Freeze-drying bodies

British local authorities are struggling to keep pace with demand for burial space and to conform to new rules about emissions from crematoria. 'Green' burial sites, where trees are planted on graves instead of headstones, are few and far between.

The Swedes have found a new way to solve the problem - freeze-drying. Bodies are frozen in liquid nitrogen, and then, in their brittle state, broken into dust that can be buried in a shallow grave. I've heard old gardeners say that when they die they'd like to be buried in their compost heap. Well, now maybe they can.

One of my colleagues emailed recently:

'With British Crematoria ... facing millions of pounds of upgrading to come into line on new emissions limits it might be a good time for them to do a bit of lateral thinking. X at Y Crem told me recently that things are so bad in Z Borough Council they seldom plan anything more than a month ahead and most business is conducted on a "firefighting" basis. I don't think Z Crem will be a pioneer. Might leave the door open for the private sector to have a go.'

Up in smoke

Up in smoke
Originally uploaded by Sparrows' Friend.

British crematoria are required by law to keep emissions to a minimum. Before we were so fussy about pollution (because the dangers weren’t recognised), bodies were cremated in all sorts of unsuitable outfits, and with all sorts of strange items in the coffins. It’s been known for relatives or friends to try to smuggle alcohol into a coffin - "he liked a little drink" – or to put coins in to pay debts. Nowadays, the coffin, lining and robes must all be made of approved materials, and checks are made that no one’s tried to place anything unsafe or unusual inside.

Cardboard coffins are becoming popular, but staff say they sometimes burn too fast. If the coffin catches fire before the door is closed, the body is exposed.

One of the latest concerns is about pollution from mercury in tooth fillings. They won’t take out your teeth, so they have to try to find other ways to stop it from escaping into the atmosphere.

Mourning sickness

Rosie Boycott, former editor of The Independent, made a TV programme about false grief for Channel Five, shown last week. I was practically cheering when I saw it. In 2002 a Welsh academic, Dr James Thomas, claimed that 'the majority did not mourn for Diana', as the conclusion to his research. Think-tank Civitas published a report in February 2004, claiming that a vocal minority indulge in 'recreational mourning'. It's all very unhealthy. It's also very annoying, because the media, including the BBC, will insist on referring to 'a nation in mourning', or 'a city in mourning', such as when Iraq hostage Ken Bigley was murdered, whenever there's been a tragedy like this. Excuse me - but who asked the 'nation' or the 'city' whether we really were in mourning for someone we never knew? One particularly shocking result of the hysteria over Diana's death was the huge amount of money spent on flowers by members of the public, left to rot in the streets, together with soggy teddy bears and pathetic love notes. More than a million bouquets were left at Kensington Palace, her home. Multiply that by the cost of an average bouquet, and you can see that London florists made a lot of money around the time of the funeral. Imagine how that money could have been used by some cash-strapped charitable organisations, including the ones that Diana supported, such for landmine victims, or AIDS patients.

On the day of Princess Diana's funeral I conducted a wedding ceremony in a small hotel in Suffolk. The couple had been expected to cancel their wedding by some of their silliest friends, although the arrangements had been made for months. They asked me if I thought they should, as they didn't want to appear heartless and uncaring, which they emphatically were not. I said no, they should go ahead. It was strange, driving to the venue, because the roads were so quiet. Hotel guests were glued to the telly in the lounge next door to the wedding room, watching the funeral. They cast disapproving glances in our direction as we trooped through to the reception in the garden. Bloomin' cheek! Only weeks before, the tabloid press had been depicting Diana as a floozy, out gallivanting with her 'boyfriend', the Fayed playboy. Now they were making out she was some sort of saint.

A year after the death, I did a Thought for the Day on local radio, as follows:

I didn't mourn the death of Diana, nor did many other people. How could we? It was all such a waste, and very sad for her family, but we didn't know her. Grief is personal.

Throughout history, humankind has mourned its dead in a variety of ways in accord with the customs of the community. It's different now. Things are less clear. The media, especially television, is a huge influence. There is a lot of confusion. People seem to want to be told what to do, as though there's an etiquette of mourning. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why so many people behaved the way they did a year ago, when crowds lined the streets of London around the palaces and along the route of the funeral procession. Maybe for a few hours those people felt a sense of community, otherwise missing from their lives.

