traditional funerals

Best Traditional Funeral Director 2017

6 October 2017
Fran Hall
1 Comment
Categories: family funeral directors, Good Funeral Awards, traditional funerals
                                A. W. Lymn – The Family Funeral Service

There was no shortage of candidates for this category, and the shortlisted 13 names included individuals as well as companies.

Traditional funeral directing continues to thrive, and the judges found it difficult to select the most deserving from among the entries submitted as all clearly have the highest of standards and impeccable presentation.

Eventually the decision was reached:

The Winner of Traditional Funeral Director of the Year 2017, with especial mention of two staff members, Louise Cook and Dominic Lister, is A. W. Lymn – The Family Funeral Service

Runners Up – Bungard Funeral Directors and Southall Funeral Service

 

Award photograph by Jayne Lloyd

Category sponsor – A. R. Adams Funeral Directors

The 2017 Good Funeral Awards were generously sponsored by Greenfield Creations

Dignity in Blunderland

6 December 2016
Charles
40 Comments
Categories: funeral, funeral cost, funeral directors, funeral poverty, traditional funerals

Posted by Charles

A relatively new element of the Christmas experience is the themed winter wonderland. We’ve already had our first hilarious example of 2016 in Bakewell, Derbyshire. The Sun headline captured it neatly: WINTER BLUNDERLAND. Bakewell Winter Wonderland slammed by families as ‘pile of s***’ that is ‘so bad even Santa f***** it off’. The shocking muddy conditions saw the festive event likened to the Battle of the Somme.

Bit of a downer, obviously, but not enough to sully the good name of Christmas, a festival that remains robustly evergreen. Everyone complains how expensive it is. It has no utilitarian function. We do it the same way every year, ritualistically, so we know exactly what’s going to happen and what part we’re expected to play. Yes, it’s lovely to look at. But it celebrates an event – the birth of Christ – which to most people is of no relevance. Sure, there’s always a few bah-humbuggers who opt out, hunker down and have a no-Christmas Christmas instead, but vanishingly few, and their example is not influential. No, the overwhelming majority find the money and give it the full turkey. We love Christmas. Cheap at half the price. 

If only we could say the same about the traditional funeral. It’s got most of the same ingredients as Christmas. Everyone says it costs too much. It has no utilitarian function. Its format never varies – it’s ritualistic. Everyone knows what’s going to happen and what part they are expected to play. It is undeniably eyecatching. It was once the vehicle for a Christian funeral, but to most people now that’s of no relevance. And yet, and yet, the number of people copping out and opting for a no-funeral funeral – direct disposal – is growing exponentially. People are increasingly unwilling to find the money for a trad sendoff. Why?

I mean, a ‘traditional’ funeral is a heritage cultural artefact. It can trace its origins to the heraldic funeral of the middle ages. In a country that loves its pomp and ceremony, this is the British way of death. Where did it all go wrong?

I’ll tell you. The undertakers, finding themselves caught in a spot of commercial bad weather, had a straightforward choice to make and they called it wrong. They slashed their margins and introduced cheaper alternatives to the the product we call the traditional funeral. Hardly a creative response, nor a plucky one.

Steady the Buffs. When people say that funerals are too expensive, is this what they really mean?

Listen hard and you’ll discern that what they really mean is that funerals aren’t worth what they cost. They offer poor value for money. That’s not the same as too expensive. 

The problem is not with cost, it’s with value.

Last Thursday, Dignity bottled it and launched a direct cremation service under the branding of Simplicity Cremations. There’s a lot of the usual sales bilge on the website employing words like ‘dignified’ and ‘respectful’, as you’d yawnfully expect. There’s also a Ratneresque Cruise missile strike against the traditional funeral:

A full service funeral can be an expensive occasion that takes time and effort to arrange. You’ll often need a Funeral Director and a whole team of staff to co-ordinate the required services, vehicles and personnel, book the time with the crematorium, deal with paperwork, manage tributes and announcements and ensure everything runs smoothly on the day. And then there are also additional costs for items such as flowers, service cards, music, maybe a memorial or headstone and often a wake. It will usually take quite a few face-to-face meetings to arrange, not to mention several thousands of pounds.

