Thomas G Long

An interview with Thomas G. Long, author of Accompany Them With Singing - The Christian Funeral. from Westminster John Knox Press on Vimeo.

Thomas G Long here, one of this blog's great heroes. Though he comes at funerals from a Christian viewpoint, most of his ideas have a universal application.

He talks about the growing practice in the US to have a funeral without a body (though with ashes, often). That's not happening to any great extent over here in the UK. But there is a conversation to be had about the role and purpose of a body at a funeral. In most UK crematoria it is set well apart from, and never in the body of, the audience. It is present, but not involved. There's a lack of conviction in this, a grudging acquiescence, you could say.

Great to hear Mr Long talk of funeral directors (and priests) who get it.

Worst funeral songs #1 - My Way

There was a little light larking at the Dead Interesting blog last week as we debated best funeral songs for atheists. Off the tops of our heads we came up with You Ain't Goin’ Nowhere - Bob Dylan, No God - Darkest Hour, Heaven is a Place on Earth - Belinda Carlisle, and, from Rupert, a variation on the famous Bob Marley song: No Jesus, No Cry. Perhaps you can think of others?

Then I found this string over at Fluther in response to: What would be an inappropriate song to play at a funeral? Most of them are a little weak, but I have to declare a weakness for We’ve Only Just Begun - Carpenters, Stayin’ Alive - Bee Gees, and Who Wants To Live Forever? - Queen. Bitches Ain’t Shit by Dr Dre sounds a contemporaneously anarchic note much favoured at Brit funerals. But for me the clear winner is: Anything by ABBA. I don’t know that it’s possible to get inappropriater than that. Made me chuckle for the rest of the day. Oh, except that, now I think of it, Take A Chance On Me has got to be a pretty good way to go for an agnostic:

If you need me, let me know, gonna be around

If you've got no place to go, if you're feeling down

If you're all alone when the pretty birds have flown

Honey I'm still free

But. Seriously. Worst funeral song. It’s got to be My Way, surely? It’s clear in its renunciation of any divinity (otherwise you’d have done it God’s Way). Nothing wrong with that: it’s a defensible existential stance. But what about the message to spouse/partner, family, friends, work colleagues, neighbours – indeed, every else in the entire world? It’s perfectly clear. I didn’t need you. You meant nothing to me. I did it without you. Yes, and in case you were wondering, I was self-created, too.

For what is a man, what has he got?

If not himself, then he has naught

Could there be a more self-regarding, more narcissistic funeral song than this?

I hate it. Got anything worse?

Some conflict of interest, surely?

Michael Parkinson

HM Government Dignity Ambassador for old people, and...

...the face behind Sun Life funeral plans, which are...

...Co-operative funeral plans.

Tut tut.

Singers for Funerals

From their press release:

Singers for Funerals is the brainchild of two professional opera singers, mezzo soprano Kirsty Young and soprano Toni Nunn. Both have performer with professional opera companies across the UK and beyond, including Kirsty's own company, Hatstand Opera. Between them, the two ladies have sung in over 600 venues in the UK, from cathedrals to tiny parish churches, theatres to town halls, mansions to marquees.

Kirsty Young is keen to bring all that performing experience to provide quality singing for funerals:
"After singing at various funerals over the years, we realised how music could be a great comfort to family members at a difficult time, by celebrating what their loved one enjoyed in life. It is often very difficult for churches to provide a choir to sing at funerals or cremations. Many families therefore had no choice but to use recorded music, where they might have preferred a real 'live' singer. We give families back that option for live music, sung by an experienced professional, at an affordable price."

I like them. Check out their website and their voices here.

The D-Word

There’s a new book out about dying and death. It’s called, appropriately, The D-Word. Now, there’s a heap of books out there about long-term care of the very ill; there’s another heap about bereavement. We don’t urgently need more of them. But there’s hardly anything out there about grim D. We do urgently need more D-books.

