No service by request
One more go at Canada’s Times Colonist. A rich seam, this.
There are 13 obits in the paper. Of those, 3 opt for no service; 3 opt for a celebration of life (I’m not sure exactly what that is, but at least one of them’s not a funeral); 4 opt for a memorial service; and just 3 opt for a funeral (all burials by the look of them). That means 8 out of 13 of these dead people will duck out of/be spared a conventional funeral. By UK standards, unthinkable.
There seem to be three reasons for the decline of the Canadian funeral.
First, older people (okay, seniors if you insist) move to retirement places and, uprooted from the place where, all their lives, they have done what was expected of them, feel disconnected from social conventions - fancy-free and free for anything.
Second, having moved to a retirement centre, these people suppose that there’ll be no one to come to their funeral.
Third, having been to awful funerals in the past, these (liberated, it has to be said) people reckon a funeral is not for them, so they specify: no service by request.
The local funeral director, McCall’s, is clearly so concerned by this that they have put a half-hour discussion of the no-funeral option on their website in the hope that people will reconsider.
In the UK we have retirement centres and more than enough experience of bleak and meaningless funerals.
So, why is it taking us so long to catch up?
Listen to the discussion on the McCalls site here: No Service By Request
Labels: ceremony, direct cremation
posted by Charles Cowling at
13:36
3 Comments:
Wow - a proper 'death announcement', and it points up just how dull ours are. We don't do 'obituaries' in our local papers unless it's to list the great and the good who 'attended' the funeral. Again, deadly dull reading.
This one sparkles with life.
No funeral ..... this is West Coast (even tho' it's Canada), and the trends seem to migrate here; so the 'celebration of life' may yet come to predominate. My god, I'll miss the sheer weight and ritual of a good funeral. Not to mention the income !
I'll add a fourth reason: Cost. I can't speak for Canadians, but I have the feeling that many Americans choose direct cremation or immediate burial simply because of cost, not desire. Funeral-home funerals can be expensive in the states. The lowest cost direct cremation in our area of Michigan is around $700. But most funeral homes charge much more -- $1,500 to $3,000+ for the same thing.
Usually, with direct cremation/immediate burial, there is still some type of memorial service held at a place of worship or elsewhere, but it takes place around a month later. I've been to a couple of these memorial services, and they have been meaningful tributes to the deceased.
I've just been reading about quantum theory, and how if you prod a tiny particle on the other side of the universe it sends messages backwards in time to influence simultaneously a particle in, say, the cheese in your sandwich.
Canada's not that far from Devon, despite appearances, and there's evidence of quantum effects happening; even here, there is an increasing trend to 'no funeral' cremations, so one FD tells me. I'm not sure if I'm detecting a note of approval from you, Charles; personally I think it's a shame when we're working to... well, actually, what are we working towards? Self-extinction, I'll agree, but for better reasons than that we're irrelevant, crap at it and expensive.
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