Leave my funeral until I'm dead, thanks

Leaving parties, when everyone's signed a card and you all stand around clutching drinks while people say things that may or may not be true about you, can be horribly embarrassing. The thought of attending one that's meant to be a funeral, only before you're dead, doesn't appeal to me at all. OK, have a party - I know a couple of people who've done that because they didn't want to miss the one that would otherwise be held after the funeral - but not a funeral, please. I really don't want to be there. I don't want to hear what people might say about me, and not just because some of it may not be complimentary. I'm really not so keen on funerals that I want to attend my own.

However, it seems that some people think it's a good idea, the people at Saltcote Place in Rye among them, but they would, wouldn't they? They're offering their venue, for a fee, for such events. Among other things, they say,

Such a funeral can be arranged to fit the needs of all the family members and friends as well as the deceased-apparent. For example, his or her family members and friends will be able to attend this pre-arranged funeral if it is scheduled so no one will be caught while on an out-of-town business trip or vacation.

Oh well, we wouldn't want to inconvenience anyone by dying while they're in the middle of a holiday, would we? Sorry, but if I'm dying, it's likely that the last thing on my mind will be your holiday plans, and if people say I was a selfish old bag at my funeral (that's if they give me one), I won't be there to hear it.

The Orwell Bridge

I've conducted several funerals with connections to this bridge, which was opened in 1982 to carry the A45 (now the A14) over the River Orwell at Ipswich. I've driven over it hundreds of times.

One funeral was for someone I knew; a very interesting man who'd been a member of the council responsible for commissioning its construction. He was proud of the curved arch in the middle, which was his suggestion. He thought it added something, aesthetically. Another funeral was for an engineer who was involved in its construction. He was equally proud of the bridge.

Sadly, many people around here associate the bridge with suicides. It's been a magnet for depressed people since it opened, the latest only a few weeks ago. I remember conducting the funeral for a young man who'd been plagued by mental illness for years. His family had been happy that he seemed to have responded to treatment, and was planning to spend some time with friends in Spain. They waved goodbye at the door of their home, after he'd refused the offer of a lift to the airport, oblivious to the fact that it was all an act. He went to the bridge and jumped over the low wall at the top, just as a school bus full of children was going past. They all needed counselling afterwards, including the driver.

I was reminded of this the other day, when I noticed that there was a TV programme about suicides on London Underground, and their consequences. I couldn't bring myself to watch it. When I was a relative funerals novice, I shared a car with a young man who'd gone to work for a funeral director after he left school. He was glad to have the job, he said, because several of his friends were unemployed. I asked if he enjoyed it. He replied that he did, most of the time. One thing he didn't enjoy was walking along a railway line, gathering the body parts of a suicide. Suicides are notoriously oblivious to the effect that their actions have on other people.

Postscript - 22/2/2011: The Orwell jumpers don't always succeed.

Photograph from Wikimedia, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic license.

More on the theme of "What creative uses can you think of for your cremains?"

Apparently, an artist has used a 3D printer to turn human ashes into objects. Fascinating. Only, what's a 3D printer? Mine is 3-dimensional. If I had a 2-dimensional one, it'd take up far less space in my already cluttered office. Or is it just that it makes things 3D? How? Magic? Must be.

Anyhow. If I was to be turned into a 3D object for my loved ones to keep on the mantelpiece, instead of a boring old urn, what should it be? Tray with a mug of tea and a slice of toast, plus crumbs? Jar of marmalade, plus spoon? Are you sensing a theme here?

Don't bother painting my coffin, thanks

You might expect someone like me (a trained artist, and all that) to get excited about beautifully decorated coffins, but I don't. I suppose that having one standing in the corner of your living room as a memento mori and conversation piece might be interesting, if you have room, but why commission someone to spend hours creating a work of art that will be either buried or cremated with you? Seems such a waste, not to mention a sort of post-mortem showing off.

