King of punk funeral pics

Some good pics of the Malcolm McLaren funeral from the Daily Swarm here.

King of punk funeral pics

Some good pics of Malcolm McLaren's funeral in the Daily Swarm here.

Minute of mayhem for Malcolm McLaren

Did the idea catch fire? Dunno. The Guardian wants to know what was your minute of mayhem. Track the responses here.

Burying Jed Kesey

Here’s an extract from an account of the funeral of Ken Kesey:

It was the least maudlin memorial service and funeral I've ever been to—his family and community loved him and shared his disinterest in sentimentality. At the burial at his farm his corpse was right there in front of us. People filed by and studied it, and put things in the coffin with him, slipped joints into his pockets.

The grave was next to his son Jed's. It was not six feet deep. They'd been working on it for three days. It was like looking into a mine shaft. Well, his friends nailed the coffin lid shut, and then they lowered it down. The youngest kids were asked to shovel in the first of the dirt. I happened to be close by, so my turn to help came pretty quickly. I got a shovel full of that good central Oregon agricultural soil and heaved it way down there onto the coffin. It made the deepest boom! I thought about what it must have sounded like from inside.

And here are extracts of an account by Ken Kesey of the funeral of his son Jed, killed in a road accident:

I sincerely hope that I do not—as Richard II worries—`play the wanton with my woes,' by this display of my family's private grief and publication of my personal correspondence. I mean only to suggest a path for others wandering in similar pain. We've all got a lot of dying ahead of us. We might as well learn how to go about it.

It was the toughest thing any of us has ever had to go through, harder than jail, or my dad's death, or an OD on STP, yet it also had and always will have a decided glory. Partly, I think, because Jed was such a good kid, very loving and very loved, and the power of his being carried us through a lot of the ache. But there was also the support we got, from friends and family, from teachers and coaches and schoolmates. Without this support I don't think we would have attempted the kind of funeral we had, or plunged into the activism prompted by the circumstances of the accident.

It's the funeral that I mainly want to share, because I think you guys and your constituency of readers should know that this homemade ceremony is legally possible. All you need is the land, the determination, and the family.

We built the box ourselves ... and Zane and Jed's friends and frat brothers dug the hole in a nice spot between the chicken house and the pond ...You would have been proud, Wendell, especially of the box—clear pine pegged together and trimmed with redwood. The handles of thick hemp rope. And you, Ed, would have appreciated the lining. It was a piece of Tibetan brocade given Mountain Gift by Owsley fifteen years ago, gilt and silver and russet phoenixbird patterns, unfurling in flames. And last month, Bob, Zane was goose hunting in the field across the road and killed a snow goose. I told him be sure to save the down. Susan Butkovitch covered this in white silk for the pillow while Faye and MG and Gretch and Candace stitched and stapled the brocade into the box.

It was a double-pretty day, like winter holding its breath, giving us a break. About 300 people stood around and sung from the little hymnbooks that Diane Kesey had Xeroxed--"Everlasting Arms," "Sweet Hour of Prayer," "In the Garden" and so forth. With all my cousins leading the singing and Dale on his fiddle. While we were singing "Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain," Zane and Kit and the neighbor boys that have grown up with all of us carried the box to the hole.

People filed by and dropped stuff in on Jed. I put in that silver whistle I used to wear with the Hopi cross soldered on it. One of our frat brothers put in a quartz watch guaranteed to keep beeping every fifteen minutes for five years. Faye put in a snapshot of her and I standing with a pitchfork all Grantwoodesque in front of the old bus.

Paul Sawyer read from Leaves of Grass while the boys each hammered in the one nail they had remembered to put in their pockets. The Betas formed a circle and passed the loving cup around (a ritual our fraternity generally uses when a member is leaving the circle to become engaged). (Jed and Zane and I are all members, y'unnerstand, not to mention Hagen) and the boys lowered the box with these ropes George had cut and braided. Zane and I tossed in the first shovelfuls. It sounded like the first thunderclaps of Revelations ...

Read a fuller account here.

