Good job

One in six UK households struggle to pay for a funeral.

UK funeral debt is worth over £130m and is rising. 

QSA seeks a funeral poverty officer to take significant steps to influence policy and practice in both government and in the market to help more people nationally who are struggling to pay for a funeral. 

This role will build on QSA’s award-winning work, Down to Earth, which helps people living on low incomes in east London to arrange a meaningful and affordable funeral.

 Quaker Social Action

Funeral poverty officer

£20,002 (28 hours per week)

More information/job pack/application forms at www.quakersocialaction.com/vacancies.

QSA1QSA2

Dead Art? Then and Now National Photo Competition

Press release from MAB to all you snappers

The National Photo Competition sees its fourth year! Hosted by the Memorial Awareness Board and this year’s proud new sponsors Funeral Directors, Lodge Brothers, the competition is calling photographers of all abilities; all you need is a keen eye for stone memorials.

The theme is stone memorials and the title “Dead Art? Then and Now” requires you to submit two photos of memorials that MUST be in stone and represent the then and the now. Photos will ONLY be accepted in the now category if the memorial is from the 21st Century. Photos can be either black and white or colour. Any use of photo editing is prohibited.

The winner’s prize is £1000 (generously donated by Lodge Brothers) and, new to this year, we are awarding a digital camera to the runner up. The competition closing date is Monday 14th October. We hope you get time to explore UK burial grounds!

A panel from the industry will then meet to shortlist the ten top photos. The competition will re open beginning of November for the public to be able to vote to choose the ultimate winner and runner up from the ten short listed entries on the MAB website! Rememberforever.org.uk

MAB’s Campaign Director Mike Dewar says, “Memorials and cemeteries have long been a favourite subject for photographers. There certainly is no shortage of unusual and interesting memorials throughout UK burial grounds and this competition focuses on capturing and showcasing their unsung beauty”.

Christopher Lodge, Director of Masonry at Lodge Brothers (Funerals) Ltd says, “ as a family business established over 200 years, we are really pleased to sponsor this unique photographic competition. Memorials play a part in our social history through both personal and public memorials. They are a lasting tribute to loved ones and those who have lost their lives for our country. We sincerely hope that this competition shows the changes within our industry and society through the theme “Then and Now” and raises the awareness and importance of commemorating in stone.”

To enter the competition and for full terms and conditions please visit: www.rememberforever.org.uk

For more information please email contact@rememberforever.org.uk

You can also become a fan on Facebook: facebook.com/MemorialAwarenessBoard

Black or coloured?

 Posted by Richard Rawlinson

With the trend for approaching funerals as celebrations of life, I gather it’s become more fashionable to wear bright colours that challenge the convention of wearing black for mourning.

Is this the experience of undertakers and celebrants here? If so, are people dressing down in line with the general trend for more casual attire, or are they continuing to dress up for funerals, only without sticking to black?

How popular is it for a specific colour to be requested because it’s the favourite of the deceased person: a Liverpool supporter being honoured, for example, by guests wearing red?

Do many undertakers now ditch the black, too? And how do celebrants dress to either blend in or set themselves apart from the congregation/audience?

I’d welcome your insights into the contemporary scene, not attending many funerals myself, and those I do go to tending towards traditional black.

There’s no right or wrong here but I’ll nail my colours to the mast by saying I like to witness a sea of monochrome mourners, reminiscent of the throng at a school assembly. There’s something unifying and democratising about a uniform on certain occasions. Bonded by a common thread, black says, ‘we’re all in it together’, no one standing out as either above or below another.

Black is also practical, not just because it conceals grimy marks, but because most of us possess a dark suit and white shirt so we don’t need to rush out to buy something new. Then there’s the claim I recently read online that bright colours make people cry! I quote: ‘Smiles are terrible for depressed people, it’s like the person is happy about our pain if they wear bright colours. Basically because misery loves company’.

Black has symbolised many things over the years, from evil to virtue, wealth to poverty, puritanical unworldliness to the height of fashion. In Roman times, the Emperor wore purple, soldiers wore red, priests wore white and artisans wore black, albeit primitively dyed meaning clothes soon faded to murky grey. Black togas were, however, worn for funerals.

In the Middle Ages, black was associated with the devil, although it was also worn by Benedictine monks as a sign of humility and penitence. Aristocrats showed their wealth through bright colours and, in some parts of Europe, commoners were prohibited from wearing these colours denoting noble rank. Wealthy merchants in northern Italy responded by choosing black robes in the most expensive cloths.

