7%. Thus their margins can only be held up by sales volumes. Should Dignity raise prices and find a significant fall in volume then they could see a significant drop in EBITDA.

If Dignity are not very careful with their handling of this acquisition it is quite possible that this could be the straw that breaks the proverbial back.

Find Brocklebank’s articles here and here

Is it politic to target terror of death?

According to the BBC, the UK is falling off the pace in the international race to live forever. There may be a measure of national shame here. In a table of 18 countries we stand at #11 behind Greece.

Spain is top. Spaniards enjoy an average of 70.9 years of healthy life. Finland is bottom. Finns eke out a paltry 67.3 years of healthy life. 

What’s chilling (perhaps) is the number of, by implication, ‘unhealthy’ years that follow. In Spain, it’s 10.5 years. In Finland it’s 12.8. In the UK it’s 11.3 years. But the report does not linger over these dispiriting figures. 

Instead, it highlights can-do-better-must-do-better declarations from the health police. According to them, we smoke too much, drink too much and eat too much. Says Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt, sounding stung, “For too long we have been lagging behind and I want the reformed health system to take up this challenge and turn this shocking underperformance around.”

The prize is sizeable: ‘30,000 lives a year could be saved if England performed as well as its European neighbours’. 

What a fascinating verb that is. Saved. 

When what they mean, of course, is extended a bit. 

Is it a good idea, one wonders, for the public health quangocrats to incentivise us to look after ourselves better (and save them money) by targeting and exacerbating the terror of death? There’s a little bit more to cause of death than self-indulgent lifestyle choices — which is why everyone born in the year 1890 is now dead. 

Apart from anything else, there’s another costly quango tasked with undoing all this terror in the interest, again, of healthy attitudes (and cost saving). It is called Dying Matters, and it is ‘committed to supporting changing knowledge, attitudes and behaviours around death and dying, and aim[s] to encourage a greater willingness to engage on death and bereavement issues.’ 

When Robert was murdered

Posted by Richard Rawlinson

There must be something in the air as I’m being uncharacteristically nostalgic about people I’ve known who have died.

An early encounter was at prep school, aged 10. My heart sank when my best friend didn’t turn up at the beginning of term, and it wasn’t until assembly the next day that I learned he’d been killed during the holidays in an accident on his father’s farm: he’d been allowed to drive a tractor across a field, but it wasn’t weighted properly and had overturned, crushing him.

I was stunned but, too young to process the guilt and devastation of his parents or even my own loss, I moved on to find a new best friend. I do, however, recall resenting the headmaster for not giving me special treatment, and informing me privately before he told the entire school.    

As an adolescent, I also recall my father talking about how his sister died, before I was born, in a BOAC plane crash while en route to India. He was driving with my mother when he saw a woman standing on a humpback bridge over a river, smiling and waving. My mother vouches he exclaimed, ‘Good Lord, there’s Patricia! Thought she was in Calcutta.’ But when my mother looked, she had vanished. It was only when they got home that they received a call that Patricia had died at that exact moment. Spooky.

I attended my first funeral aged 19, and it was for a talented and beautiful friend who died in a car crash during her gap year. I felt anger at the waste of a promising life. Since then, I’ve known relatives who have died of old age and cancer, and friends and acquaintances who have died as soldiers and war correspondents, of AIDs-related illnesses, drugs overdoses and suicide. Having recently written about Issie Blow and Jennifer Paterson, my thoughts now turn to the only person I’ve known who has died as a victim of murder.

I met Robert Tewdwr Moss in my 20s as a fellow diarist at London’s Evening Standard. If we weren’t assigned to cover early-evening book launches and private views, we’d sometimes go to a bar after work. Although in the picture (above) he’s wearing a D&G vest, he was a dandy at work: a louche, floppy-haired aesthete, resplendent in velvet waistcoat, watch chain, wing collar and Byron-esque cravat.

His sartorial contrasts are relevant. Over drinks, he’d confide in me about his ‘double life’, a roué on the fringes of the literati, and a ‘cottage cruiser’ with a taste for ‘rough trade’—his penchant being Big Bad Black Boys. Or Asians. Or Arabs. In fact, anyone but effete, middle class white men.

I learned of Robert’s murder on my return from a villa holiday in Tuscany in August, 1996. Being abroad, I’d missed the write-ups in the papers about a robbery gone wrong. He’d been left bound and gagged while his Paddington flat was ransacked, and he died later of suffocation. The culprits were at large with no apparent leads for the police to go on.

I quickly came up with a theory about how burglars had got into his flat with no signs of a break-in. I fretted about getting involved with a criminal investigation but then called the police, eventually being put through to the detective in charge. I explained I was a colleague of Robert and that I was unsure if it was common knowledge that he was a gay man who picked up a certain type of stranger—that muggers hanging around pubic conveniences and parks, posing as rent boys, just might be the culprits. The policeman thanked me for my tip (elementary, my dear officer), and I heard later that a youth called Azul and his accomplice were arrested and charged, Robert’s laptop being found in their lair.

In the obituaries, no one mentioned this taboo side of a flamboyant presence in London’s salons. A floral extract from The Independent:

‘It is an undeservedly ugly end to an elegant life, and no one who knew Robert Tewdwr Moss will entertain any memory other than that of a handsome, willowy young man with a quizzical, innocent look on his face as he told you something so louche, surreal, and hilarious that you had to laugh out loud. He was kind, generous and witty, and London will be duller for the lack of him’.

