Davina Kemble’s pebble coffin has been featured in the Wiltshire Gazette and Herald. She’ll be on BBC Wiltshire next Thursday afternoon. If you click on the cutting it will leap up to a larger, more readable size.
Archive: September 2013
The crying need for more funeral venues
Guest post by Wendy Coulton of Dragonfly Funerals
It struck me today when queuing at a takeout coffee kiosk how many choices I am prompted to make when I place my order – what type of coffee, how many shots, what size cup, any extras (chocolate sprinkles or cinnamon on top) and whether I have a loyalty points card? And before my thoughts were broken by the familiar coughing and spluttering of the milk being heated, I wondered how many coffee outlets there were in my home city of Plymouth? I tallied up 20 with ease.
Sadly, though, the bereaved in a city population of over 240,000 residents are currently not spoilt for choice if they want a non-religious venue for the funeral service/ceremony of their nearest and dearest. If you don’t want a church, one of the two local authority run crematorium chapels in Plymouth tends to be the assumed ‘only’ alternative.
Don’t get me wrong, I have no issue with the staff at the crematoria. They are fantastic and do the best they can within the constraints of the facilities and the volume of funerals taking place. And some families will have no issue with the crematorium chapel’s fixed layout and absent ambience.
There is a hidden ‘gem’ though which I would love to see being more widely promoted without reliance on Funeral Directors to tell their clients. It’s a beautiful Victorian Gothic chapel – where I can, as a qualified Civil Funeral Celebrant, conduct ceremonies because it is deconsecrated – in Ford Park Cemetery. The cemetery is run by a charitable trust and with significant grant and donations funding they transformed the disused chapel from a machinery store into a very special community space.
Following funeral ceremonies there mourners told me they felt the chapel lifted their spirits and how much they appreciated not feeling rushed, and having the freedom to ‘personalise’ the space within the chapel and freely move and participate in the ceremony.
I have heard by word of mouth that a funeral occasionally is held at a local rugby ground for longstanding club supporters but as far as I know that’s about it when it comes to current funeral venues in Plymouth.
When I did an online search for Plymouth wedding venues, thirty options immediately appeared from manor houses and country golf clubs to a fort and even a zoo! It begs the question why can’t these venues also host funerals?
Is it a decision these businesses make based on the misplaced assumption that having a coffin with the body of a dead person in it on the premises may offend customers or upset their staff? Do they think funerals are not commercially viable? Often weddings and funerals are cited as the only time family members scattered to the four winds come together and they value the opportunity to socialise after a funeral – sharing memories and catching up. Hospitality services could be part of the ‘offer’ package for funerals to make it financially worthwhile for the venues to host.
We are a consumer society – we know our rights and we know how to complain don’t we? The bereaved seem to ‘settle for’ whatever funeral service venue they are advised is available in their area. There should be at least 30 options popping up on an online search for Plymouth funeral venues.
One day…
Don’t charge, don’t care?
A mother whose son was stillborn is calling for an investigation after his ashes were not returned to her for over a year, reports the Northern Echo. A spokesman for Speckmans Funeral Service, part of Dignity Funerals, said: “We collected the cremated remains and returned them to the funeral home with the intention of contacting the family but unfortunately a member of staff did not follow our usual procedures and this did not happen. A senior manager visited Ms Heaviside to profusely apologise for this oversight and assured her that our procedures have been reinforced so that this does not happen to another client.
An incident of negligence like this can sometimes be an indicator of institutional negligence. This being so, it is entirely permissible to speculate on what other negligent conduct may go on at Speckmans, and therefore the entire Dignity plc operation, that we don’t know about because it doesn’t reach the press.
Baby funerals are carried out under contract. They normally don’t make any money for a funeral home and, where they don’t, may be an invidious duty — a nuisance. And so we are entitled to speculate, without over-exciting Dignity’s libel lawyers, whether the failure to put Ms Heaviside in touch with her baby’s ashes was simply because no one could be bothered. We are entitled to wonder what other carelessness might have been accorded to other babies in Speckmans’ care.
