June 2013 – Page 2 – The Good Funeral Guide

Does death really matter so little?

13 June 2013

Charles

2 Comments

Categories: Attitudes to death, bereavement, bureaucracy

Citizens of the UK have no statutory right to bereavement leave. Momentous as the event of a death may be, it is not reckoned to be of sufficient magnitude to enjoy equal rights with birth. Says a lot about our cultural attitudes to mortality, doesn’t it?

There’s currently an e-petition calling for a legal right to take time off work in the aftermath of a death. It’s passed the 10,000 mark, triggering a response from the government. This is what they say:

The death of a family member is deeply upsetting for those involved and the Government would expect any employer to respond to such situations with sensitivity and flexibility. However, the Government believes that all requests for leave related to bereavement are best left for employers and their employees to decide between themselves. The Government has not legislated for bereavement leave in any situation and there are no plans to introduce a specific right to support bereaved parents/relatives. In doing so we would be obliged to put in place limits, standards and definitions. The amount of leave needed can vary from one individual to another, and defining what family relationship would qualify for such leave, would be difficult, as it would be impossible to legislate for every circumstance. Whilst there is no specific right to “bereavement leave”, all employees do have a day-one right to “time off for dependants” which allows them to take a reasonable amount of time off work to deal with unexpected or sudden emergencies, including when a close family member dies. Time off will cover arranging and attending the funeral. Employees who exercise this right are protected against dismissal or victimisation. The right does not include an entitlement to pay. The decision as to whether the employee will be paid is left to the employer’s discretion or to the contract of employment between them. The Government hopes that employers are as sympathetic and flexible as possible in responding to employee requests for time off, particularly when bereavement is involved. This e-petition remains open to signatures and will be considered for debate by the Backbench Business Committee should it pass the 100 000 signature threshold.

There may be flaws in the government’s argument. The statement “defining what family relationship would qualify for such leave, would be difficult” applies equally to birth, doesn’t it? It isn’t difficult at all.

You can sign the petition here. I hope you will. It won’t make the slightest bit of difference in the short term. We have to play the long game with this one.

Here’s a reminder of the present status quo:

Maternity leave

As an employee you have the right to 26 weeks of Ordinary Maternity Leave and 26 weeks of Additional Maternity Leave making one year in total. The combined 52 weeks is known as Statutory Maternity Leave.

Paternity leave

As long as you meet certain conditions you can take either one or two weeks’ Ordinary Paternity Leave. You can’t take odd days off and if you take two weeks they must be taken together.

Compassionate leave

If you are an ‘employee’, you have the right to unpaid time off work to deal with emergencies involving a ‘dependant’ – this could be your husband, wife, partner, child, parent, or anyone living in your household as a member of the family.

When a dependant dies, you can take time off to make funeral arrangements, as well as to attend a funeral.

Undertakers feast on misery, situation normal

12 June 2013

Charles

8 Comments

Categories: celebrants, funeral cost, funeral directors

There’s a story in the Scottish Daily Mail, 7 June, that exemplifies very well the misinformation and scaremongering that are characteristic of media treatment of funerals in the UK. Here it is:

LOCAL authorities and funeral directors are making money out of family misery, with ‘the cost of dying’ reaching thousands of pounds in Scotland, according to a trade union.

The GMB union said funeral charges would come as ‘a real shock to many in Scotland’.

Both Edinburgh and Glasgow councils charge about £2,000 for burials. Other councils are not far behind, with South Lanarkshire, East Dunbartonshire and Perth and Kinross all charging more than £1,500.

Even the cheaper option of cremation is almost £1,500 in Edinburgh and more than £1,000 in Glasgow, South Lanarkshire, Perth and Kinross, Aberdeen and Fife.

Total UK funeral costs average more than £7,000.

GMB Scotland secretary Harry Donaldson said: ‘ Someone is making a lot of money out of people’s bereavement. At a time when the cost of living occupies most peoples concerns, it will be a real shock to many in Scotland that the cost of dying is so high.

‘Few people have any idea of how much even a simple burial or cremation actually costs.’

Here come the facts:

The average established funeral home owner earns between £30,000–50,000 a year. Have I got that about right?

The cost of cremation in Edinburgh is, actually, £594–675.

The £7,000 cost is the one put about by Sun Life to frighten people into buying financial products. It bundles all sorts of extraneous stuff like probate. The cost of a cremation funeral is way under half of that (with the odd dishonourable exception).

Burial charges are the bargain of all time. What’s the real cost of a grave once you’ve factored in maintenance and mowing for ever? £14 million, anyone?