I didn’t feverishly tear it free from its Amazon packaging. Two reasons. I know the author, Sue Brayne, slightly. On a personal level I like her a lot. She’s absolutely not one of these too-nice-to-be-true people you can meet too many of in the death industry. She tells it as it is. We met at a conference of conjoined quangos which has now re-badged as Dying Matters. I blogged about it intemperately at the time. I sounded off in the street afterwards as I walked with Sue to the station. She made no objection to the f-word, either. I honour her for that. I very, very much don’t want to not like her book.

Second reason? The father of a good friend went to hospital a fortnight ago. After conducting batteries of tests, the people who work miracles, the doctors, had that conversation with the family where they make it gently clear that, this time, there’s no cure, just care. He’s going to die. Probably quite soon. Unthinkable? No, they all knew it would happen sometime; he’s been getting old fast recently. But thought about? Not much. Some things you don’t think about till you have to.

So what my friend, and his family, and his dad all need is somewhere to go where they can find out about this business of dying. They need information. And because news like this can make you feel very lonely, very disconnected, they need to know how it felt for others, too, so that they can set their experience in a broader context. And for all the well-meaning advice I have been able to offer them, and not very much at that, it’d be so much better to have a book to recommend.

Come to think of it, I need some advice, too, on how to conduct myself towards this dying man and his family. I like them all very much. I’ve known them for years. They are good people. It’s going to be really hard.

So: reviewing Sue’s book isn’t an exercise in judicious objectivity. Bluntly, it had better be very good or I’m going to feel badly let down.

And the good news is that it is superb.

Sue sets out her stall: “The D-Word is based on the lived, felt, human response of what it’s like to die.” Her method? To tell it “through the personal narratives of relatives, friends and carers”. Sue draws conclusions from these stories. She also gives us lots of useful information and, by doing so, a language of dying. Literally. A vocabulary. So that we can talk about it and understand the hazards of not talking about it – and the hazards of talking about it in treacherous euphemisms.

Sue covers the ground. A little potted history tells us how we got to be so death denying. She examines the value of an existential explanation – a faith (though she doesn’t cover atheism). She examines how professional carers regard dying. There’s an excellent chapter about survivors of violent or sudden death, what helped and what didn’t. She talks about both where to find support and how to give it. She tells us how to support the dying. And she tells us what dying feels like, much of which is the fruit of her years of research with Peter Fenwick. She does all this in just 165 pages. She has interviewed the best possible people, and must be congratulated on finding them. She has even tracked down one of the UK’s best and nicest undertakers, James Showers, whose definition of a funeral is, I think, both moving and brilliant. A funeral, he says, transforms “a fact – that someone has died – into a ritual that is authentic and relevant to those who were close to that person, to help them say goodbye in public and with meaning ... to turn their grief into something beautiful.”

I don’t know how many copies Sue has sold yet – it’s early days. She’s just sold another. I am sending one to my friend as soon as I have posted this. Thank you, Sue.

You can buy the book from Amazon. As recommended as it gets. Find it here.

Burial depth

Dave Matthews here, supporting my campaign for shallower burial.

Want the lyric? Find it here.

Still, small voice of calm

The novelist Martin Amis has called for euthanasia booths on street corners, where elderly people can end their lives with “a martini and a medal”.

The author of Time’s Arrow and London Fields even predicts a Britain torn by internal strife in the 2020s if the demographic timebomb of the ageing population is not tackled head-on.

“How is society going to support this silver tsunami?” he asks in an interview in The Sunday Times Magazine today.

“There’ll be a population of demented very old people, like an invasion of terrible immigrants, stinking out the restaurants and cafes and shops. I can imagine a sort of civil war between the old and the young in 10 or 15 years’ time.”

Read the Sunday Times account here. And the Independent account here.

Conspicuous combustion

No new technology devised for the improved disposal of dead bodies has managed to achieve both efficiency and spectacle. There’s a perfectly good reason for this: the brains behind cremation and cryomation and resomation never reckoned spectacle to be a selling point. After all, funerals in the UK are private events, most of them. When they aren’t, it’s the processional that’s spectacular, not the disposal. Where’s the climax point in such a funeral? I’m not at all sure that there is one. Ought there to be? I don’t know. What do you think?