Life Ain't Always Beautiful

Here’s an unusually well-written blog: THE MY WIFE HAS CANCER BLOG. Had. She died on 29 March, and its author will shortly be wrapping it up.

It’s a very good, if sometimes difficult, read. And there’s an interesting post on funeral costs. We’d find it hard to do anything like that so cheaply in this country, where direct cremation has yet to catch on – and a memorial service instead of a funeral.

There’s a touching little slide show put together by a friend of the author, whom he describes as a ‘computer genius’. It doesn’t take a genius, of course. He could have used Animoto. And if he’d really wanted one created by a genius he’d have gone to Louise at Sentiment.

WARNING! This blog may disappear without warning at any time. Don't worry! It's because Blogger is discontinuing its server (or somesuch). It will transmigrate to WordPress and be resurrected as something altogether user-friendlier. Service will be suspended for no more than a few days.

Quickie Wednesday

Interesting piece from Canada on home funerals in which a ‘death midwife’ (gotta find a better term than that!) acknowledges that funeral directors can, in the right circumstances, do the job as well as her. She’s right, of course. Good funeral directors are not the enemy. Read it

From Pam Vetter’s newsletter, this tragic account of a car crash which killed three generations of a Mennonite family. They were musicians. Hear them sing here.

And now I’m off to spend the day with my friend Teresa Evans.

Pip-pip!

Cash for corpses

You can tell how developed a society is by the price it puts on life. Could, rather. In the most developed societies there’s a re-evaluation going on. The Office of National Statistics calculates that death is now preceded by the unendurable prospect of an average 10 years’ chronic illness or dementia. It scares the hell out of us. No one wants to go there.

So there’s a national conversation about assisted suicide and self-deliverance. We read about Debbie Purdy and lovely Omar and we say, “If that was me... Yes, of course she should be allowed to. It’s what I want for me, too.”

What price life, now?

What price keeping all our old people alive, too? Can we afford it? Can we not incentivise them in some way to sign up to an accelerated end-of-life care plan? Yes, we’ve got ADRTs, a thin end of the wedge, but something faster? Because if we don’t, there’s going to be a heck of a doubly-incontinent lot of them when the baby boomers start their final, slow descent. And I don’t know who’s going to look after them. And I don’t know where the money’s going to come from. No one does.

So we’ve identified a brand new human right: the right to die. There’s been remarkably little fanfare about that.

But with rights come responsibilities. Have not the old a duty to vacate the stage, leave the building?

We’re getting our heads around it, this de-sanctification of human life. We’ll get our heads around the eu-word. We’ll have to. We have our abortions, after all.

So it’s interesting to see the Nuffield Council on Bioethics talking today about ways to incentivise organ donation. In the words of Management in Practice:

Under the Nuffield Council on Bioethics' plans, organ donors would be put on a transplant priority list and their families would be helped with funeral expenses.

The priority list proposal would see donors at the front of the queue for kidney, heart and other organ transplants, while contributions would be made to the funeral expenses of dead donors' relatives.

Financial incentives, "presumed consent" systems, personal "thank you" letters and certificates and souvenirs such as T-shirts and mugs could also be considered. The financial incentives may range from payments to the regulated selling of organs, eggs or sperm and a fully-fledged free market or just modest expenses.

Today’s Guardian quotes Dame Marilyn Strathern, professor of social anthropology at Cambridge University, who is leading the consultation working party: "We could try to increase the number of donors by providing stronger incentives, such as cash, paying funeral costs or priority for an organ in the future, but would this be ethical?"

Ethical? Cash for corpses? Leave it out, Dame Marilyn. You are the future.

What about the workers?

Here’s a nice biz opp for someone in the UK: a jobs review site.

Wossat? It’s a site where people leave anonymous reviews about the company they work for. Very useful for people thinking about working for that company.

Over in the US they have a few of these sites. One of them is JobVent. As you might expect, it’s those who hate their job who are more likely to leave a comment than those who love it. But if, as a prospective employee, you evaluate judiciously, I’d have thought that this site would give you a pretty good insight into what to expect. If you’re thinking about working for Paragon Application Systems, for example, you’ll be impressed by a string if stuff like this:

I have worked for Paragon for 10 years. This company has a family-type atmosphere, and we genuinely care about each other. The owners are generous with the benefits, as well as praise for all of the employees. The employees respect each other and strive to work together as a team.