No thanks. I'd rather that my dearly beloved commissioned something that they like to hang on the wall or stand in the garden, and buy the cheapest environmentally-friendly coffin for my remains. It's only going to keep me tidy in transit.

Paying for an elegant headstone's another matter, if you really want one. At least they'll last.

Image - coffin design by Simon Wild from The Happy Journey Collective

Begrutten

One of the people I follow on Twitter is Lindsey Mason, who writes a column for the STV website. Lindsey (tigerbaps on Twitter) is usually very funny, but her latest column has a more sombre tone. It's about what she told her daughters about their dad, who died when the eldest was six.

Lindsey wrote,

Hannah is the image of her dad, right enough. She even has mannerisms of his that she couldn’t possibly have known about. Sometimes I look at her and she’s chewing the side of her mouth the way he used to do when he was concentrating on something and it makes my heart leap. I said earlier that I don’t believe in life after death, but in a way I do, because I just need to look at Rachael and Hannah and there he is, looking right back at me. I’ve always felt that Hannah was searching for her dad. Searching for some forgotten memory or some vital piece of information that I’ve missed out about him that would make her unlock a memory. But the truth is, she IS the something she’s searching for. She IS her dad. She can’t escape that. It makes me feel good.

You can read the whole thing on the STV website, where you'll learn what "begrutten" means. I recommend reading Lindsey's other columns too.

Getting it right

Just been reading Gloriamundi's latest blog post, about whether to choose burial or cremation. I've left instructions with the anatomists that they should bury what's left of me when they've no further use for it, assuming they accept my body bequest in the first place.

Gloriamundi asks, "What price on getting such things right?" Trouble is, things don't always go right. Sometimes it's someone's fault, sometimes it's not. As long as things haven't gone horribly wrong, whatever happened might become part of a family's story, told and retold, about the day you buried Dad, or Gran, or whoever, while you wonder what he or she would have said about it.

There's a green burial site near here where I've conducted a few funerals. One was for a man whose family had prepared a celebration around his grave, with anecdotes, tearful goodbyes, lovely poems, and gentle jokes about his idiosyncrasies. It was to end with an Irish piper, a friend of the family, playing a lament as the coffin was lowered. I said the words of committal, the piper started to play, and the bearers started to lower the coffin. It was a rectangular cardboard coffin, not tapered as most coffins are, and it soon became evident that the grave wasn't big enough. There was a lot of fiddling about and suppressed huffing and puffing, but it was no use; the coffin was stuck. As the piper continued to play, the bearers had to give up and leave it wedged in place at a wonky angle. I don't remember what I said, but everyone laughed and exclaimed that he'd have enjoyed the joke, before they drifted away. An embarrassed funeral director, who had a reputation for making mistakes, stood looking at the coffin. He'd supervised the grave-digging and supplied the coffin, so he couldn't blame anyone else. Maybe he ought to buy a new tape measure, I suggested. He didn't answer.

That was a case of human error. On other occasions, things have gone wrong for reasons beyond anyone's control. Snow, rain and wind can all play a part in funeral ceremonies. There's not much you can do about any of them. Just wear sensible shoes, and hope for the best.

Portraits of the dead

I go to the BP Portrait Award Exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery every year. My son agrees with me that the standard keeps getting higher. It will be interesting to see Daphne Todd's portrait of her mother this year. It was painted after death. Annie Mary Todd was a hundred years old and her dead body is as you'd expect - emaciated and worn out, an empty shell.

There will be people who'd prefer not to see it; the fear of death is common and they'd rather not be reminded of it. Some will be repelled, others fascinated. Mrs Todd agreed to be painted after she'd died, so this isn't posthumous exploitation.

Posthumous portraits were once quite common, though they were usually painted to show an idealised version of a deathbed scene. When Sir Kenelm Digby's wife Venetia died in 1633, he sent for his friend the artist Sir Anthony Van Dyck to draw her. Seven week's later, he finished this portrait, which "played an important role in Kenhelm's mourning" (from Death in England, ed. Peter C Jupp & Clare Gittings).