Over in Pattaya, Thailand, there’s a foreigner who records his assorted ramblings in a blog. When I say ramblings, I’m using his word. I’d have gone one better. It’s a good blog, an interesting read, and our rambling foreigner is a good photographer.

He recently witnessed the spectacular funeral pyre of a local Buddhist monk. So long did the construction of the pyre take, the monk had been dead for a year before being able to check out on it. At the top, a pic of the pyre. According to our rambler: “the pyre was an impressive sight, and they had even built in a degree of animation. Yellow tapes extended out on both sides into temple buildings, and unseen hands were pulling them to flap the wings and move the elephant head and trunk.”

Below is a photo of the pyre in its full glory. Read the blog post and see more photos here.

German way of death

Interesting piece in the Earth Times on how Germans are doing funerals differently:

Germany is experiencing a new type of culture of bereavement. People are moving away from the classic funeral with a priest and familiar rituals to one that confronts grief and death in a more personal way.

"Germany's funeral culture is experiencing fundamental change at the moment," says Professor Norbert Fischer, a historian at Hamburg University. Fischer says a growing number of people want to decide what happens to their bodies after their death. The bereaved also want a less tense and cramped approach to the funeral ceremony.

This change is expressing itself in a number of very different ways. "On the one hand there is rapid growth in the number of anonymous burials. There is also growth in the type of place where funerals and memorial ceremonies are taking place," says Fischer. In Germany there are over 80 forested areas, for example, where ecologically friendly urns can be buried beside trees.

There is also an increasing number of common graves. Fans of Hamburg soccer club can now find their final resting place at a plot close to the club's grounds in Altona district. Members of the club "Garden of Women" can be buried alongside former famous Hamburg residents in Ohlsdorf graveyard.

Read the whole article here. The pic at the top is by Mike Egan.

No Grey Suits

Another home funeral story today. It’s beautiful. And the account was written by a man. So much of what read about home funerals is by women, so it’s good to have this balance.

It’s called No Grey Suits. Grey Suits = funeral home staff. You can download it as a pdf (all 52 pages of it). Very well written and illustrated. Very empowering. Here’s how its author, Jack Manning, begins:

This book is a love story, or more correctly, a story of love. And how a bunch of friends and family came together to celebrate the end of life and help each other get through the loss of their friend, mother, wife, daughter, sister and colleague.

Download the book here.

Earth, wind and pyre

The be-wigged hair-splitters are having a sprightly time of it in the Appeal Court, where Davender Ghai is demanding the right to be burned, when he’s dead, on an open air funeral pyre.

This is a matter of concern not just to those Hindus who want what Baba Ghai wants, but to anyone who wants to be burned on a pyre. There’s nothing exclusively Hindu about a pyre. The Natural Death Centre is right behind Davender Ghai’s appeal, and Rupert Callender has written in support of him:

It is a mistake to see this legal challenge as coming from a minority group seeking a religious right that is alien to us, it is actually part of a wider demand for social change and as the recent excavations at Stonehenge are revealing, a part of our own indigenous cultural heritage. Rituals involving fire for purification, celebration and seasonal marking abound all over this country. The revived Beltane celebrations in Edinburgh are attended by over 12 thousand people. Up Helly Aa, the Viking fire festival in Lerwick in Shetland is the largest such ritual in Europe. The town of Lewes in Sussex has retained an extraordinary and enviable continuation of culture and identity based entirely around the bonfire celebrations of November The 5th, and let us not forget the public outdoor burning of the druid Dr Price in front of a crowd of twenty thousand, whose challenge was influential in legalising cremation in the first place.

In court yesterday the arguments swirled around what constitutes a building. Ramby de Mello, representing Davender Ghai, offered this definition:

“The expression crematorium should mean any building fitted with appliances for the burning of human remains. ‘Building’ is not defined. We say it should be given a broad meaning.”

At close of play yesterday, the mood in the Ghai camp was upbeat. Given their mood at the start of proceedings, this is encouraging. Today should be interesting.

Read the account in the Times here.