But you might detect an odour of rodent in this:

Why are all the reviews on the same date? Same person perhaps?

I found JobVent yesterday and checked out Service Corporation International, possibly the most incompetent corporate undertaker the world has ever seen and almost certainly living proof that no corporate, however stealthy, however well camouflaged, can ever thrive in the funeral market. There was one review when I first looked. This morning, seven. Six are extremely negative. The positive one looks like a plant.

I wonder what reviews our own dear corporates would get? And I don’t mean that in a nasty, snidey sort of way. It’s easy to guess the negatives, nothing new there. It’s the positives I’d be interested to see.

Time to privatise cremation?

Over in Apple Valley, Ca, Stephen Atmore, 11 years retired from the local phone company, has gone back to work. He’s opening a crematorium in a strip mall and trying to get his head around it: “I still wake up every morning asking myself why I am doing this.”

Like a lot of people in the death business he was inspired to get stuck in as a reaction against the exploitative practices of service providers which he experienced when two close family members died. He was further affected by the spectacle, common enough in the US, exceedingly rare in the UK, of families on the side of the road advertising car washes to help pay for a funeral.

Says Mr Atmore: "This is for the economically challenged families who don't want to and can't spend the money on cremations."

He’s not set his prices yet, but he’s going to keep them as low as he can.

He’s providing a service which no one in the UK is allowed to offer. You can bury people as a freelancer over here, but you can’t burn them. Under the terms of the 1902 Cremation Act only a local authority (Local Government Board) can do that:

The powers of a burial authority to provide and maintain burial grounds or cemeteries, or anything essential, ancillary, or incidental thereto, shall be deemed to extend and include the provision and maintenance of crematoria:

Provided that no human remains shall be burned in any such crematorium until the plans and site thereof have been approved by the Local Government Board, and until the crematorium has been certified by the burial authority to the Secretary of State to be complete, built in accordance with such plans, and properly equipped for the purpose of the disposal of human remains by burning.

The model of a British crematorium doesn’t work. In order to be more or less fuel efficient it must burn as many bodies as it can in a day. But because the incinerator is attached to a ceremony space it must hurry people through with indecent haste. It’s a thinly disguised production line which can’t, when winter comes, even keep up. You pay for the ceremony space whether you want to use it or not. Your fee is further inflated by a sum used to subsidise the maintenance of the cemetery.

What’s more, for the poorest people in Britain the state provided funeral payment will almost certainly fall short of the full cost. A budget cremation service would make all the difference.

Why should a Brit not be permitted, like Mr Atmore, to offer an alternative to that provided by the state? With local authorities increasingly contracting out their crematoria to big corporates like Dignity and Co-operative Funeralcare, there's already more than a whiff of privatisation in the air.

How, under the Cremation Act, will it ever be possible for anyone to build a pyre for open-air cremations? This who want to do it must be thinking it through. I hope one of them will tell us.

In life, in death...

Good to see that Malcolm McLaren will be going out in the anarchic style he did so much to popularise. We are all invited to observe a minute of mayhem at noon on Thursday.

More funeral arrangements here.

Embracing the unacceptable

There’s a good piece over at Salon magazine which I’ve been holding over for a while to use on a slow news day in Deathworld. This is such a one. And what follows is a lot more nourishing than a bit of tittle-tattle.

The piece is by Fred Branfan and is titled Choose Death. What follows are extracts only – to whet your appetite.

This must be said about death: It is unacceptable. Who of us would design a world in which we spend our whole lives learning to live well only to die before fully experiencing our lives? Who of us, if we truly searched our heart of hearts, would really choose to die if we could live indefinitely in good health, able to learn and grow, in loving and meaningful relationships, doing work useful to our species, other living beings and the cosmos?

And what about the way it happens? This business of growing old, losing function and dignity, suffering, and pain?