I've drawn a relative on her deathbed at the hospice. I've also drawn dead babies for bereaved parents. They were invited by hospital staff to hold their baby and have his or her photograph taken, but the photos of a tiny premature scrap weren't suitable to show in a frame on their mantelpiece. Pencil drawings, without the livid colour of the tiny bodies, was a gentler way to remember them. I don't charge for them.

Memento mori

Gloriously dead, originally uploaded by Nad.

From a Flickr set by Nad (see previous post). Recommend viewing by slide show.

Playboy

From a report of a trial in the Willesden & Brent Times, October 8th, 2009:

Leon Labastide, 21, known as 'Playboy' ... was shot in the back and found dying by his mother on May 23rd, 2004.

I've done funerals for murder victims but, so far, gang warfare hasn't spread to rural Suffolk.

Photographs by Nad.

Nike headstone

Found on the Interweb today - a photo of a funeral director's window in Birkenhead.

White chrysanthemums

White chrysanthemums are popular with funeral florists, who use them to spell out tributes for "MUM", "DAD", and various other names or relationships.

Some funeral flower facts for you:

White chrysanthemums are associated with funerals in Eastern Europe and in China, Japan and Korea.

Floral tributes became popular here from the 19th century, partly for their symbolism, but also because they were used, with aromatic herbs like rosemary, to try to hide the smell of putrescent bodies.

After the Hillsborough disaster in 1989, it became increasingly popular to lay floral tributes for strangers at the site of car accidents, murders and disasters. The florists did very well out of Diana Princess of Wales' funeral, when thousands of flowers were heaped in the streets of London.

Some of the nicest floral tributes I've seen were informal ones that had been picked from mourners' own gardens. White chrysanthemums don't lend themselves to informality.

It's time to re-educate the funeral directors, again

Funeral arrangers are the people in a funeral director's office who interview clients and make the arrangements. They're the ones who contact us to ask if we'll do a funeral for a client who doesn't want a religious ceremony. At least, that's how it's supposed to work.

We send all the funeral directors in our area a newsletter every year or so, to inform them about our service and remind them what we will or won't do. With staff changes, some need re-educating periodically.

One of our biggest problems is the arrangers who book a venue (such-and-such a crematorium at 11am on Tuesday, say) before they contact us. When it's a fait accompli, there's not much we can do if all of us are already committed elsewhere. There've been times when I've had to tell an arranger, sorry - we can't help you.

Then there are the ones who don't really understand what a humanist funeral is. Their client might have said that they don't want a religious funeral, but they still choose to sing hymns, for example. I've known clients say, "But it's not really religious, is it?" about Abide with Me, Jerusalem, or Morning has Broken. Don't they ever listen to the words? If the arranger is doing his or her job properly, he or she should know better than to steer people like that in our direction. They need a civil celebrant, who's not much fussed about what we call "pick 'n mix" funerals, or one of the many freelance celebrants who'll do the same.

This morning I had an email from an arranger who'd asked me to do a funeral a few days ago. I'd queried whether the client had chosen any music. The email listed four hymns! I spoke to the client on Tuesday. I asked, "You do understand that I provide a funeral that's totally free from religion, don't you? No hymns, prayers, religious readings, or references to an afterlife?" "Yes," he said, "that's what we want. Mum wasn't religious." I haven't been able to get hold of him again today, so far, but what seems to have happened is that the arranger has handed him a list of recorded music and said, "You can choose from this." Not appreciating that they can have anything they want (and I mean anything - the new Wesley system means access to an almost unlimited number of recordings), the client opted for the hymns because he thought that was usual, or didn't have a clue what he wanted.

Meanwhile, I've been backed into a corner by another client, who insists that we sing Jerusalem because her husband loved the song. I can see that this is going to be one of those weeks.

An ironical choice of music

A funeral client, arranging her Welsh aunt's funeral, chose 'Land of my Fathers' to play us out at the end. I don't think she saw the irony; her aunt was illegitimate.