In other words, yep, our flagship product is a bunch of crap. Too much time, too much effort, too much money. Don’t buy it.

Why would Dignity do that? These are clever people. Why diss the product that yields the best margin? This is industrial strength, Santa-killing insanity.

On the same day that Dignity was raising its cowardly white flag, Team GFG was, by happy coincidence, in London meeting a high-level ceremonialist with excellent connections and a strong belief that all is not lost. Because, dammit, we’re not giving up on the traditional funeral. We think the thing to do is to fix it – fix this issue around value.

What is a high-value funeral? It’s closely related to a high-value Christmas. It is something which does people a power of good. In the case of a funeral, it is transformative of grief.

For undertakers, ‘funeral flight’ represents an urgent existential threat. The business model of a funeral director is structured to provide all or most of the elements of a traditional funeral. Bankruptcy is hovering. When most funerals are private events or non-events, where will be the job satisfaction? For people grieving the death of someone, the consequences of the death of the funeral are quantified by John Birrell – here.

Christmas happens when we need it most. The days are short and dark, the weather awful. We all need cheering up. The retailers, whose livelihood depends on us splashing out bigtime, cleverly meet our needs with both the right merchandise and also cleverly pitched marketing messages – those supermarket  tv ads are all about the feelgood factor. Retailers understand that they will only sell us stuff if they can show us the Christmas is going to be a richly meaningful experience.

When commercial interests align with consumer needs you’ve got the makings of a thriving market, one in which everyone does well. Our undertakers would do well to ponder this, and so would our celebrants. Funerals happen when we need them most, too. If the public, processional, ceremonial funeral is, as we believe, the best way to deliver a high-value funeral experience – a funeral worth every penny – how can it be updated and repurposed in such a way as to accomplish that?

Traditional Funeral Director of the Year

7 October 2016
Fran Hall
No comments
Categories: Good Funeral Awards, traditional funerals

trevor-e-w-hickton

Trevor E. W. Hickton

 

Trevor EW Hickton Ltd cleaves to funeral traditions and justly prides itself on its ceremonial excellence. The firm is also open-minded about new trends and works in a mutually supportive spirit with other independent funeral businesses.

Cradley Heath-based funeral directors Trevor E.W. Hickton have been carrying out the funerals of Black Country folk since 1909. Hickton’s is an inseparable part of its community and the family firm is now into its fourth generation.

The Black Country is proud of its funeral traditions – as it is of all its distinctive traditions – and Hickton’s gives Black Country people precisely the service they want and expect. The firm says of itself: “We uphold age-old funeral traditions our family have always used still to this day. Top hats, tail coats and paging the funeral cortège is policy.” In everything they do, Hickton’s employees are smart and dignified and the firm’s funeral vehicles are always immaculate.

Traditional in outlook the firm may be, as the vast majority of their clients expect, but Hickton’s also has a genuine passion for and interest in new ideas, opportunities and choices for families. Instead of being threatened by this they are – and this is rare in the funeral industry — embracing it. They are willing to offer families a whole range of choice of services and products which can help make funerals special and personal.

In an industry in which best practice-sharing is patchy and funeral directors regard competitors with hostile suspicion, Hickton’s is laudably and conspicuously collegial. The firm supports smaller independent funeral directors by renting out mortuary space, vehicles and staff. This has created a genuinely supportive community of independent funeral directors in the West Midlands who work to help each other.

Trevor E.W. Hickton’s 5 funeral homes cover the Black Country and Birmingham.

 

Runners Up in this category:

Albany Funerals 

Suzan Davies of Abbey Funeral Services

 

Wise words

10 September 2016
Fran Hall
8 Comments
Categories: alternative funerals, Arranging a funeral, Attitudes to death, Burnout, Children and funerals, death and funerals, Death education, Etiquette, Formality vs informality, funeral, funeral directors, funeral reformers, funeral trends, Good Funeral Awards, home funerals, independent funeral directors, Natural Death Centre, perceptions of funeral directors, The future of funerals, traditional funerals, uber undertakers

ru-callender

Ru’s opening words to the assembled guests struck a chord with many who were there, so we thought we’d put them on the blog for the whole world to read. Over to you Rupert.