A holocaust which will eventually claim the lives of every single person we have known, met, seen or heard, every loved one, every friend, every family member, every person who has lived before us and all who will follow us. Every one. Even us. Especially us.

And, sooner or later, we ask with Tolstoy, "How?" How, indeed, shall we live in the face of this knowledge, this outrage, this negation of everything we seek to be? Is there an alternative to denial on the one hand, and anger, bitterness, depression on the other?

There is.

Choosing to accept the unacceptable.

Choosing to accept the acceptable is very different from resignation, passive submission. Resignation is life-denying, a deadening, numbing reaction to life in which we die before dying. Choosing to accept is vital, life-affirming, an embrace of life.

No, it is our sweet, poignant and unique fate to alone have the ability to achieve genuine inner peace by choosing to accept what we know is unacceptable, reaching the outer limits of the creative tension between life and death, pain and bliss, love and fear.

It is as true as when Gautama Buddha articulated the Third Noble Truth 2500 years ago: It is possible to be happy in this world, through non-clinging, by experiencing life as we appreciate a sublime painting that we would not even think of trying to own, possess or control.

It is precisely because death is so unspeakable, so horrible, so unacceptable, that choosing to accept it can become our liberation, our pathway to the deepest set of experiences of which the human soul is capable.

Read the entire article here.

Co-operative Funeralcare - a case for care in the community?

Video by Dean Martyn for his degree show 2008

Listeners to this week's edition of Radio 4's hilarious News Quiz hooted from the outset when the programme kicked off with this announcement from the Whitby Gazette:

Does your Mum deserve an evening of pampering which will make her feel like a princess? The Whitby Gazette has teamed up with Co-operative Funeralcare to give her a night out she'll remember for years to come.

A scan of the Whitby Gazette website reveals that, owing to the fierceness of the competition, there were, thanks to the bottomless generosity of the Co-op, two incredibly lucky winners (a dead heat): Lisa O'Brien and Donna Dyson. Not only were they fed, they were also presented with floral tributes (coffin sprays?) by Effcare's tame florist and, of course, conveyed hither and yon in long wheel-base griefmobiles.

Lisa suffers from osteoarthritis and fibromyalgia. Donna is her Dad's carer. Read the story here.

Is it puerile to snigger at undertakers who do good works? Yes, of course it is. But only if good works are done for good works' sake. By good people.

In the midst of life...

Following on from the last two days' posts, here's another on the same theme. It's a story in today's Sunday Telegraph. Sorry, no link, they don't seem to have archived it yet.

Residents near a funeral parlour in Tonbridge, Kent, claim they are being made miserable because covered bodies are wheeled on trollies past their homes.

One local man, Tim Potter, said: "It just ruins any nice, mellow mood you were in to have a coffin wandering past in front of you."

The company, WF Groombridge, said it would be happy to discuss any concerns with residents.

A funeral is not a community event. Official

If you didn’t catch Rupert’s delightfully unbuttoned comment on yesterday’s post, have a look.

The interesting thing about the death deniers is that they don’t just put their hands over their ears and count noisily to ten until you stop. Whether death is the Old Enemy or just a Disgusting Old Man, it certainly brings out the streetfighter in the citizenry.

Up in Morpeth the town council was recently asked if it would permit a humanist funeral to be held in a community centre. Councillor Derek Thompson had this to say on the matter:

"Funerals are not what the centres were intended for when they were established, they are to be used for community recreation and social and leisure events. Holding them would be an inappropriate use of these buildings and we have no duty to provide them for this reason, so I'm strongly against this. I would also be worried about the effect they could have on people turning up for the next event after the funeral, whether it's a bridge club or a children's party."

Whether the applicant had been a paedophile ring or a witches’ coven, you wonder if it would have elicited greater disapprobation.

Read the sorry story here.

The living dead

Ever heard of Jane Jacobs? I hadn’t til this morning. I’m a fan already. I live in Redditch, a new town which must have looked great on paper but turned out a brutal, car-clobbered flop – even before a majority of misguided citizens voted in the felonious Jacqui Smith as our MP. If only the planners had read Jane Jacobs. In Ms Jacobs’ acute analysis, Redditch is a town not of neighbourhoods but of disparities. Spot on.