After reading the above, a celebrant friend wrote that she'd conducted a funeral for a young man "of heroic proportions" -

He weighed well over twenty stone. He was carried in by his mates to the old '70s Hollies' hit, "He ain't heavy he's my brother". Six of them carried him in, staggering, sweating and wobbling all over the place.

Mr Deity & Death

Click here for more Mr Deity videos.

Manners maketh man (or woman)

Supposing you were bereaved in tragic circumstances. Supposing you received condolence cards and letters (as most people do), and one was from a local person you didn't know very well. He might have felt compelled to write because he'd been bereaved himself, and wanted to express his sympathy, as people do.

The letter contained spelling mistakes, it was untidy, it misspelled your surname. Would you post in on the parish noticeboard with the errors marked in red? Would you tell everyone you knew about it, and humiliate its author?

Of course not. Only a bad-mannered, socially inept person would do something like that. No one who knew what you'd done would ever want to write to you again.

You've got to laugh

I heard a good story yesterday, told by a woman who used to work for a London funeral director. She lived above the shop.

A neighbour was bereaved. Instead of going to the funeral director where my friend worked, she walked past and went to another firm, a few streets away. The funeral arranger there was curious, and asked her why she hadn't gone to the nearest business.

"Well," she said, "I've walked past there many times and heard them laughing around the back. I don't think that's very respectful."

"Mrs Brown," said the funeral arranger, "if you walk around the back of our premises and listen at the door you'll often hear the staff laughing and joking. They deal with sadness and tragedy every day. If they were constantly gloomy and miserable and didn't laugh together, it wouldn't be good for them."

Mrs Brown admitted she hadn't thought of that.

In my experience, the popular perception of people in the funeral business being straight-faced and gloomy is false. Funeral firms' staff, crematorium and cemetery staff, all have to be serious when they're on duty. When they're not on duty, they're often very funny. I just wish that some of them wouldn't make me laugh before I do a funeral, so I have to go into the vestry and compose myself, but I'll enjoy a laugh with them afterwards.

The photograph, taken in 1901 by Sir Benjamin Stone, is of two funeral mutes. Mutes were hired to lead funeral processions, looking suitably gloomy. I suppose that if you had a naturally lugubrious expression, you might have been in demand. I bet they enjoyed a laugh when the funeral was over.

______________

Sample joke from one of my friends from the Co-op:

A man walked through a cemetery late one night and heard tapping. He went to see where the noise was coming from and found a man on his knees in front of a headstone with a hammer and chisel, chipping away at the stone. "It's a bit late to be working mate, isn't it?" he asked. The man with the chisel carried on carving for a bit, then said, "They got my name wrong."

It's the way you tell them.

They're not doing it his way

When Father Ed Tomlinson of St Barnabas's, Tunbridge Wells, complained in his blog that he has

"... stood at the Crem like a lemon, wondering why on earth I am present at the funeral of somebody led in by the tunes of Tina Turner, summed up in pithy platitudes of sentimental and secular poets and sent into the furnace with ‘I did it my way’ blaring out across the speakers!"

he probably didn't expect the negative publicity. His comments were reported in the local and national press, leading to criticisms that he was "insensitive" and "heartless".

Ed doesn't get it. Why would anyone want to have a personalised funeral ceremony, when he can offer "the gorgeous liturgy of the requiem mass"? That's just it, Father Ed. Ask most people who're rejecting the "gorgeous liturgy" option and they'll say that they've been to a funeral where the priest talked about God and Jesus but said hardly anything about their dear departed; certainly nothing that they recognised. "It could have been for anyone," they'll say, or, "I wondered if I'd come to the right funeral; I didn't know who he was talking about."

Father Ed despairs of hearing "My Way" blasting out of the crematorium speakers; I sympathise. It is very popular. Having heard it many, many times, I groan inwardly when anyone asks for it. However, as long as no one asks for "Jesus wants me for a sunbeam", I'll cope.