Corporate funeral directors customarily respond to a scandalous incident by promising to reinforce procedures. Were it the case that the staff at Speckmans had slipped up because no one cared enough, it is unlikely there would be the remotest chance that reinforcing procedures might incentivise them to give a damn from now on.
Death Over Dinner
It seems that Death Cafe has spawned a little brother, birthplace Portland Oregon, dob sometime earlier this summer. It’s name is Death Over Dinner.
The aims of Death Over Dinner are pretty much the same as those of Death Cafe, namely, to get folk together to talk about you-know-what. It’s the initiative of Michael Hebb, who works at the University of Washington. The rationale for dinnertime deathchat? In Hebb’s words: “The dinner table is the most forgiving place for difficult conversation. The ritual of breaking bread creates warmth and connection, and puts us in touch with our humanity. It offers an environment that is more suitable than the usual places we discuss end of life.”
It’s a good formula. Death Cafe has already taught us that the model works. I must own up here to my own blindness to Death Cafe — I didn’t think it would. How wrong, sometimes, can we be.
The Death Over Dinner website is excellent. It is simple, instantly understandable and, above all, empowering. You can rapidly plan your own dinner party online. It is suggested that you give your guests, and yourself, a bit of homework in advance. You choose that from a bunch of truly excellent resources. The system generates an invitation to your guests together with tips about how you might facilitate the discussion. When it’s over, you can share your experience with the website which, usefully, pools them with others.
The website is highly functional. It’s a lovely piece of work. Top marks go to the collection of resources, written, audio and visual.
There are downsides. It is very US-centric. I very much didn’t like: “We have gathered dozens of esteemed medical and wellness leaders to create an uplifting interactive adventure” because like most Brits I don’t like being told what’s good for me by leaders of any sort. These initiatives work best if they’re bottom- up — like Death Cafe.
Given Death Cafe’s viral spread around the world, there’s probably a lot to be said for the two initiatives working together.
You can have a dummy run on the website — fill out the form and see what you think of the contents of the email you get back moments later.
There is much to commend this enterprise. Find the website here.
Father
Mickey, Cormac and Cathal Mac Connell at the funeral of their brother, Seán Mac Connell
When my father died
The professionals cried,
The undertaker and doctor.
Little more need be said
Of a man with a heart of gold
Locked in a tabernacle of arthritic bones
who could melt stones… with his words.
Who loved children and dogs.
Deep lakes and cotton covered bogs.
Ballads dropped from his lips
And a mercury brain generated
Quips worthy of the best.
For that he was.
The best.
Written by the former Agricultural Correspondent of The Irish Times Seán Mac Connell and read at his funeral.
Royal funeral
Not wanting to leave anything to chance, or to the event planning abilities of others, pioneering LGBT activist Jose Sarria laid out specific instructions for how his funeral would go down. His Imperial Court family — all those members of the organization that he founded when he named himself Empress I in 1965 — made it happen, and all arrived to Grace Cathedral today in San Francisco wearing their veils, crowns, and mourning garb, as requested.
More.
Let’s have a feedback frenzy
We don’t do feedback forms at the Good Funeral Awards. Whose eyes light up at the sight of a feedback form (groan)? But that doesn’t mean to say we don’t care like hell what you think. Please say.
First, there’s the business of the misnomer. The Good Funeral Awards is but one constituent part of what last year we called the Joy of Death Festival. The gathering ought to have an edgy, eyecatching name – there’s no future in hiding your light under a bushel. The title alluded to the Joy of Sex, of course, and carried the subtext: if you do it right (there are lots of ways), it’ll be really good. The media certainly perked up and took notice, and it landed two of the participants on BBC R4’s Saturday Live. When a catchy title and a wacky awards evening can gain that quality of audience for people who would otherwise remain unheard, then it can be said to be useful. If it takes a certain amount of ratlike cunning to achieve that – well, what is it they say about omelettes and eggs?