Black became emblematic of Protestantism, and a reaction against the opulence of Catholic church interiors, and the red worn by the Pope and Cardinals. Artists took sides, too, with Protestant Rembrandt using a sober palette of blacks and browns, and Catholic Rubens favouring rich brights. At the same time, all churches in the 17th century became superstitious about witchcraft, persecuting unfortunate women who kept a black cat.

With the emergence of the middle classes in the 18th and 19th centuries, a dark, sober wardrobe became fashionable across society in Europe, not just for mourning. It was the colour of the French Revolution and of the Industrial Revolution, fuelled by coal and oil. It was the colour favoured by romantic poets such as Shelley, usually portrayed in black jacket teamed with an open white shirt.

In the 20th century, black was the colour of fascism, but also Parisian intellectuals and New York beatniks. Chanel pioneered the Little Black Dress, Marlon Brando was the pinnacle of cool in his biker leathers in The Wild One and, later, punks and goths saw black as part of their rebellious subculture.

And here we are today. Black tie parties are now few and far between, and black is not necessarily expected at funerals.

 

Footnote: You can stop reading here but, while on the subject of sartorial traditions, I’ve been vexed of late about why we always associate the fez with the smoking jacket. Why do we see Victorian gents wearing this cap and jacket ensemble when relaxing at home, when usual etiquette is for men to uncover their heads indoors?

As with so much menswear history, the answers are practical first, aesthetic second. In the days before central heating, the cap kept one warm when indulging in a sedentary activity such as reading in a library chair, cigar in hand. As this is a private domestic activity the no-headwear-indoors rule doesn’t apply.  

The small size and softness of the fez/smoking cap is also more comfortable than a more formal head-warmer such as hard topper or bowler, just as a velvet/silk-quilted smoking jacket/robe is more comfortable than a tailored morning coat designed to be worn out and about during the day.

Finally, the smoking cap and jacket protected the hair and regular clothing from the smell of smoke.

As well as being lightweight and protective against draughts and odour, the classic fez style of Ottoman origin—cone-shaped red felt with a black tassel—became popular for aesthetic reasons, too, conjuring up a backstory of a British gent who was well-travelled and worldly. The style was adapted as a velvet cap, decorated with gold embroidery, giving fiancés and wives something to work on as a personalised, home-made present for the man in their life.

It would have been as bad form to wear this intimate, domestic cap at one’s club as it would be to walk out in a nightgown. Wearing a hat in a public interior is a criticism of the host’s temperature control, and if you’re worried about smoke in your hair in a communal smoking room, you should perhaps stay away.

Why scientists dismiss NDEs as psychedelic trips

Posted by Richard Rawlinson 

Scientists have observed that when Near Death Experiences (NDEs) are occurring the pineal gland releases DMT, a powerful hallucinogen. DMT is produced at night and small amounts are secreted as you dream. When you die, a large amount is secreted. Many say this is the cause for these NDEs, mere hallucinations and nothing more. But why is DMT produced, and why at the time of death? Could it be acting as a bridge between our physical existence and other dimensions of the spiritual world?

Scientists are dragging their heels on clinically testing this phenomena, even though we have the technology to invent machines sensitive enough to register consciousness outside matter. If governments fund scientists with billions of pounds to devise the Hadron Collider to discover how matter forms at a subatomic level, they can surely help investigate life after death, too? If astrophysicists and nuclear physicists invent devices that can ‘see’ the invisible, why not try harder to prove life after death?

Could atheism be a reason? A Gallup poll on immortality found only 16% of scientists believed in life after death as opposed over 60% of the general population. Infinite parallel universes, fine. Afterlife, too crazy.

Any NDE research is invariably modestly funded by the private sector and conducted by medical professors and the softer science practitioners such as psychologists. Yet a crucial point for any argument for a non-material dimension of the dead is the astrophysics claims that 95.4% of the universe is made up of mysterious dark matter and dark energy, not the matter and energy we call ‘real.’ Our bodies are barely physical at all when the ratio of the amount of matter in an atom to the total size of an atom is roughly that of a pea to a football field. The rest is energy in the form of forces.

Even among physicists, there’s rarely true objectivity. They invariably deal in a set of effects rather than fact. If this and that are observed to happen, why they happen is deduced. They don’t really know for sure, for instance, if there was ever a Big Bang. That’s why the Hadron Collider was built, to attempt reproduction of how matter was born.

So why not rely on soft-science clinical tests on the continuation of organised consciousness outside of matter? An intriguing thing about NDEs is the similarity of recorded accounts among people of different religious backgrounds and cultures: a strong feeling of oneness; not wanting to come back; being able to see their dead/dying body; brilliant white lights; glimpses of life flashing before their eyes. If people with different minds are having a hallucinatory experience, why so similar?