Who was Jane Jacobs? Here’s something from the website:

Jane Jacobs (1916-2006) was an urbanist and activist whose writings championed a fresh, community-based approach to city building ... her 1961 treatise, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, introduced ground-breaking ideas about how cities function, evolve and fail, that now seem like common sense to generations of architects, planners, politicians and activists.

Jacobs saw cities as integrated systems that had their own logic and dynamism which would change over time according to how they were used. With a keen eye for detail, she wrote eloquently about sidewalks, parks, retail design and self-organization. She promoted higher density in cities, short blocks, local economies and mixed uses. Jacobs helped derail the car-centred approach to urban planning in both New York and Toronto, invigorating neighborhood activism by helping stop the expansion of expressways and roads ... A firm believer in the importance of local residents having input on how their neighborhoods develop, Jacobs encouraged people to familiarize themselves with the places where they live, work and play.

Here’s Ms Jacobs:

“...that the sight of people attracts still other people, is something that city planners and city architectural designers seem to find incomprehensible. They operate on the premise that city people seek the sight of emptiness, obvious order and quiet. Nothing could be less true. The presences of great numbers of people gathered together in cities should not only be frankly accepted as a physical fact… they should also be enjoyed as an asset and their presence celebrated…”

Here’s a delightful description of the “intricate ballet” performed by people as they walk the pavements:

“Under the seeming disorder of the old city, wherever the old city is working successfully, is a marvelous order for maintaining the safety of the streets and the freedom of the city. It is a complex order. Its essence is intricacy of sidewalk use, bringing with it a constant succession of eyes. This order is all composed of movement and change, and although it is life, not art, we may fancifully call it the art form of the city and liken it to the dance — not to a simple-minded precision dance with everyone kicking up at the same time, twirling in unison and bowing off en masse, but to an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole. The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and in any once place is always replete with new improvisations.”

Jane Jacobs

Fans of Jane Jacobs keep her legacy alive by going on walks together. Jane’s Walk, they call this programme, “a series of free neighborhood walking tours that helps put people in touch with their environment and with each other, by bridging social and geographic gaps and creating a space for cities to discover themselves.” Each walk has a theme and, as they walk, everyone talks to each other.

In Toronto on 2 May they’re holding a Jane’s Walk with a death theme and will debate the proposition by its leader, funeral director Kory McGrath, that “the disappearance of funeral homes & burial grounds from urban neighbourhoods further removes us from our own understanding and acceptance of death, funeral rites & ceremonies, and compassion towards bereaved members of our communities.”

These are the themes the walkers will explore:

-How is a location of a funeral home or burial ground important to the living?
-How does a visual reminder of death affect the bustle of city life?
-What do we learn about our neighbours and ourselves when sacred buildings and spaces are a part of our urban landscape?
-Why have funeral homes & cemeteries moved out of the city?
-With the secularization and multiculturalism of cities, how can funeral providers and burial grounds be redesigned to integrate meaningfully into a diverse community and become part of the fabric, not a place that is taboo or morbid?

Brilliant.

Find out more about Jane Jacobs here and here.

Dead man ruling

Nice crazy story from the US, where the townspeople of Tracy City, TN, have just thrown out their mayor by electing a dead one instead. What an admirably creative protest vote.

Read it here.

Slow blog day

I've got nothing urgent to say today. So here's a bit of Dark Sanctuary.

A very, very good book

Tom Jokinen is a radio journalist and producer in Canada. In 2006 he took time off from his job to train as what we in the UK might call a funeral service operative. Why did he do it? Part curiosity: “There’s a time, from when someone dies to when they magically pop up at the funeral or the cemetery or as a bag of ashes that remains a black hole, invisible to the rest of the world, and everyone’s happy with the arrangement.” He wants to find out about that. The other component of his motivation (if it can really be analysed) is temperamental: Tom is of Finnish descent and “Folklore says the only time a Finn ever feels joy is when he’s imagining his own funeral.”