Should she or shouldn't she?

When Charlotte Raven was diagnosed with Huntington's, an incurable degenerative disease, there seemed only one option: suicide. But would deciding how and when to die really give her back the control she desperately craved? And what about the consequences for her husband and young daughter?

In 2006, 18 months after the birth of my baby, I tested positive for Huntington's disease. The nurse who delivered the news hugged me consolingly and left me with my husband and a mug of sweet tea to cry. In the days that followed, I began to realise why so few of the people at risk of inheriting this incurable neurodegenerative disorder chose to find out.

Having tested positive for HD, I was told it was inevitable that I would develop the disease at some point – but that it was not possible to know when. HD typically strikes in midlife. A fortunate few like my father suffer no symptoms until as late as their 60s, but for most it begins in their late 30s to mid-40s. I am 40 years old.

My first suicidal thought was a kind of epiphany – like Batman figuring out his escape from the Joker's death trap. It seemed very "me" to choose death over self-delusion. Ah ha, I thought. For the first time since the diagnosis, I slept through the night.

Very interesting article on self-deliverance/suicide in the Guardian. Long, but well worth it. Read it all here.

Thing or person?

I was called to perform an emergency Taharah – the ritual cleansing and preparation of a body for burial. I was the rabbi of a large congregation, and although I had participated in Taharot in this funeral home, I had never been summoned for an "emergency Taharah."

The manager of the funeral home, a friend, walked me to the door of the Taharah room but refused to enter with me. I peeked in and saw that there was a tiny body under the sheet, and assumed that the man, who had suffered the terrible loss of a son-in-law and grandchild in an auto accident, could not bear to see a dead baby.

I prepared everything I would need and uncovered the body. Whatever it was under the sheet barely appeared to be human. I was horrified by what I saw.

Read the rest of this remarkable and incredibly heartwarming story here.

Different cultures, different customs

Phero Tran Tieu's Funeral from Joseph Pham on Vimeo.

Why do atheists have dead bodies at funerals?

The question Can you have a funeral without a body? is not as useful as the question Why would you have a dead body at a funeral? Yes, yes, you can’t have a wedding or a civil partnership without the happy couple, and you can’t have a baby naming without a baby, so how can you have a funeral without a corpse? But are these events equivalent to a funeral? A corpse is a passive, insensate participant, that’s the difference. Yes, a baby is not an active participant at its naming, but it has to live with the consequences. What difference does a funeral make to a corpse?

That’s the nub of it. And the answer is that for some people a funeral does make a difference to the corpse and for others it does not.

There are, I think, three ways you can view a dead body. Think, now, of your own body when it’s dead. Which of the following will apply?

1. My body and my soul belong together (I am not dead, I am sleeping).

2. I had a body. Now I am a spirit (my body is old clothes).

3. I had a body. That was me (ditto).

Each describes a specific bodily status. Number 1 is explicitly Christian; you are sort of sleeping, awaiting resurrection in your earthly body. Number 2 is broadly spiritual. Number 3 is explicitly atheist. If you are a number 1 or 2 you are going somewhere; you are in a state of transition, the difference being that 2s leave their bodies behind. If you are a number 3 everything stopped when you took your last breath. Every minute that passes thereafter leaves you further and further in the past.

In order to mark the transition of a dead body number 1 it makes good sense to demonstrate its continuing dynamic by physically bringing it to a departure ceremony and wish it safe journey.

For a number 2 body I’d have thought a departure ceremony optional. John Lennon was a 2. Yoko One had his body burnt unattended and held a memorial ceremony instead, to take place everywhere and anywhere. “Pray for his soul from wherever you are,” she said. But inasmuch as the flight of a soul is about movement and transition and endurance, a farewell ceremony for the body is an appropriately symbolic alternative.

As for the number 3s, I’m not sure that they’ve thought this through. Ask an atheist if he or she wants to be cremated or buried. Chances are you’ll be made aware of a strong preference, arrived at in the consideration of a strong revulsion for one or the other. Wrong answer. The right answer is that it doesn’t matter a bit.

