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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.