He’s written a book about it: Curtains – Adventures of an undertaker-in-training. It is intelligent and humane. It is full of interesting behind-the-scenes information – the what really goes on – together with thoughts and reflections on life and death (you can’t have one without the other).

He critiques Mitford: “To me, the heart of the debate she left behind is a nagging question: what is the body anyway? Is it charged, mystical, something to be marked and honoured with ceremony and balm, or is it “discarded clothing”?”

He talks about Richard, one of the funeral directors at the funeral home: “he views the undertaker’s role as grief therapist this way: grief therapy is bullshit. The only therapy he provides is to make sure the limo turns up when it’s supposed to, the right hole is opened at the cemetery and the right music is played at the service ... There’s no false sympathy and hand-holding, which is how the corporate undertakers mostly play it. They want to be your friend. He wants to be your funeral director.”

He considers the “illusion of vitality” achieved by embalming: “It’s a paradox that Japanese robot builders have been trying to solve. They keep building human replicas that look more and more lifelike ... they find that the closer they get to perfection the more frightening the end product appears ... The embalmed corpse is an in-between: both a person and an object to fear.”

Tom talks about his own fear of handling dead bodies. His boss “told me to be patient, that my natural fear would evolve into something deeper: respect and awe for the body. We live in a caste system, where the Brahmins subcontract their problems to the unclean, the Dalit caste, the corpse-handlers. In time I’d get used to my social role.” Later, “During a cremation, Glenn shows me how to open up the skull with a iron hook to expose the soft tissue to the open flame, thereby getting a cleaner burn.” Another funeral director tells him “You should respect death and respect the dead, not out of fear, but because it’s the proper human thing to do. He says hospitals have made us ashamed of death. When we die we should all be allowed to leave through the front door, same way we went in.”

He quotes all manner of interesting people: “According to the anthropologist Nigel Barley, the Toraja of Sulawesi wrap their dead tightly in absorbent cloth to preserve them until the next stage of the ritual, which may not come for years. He met a man who kept his dead grandmother in his house as a storage shelf for his collection of alphabetically organized cassette tapes.”

He’s an acute observer. In one funeral home he notices that the pictures on the wall, “like every painting I’ve ever seen in a funeral home, have no people in them.”

He attends a Mennonite funeral: “It’s the same ritual that sent their grandparents and great-grandparents to the sweet home of the happy and free, and when they die, and their kids die, someone will dig a hole and bury them too. There’s a symmetry that’s also oddly liberating in its lack of choice.”

He talks about home funerals. “BT Hathaway, the Massachusetts undertaker ... told me it was fine, the home funeral, for the 5 per cent who have money, time, resources, education and political and emotional will. ‘But the average consumer is not so well equipped,’ he said. ‘It’s poetic, but the truth is, I don’t know that many poetic families.’ This of course is the same argument for why people eat at Pizza Hut instead of milling their own wheat and breeding their own pepperoni cattle: why make it hard on yourself?”

He asks his boss: What’s the right thing to do when someone dies? “He thought about it, then said, ‘I don’t know.’ Not the answer I wanted, but after a moment he added, ‘I think you have to struggle with it.’”

Tom’s own conclusion is similar: “A simple act, without the artifice of embalming or baroque funerary product. Just a direct application of body to ground where it’s left to contribute to the great cycle: ashes to ashes and all that, back to Mother Nature in a shroud and a plain wooden box. Instead of deflecting a confrontation of death through commerce, you face it, fill the hole by hand, and then get on with the hard work of mourning, knowing that instead of passively choosing an object from a catalogue and subcontracting the ritual to someone else, you’ve acted, taken a stand, not against dirt but in favour of it. An act with meaning.” In the evening he meets his wife for supper. “I have seen the future,” I tell her. “And it’s Jewish.”

This is a very, very good book. Amazon will gladly send you a copy in exchange for just £9.99. Money well spent. Subsequently, time well spent.

Cremation: an alternative to burial or an alternative to bother?

There’s a fine new essay by Thomas Lynch in the The Christian Century. It’s as wonderfully well written as you’d expect – seductively so. Much of what he says about the modern funeral he has said before: that it “too often replaces theology with therapy, conviction with convenience.”