“Welcome everyone to the Good Funeral Awards 2016!

It started off, as so many good things do, in a sweaty basement in Bournemouth, and has grown into this glamorous Metropolitan lunchtime bunfight.

My name is Ru Callender and I should be standing here with my wife, Claire – sadly, she’s got flu. Together, we run The Green Funeral Company in Devon, and we used to be the Enfants Terrible of the undertaking world. Self taught, stubborn, scruffy, we still use our family Volvo instead of a hearse – but as we’ve been doing it for 17 years, we’re probably just terrible…

Today is a genuinely unusual mélange of the alternative and the conventional funeral world, and it has probably taken longer than the Good Friday agreement took to get everyone in the same room.

You are here because someone thinks you’re great. Let that sink in.

Even if you asked them to.

This gathering is largely due to Charles Cowling and crew of the Good Funeral Guide, and also to the original renegade masters, the Natural Death Centre, both of whose organisations dared to believe that ordinary people could deal with the gritty detail of death, the truth about what happens to our bodies, that a deep, internal understanding of death is part of our birthright, part and parcel of being human.

And what they did – brace yourself, maybe have a glug of wine to steady yourself here, was to treat the public as adults, to include them in a conversation about the one thing that will happen to each and every one of us.

They presumed, as we all should, that people can handle more than the protective narrative that is fed to them.

They were right.

It was thought wildly radical then, now it just seems honest and transparent.

I said funeral world because I refuse to use the word industry. Making computers is an industry. Fashion is an industry. Even getting fit is an industry. I don’t decry industry. It’s necessary.

But death is a true mystery, and working with it should be a vocation, a real calling, and if you’re not meant to be here, if ego, or an understandable search for meaning in your life has misled you here, then death has a way of calling your bluff. You are either initiated, in or out.

This work, the real work of dealing with death and loss is not glamorous, however closely it nearly rhymes with sex, however interesting it makes us appear to those who unfortunately have to work in jobs they hate to pay the bills, and that matter little.

This work, done properly, is incredibly stressful.

It’s exhausting, frightening, physically, emotionally and existentially challenging, but it is also deeply, deeply rewarding.

Burn out is a real risk, or worse, an unconscious hardening of your outer emotional skin – these are the risks you face depending on whether you fully engage with it or not.

Breakdown or bravado. Truly a metaphor for our times.

So, if you work with death – florist, celebrant, undertaker or chaplain, particularly if you are new to it, you really have to let it in.

Go deeper.

Feel it. Fear it. Don’t pretend to love it , because the only thing worse than death is not death – and then, if you can, let it go.

 

This world is also open to all.

Undertaking is completely unregulated, and should remain so in my opinion, not just because no amount of qualifications can teach you what to say to the mother of a dead child, that is an instinctive language that rises unbidden from the heart, but also because we are all amateurs when staring into the abyss, all professionals when faced with a dead body.

And they are OUR dead, yours and mine. We are all funeral directors eventually.

It is a shared mystery and your guess as to what it means, and your actions as to what to do are as valid as mine, or the Church, or the Humanists.

Nobody knows for sure.

The mechanics of what needs to be done are easy, I promise. Keep bodies cold. Put them in a suitable receptacle. Carry them, bury or burn them.

The rest, the words, the rituals, the how we do this, you KNOW, deep down what is right for you. You know.

 

But here I am, bringing you all down at a funeral award convention – I should get a prize for that!

But just indulge me one last time before we start bringing on the champs, and this celebration of the real change that has happened gets underway –

Euphemisms.

They cover the kitchen floor of bereavement like a spilled cat litter tray.

They protect no-one, they fool no-one, they confuse children. They are well meaning, but they are wrong.

I’m only going to take on one here, and I apologise if anyone has to amend their speech or their website as a result.