Objections to the JoD name came mostly from within the industry, most vocally from someone we reckoned a major stakeholder in the event. So we dropped it and used the Awards title as an umbrella. We may need a new name that makes it clear that the weekend is not all about the bit in the evening. Ideas?
Any event that becomes formulaic and predictable is a bore before it’s even begun. So we’ll try to morph or even reinvent every time. Next year we probably need to spend less time sitting in a darkened room. Every talk this time was excellent and memorable, but the essential business of greeting old friends and making new ones inevitably meant that probably everyone missed at least one great session. There should have been more for Pia, who was on immediately after lunch. My conscience will never heal after missing Kristie.
We thought we might try something of a parliament next year, with motions proposed in no more than 3 mins, followed by debate and even a vote. Someone suggested a death book club, where people talk about their favourite bits of snuff lit. Like it? What else?
The awards ceremony itself is bound to inspire outbreaks of huff and incredulity. This is a generic problem common to all awards events – when did you last agree with the Oscars? On the plus side, it is glamorous; it offers a brilliant marketing opportunity to those nominated whether they win or not; and it is eyecatching to the media. It attempts to sing the praises of unsung heroes, and there is of course merit in that. The price is paid in hurt feelings, and I have never been happy with the aftermath. An awards ceremony can never do justice. We can’t just sit there while 348 people go up for each prize. The element of sudden death, winner takes all, is something people seem to like. The only time the judges get it right is when the winner is who you think it should be. But is the omelette worth the broken eggs?
The plusses of the weekend were countless and unarguable. They resulted from wonderful, serious minds coming together and talking. Strangers to Funeralworld thought they’d woken up in Heaven. The quality of those who came was stunning. The breadth was great, too: everyone from newbies to Ken and Paula; secular celebrants and Sandra Millar from the C of E; people from faraway places like Fife and Manchester; old school undertakers talking to ‘progressives’. And it’s not just a natterfest, it does a useful job of work in connecting people. As Noel Coward had it, ‘work is more fun than fun’.
And I think the rationale is a good one, too: An inclusive, unstuffy event, which attracts the liveliest minds in Funeralworld and the general public, and strives to be useful. No one has ownership of the event. It belongs to all who participate. Brian Jenner is our lead organiser and host.
If we do the awards again, who do we invite? My favourite suggestion is Grayson Perry. Brian likes the idea of Richard Wilson.
Thank you for making it happen, Brian. Without you, zilch.
Good Funeral Awards 2013 – the winners and the runners up
Most Promising New Funeral Director
Winner: Poppy Mardall
Runner-up: Stacey Bentley
Embalmer of the Year
Winner: Liz Davis
Runner-up: Angie Maclachlan.
The Eternal Slumber Award for Coffin Supplier of the Year
Winner: Yuli Somme
Runner-up: Roger Fowle.
Most Significant Contribution to the Understanding of Death
Winner: Jean Francis
Runner-up: Pia Interlandi
Crematorium Attendant of the Year
Winner: Andy Barlow, Colwyn Bay crematorium.
Runner-up: Mandy Ryan and Martin McEvilly, Redditch crematorium
Best Internet Bereavement Resource
Winner: Jane Harris and Jimmy Edmonds for Say Their Name, a video made for the Compassionate Friends — http://beyondgoodbye.co.uk/?page_id=3918
Runner-up: Teresa Evans — http://evansaboveonline.co.uk/
The Blossom d’Amour Award For Funeral Floristry
Winner: Heather Gorringe
Runner-up: Donald Thornford
Funeral Celebrant of the Year
Winner: Barbara Millar
Runner-up: Lynne Watson
Cemetery of the Year
Winner: Rotherfield Greys
Runner-up: Sun Rising
Gravedigger of the Year
Winner: Stuart Goodacre from Horncastle, Lincolnshire.