The funeral industry isn’t great at news management, too often finding itself in reactive mode. Some players let the side down badly, too. Co-operative Funeralcare is in the news again today for burying the wrong body — again. Some funeral celebrants let the side down too. If you’ve a few mins to spare, watch this promo film by an outfit called the Fellowship of Independent Celebrants. It may have a regrettable whiff of ‘making money out of family misery’.

Peaceful EV feeling

11 June 2013

Charles

7 Comments

Categories: Hearses, National Association of Funeral Directors

Was there anything we missed? We spent three days at the National Funeral Exhibition, most of it talking, very often to people with whom we have had a virtual relationship for years. It’s a weird thing about the world today that you can get to know someone very well indeed — without ever having met them in the flesh. The worst thing about meeting them all at once is that your brain eventually turns to mush and you start talking gibberish. By heck it was marvellous fun, though. As Kitty says, it’s all about the people, innit? Funeral people, the nice ones, are right up there with the best of them.

So was there anything we missed? Most of the stuff looked like the stuff that’s always there but, as I say, we didn’t get to see it all. Anything groundbreaking? There was a franchising business that caught our eye. We grabbed the flyer and said we’d ring. There’s always been talk of franchising in the funeral industry, but we’ve never yet seen it happen.

What was the highlight (apart from the free almond croissants at the NAFD stand)? For us it had to be the Brahms electric hearse, pictured rather poorly above.

We first met Steve Cousins, its progenitor, two years ago at the Arbory Trust natural burial ground in Cambridge. Lovely man. He’d brought his prototype. It didn’t get, as they say, off the ground. Must have been an expensive failure, that. We’ve often thought of him since, wishing him well, wondering what he was up to.

And the answer is that he was plugging away in the brave and determined manner characteristic of all inventive people. We think he’s come up with something really special.

The cost is around £38,000. Three quid’s worth of leccy overnight gives you 120 miles of motoring. It’s a customised Nissan Leaf, and it’s a very nice, classy makeover — seriously chic and stylish. It’s wee compared with the standard steroidal hearse and, actually, that’s part of its charm. You can’t get get your bearers in, though. We can see a lot of middle class chattering types like us really going for it.

Leverton’s have bought the first (it’s already LEV-ed up and raring to go). Very astute move, in our opinion. And, what’s more, here’s a vehicle ideally suited to London’s roads where traffic runs at an average of 10 mph, the same as it was in Samuel Pepys’ day.

So there you have it. Best In Show 2013: the Brahms electric hearse. Winner by a mile.

What was yours?

Our thanks to the exhibition organisers, the NAFD, and David Hyde, for inviting us We hope we behaved.

ED’S NOTE: EV = electric vehicle. Clue to the title here.

Daddy, where were YOU at the NFE?

7 June 2013

Charles

6 Comments

Categories: Uncategorised

Are you coming to the National Funeral Exhibition?

The NFE is the biggest and best business-boosting/networking/nattering event in Funeralworld and we are delighted to have been invited. To mark the occasion we are presently decanting the GFG-Batesville Shard, packing the wretched, zit-face interns into charabancs, and looking forward to spending the next three days sampling the delights, delighting in the sights and feasting on chat with all and sundry.

If you’re undecided, make up your mind to come. You don’t want to spend the next 2 years feeling like the person in the pic above. Simply present yourself at the desk, flash your business card and they’ll bung you a badge.

Meeting up can be touch and go, such is the throng. So, if you’d like to catch us, we shall be taking tea and cake in the Stroller Restaurant between 3 and 4 on each day.

Call us on 07557 684 515

We hope to see you there!

Doing the rite thing

4 June 2013

Charles

1 Comment

Categories: ceremony, Ritual

On Monday, in response to this:

… we get to carry on without the benefit of a formal ceremony or other ritual observance after near-bereavement experiences like the breakdown of a relationship, or redundancy, or a child leaving home. We resolve those privately.

Kathryn Edwards wrote:

… from my ritualist perspective … how is it that we stumble through quasi-bereavement sorrows such as job-losses and relationship break-ups WITHOUT rituals?

It appears that she may have Harvard on her side. This won’t surprise anyone who knows her.

Behavioral scientist Michael I. Norton became interested in mourning rituals after reading Harvard University President Drew Gilpin Faust’s This Republic of Suffering, which describes elaborate ways that parents, spouses, children, and friends dealt with the massive loss of soldiers during the American Civil War. It got him to wondering whether rituals were merely a traditional part of the grieving process, or whether they truly alleviated grief.

“We see in every culture—and throughout history—that people who perform rituals report feeling better,” says Norton, an associate professor in the Marketing unit at Harvard Business School. “But we didn’t know if the ritual caused the healing.”

Norton did some experiments and found that rituals indeed alleviate and reduce grief, even among people who don’t inherently believe in the efficacy of rituals.