Loved ones.

Not everyone is loved, some because they have led sad, lonely lives, others because they did bad things.

They die too. They need funerals and their families are broken, and the depth of their pain makes the phrase ‘Loved one’ seem like a jeer.

Just saying.

So call them the dead, the dead one, the dead person, anything other than ‘loved one’. Call them by their name!

I know it’s awkward, but it will spare you the look of contempt you get when you say it to the wrong person.

Lecture over.”

Tradition is a guide, not a jailer

28 October 2014
Charles
12 Comments
Categories: funeral, Hearses, traditional funerals

When Lawrence Llewelyn Bowen was at large on tv’s Changing Rooms, it was not unusual for people to weep when they saw what he’d done to their living room and, through their tears, defiantly declare that, first chance they got, they were going go out and buy 5 litres of brilliant white.

Not all, mind. Some loved the opulence and the clutter.

The same tension between magnificence and minimalism has been evident throughout the history of the British funeral. The time of greatest opulence was between 1400 and 1700, the golden age of the heraldic funeral, supervised by the College of Arms and reserved, of course, for armigerous people, ordinary folk being of no account in those days, not having Russell Brand to speak up for them. The period of greatest minimalism was during the Protectorate, when the Directory of Public Worship (1644) ordained:

When any person departeth this life, let the dead body, upon the day of burial, be decently attended from the house to the place appointed for public burial, and there be immediately interred, without any ceremony.

Cromwell’s own funeral was exceedingly grandiose.

The Puritan funeral has only been surpassed in simplicity by that minimalist newcomer, direct disposal.

The educated and the posh know that the first rule of good taste is restraint. Their fastidiousness is not endorsed by most so-called ‘ordinary people’, who love to put on a good show and, afterwards, festoon a grave with garish, joyous grieving bling. The East End funeral is a good example, the sort of occasion that Bertram Puckle had in mind in his 1926 bestseller, Funeral Customs, Their Origin And Development:

The procession conducting the body to the grave has always offered a welcomed opportunity for the display of pomp, circumstance and ostentatious grief, so prized by the vulgar mind. The average man or woman can claim public attention only at marriage and burial, and on each of these occasions a nonentity becomes the centre of attraction in a ceremonial procession to and from the church.

Not sure if he means the undertaker, the chief griever or the corpse.

We all love a bit of pomp and ceremony even if, for some people (liberals, lefties, intellectual snobs) admitting it is like fessing up that their favourite film is the Sound of Music. Strong men and women of all worldviews have wept at the spectacle of the doggy mascot of the Irish Guards. I know; I am one of them.

And that’s why I deplore the decline of the ‘traditional’ funeral for people who wish, in the spirit of the Irish Guards, to put on the dog for their funerals, but are presently declining to do so either because we, as a culture, are going through another bout of minimalism or, as seems more likely, they are not getting value from our trad, ceremonial funeral. It’s not doing them enough good to justify the expense.

Before we consider the elements of the ceremonial funeral and ask ourselves what we want to keep and what we can repurpose, let’s make sure we understand one thing above all. The modern ceremonial funeral is modelled on the Victorian funeral. And it doesn’t stop there, because the Victorian funeral was a chivalric revival of the medieval heraldic funeral. Our trad funeral has its origins in chapter one of our island story. Are we really going to stand stony-eyed and watch all that go down the pan?

The obsession with the one-off, bespoke, personalised funeral fails to take into account all those who like funerals whose format is a comfortingly familiar and recognisable and which contains a well-written, well-delivered, highly personal eulogy.

Here, then, are some generic elements of ceremonial. Which would you junk and which would keep?

1.  Public
2. Processional 
3. Eyecatching (ie, presents a visual spectacle)
4. Hierarchical
5. Creates a fitting sense of occasion
6. Comprises symbolic, non-verbal acts
7. Ritualistic, operating according to arbitrary or arcane rules
8. Incorporating visual, tactile, olfactory, kinetic, auditory and gustatory (food) elements
9. Participative
10. Of minimal utilitarian value

Next, which of the following statements do you agree or disagree with?