Runner-up: Paul Rackham from Diss in Norfolk
Best Funeral Arranger
Winner: Dee Besley – Rosedale Funeral Home
Runner-up: Angela Bailey — Harrison Funeral Home
The Bereavement Register Funeral Director of the Year
Winner: John Harris — T Cribb & Sons
Runner-up David Summers — AW Lymn, The Family Funeral Service
GreenAcres Woodland Burials Green Funeral Director of the Year
Winner: Rosie Grant, Natural Endings
Association of Green Funeral Directors Greenest Funeral Director in the AGFD
Lifetime Achievement Award
Winner: Paula Rainey Crofts
Runner-up: Josefine Speyer
This Good Funeral Awards ceremony constituted just one event in a weekend of countless highlights which brought together, in a spirit of amity and good felllowship, more than 100 people of all sorts who work with the bereaved. More to follow. If you’d like to write about how it was for you, please send your copy to: charles@goodfuneralguide.co.uk
A HUGE thank you to Brian Jenner, without whose inspiration and tireless organisation the Good Funeral Awards weekend would be no more than a very good idea.
Is Dawkins’s refusal to reassess Darwin a sign of unscientific denial?
By Richard Rawlinson
Richard Dawkins has said Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution is ‘about as much open to doubt as the theory that the earth goes round the sun’. He’s said that ‘understanding evolution led me to atheism’, and that he’s against religion because ‘it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world’.
Many agree: evolution is touted as a reason for disbelieving in divine creation and the eternity of the soul. Most theists also believe in evolutionary theory, and disagree that faith and science are irreconcilable. They disagree they’re blocked from trying to understanding the world on many diverse levels.
Dawkins isn’t very good at uncertainty. He’s a ‘my way or the highway’ kind of guy. I wonder what he thinks about the fact that his views are increasingly under fire—and not by religious people but by scientists questioning his discipleship to Darwin. A staggering 800 eminent scientists from Yale and Cambridge to the Russian Academy have so far signed up as Darwin dissenters, calmly and rationally skeptical about the Neo-Darwinist theory claiming that natural selection, acting on random mutations, is the primary mechanism for the development of the complexity of life. See here http://www.
For decades, the media has regurgitated the scientific propaganda that only religious fundamentalists question Darwinian evolution. Clearly not so. And for decades, biology textbooks have been printing the illustrations of Darwinian Ernst Haekel, who distorted the differences between the embryos of worms, fish, birds, four-legged mammals and apes to imply man, like all species, stems from the same first cells emerging from primordial ooze.
This is far from the only time Darwin was propped up by less than scientific means. In order to prove Neanderthals were ancestral to humans, early 20thcentury paleontologist Charles Dawson announced he had discovered, in a gravel pit in Piltdown, the missing link that Darwinists needed. It was a skull which turned out to be a forgery, part human with the addition of an orangutan’s jaw, both chemically treated to make them look like a fossil.
Should educationalists stop propagating Darwin’s theory uncontested? His appeal seems to be that we desperately want to believe slime morphed into spineless worms, became aquatic skeletal creatures with eyes and fins, became amphibious creatures with legs and hair, and so forth. We want to believe Man is nothing more than an animal who happened to make himself supreme by creative brain power aided by manual dexterity.
It’s a theory that provides a neat answer to our deepest questions. But it’s science that’s evolved since the 19th century, and it’s both scientists and we the public who have remained reluctant to admit we may have got at least some of it wrong. Denial is now slowly changing to open receptiveness to possible new truths, even if the biggest truth of all is we still don’t know the answers. The Enlightenment is yet to come.
For an essay from an academic dissenter, see here.
Those whom Agni has tasted
3rd post in a series by Jenny Uzzell examining the question: What is a funeral for?
For those in Ancient India, it appears that funerals were vitally important, not only to the dead, but also to the smooth running of society.