Then there’s the NDE of a woman, born blind. After a car crash, she reported being able to see herself lying in hospital, and was inexplicably able to describe specific details about the people who attended to her. She found herself seeing light, colours and shapes, even though these concepts are impossible to describe to a blind person. She ‘woke up’ with knowledge that she could not possibly possess. 

Funerals must address dreams, too

In an excellent article in the Christian Century, the Rev Samuel Wells, an American, describes taking a British funeral. There are lessons here for clergy, funeral celebrants and undertakers. 

And so it was that I was called to preside at the funeral of Michael. Michael had had a difficult life. He had Duchenne muscular dystrophy.

At the funeral tea I lingered and asked Michael’s mother what it was like to say goodbye. “Oh, it wasn’t much fun,” she said. “But d’you know what?” she added. “I slipped a packet of condoms in the coffin just before they closed it.” And she winked.

Was ever a parting gesture so laden with complexities of meaning? The young Tutankhamen, teenage pharaoh of the 14th century BC, was surrounded in his tomb by an array of golden artifacts. Michael was sent to the hereafter with a supply of prophylactics … The condom represented the adulthood Michael had never attained, the manhood he’d never inhabited.

Whatever the packet represented, it was a poignant symbol of care and abandon, restraint and permission, encouragement and playfulness, fertility and wistful regret. Michael’s mother had spent 14 years caring for his every bodily need: her final gift was a gesture toward the single bodily desire that remained out of his reach, the one that she couldn’t satisfy for him. It was a microcosm of what this life had not given him—and maybe the next life would.

Since that day I’ve changed the way I talk with grieving families about their loved ones. I ask if there’s something they want to put in the coffin. I wonder with them if there’s something their beloved had always longed for or something that remained out of reach. Is there a way the funeral can name and address what could never happen or the dream that could never be? I try in each funeral to include something visual, tangible, laden with unspoken meaning—a gesture, an artifact, a procession of gifts, a picture, a focus for prayer. Michael’s mother taught me that God makes heaven out of our faltering, foolish and fragile attempts to imagine and construct it.

If clergy will not shape liturgy to incorporate people’s longings and regrets and desires … then people will simply go ahead and construct their own. Only if they’re very lucky will the clergy hear about those homemade liturgies. With a wink.

Read the whole article here

David Abel answers his critics

 

If funeral celebrants suffer from anxiety, that is not surprising.

In addition to job anxiety, because they exist at the beck and call of undertakers, and financial anxiety because they must resign themselves to the vagaries of the mortality rate, there comes with the job, also, a degree of social anxiety — just try telling people what you do.

And then there is status anxiety. Until the British Humanist Association began training civvies to minister to the unchurched, all funeral obsequies in Britain had been presided over since the dawn of time by people, whether shaman or sorcerer, soothsayer or priest, who were imbued, in popular perception, with a special, sacred, qualification. Funeral celebrants need to have an answer to the question: “By what authority vested in you do you do this work?”

The full answer to this question is long and complex but can probably be condensed as ‘I (think I) am the Right Sort of Person’. What, precisely, is a Right Sort of Person? There was a discussion about this recently here

Which brings us to the question of money, wherein lies all manner of vexation. Celebrants need to put food on the table if they are to be able to act out  their vocation. In Africa, as Kathryn Edwards is wont to observe, it is the custom of villagers to leave a chicken at the door of the shaman. In our altogether more advanced society, celebrants must submit an invoice or specify the amount to be placed in the brown envelope customarily slipped into the back of the hand by the conductor as he simultaneously whispers from the side of his mouth, “Which one’s the widow?”

The vexed question of money has been at the heart of the distaste felt by many Right Sort of People towards what they feel to be an insurgency by the Wrong Sort of People, who are reckoned to be simply not up to it and, with an output level of up to ten funerals a week, only in it for the money. A complicating factor here is that the disapprobation of the RSPs looks a bit like, sounds a bit like, snobbery and is probably experienced as snobbery. Feelings are therefore running pretty high. 

The contumely of RSPs has been focussed on the unfortunate and possibly undeserving person of David Abel as the most visible personification of this insurgency of the simply-won’t-do’s. This was because he posted a video on his website which described the amount of money to be made from funerals, to the exclusion of any discussion of a wider ministry to the bereaved. There was quite a lot of howling about it. 

Not that RSPs are in it for the no-money. Most have a tender regard for their market value, especially relative to what bereaved people spend on accessories like flowers, and what undertakers bank in profit. Most think they’re worth more than they get. But they are, also, possessed of ideals. They see their work as ministry. 