1. Funerary ceremonial is a means of preserving historic attitudes and conduct – ‘this is what we think and this is what we do when someone dies’. To reject socially sanctioned ceremonial is not an expression of autonomy, it is an anti-social act.
2. Ceremonial confers legitimacy – ‘if we did not do it this way it would be inauthentic’.
3. Tradition – ie faith in the authority of immemorial beliefs and institutions – is the path to truth – ‘I will only be able to handle this and make sense of it if I stick to the ritual.’ Desired consequences ensue if you do the ritual right.
4. Rejection or absence of ceremonial typifies a culture where institutions and collective beliefs are weak. Tradition dies when social conditions and/or belief systems alter and traditional responses are seen to produce an adverse reaction.
5. A familiar ritual is a means of dealing with something we do not fully understand. We meet the event with such wisdom as we have already assimilated from previous experiences of the ritual
6. A processional funeral is a vehicle which takes you from one mental/emotional state to another. “A good funeral gets the dead where they need to go and the living where they need to be.” – Thomas Lynch
7. Ritual is the best means of bringing people together

“A good funeral is not static. The first great necessity of death is to move the body of the deceased from here to there, that is, from the place of death to the place of final disposition. In most places around the world, and throughout most of human history, carrying the body of the deceased to the grave or the fire or the mountain, weeping or singing, mourning and praying along the way, is not done before the funeral or after the funeral – it is the funeral.” Thomas Long

Funerals, who needs em?

19 January 2014
Charles
24 Comments
Categories: celebrants, funeral, funeral cost, funeral customs, funeral directors, funeral trends, Secular approaches to death, traditional funerals

When England first played Scotland, on 30 November 1872, both teams employed formations that would raise eyebrows today. Scotland went for a cautious 2-2-6 while England employed a more swashbuckling 1-1-8. The game was all kick-and-rush in those days.

Kick-and-rush. It’s how businesses, anxious to futureproof themselves, respond to prophecy. Some bright spark peers into a crystal ball, dreams a dream and holds up a trembling finger. No matter that their vision is little more than a projection of their wishes and values, everyone rushes towards it.

Remember the Baby Boomer Hypothesis which held that, just as baby boomers reinvented youth culture, so they would reinvent death culture? Pretty much everybody bought that, including the entire advisory council of the GFG. The theory was that these free radicals would reject bleakness and embrace creative, themed, personalised, sometimes iconoclastic celebrations of life. The good news for the industry was that there would still be good money to be made from funerals so long as undertakers made the switch from cookie-cutter to bespoke; from being po-faced solemn-event planners to bright-eyed party-planners adding value through accessorisation and offering concierge-level service and red-carpet delivery. Pretty much the package Alex Polizzi tried to sell to David Holmes in The Fixer.

It’s not happening, is it? And as we take that in, we reflect that baby boomers have, yes, always been insouciant about what went before and unsentimental in their rejection of it. They’re re-inventors, not renovators. And they’re not all going the same way.

The evidence seems to be that baby boomers are increasingly asking themselves what good a funeral would do, really. More and more of them see little or no emotional or spiritual value in the experience. They’re not all rejecting them out of hand all at once. Some are dressing trad funerals up in a gently creative way with wacky hearses, jolly coffins and startling music choices. But on the whole they’re whittling them down. The reasons are complex and we’ve rehearsed some of them here before.

Dissatisfaction with the value offered by a funeral is probably most widely evidenced in the near-universal belief that funerals are too expensive — ie, they’re not worth what they cost. The strength of this rejection of funerals is evidenced in people’s unrealistic incredulity that a basic funeral should cost much more than having an old washing machine taken away.

Read the comments under any broadsheet article about funerals. The evidence of rejection is everywhere. If the effect of a funeral is to leave you feeling, next day, beached and empty, that’s not surprising. A funeral is supposed to fill a hole, not leave a void. Here are some recent comments in a discussion forum on Mumsnet, of all places:

My MIL has said … she wants the absolute bare minimum in terms of coffin and cremation. No service, no ‘do’ afterwards. Then she wants close family to either go somewhere nice for the weekend together. 