So, for number 3s, atheists, to bring a dead body, outworn carcass and so much deadweight, to a farewell ceremony would seem to be illogical and unnecessary. For atheists, surely, it’s got to be a memorial service every time?

My argument is not nearly as cut and dried as it seems.

Brilliant new website for grievers and undertakers

Welcome

This site is dedicated to supporting
the bereaved and paying tribute to the loved ones we have lost. It is designed to assist you with funeral planning, sharing memories and coping with grief.

We are here to help you to:

• find an obituary
• set up a free memorial site
• view global tragedies
• check lists for funeral planning
• find a funeral director
• understand the grief process
• express yourself on the grief wall

Learn more about Absent Friends

I like this website. It's new. It's a one stop shop for mourning people and dismal traders. One of the services it offers is 'complimentary obituaries'. Well, we all want one of those. You can scrawl on a wall. You can come to it in the throes of grief and, look, you get to console (or something) yourself by viewing global tragedies. What else could they offer in this line? I dare not let my imagination loose. But you do not operate under my constraints.

Why do atheists believe in heaven?

All faith groups have sects to be ashamed of, the ones who want to string up gays, stone women taken in adultery, that sort of nonsense. Let’s not get into one of those complacent debates about how it could be that faiths based in love can spawn such hatred. We might, though, consider drawing the line against outlawing fundamentalists by using anti-terrorism laws. Did you see that the edict issued by free speech-loving Mr Johnson against Islam4UK extends to a proscription against insignia and clothes. Clothes??!! Talk about taking a sledgehammer to crack a nutter.

Rectitude breeds contempt, that we can say. But in one faith group it breeds anger to an intriguing degree. Atheists. The Dawkinistas.Terrifically cross lot. No one is safe from their yelling, even old maids cycling to church through the morning mist. Is there something essentially silly about preaching a negative, getting all hot under the collar about Nothing? I don’t have a view on this myself. I am a bystander, merely; a quizzical commentator.

Anyone who believes anything has problems with the doctrine. Those who don’t are the ones to watch. How many atheists fervently believe in Nothing? Not that many when the chips come down to it. When you shine the interrogator’s light into the eyes of their faith you’ll more often than not elicit this anomaly: “I don’t believe in god...but I do believe in heaven.” This is the point when my friend Richard, an exuberantly faulty Catholic, quotes Chesterton: "When people stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing - they believe in anything."

This is a problem for humanist funeral celebrants – an acute embarrassment. Members of their flock are always wanting to sing from a hymn sheet and lift their eyes to a hereafter. It’s not so much an aspiration as a supposition. Belief in a heaven of some sort seems to be ineradicable from the mind of humankind, a heaven which needs no whitebeard concierge.

Lifestyle gurus are always telling us to live in the present. Ever tried it? People with a death sentence can do it, and some meditators, perhaps, but most of us are too busy using the present to assess our past or plan our future. In our heads, the future is where most of us do most of our living. We defer a lot of pleasure in the sure and certain hope of that future. This is why we have pension plans. And this is why the death of a young person is so much more painful to us than the death of a very old person: the young person has been denied so much more future.

Even a completely clapped out body cannot rid most of us of the habit of living in the future. Sure, we can at this stage easily see that an earthly future is out of the question. That’s when our minds leap lightly into the hereafter. And that’s why atheists believe in heaven.

Finding Valhalla

A friend writes. She is to be interviewed for the talking wireless. They’re going to want her take on Viking funerals. What, she wonders, are my views on Viking funerals? Can you, I wonder, help?

Interesting territory. We think of the classic Viking funeral as a blazing longship, bearing the corpse of a chieftain, drifting slowly and spectacularly across the sea. This is mostly myth. Where immolation took place in a longship it normally happened on dry land. The ship would customarily contain grave goods of all sorts, of course, we’re comfy with that, but it would also contain, often, slaughtered horses and servants. We’re not quite so comfy with that, and not just because we read the Guardian or suffer from servant envy.

And while that was one way the Vikings did funerals, the blazing longship, they weren’t one-trick ponies, they had others besides, and I’ve blogged about them. Here.