Most of our knowledge about this period comes from the Rg Veda, arguably one of the oldest sacred texts in existence. It is only in the final book of this (book 10) that clear reference is made to funerals and afterlife beliefs. At some point during the period over which the hymns in Book 10 were composed (or at least compiled) the practice of disposing of the dead changed from burial to cremation, probably as the result of a change in theology.
Hymn 18 is the liturgy for a burial funeral of a young man. Premature death was often seen as a sign of the gods’ displeasure and was highly inauspicious. In the worst cases it could be seen as infectious and this is clear in this hymn, which seeks to make a boundary between the living and the dead which death cannot cross:
“Go hence, O death, pursue thy special pathway apart from that which the gods are wont to travel…touch not our offspring, injure not our heroes…here I erect this rampart for the living. Let none of these, none other reach this limit. May they survive a hundred lengthened autumns and may they bury Death beneath this mountain.”
This is clearly accompanied by the appropriate actions and serves to limit the god of death (Yama) in what he may do. Another purpose of this funeral is to purify the widow and return her, ritually, literally and, probably, emotionally to the land of the living:
‘Rise, come unto the world of life, O woman. He is lifeless by whose side thou liest. Wifehood with this thy husband was thy portion, who took thy hand and wooed thee as a lover. From his dead hand I take the bow he carried that it might be our power and might and glory. There art thou, there and here with noble heroes may we overcome all hosts that fight against us.”
The purpose of this funeral is not only to ensure the well being of the fallen hero (the hymn goes on to talk about the earth opening into a palace for him) but also to re-integrate the widow into society and to protect the mourners from the unlucky death.
Hymn 16 is a cremation liturgy and shows the later theology of the afterworld. The god Agni (sacrificial fire) is the channel by which things from our world may reach the beyond. These could be food offerings or the dead themselves. Agni is addressed:
‘O Agni, to the Fathers send him who, offered in thee goes with our oblations.’
The dead were understood to have a physical body which purified and carried to the ancestors by fire was reunited with the spirit and dwelt with Yama. The Fathers were often invoked for help and so the importance of giving someone the ‘right send off’ was immense. Once in Pitriloka (the land of the fathers) the dead had to be sustained by food offerings from their kinfolk.
All of this may be very interesting (well it is to me, anyway), but what relevance does it have to us? In the context of Hinduism, quite a lot. Afterlife beliefs have changed and most Hindus now hope for re-incarnation or, better yet, for moksha or liberation from the cycle of death and rebirth. The fire is seen as a purification (very young children and holy men are likely to be buried) which allows the soul to leave the body and maybe even, if the correct rites are performed, to attain moksha. It is for this reason that many Hindus choose to travel to Varanasi on the banks of the Ganges to die, or seek to have their remains scattered into it or, failing that, into any other river. This is believed to facilitate Moksha, and so, for the next of kin the correct prayers performed at the right time, in the right place and with the correct rituals could make the difference between another rebirth and moksha. This then is the over-riding purpose of the funeral to which all others are subsumed.
Hinduism is not the only place where this still applies. As was mentioned recently on this blog, Roman Catholics believe that for many a period of purification in Purgatory is required before entering heaven. This can be reduced by offering prayers of intercession for the dead and by offering mass for the repose of their soul. With this at stake, it is easy to see why the celebration of the life of the dead person often takes back seat. This is not excluded from Catholic practice (it is often done at the vigil for the dead before the funeral mass, or at a memorial service afterwards) but one of the purposes (there are, of course, others) is to make things better for the person who has died and this is the overriding concern.
For most of us, regardless of whether or not we believe in life after death, what we do at the funeral makes no difference to the dead, so it is for the living that the funeral exists. Where dispute arises (as has been the case recently with the Bishop of Meath restating the fact that there should be no eulogy at a funeral mass) it is often because people have not understood that the two sides have fundamentally different opinions about the purpose of a funeral and who it is for.