I had it put in my will that i don’t want any sort of funeral when i die. I think the money funeral directors charge for the most simple of services is utterly abhorrent

[My mother-in-law] died recently, she didn’t care what we did by way of funeral (I think her only words on the subject were that we could drop her off the pier for all she cared…)

My uncle didn’t want a service – he just went straight to the crematorium.

I wouldn’t want to burden love ones with the cost, I have life insurance but would want the cheapest option

It is criminal how the respectful disposal of our loved ones has turned into a million pound industry!

I have left strict instructions that I am to have no funeral service and I have made sure everyone knows about it. It is written in my will and my family would never go against my wishes. They know how strongly I feel about it.

Immediate cremation, ashes in a simple box and then take me down our local and stick me on the bar whilst everyone has a quick drink. Next day, throw my ashes in the sea at the place I grew up in as a child. That will do. No order of service with dodgy photos and poems, no wittering on about my life and no-one failing miserably to pick out my favourite songs. Boo hiss boo.

I am a crematorium manager, and can confirm that plenty of people choose to have no funeral service.

I just don’t get the whole thing. I’ve only ever been to one funeral that was really a lovely rememberence and not out of duty of what they thought they had to do. I would much rather my family used money to go on holiday to our favourite place and remembered me there.

My FIL keeps saying he doesn’t want a funeral and wants to be cremated asap with no ceremony or fuss.

We chose not to have a funeral for my dad when he died. Cardboard coffin, cremation with no service. I think he would have been pleased but I tend not to tell anyone as I have some judgey reactions as if we were being cheap (was not relevant) or he was not loved (he was very much).

The Mumsnet discussion includes a few objections on the lines of: ‘To be fair, it’s not really about you. It’s about the loved ones you left behind, it’s an essential grieving process.’ But the overwhelming majority can see no good in a funeral.

This would seem to overturn the supposition that excellent secular funeral celebrants and empathetic undertakers would save the public ceremonial funeral by making it meaningful once more. But there’s a growing realisation that you don’t need to put a corpse in a box and tote it to the crem in blackmobiles, you can create a perfectly satisfying, private, informal farewell event with ashes. Direct cremation, already growing rapidly, looks set to skyrocket.

I know that there are lots of people who believe that reports of the demise of the funeral are exaggerated. They tell me to stop being so pessimistic, things are getting better. But I had lunch with Fran Hall, chair of the Natural Death Centre on Friday, and was struck to discover she thinks as I do. She said, “One day soon the industry is going to wake up and find itself dead”.

It’s possible that there’s no saving the funeral — it’s had its time. After all, it’s not just Britain that’s saying nah. But funeral people, overly focussed on commercial concerns, are putting up absolutely no concerted philosophical defence.

If the public, ceremonial funeral is worth saving, now is the time for the best in the business, from all walks of belief, to come together and be an influential voice in public discourse about funerals, much of which remains incoherent. If the emotional and/or spiritual health of the nation is at stake, who better to do it? Ans: among others, the people whose livelihoods depend on it. Come on, don’t go down without a fight. Do we really need funerals? If so, why?

Don’t all rush, I could be wrong, this may not be a Dunkirk moment. But crisis or no there still exists a pressing need to make a considered, rational and persuasive case for funerals — if, that is, you truly believe they do any real, deep and lasting good. Do you?

There are an awful lot of people out there who don’t. If you can’t demonstrate the purpose and value of your product, who’d want to buy it?

Fusion funerals: Cockneys, immigrants and Hackney hipsters

16 January 2014
Charles
2 Comments
Categories: family funeral directors, funeral cost, funeral customs, funerals in other cultures, Good Funeral Awards, traditional funerals

Posted by Richard Rawlinson

The story of T. Cribb & Sons is one of business resilience in the cultural quicksand of London’s East End. A family-run firm of undertakers since 1881, its heritage is Cockney: close-knit, white, working class communities celebratory of both their roots and the material trappings of wealth: pie and mash and the dogs coupled with a taste for pin-sharp schmutter. Their funerals have been summarised as Victorian music hall meets Catholic High Mass: undertakers with toppers and canes, horse-drawn carriages and extravagant floral wreaths.