David Abel has now posted a video on the Fellowship of Independent Celebrants’ website in which he acknowledges and addresses the criticism he has received. He talks of the importance of vocation, advising those who think they’d be able to do something else equally well to do that instead. 

He also tells potential candidates of his training course that celebrancy “is not a get-rich-quick scheme”. At the same time, he advises them to make a careful assessment of what they need to earn if they are to be able to follow their vocation: “I have to acknowledge … that this is a business.” He also addresses the matter of the number of funerals a celebrant might expect to take per week, and do them well. He reckons 8-10 probably too many, 3-4, plus a weekend wedding, more appropriate. 

I am sure you will agree that he deserves a hearing. See his new video here. (I can’t embed it) 

Thought for the day

“I wonder if, 

working with funerals 

and the bereaved, 

one can also be

too attached

to the idea of death, 

taking refuge in it.”

Clarissa Tan

The ideal death show

Article in today’s Spectator by Clarissa Tan(There is no paywall around this article, so I hope the Speccie won’t mind us reproducing it all.)

I am in a yurt, talking about death. Everyone is seated in a circle, and I am the next-to-last person to share. The last of the summer sun is shining through the entrance. At one end is a display coffin of biodegradable willow — there’s also tea and coffee, and coffin-shaped biscuits with skeleton-shaped icing.

‘I am a reporter,’ I say. ‘I’ve come to cover this event. But don’t worry, I won’t report what you share in this yurt. Also, I have cancer. I have been in treatment for one year, but now the treatment is over. I take one day at a time.’

There is silence, then hugs. I thought I would cry, but I don’t. Instead, I feel acceptance and a strange kernel of satisfaction. For the rest of my time here I am Death Girl, shrouded in drama.

The yurt is on the grounds of a beachfront hotel in Bournemouth. I am attending the Good Funeral Awards, meant to honour the best in the business. Running up to the awards dinner there are a series of activities such as the ‘death cafe’ I am participating in, where people mingle to mull mortality. Death cafes are now taking place all over the world, as Mark Mason has written in this magazine, but the weekend also will feature a number of speakers on subjects such as the use of LSD in the care of the terminally ill, memorial tattoos and what to wear for your final journey. An award will go to the embalmer of the year — a miniature coffin in the style of an Oscar.

I arrived expecting a weekend of black comedy. This is what I find, but there’s something else — a sincerity and straightforwardness that takes me by surprise. Many of the attendees are involved in the death business, as coffin makers and corpse tailors and funeral celebrants, because they feel our society does not pay enough attention to death. We avoid it, plaster over it, try to pretty it up and Botox it out of existence.

Even old age is taboo. As we all live longer and longer, so our actors and actresses, politicians and pop stars get younger every decade.

‘Why do we do this, when death is something that happens to all of us?’ lamented one woman.

Why, indeed? I’d done it too, until I discovered my illness. Then I thought of little else — about the fragility of life, the permanence of death. Friends sent me amulets, prayers, ginseng, ‘positive energy’. My heart opened, and something flooded in. What if death were not disconnection, but connection? What if we were just going to meet our Maker? Then death would not be severance, but reunion. It is not at all a fashionable point of view, but I believe in God — and a good one, at that. The belief fills me with healing, wonderful hope. It is the hope not that I will live. It is the hope that I am loved.

The awards dinner is actually a happy affair. The great and good of the funeral industry quaff champagne and exchange jokes. Opposite me at my table is a woman who runs a funeral company. She is flanked by her husband, who also manages the business, and her brother, who is up for gravedigger of the year. The actress Pam St Clement, whose EastEnders character Pat Butcher died on-screen in January last year, is here to present the prizes. Everyone claps and cheers. In the midst of death, we are in life.

It’s a fine line between the two. Looking at the people around me, women in evening dress and men in black tie, it strikes me that death can be a glamorous affair. I wonder if, working with funerals and the bereaved, one can also be too attached to the idea of death, taking refuge in it. That’s another thing I’ve realised, too. Twelve months of ill health, hospitals, medicines — while they were tough, they also gave me an identity. I am a journalist and death gave me a story.

I realise that although I am frightened of dying, there’s a also a tiny part of me that’s always been scared of living. The finality of death is hard. The uncertainties of life can be harder.

After the dinner, the winners and losers of the Good Funeral Awards get up to dance. I peek into the ballroom bespeckled with lights. What will they play? ‘Born to Die’? ‘Forever Young’? Perhaps ‘I Will Survive’? Or ‘Stayin’ Alive’? I decide I’ll take a cab back to my bed-and-breakfast and watch Michael McIntyre’s Comedy Roadshow on telly. Perhaps this is not the time for me to dance with death.

The Good Funeral Guide
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