In one experiment, the researchers set out to determine whether rituals led to an increased sense of control, and whether that sense of control served to alleviate grief. To that end, they asked 247 individuals … to write about either the death of a loved one or the death of a relationship. Some participants were asked to include a description of a ritual they performed after suffering the loss; others were not.

Norton and Gino were surprised to discover that the majority of the recounted rituals were neither religious nor communal. Rather, they were personal, private, and occasionally angry—but in a controlled way.

After the writing exercise, all the participants completed a questionnaire, using a numbered scale to recall how much they felt out of control after the loss, as well as the extent to which they still grieved the person. Those who had described a personal ritual also reported feeling both more in control and less aggrieved after the writing exercise, indicating the power of merely reflecting on ritualistic behavior.

If you’re still interested, do read the whole article. One of Norton’s conclusions, in particular, is vitally important for all students of funerary rituals:

Observing a ritual is not nearly as powerful as performing a ritual.

Whole article here.

Lobbying scandal strikes Funeralworld?

4 June 2013

Charles

17 Comments

Categories: funeral directors, National Association of Funeral Directors

The lobbying scandal presently raging in Parliament has drawn the spotlight to all-party parliamentary groups — APPGs. Three dishonourable Labour peers were caught by undercover cameras (remember them?) telling reporters that an all-party parliamentary group could be set up as a lobbying vehicle for a fake South Korean solar energy company. The ignominious Patrick Mercer declared his willingness to set up an APPG in favour of Fiji.

There’s an APPG for funerals and bereavement. It is chaired by Lorely Burt, Lib Dem MP for Solihull. It is funded by the National Association of Funeral Directors. It contains no representatives of consumer bodies and is arguably the poorer for that. It represents the interests of the industry, and these are often the interests of consumers, too. They are presently pressing the case for increasing the social fund funeral payment.

Short of sending in our own undercover cameras, we are of the impression that this is an APPG which may be designated blameless, if possibly a little one-sided.

Beyond wordless

3 June 2013

Charles

10 Comments

Categories: Attitudes to death

David Aaronovitch tells a tale in today’s Times which seems to speak volumes about, uh, attitudes to death, or families, or Britishness or… something, such that I thought I must share it with you. The background is that the Aaronovich family dog, a Kerry Blue, has been diagnosed with cancer and will die soon.

When the vet told us, my wife Sarah and I were upset enough on our own account. But Sarah was particularly worried about how the children would take it. Exams were coming; there were other problems to be dealt with. Perhaps we should put off telling them until the moment was more propitious.

Then, as we dithered, a friend who lives in Lincolnshire phoned and told us about her experience. She has four young children, and they had grown together, played together, yapped together with their dog, a schnauzer called Dennis. Dennis was afflicted by illness rather more suddenly order cialis with paypal than Ruby and a schoolday visit to the vet established that it was probably best for the poor animal to be ushered in the next world within the week.

Our friend could not bring herself to tell the children who she knew would be badly affected by the news. So she didn’t let on, which meant that on the day of execution she had done nothing to prepare her little ones. They came home from school to the dogless house and, amazingly, didn’t seem to notice. So our friend put off the dreaded moment again.

Tuesday came and went, then Wednesday and she began to wonder. After a week in which not one of the children had so much as mentioned the dog once, it occurred to their mother that she might have overestimated the trauma of Dennis’s demise. To this day she hasn’t said anything and neither have her children.

Source

Funeralcare for sale?

3 June 2013

Charles

16 Comments

Categories: Co-operative Funeralcare

The capital shortfall at the Co-operative Bank is estimated to be somewhere between £1–1.8 billion. This debt has been downgraded by Moody’s to junk status. The Co-op is going to have to sell assets in order to pay it off.

Here’s the news for Funeralworld. Today’s Daily Telegraph speculates as follows:

Further asset disposals are under review. The bank has already announced the sale of its life insurance business and the parent Co-op Group may be asked to sanction the disposal of other assets that range from funeral parlours to farmland.

Things could get interesting.

Thinking the unsinkable

3 June 2013

Charles

21 Comments

Categories: cremation, direct cremation, funeral customs, funeral directors, funeral trends

In October 2008, in a piece about direct cremation, I wrote this: In the UK we are culturally conditioned to believe that a funeral for a body is indispensable. Could that change? In July 2009 I wrote: I never thought [direct cremation] would jump the Atlantic, but it has. We now have our first direct cremation service over here and it’s busy. Simplicity Cremations*, it’s called.