With its vicinity to London’s docks, the East End has for centuries attracted immigrants, from the French Huguenots to Polish Jews, the Irish to the Chinese. More recently came the Bangladeshis, Africans and eastern Europeans.

Meanwhile, true Cockneys have upped sticks to Essex. Many a London cabbie will tell you how they cashed in the terraced house in Bow for an all-mod-cons Barratt home in Brentwood while opining ‘the East End ain’t what it was’. And you only have to watch TOWIE to see former Cockneys splurging their cash on smart clobber and wheels, along with Sex on the Beach cocktails and cosmetic dentistry.

T. Cribb & Sons, which started with a single parlour in Canning Town, has also branched out into Essex, buying up undertakers in Loughton, Debden, Benfleet and Pitsea. However, of its 1,800 funerals a year, half are now for non-whites, especially Africans and Asians in east London.

It’s introduced a repatriation service for west African immigrants who prefer to be buried back home in Nigeria or Uganda. It’s also attracted the British Ghanaian community, increasingly content to be buried in England and who, like Cockneys, have a taste for flamboyant funerals, sometimes beyond their means.

Attention to the needs of a broad demographic can also be seen in details such as a Hindu/Sikh washroom at Cribb’s Beckton branch, and the way it’s mindful to bring Chinese mourners home from a funeral by a different route, in order to ward off evil spirits. It even provides limos with the lucky eight in the number plate. Again for the Chinese, it offers a wall of small vaults for votive offerings such as sticks of incense. At £750 for a five-year lease on a vault, this service is being adopted by white Brits, too, showing how cultural influences go both ways.

T. Cribb & Sons is now courting the Muslim market, currently served by a few Bangladeshi undertakers attached to mosques. The showy traits of the Cockney funeral are theologically out of step with Islam in which dead people are swiftly washed, prayed over and buried. But as with most cultural melting pots, people draw on outside influences, whether integration is approved of or not.

For more on this subject, see The Economist here.  It’s a good read, rich in colour gleened from firsthand research. What it doesn’t address is the colonisation of former Cockney turf by middle class West Enders who have headed east for more affordable housing in areas from Stratford to now-trendy Hackney and Shoreditch. As these right-on Guardianistas grow older, might we see less emphasis on Cribb’s website on black-plumed Friesans, bling limos and lavish floral tributes, and more on wicker coffins, woodland burial grounds, ethnic-chic joss sticks and vegetarian catering services at the wake?

As The Economist writer says, ‘Undertakers thrive on the loss of their clients—not on the loss of their client base’. Meeting evolving demand is key. But you can see why some undertakers favour the big spenders. Flowers spelling GRANDAD: A PROPER DIAMOND GEEZER destroy the ozone layer? Gimme a break. Next you’ll be saying wreaths depicting the St George flag might upset the neighbours.

We need to talk about funerals

24 August 2011
Charles
8 Comments
Categories: alternative funerals, ceremony, death and funerals, funeral customs, funeral directors, Reasons to go to a funeral, Secular approaches to death, traditional funerals

Posted by Vale

But, I hear you say, we do already. All the time. Interminably.

And, of course, we do.

This website springs from the Good Funeral Guide and the blog is full of discussions about new ways to dispose of bodies, about wild and wonderful flights of imagination in the services that are being created and lots of talk about the funeral industry itself. There is even room for philosophising in the many posts that consider what funerals are for (click on the category Ceremonies at the bottom of this post for a full listing).

But it struck me recently that, interesting and important as this talk is, most of our posts are about what happens in and after the service. We talk much more rarely about what happens before, even though this is where, for the people involved, all the important decisions are taken. It is also where funeral directors have an  opportunity to make a real difference to the quality of the service provided. To understand how, you first have to recognise what is happening.