History be damned. There’s nothing more subversive of mystery and wonder than party pooper facts. What’s interesting is what survives: the glorious myth. And what’s interesting about the glorious myth is that it continues to exert such a strong hold on our twenty-first century imagination.

Why?

Because it meets so many of the needs of the living. Those needs are timeless, of course. They are aesthetic, emotional, spiritual and practical.

In terms of practicality, a holocaust is a good way of disposing of a dead body. Beyond that, it is spectacular. The flames rise (vertically) to the heavens as the wind fills the longboat’s sails and it journeys (horizontally) to the horizon in a way which mirrors the words of the Christian prayer: “But as thou didst not lose them in the giving, so we do not lose them by their return. For not as the world giveth, givest thou, O Lord of souls: that which thou givest thou takest away: for life is eternal, and love is immortal, and death is only the horizon, and the horizon is nothing save the limit of our sight.”

There is compelling emotional and spiritual appeal in this imagery, of journeying, transition, transfiguration and consummation (deliberate pun). The spirit rises as the craft moves over the face of the waters; that which is earthly is subsumed by the sea. All the elements are present: earth, air, fire, water. And there is an inexorable dynamic.

Is it that we yearn for Viking funerals because modern funerals fall so dismally short on all fronts? They do. don't they? Above all, they lack movement, and we especially need to rediscover that. Burial still meets lots of needs if there is a strong element of processional. Cremation, on the other hand...

So perhaps we should apply a Viking test to all funerary rites. This would produce interesting results, especially at a time when we are looking for an alternative to cremating dead people in incinerators. What do you think a Viking would say if you tried to interest him or her in cryomation? Sorry, I don’t know the ancient Norse for the predictable expletive, but you know its translation.

All of which leads to the conclusion that instead of looking for smart technology to dispose of our dead we need something altogether more retro. The solution to the problem of the dismal industrial cremator suddenly becomes crystal clear.

The open air funeral pyre.

Please add your helpful thoughts about Viking funerals in a comments box below. Oh, and click on the pic above to make it bigger.

FOOTNOTE: Read about the Viking funeral of Tal Stoneheart, brother of the Lib Dem MP Lembit Opik, here.

Too good to be real

I have tried, in the Good Funeral Guide, not to cover topics already dealt with by others. Instead, I have incorporated lots of signposts to best sources of information and best archives of resources – poems, music, ceremony ideas.

There’s lots of stuff out there about eulogies, most of it guff. But TheFuneralSite has some really good advice about eulogy writing. I especially like the following (mostly, let’s be honest, because I fervently agree with it):

A eulogy composed and delivered by someone who loved the deceased is the key component of a meaningful memorial gathering.

Think about the funerals you’ve attended. What do you most remember? Wasn’t it the daughter’s speech about her mom’s life or the nephew’s series of stories about his Uncle? These speak directly to our hearts. We relate immediately to the speaker. They may make us cry, but this group experience will draw us together as a community and help us to acknowledge the life of our relative, friend or associate that has ended.

...

Often the eulogy is given by a clergy or celebrant who has never met the decedent let alone loved them. Although the clergy or celebrant may do an excellent job of interviewing family and friends and presenting an accurate and interesting eulogy, the intimacy of first hand knowledge and heart-felt attachment will be missing and can lead to disappointment.

It almost doesn’t matter what is said, the experience of someone who loved the decedent standing up and speaking on behalf of the departed is a powerful experience for both the speaker and the audience.

The personal eulogy is a gift to the departed and to those in the audience.

Don’t miss out on this extraordinary life experience.

I also like the Top Five Reasons to Give a Eulogy, especially number 5: It’s the right thing to do.

If a funeral is too good it risks being no good. Seamless scheduling + slick stage management + faultless timings + superb performances + splendid merchandise = too good to be real.

Here’s a moving example of what I mean, the conclusion of two posts written by a US blogger about his father’s funeral.