I seem not to have been wholly persuaded, however, for in March 2010 I wrote: It seems unthinkable that the practice of direct cremation … could land on our shores. In May 2010, in response to a very valuable analysis by Nick Gandon, Jonathan, a sagacious and valued commenter on this blog, wrote: Funeral directors aren’t set up to cater for direct cremation because the demand is almost nil.

Seems like ancient history now.

The growth of direct cremation marks a cultural shift that, so far as I know, has gone unremarked by the British media. So far as the media is concerned, direct cremation doesn’t mark a cultural shift at all, it’s simply a branch of the cheaper funerals market, and we all want cheaper funerals, don’t we? The Dismal Trade seems mostly to share this analysis. Direct cremation is for poor people who can’t afford a full fig funeral, for a few well-off middle class people who want a ‘fuss-free’ funeral, and for the I’m-not-worth-it brigade who don’t reckon they’re worth funeralling anyway. It’s a niche market.

So far as we can tell from their responses, funeral directors experience the impact of direct cremation as a commercial, not a cultural phenomenon, and certainly not as an existential threat. Most people still want a trad funeral, but direct cremation has affected the trad funerals market by making stripped-down respectable. It has empowered funeral shoppers to say no to stuff they don’t actually really want. The days of one limo or two have been succeeded by one limo or none — oh, and no flowers, either, thanks. We are witnessing a watering down of the Big Black Funeral. How much more dilution can it take?

Culturally, until the last five years or so, we supposed there to be a crucial, indispensable emotional and spiritual value in holding a funeral in the presence of a dead body. Now, we’re not so sure. A combination of all manner of factors may be responsible, longevity in particular — when death is merely the postscript to a long and beastly illness, there doesn’t seem to be much more grief work to do. On the other hand, the deaths of young people remain not just as momentous as ever, but more so.

There is, arguably, a perfectly good rationale for direct cremation. Reducing a body to ‘ash’ and rendering it, thereby, portable, durable and divisible, is a very effective way of preparing it for a funeral. There is remarkably little understanding of this among funeral directors; most of them simply do not get it, probably because they scent no commercial opportunity.

So here are the big questions:

Is it preferable, in the interest of emotional and spiritual health, to hold a funeral in the presence of a dead body? Or do ashes actually serve perfectly well?

Biggest question of all:

Is it perilous to your emotional health not to hold a funeral at all? After all, we get to carry on without the benefit of a formal ceremony or other ritual observance after near-bereavement experiences like the breakdown of a relationship, or redundancy, or a child leaving home. We resolve those privately.

It seems extraordinary that the funeral industry has mounted no concerted defence of the funeral. Nor, so far as I know, have any academics responded to what’s going on and debated the question: Is your funeral really necessary?

Because if pragmatic Brits cotton on to the idea that a funeral serves no purpose, does them absolutely no good at at all, is all just a lot of hollow show and hot air, they’ll be only too pleased to say goodbye to a tradition they never had much time for anyway.

And that’ll be curtains for an industry thought to be unsinkable.

*Simplicity Cremations is now Simplicita Cremations. I’ll leave it to Nick to explain why.

Undertakers overcharge, situation normal

1 June 2013

Charles

20 Comments

Categories: funeral cost

You may or not have been up early enough to catch the ITV Daybreak piece on funerals on Thursday morning. The GFG media monitoring team wasn’t. It was at the seaside. Had it not been for a call from Rosie at the Natural Death Centre we would have missed it altogether.

Impelled by a strong sense of duty, and to the accompaniment of howls of impatience — you have to wade through acres of vapid adverts to get to it — we have now witnessed the report for ourselves.

We learned nothing new. The tone was hostile and entirely price-focussed. ITV had commissioned a poll and discovered that 1 in 3 of us feels pressurised into spending more than we want; 42 per cent of us feel we were overcharged; 1 person in 3 doesn’t understand the costs; and 1 person in 7 isn’t happy with the service. It all depends how you word the questions, doesn’t it?

ITV requested quotes from 120 funeral homes around the country for a simple funeral. Something like £2000 separated the cheapest from the dearest.

A woman seeking direct cremation was told by one funeral director “We don’t do that” and failed to recommend someone who would. Her google-savvy daughter, after “weeks”on the internet, eventually sourced Poppy Mardall, whom she praised to the skies. How she missed all the other direct cremationists out there is a mystery.

Dominic Maguire, for the NAFD, countered criticism by reminding us that a third or more of the cost of a funeral is disbursements and only 80 people complained last year.

There was good advice about asking a friend to do the ‘project management’. We were told that we could do it all ourselves, but we were given no guidance on the small matter of how to look after a dead body.

The report did not tell us that there are lots and lots of good guys in the industry; seek and you shall find. It was, arguably, an unhelpful omission.

You can catch the report on the ITV Player here. Starts at 7.42.