Think about the traditional way that funerals were commissioned (and allow me to exaggerate and oversimplify for a moment). In a religious context it is the priest/ rabbi/ immam or whoever that acts as the guardian of the process. They may well be involved before death. After they act both as guardian and guide to what is to be done, in what timescale and with what rites. Funeral director, the family themselves, every player in the funeral process submits to this approach.

For the people involved in – and who are happy to identify themselves with – the process there is a great deal of comfort in this. It is often rooted in community. It will express contains both tradition and continuity, and it satisfies the requirements of faith. There is the added satisfaction of  knowing that all that is right and proper has been done.

Of course the direct link between family and faith – even as a cultural association) has been weakening for a long time now. In this census year a UK survey by the British Humanist Association suggested that two thirds of us do not regard ourselves as religious. While, internationally, another study claimed that data collected over a number of censuses (censi?) showed that in nine countries there was a trend that would lead in the end to the extinction of religion.

In these circumstances what should families do? The GFG is unequivocal. People should be given the information, advice, time and support they need to work out what sort of funeral service they want.

But, without access to another wise guide, funeral directors have, by default, acquired a huge new responsibility. More often than not they are the ones that families turn to as they begin to face up to the question of what sort of service it is that they need to commission. It has to be a real concern that – with some notable, brilliant and inspiring exceptions – too many still feel that the old process is the best – even where it lacks all legitimacy or meaning in the lives of the people affected.

This is why we need to talk about funerals. Meaning, spirituality, grieving, the comfort of community are all possible outside of religion, but only if the right questions are asked at the start. What needs to happen to make sure that more funeral directors are willing to ask them?

Individuality in the Requiem Mass?

8 August 2011
Charles
1 Comment
Categories: Religious funerals, Requiem Mass, traditional funerals

Posted by Richard Rawlinson

Réquiem ætérnam dona eis, Dómine (Eternal rest give to them, O Lord).

There is often talk about the tone of funerals: the balance between celebrating a life and grieving a loss; the ratio of bespoke parts reflecting individuality, to formulaic parts reflecting the universality of death.

Catholics expect this balance in the funeral rites, too. In the Prayer Vigil, or wake held between death and funeral, allowing the bereaved to say their goodbyes. In the Requiem Mass, which allows for personal choices of hymns, Bible readings, prayers and words of remembrance. In the Committal, the final leave-taking at the graveside or crematorium. In any post-Committal drinks party.

That care should be taken so any secular poems and songs chosen for the prayer vigil or words of remembrance should be in keeping with the Christian faith is unlikely to be an obstacle for someone opting for a Catholic funeral.

But the wealth of church music invariably fulfils, from the Requiem Masses by Verdi or Mozart to Celtic chants such as this rendition by Matt Meyer of Litany of the Saints.If you must, you can even select schmaltzy hymns, though not over my dead body, please.

Sacred literature also serves to offer thanksgiving to God, as well as prayers for the deceased and support for the bereaved. Psalm 23, ‘The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want’, is a popular choice as are certain readings from St Paul’s letter to the Romans, or this prayer by Cardinal Newman:

‘O Lord, support us all the day long of this troublous life, until shadows lengthen, and evening comes, and the busy world is hushed, and the fever of life is over, and our work is done. Then, Lord, in thy mercy, grant us a safe lodging, a holy rest, and peace at last. Amen’.

Such selections blend with the familiarity of the Eucharistic liturgy as all masses, funeral or otherwise, re-enact the Easter journey of Jesus Christ from death to resurrection.

Keeping God central as the author of all life is occasionally greeted with mixed emotions. The bereaved can be feeling anger and want the sole focus to be on their deceased. In this state, they may think their beloved doesn’t need the Credo , Pater Noster and Hail Mary repeated to help the deceased to rest in peace. As the mass is celebrated, they may drift off into private contemplation of the person they have lost.

However, those attending the funeral mass more often gain comfort from it, playing their part in willing the deceased Godspeed, contemplating the good that merits God’s love, and the sins that require forgiveness.

Whatever music and spoken words are chosen, those meditative moments of golden silence are what makes each funeral unique. Still waters run deep.