Father Ed thinks that his parishioners don't know what's good for them and he does. He says,

I know that ‘dwindling funeral syndrome’ is the shared experience of most every priest I speak to, save those served by undertakers of genuine faith or respect.

Does he mean that "undertakers of genuine faith or respect" should ignore their clients' wishes and point them in his direction anyway? I know some do, and if their client is determined to have a non-religious funeral they might give in very grudgingly.

Father Ed seems to think that Humanist funerals are inferior to his liturgical ones, but he probably hasn't been to many, if any (I've known priests turn up at Humanist funerals, exuding disapproval). There are rubbish Humanist funerals, and some great religious ones. No one has a monopoly of quality, but many families will say that the Humanist funeral they'd arranged was satisfying, honest, and moving; that it reflected the life and personality of the person who died without cloying sentiment; that it made them laugh and cry. And, Father Ed, contrary to what you might believe, we don't all do it for the money.

But he won't care. Father Ed is from the patriarchal, "we know best" Church tendency that can't understand why its authority is dwindling, fast. He'll sulk and sulk.

He wrote that when he dies, "I will still have the gorgeous liturgy of the requiem mass to look forward to." Pity he won't be there to enjoy it.

Josef

One of the things that Richard Wilson discussed on last night's 'Two Feet in the Grave' TV programme was post-mortem photography. The Victorians took photographs of dead people, posed to look natural, such as a dead child propped up in a chair, surrounded by her dolls.

I bought this small photograph last week from a dealer. It shows a dead man in a coffin, which is supported by two chairs. The coffin sides don't seem very high, but maybe it was the fashion, wherever he came from, to have a deep lid. On the back is inscribed his name - Josef. I can't read his surname. The inscription's in German. It looks early 20th century. I wonder who he was, and what his story was?

Two Feet in the Grave

You have 5 days left to watch this programme on i-Player - recommended.

Click here for the OU/BBC Death & Dying page.

What to do with big people?

In case you were wondering, "big" is a euphemism for "fat" - very fat. There are more very fat people than ever these days, and when they die, that can cause problems.

Years ago, I knew someone who'd worked as a post-war hospital porter. He worked nights, when there weren't enough staff, and was asked to move a corpse from one of the floors above ground level when the lift wasn't working. There was no one to help him, it was a large body, so he stood at the top of a flight of stairs (concrete, with dark tiles on the walls on one side) and pondered. Reasoning that the guy was dead, so he wouldn't know anything about it, he rolled the body to the ground floor. I don't remember how he got him off the floor at the bottom. If it had been a lightweight corpse, he'd have been able to sling it over his shoulder in a fireman's lift, but it weighed at least 20 stone.

Nowadays, mortuaries, funeral directors, crematorium staff and others have to deal with corpses weighing much more than that - in some cases, over twice as heavy. In our area, none of the cremators are big enough to take very big bodies, so they have to be taken to a crematorium miles away. There are plans to build a new, privately-owned crematorium in our area, that will have an extra-large cremator. I don't suppose many people have thought about the extra cost involved with having to do this.

You read about the fire brigade being called to move hugely obese patients to hospital, but you don't hear much about what happens when they're dead.

You can't have a lovely environmentally-friendly cardboard or wicker coffin if you're hugely fat; you'd just spill out of it, like a badly wrapped parcel.

You can't be carried by pall-bearers if you're more than 20 stone; you have to be pushed on a trolley.

It's difficult to bury a fat person; you need a very big hole, and a way to lower the coffin so it doesn't just thump to the bottom.

They've had this problem in the US for longer than us, so they've been manufacturing 44" wide cremators for a while, and now we're having to import them.

Fat people cost everyone money - not just because of their healthcare problems, the difficulty of moving them from A to B when they're ill and can't walk, but because it's very expensive to dispose of their corpses when they die.

The moral? Do everyone a favour, and don't die fat.

Illustration: 18th watercolour of a fat man by G H Beaumont