A year ago I was on Radio Suffolk talking about the news of Diana's death with Rachel (the presenter). I said that many people seemed to have lost a sense of proportion. I saw Rachel wince, anticipating a backlash from enraged listeners, but the only calls we had were from people who said they agreed with me but hadn't liked to say so. I resented the way that those of us who didn't identify with the 'we' the commentators kept talking about were discouraged from saying anything at all, even from saying that we felt it was all a bit excessive. Too many people made a virtue out of weeping for Diana. Weeping for her was something you did or didn't do, but no one should have been made to feel that if they had no tears they should apologise for it.

Grief, the genuine article, affects everyone differently. Some go quiet. Some weep. Some get angry. Some want to be alone. Some want to be with others. Some do all these things. The situation changes daily. Grief affects us emotionally and physically. Some people, bereaved for the first time, are shocked by how little control they have over it. If you loved someone, even if you didn't always like him or her, grief is the very natural consequence of losing them. And it's personal - —very, very personal.

So if you feel there must be something wrong with you because you haven’t been swept away on a tide of popular emotion, I can assure you there isn't. Many other people feel like you, but just don't like to say so. As Shakespeare wrote:

... to thine own self be true,
And it must follow as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.

25 October - update

A Story from the Telegraph:

A passer-by saw what he or she thought was a dead human foetus in a Liverpool alleyway, and after a few days the area was cluttered with the usual soggy teddy bears, dead flowers and mawkish messages. It turned out to be a dead chicken, the police said yesterday, not a human being.

Be honest

The staff at a crematorium see and hear hundreds of funerals. "How's the new music system working?" I asked an attendant the other week. Instead of supplying CDs to play at funerals, we have to tell them what the family wants and they get it downloaded and play it through their system, which means that my friend must sit through more funerals than he used to. He responded gloomily, “Oh, they’re all wonderful!” He didn’t mean that the funerals were wonderful. He meant that the deceased were all supposed to be wonderful, according to their eulogies, which cannot possibly be true. Everyone lived an exemplary life, they were all loved, no one had anything negative to say about any of them, and – he went on – they keep singing the same hymns, over and over again! No wonder he’s bored!

I’d gone to conduct a funeral for a very old woman who wasn’t wonderful. Her daughter read a tribute that was painfully honest about the hurt she’d caused by being emotionally cold and detached. She had never, ever told her children she loved them, or shown any physical affection – no hugs or kisses, praise or encouragement. I wondered why she’d been like that. Maybe she’d been deprived of affection during her own childhood. Maybe she had a personality disorder. It’s good that her daughter hadn’t followed the same pattern. Some people never escape their early conditioning, others transcend it. In old age, the mother had had dementia. She forgot everyone and everything. She was oblivious to the hurt she’d caused. Perhaps she always had been.

I didn’t see the attendant after the funeral, so I didn’t get his reaction. We hadn’t sung any boring hymns. The deceased was described honestly, though it was clear that her family still loved her, and grieved for her. They also grieved for what they’d never had - love and affection.

Funerals don’t have to be all the same. People are different, but mostly flawed to some extent – some more than others. If we’re described solely in glowing terms after we’re dead, however imperfect we might have been, we won’t be remembered as we really were. Voltaire wrote, “We owe respect to the living: to the dead we owe only truth.”

Horses, not a hearse

Two Suffolk Punches, an ancient rare breed of heavy horses, pull a wagon carrying a coffin to the crematorium. This was at the request of the deceased, a relative of mine, who loved horses, especially this sort of horse (for more pictures, click on this picture).

Many people don't know that they can do more or less what they like at a British funeral. You don't have to use a funeral director; you needn't have a conventional hearse; you needn't have a conventional religious funeral; you can be buried in your own garden (subject to a few sensible rules); you needn't have a headstone; you can have a tree planted on your grave. There are many possibilities.

Would suggest, however, that if you make very elaborate plans for your own funeral, you may make if more difficult for your family and friends to grieve as they suffer the additional stress of trying to realise your wishes. If you think you're going to make things easier for them by arranging everything, think again.

Choose some music, maybe. Choose where you want it to happen. Write a few lines of farewell (resisting the urge to settle any scores posthumously), or choose a poem or two. Suggest a charity that might benefit from your death. Funerals are like weddings, in some respects. Spending a lot of money on them doesn't guarantee a satisfactory result. It's the content that matters, not the show.

On the fear of death

"Men fear Death as children fear to go in the dark; and as that natural fear in children is increased with tales, so is the other."

Francis Bacon (1561-1626), Of Death

"All say, 'How hard it is that we have to die'- a strange complaint to come from the mouths of people who have had to live."

Mark Twain (1835-1910), Pudd'nhead Wilson

"I'm not afraid to die. I just don't want to be there when it happens."

Woody Allen (1935-), Getting Even

Quotes from The Oxford Book of Death, Ed. D J Enright.