The funeral was almost over. The funeral director was clearly wrapping things up and this man came forward asking for a chance to say one last thing. He was a short man and was of East Indian descent. I recognized him only because he had introduced himself to me before the funeral. With apparent nervousness and a heavy accent, he began to speak.

"I work for Chip for six year. When I look for a job he interview me and he is very nice. When I work for him I never see anything on his face but a smile. In six year he never say a thing to hurt my feeling. He help me and my whole family. He is a good man to work for. When he leave (company) we walk out the door with him and he gave me his book to help me understand some things. There were some tears on my face. Thank you."

This was the most moving of all of the speakers, in my opinion. Despite the fact that the service was ending, he felt compelled to speak, knowing he would never get another chance to say those things in that forum. Despite his obviously difficulties with the language, he stood up and told this story and blew away those assembled with his simple story of how with nothing more than a little kindness and decency, my father had made an immense impact on his life.

Be sure to read both posts. Find them here.

Adventurous ashes

When Ralph B White died two years ago his friends at the Adventurers Club of Los Angeles set about taking portions of his ashes to all manner of furthest flung parts of the globe.

"Rather than have people mourn him, he wanted to give people incentive to go have adventures," said Rosaly Lopes, who was engaged to White when he died and is the keeper of the ashes.

Though White covered a lot of the Earth during his life, said Krista Few, his daughter, most of these scatterings have delivered his ashes to new territory. "The competition is what is the most bizarre place we can take Ralph?"

It's a nice story. Read it here.

What does dying feel like?

Eighteen months ago Tony Judt was, by his own description, "a 61-year-old, very healthy, very fit, very independent, travelling sports-playing guy". He had a slight shortness of breath walking up hills and found himself hitting the wrong keys when he typed, nothing more.

Then in September 2008 he was diagnosed with motor neurone disease, a progressive degenerative illness that causes the cells which control movement to die.

Read the full and excellent article in the Guardian here.

Thanks to Carla.

Counting the cost

Here in the UK we are all following, intently or wearily, the furore created by the declaration of intent by Anjem Choudary and Islam4UK to hold a procession through the streets of Wootton Basset “not in memory of the occupying and merciless British military, but rather the real war dead who have been shunned by the Western media and general public as they were and continue to be horrifically murdered in the name of Democracy and Freedom - the innocent Muslim men, women and children.”

Silly stunt, you may say. Politicians of all hues have condemned him. Many would ban him. Sir Hugh Orde, president of the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo), says he would be "surprised" if senior officers in Wiltshire seek to block the protest because any group has a right to march even if their views are "unpleasant and offensive ... Our view is we will have to deal with it, people have a right to march. People might not like it but that is the law.”

Whichever side you’re on, it’s worth looking at this in the light of the ritual which now attends the repatriation of dead service people. That’s what I want to focus on: this new ritual.

It’s a recent thing, this bringing home our dead, only made possible by skilful morticians, refrigeration and aeroplanes. It’s a novelty. It’s also a curiosity. These processions through Wootton Bassett look like funeral processions, but they’re not. They are journeys to the coroner. When dead civilians go to the coroner they go, not in a hearse, but in a low key van of some sort (call it a private ambulance if you like) in everyday traffic. It’s a non-event and none the poorer for that. The funeral to come is the thing, after all.

It’s as if these dead service people are being given a sort of pre-funeral. Why? Don’t people have the opportunity to honour them (or protest about them) after the coroner has handed them back to their families at their funeral proper? Of course they do. So why?

It’s an invention of the Ministry of Defence. PR? It’s your call. These processions are well regarded. And bringing home the dead in this way certainly gives the country a way of counting the cost of the war in Afghanistan.

But while these processions offer ordinary people the chance to pay their respects to the dead, they have also become expressions of patriotism and militarism. Wootton Bassett is no place for pacifists or dissenters. It’s Daily Mail country. It’s got political. So it’s no surprise to see the political Mr Choudary requiring the right, in his own way, to drive home the cost of the war to Afghan civilians.

If Wootton Bassett has become a political battleground, the invention of this about-to-be-hijacked ritual is something the MoD may now regret.

No death threats, please. Use a comments box to put me right.