I had reservations about telling another side of Robert’s story here. A deciding factor was that he was far from in the closet so there’s no outing involved. At the time of his death, he had just finished a book, Cleopatra’s Wedding Present, about his travels in Syria, and incredibly risky antics therein. With the country today a war zone with atrocities being committed by rebel fighters and the troops of President Assad, Robert enlightens us by showing hidden undercurrents in the ancient capital of Damascus.

The expansive Independent again:

‘Tewdwr Moss’s engrossing account often lingers at the maws of hell – in scrapes and sexual assignations enough to rival Joe Orton’s – but all the while it is perfumed with his prose, as heavily scented as the man himself. “Perfume is the one luxury I allow myself when travelling into the unknown,” he opines.

‘Yet the feyness never grates; he is too funny, acutely observant and emphatic. He drifts through souks, falling in love with Jihad, a Palestinian ex-commando. He meets a Shiite Muslim girl who, in a mosque, shows him her silver cross, an act ‘which could result in the girl getting stoned, and me with her… I realised that however much I loved the Arab world, my liking was indissolubly linked with my gender’.

Who knows what Robert would be up to if he was alive now. They say only the good die young, but the charismatically flawed have a habit of having their life cut short, too.

FootnoteAt the beginning, I said something must be ‘in the air’ that’s making me reminisce. That’s too nebulous. Had I not previously known GFG’s founder Charles Cowling, I doubt I’d have become a visitor here let alone a contributor. I usually write for money about subjects from the arts and history to politics and religion. I wasn’t aware death was so engrossing until I dropped by to check out what my ol’ chum was up to these days. I found myself intrigued. I’d given thought to death as a universal truth, and I’ve had brushes with bereavement, but I hadn’t given enough thought to the civil celebrants, undertakers, embalmers, grave-diggers, crem furnace operators, priests, doctors, palliative carers and euthanasia administrators who deal regularly with death. It’s an ongoing education. I’ve now even made a will and laid down preferences for my own funeral! Life is short: do we ‘gather ye rosebuds while ye may’ or ‘repent, repent, repent’? A rhetorical question.

Bournemouth To Host Awards Ceremony For The Funeral Industry

GFA

 

Press Release

11 March 2013

Bournemouth To Host Awards Ceremony For The Funeral Industry

Nominations have opened for the second Good Funeral Awards, which will be awarded on 7 September at a glittering ceremony in Bournemouth.

The awards recognise outstanding service to the bereaved.

There are 13 categories including most promising new funeral director, coffin supplier of the year, best alternative hearse and gravedigger of the year.

Anyone wishing to acknowledge excellent service they have experienced at a funeral is eligible to make a nomination by filling in a form at http://goodfuneralawards.co.uk/nominate/ 

The awards will be part of a weekend of activities from 6-8 September for those wishing to find out more about mortality. It will include lectures, a procession of hearses and death cafés – opportunities to discuss the grim reaper over tea and cake. 

In a session sposored by The Green Funeral Company, psychiatrist Dr Ben Sessa, will speak about the use of psychedelic drugs in the care of the terminally ill. Lucy Talbot will give a presentation about memorial tattoos. 

The event will be hosted by leading consumer advocacy groups, the Good Funeral Guide, the Natural Death Centre, Green Fuse and Final Fling. The purpose is to penetrate the fog of mystery and misunderstanding that swirls around the funeral industry and spotlight its stars. One day we will need them. 

Charles Cowling, author of the Good Funeral Guide, said “Some the nicest, most decent, most professional people in Britain work tirelessly in service of the bereaved. We want to tell their stories and say thank you.”

For more information please call Brian Jenner on 01202 551257. Website here

ED’S NOTE: You will see that Brian has negotiated really good deals for accommodation at seafront hotels. As last year, this will be a weekend of good fellowship and great networking. More events and speakers to be announced. 

A glass of Grim Reaper?

Posted by Vale

The Urban Dictionary (strapline: The Dictionary you wrote) is great place for the gross, the ghastly and the newly minted.

It’s for people who speak ‘urban’ and the definitions reflect their preferences and predilections. For example there is no definition of the word morning because:

the type of people who speak ‘urban’ do not know what morning is.

“Now that I’ve got a job I’ve got to get up in THE MORNING.”
“Morning? What the hell’s that?”

Dead is defined very simply:

1. dead
 Britney Spear’s career – Wow britney spears sucks Dead images: These dudes are dead.

2. dead
 Something that is no longer living and can now be kicked – Yep it’s dead! *Kicks it*

And did you know the Grim Reaper was also a cocktail? Me neither:

5. Grim Reaper
The Grim Reaper is a cocktail made with equal parts vodka, gin, tequila and cask wine. The mix is traditionally made with Mishka, Gordon’s, 125 and Fruity Lexia respectively. The ingredients are known as the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

The spirits are meant to be the cheapest possible in order to replicate the authenticity of the Grim Reaper. Variations upon this formula include the Fancy Reaper (expensive spirits and wine), the Bloody Reaper (substitute white goon with red) and the Grim Suicide (3 full bottles in a cask of wine).

The side effects are not well documented, with reports of dizziness, memory loss, feelings of grimness, random acts of extreme violence, unwitting transportation across state borders, death, irate messages and grand larceny.

It is believed that these ingredients are the basis for the drug PCP, weed killer and embalming fluid.

The controversy associated with the Grim is the inability to refuse once the beverage is suggested. Despite the danger, this can lead to a Double Grim and in rare cases a Triple Grim: some claim that Sid Vicious did 7 Grim Reapers before his death, however the evidence is unsubstantiated.

They should certainly be serving Grim Reapers in the bar at this years National Funeral Exhibition at Stoneleigh in June, don’t you think?

The Good Funeral Guide
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