Here are some extracts to whet your appetite:

"When I'm gone just cremate me," Hughey MacSwiggan told his third and final wife as she stood at his bedside while the hospice nurse fiddled with the morphine drip that hadn't kept his pain at bay. The operative word in his directive was just.

...

And Hughey was just cremated, which is to say his body was placed on a plywood pallet, covered with a cardboard carapace and, after the paperwork and permits were secured, loaded into the hearse and driven to a site toward the back of an industrial park where a company that makes burial vaults operates a crematory on the side.

...

Of course, the problem is not with cremation, which is an ancient and honorable, efficient and effective means of disposing of our dead. Nor is the fire to burn our dead any less an elemental gift of God than is the ground to bury them in. The problem is not that we cremate our dead, but how ritually denatured, spiritually vacant, religiously timid and impoverished we have allowed the practice to become. It is not that we do it, but how we do it that must be reconsidered.

...

In cultures where cremation is practiced in public, among Hindus and Buddhists in India and Japan, its powerful metaphoric values—purification, release, elemental beauty and unity—add to the religious narratives the bereaved embrace. The public pyres of Bali and Calcutta, where the first-born brings fire from the home fire to kindle the fire that will consume a parent's body, are surrounded by liturgical and civic traditions. Elsewhere, however, cremation is practiced in private, the fire kept purposefully behind closed doors. Whereas the traditional funeral transports the corpse and mourners from parlor to altar, then to place of disposition, cremation, as it is practiced in the U.S., often routes around, not through, such stations in the pilgrimage. We miss most if not all of the journey, the drama and metaphor.

There’s a good, clear-eyed critique of Lynch’s essay at Fr Jonathan’s blog here.

Dead reckoning

No UK funeral director ever went far wrong by slapping a more or less stonking margin on the price of a coffin. Coffins are much cheaper to make than almost anyone would realise. An oak foil veneer MDF coffin with a trade price of £50 looks to any uneducated eye as if it’s easily worth £250. This being so, most funeral directors ‘bury’ some of what they call their professional fee in the cost of the coffin. It makes them look like better value.

It doesn’t necessarily make them exploitative however bad it may look (when you find out). They are spreading, not adding, remember. And UK funerals are not so expensive that people want to bypass funeral directors by whatever means they can. Over here, we can have a decent funeral for a little over £2,500. In the US it’s difficult to reel away with any change from £6,000.

There’s nothing to stop anyone here from saving themselves a few bob by buying a coffin direct from the manufacturer – if they can find anyone to sell them one. Most won’t. In the US, however, there’s more urgent demand and a growing online marketplace. You can buy a coffin (okay, casket) at Walmart and Costco.

Because US undertakers also ‘bury’ some of their professional fee in the cost of the casket, it embarrasses them financially when any client proposes to supply their own. There’s an amusing recent tale in a Chicago paper of a dodgy sod of a funeral director who throws all manner of preposterous objections in the way of a client who discovers she can save $1,600 by sourcing her own casket and burial vault. You can read it here.

UK funeral directors price their services and merchandise in such a way that they could never make a living if people did not buy a complete package. This is why the itemised price lists of the majority are not itemised in a way we understand by itemised. If, say, you tell them that you will not need bearers to carry the coffin, then ask how much that will be off the bill, there’s every chance you will be told that bearers are part of the professional fee (you’ll pay for them anyway).

There are precious few truly itemised, fully transparent price lists out there. So let’s hear it for Paul Sullivan, a brave new start-up in Dover, whose price list is as transparent as it gets, whose coffin prices are very fair and whose bearers are optional. See it here.

You can pick from Paul’s list, jot down the figures, do the maths. You’ll get only what you pay for. Hurrah. This is very empowering for clients. Paul and his ilk might even like to go a step further and offer what Basic Cremations of Milton, Ontario, provide on their website. They call it a Quote Builder. You check what you want, it keeps a running score and, at the end, gives you a bottom line. I love it. See it here.

The reluctance of so many UK funeral directors to take to the Web has become risibly absurd. People expect to be able to price shop online. Wakey wakey!