Bishop Tutu: "An Unpretentious Monk's Homegoing"

From the very wise Amy Cunningham, about the burial of Desmond Tutu:

The church setting was glorious, and the other bishops wore their robes, but surely the great man who helped upend apartheid would exit in a mahogany, walnut or cherry casket with brass rails of some sort. And wait a minute—what’s going on there with the slender foot-end of the Archbishop’s pine coffin resting naked, skirt-less on the church truck? It’s not landing normally. No rails on the sides, just rope. Tiny fist of flowers for a significant public figure like that? Yes. It’s not that the funeral directors I know staring at photos like the one above—longing only for a dignified look—are hoping to up-sell the theologian’s handlers. It’s just that some folks in funeral work instinctively struggle to pair humility with high stature. In truth, I also would have preferred a truck skirt or bier, or modern catafalque in church, but the rolling truck, in the end, had a nimbleness to it, and spoke to transparency. What you see is what you get: an unpretentious monk’s homegoing.

No One is "Good" at Funerals

In 8 things this funeral director wishes you knew, Louise Winter writes:

Last year I founded Poetic Endings – a modern funeral service – because I realised that most of the funerals happening today are not serving their purpose. What should a funeral do? Why do we even have them?

She reassures us that we don't have to be "good" at funerals. We don't have to do what funeral directors tell us is how it's done. We don't even need to use one. What we do need is to talk beforehand about what our loved ones want, and to do what honors them and is kind to those who are mourning.

Always Go to the Funeral

Dierdre Sullivan explains on NPR why it matters that you are there when someone dies.

I believe in always going to the funeral. My father taught me that.

The first time he said it directly to me, I was 16 and trying to get out of going to calling hours for Miss Emerson, my old fifth grade math teacher. I did not want to go. My father was unequivocal. "Dee," he said, "you're going. Always go to the funeral. Do it for the family."

I once wrote about why it is important to go to weddings. A lot of the reasons are the same. Sullivan writes:

"Always go to the funeral" means that I have to do the right thing when I really, really don't feel like it. I have to remind myself of it when I could make some small gesture, but I don't really have to and I definitely don't want to. I'm talking about those things that represent only inconvenience to me, but the world to the other guy. You know, the painfully under-attended birthday party. The hospital visit during happy hour. The Shiva call for one of my ex's uncles. In my humdrum life, the daily battle hasn't been good versus evil. It's hardly so epic. Most days, my real battle is doing good versus doing nothing.

In going to funerals, I've come to believe that while I wait to make a grand heroic gesture, I should just stick to the small inconveniences that let me share in life's inevitable, occasional calamity.

Life lessons from the people we call to lay someone to rest -- Washington Post

The Washington Post Magazine has a superb series of profiles of people who provide support and comfort in death, from the gravestone carver to the bagpiper, to the casket-maker and the florist. A home funeral expert says:

We’re in a culture that doesn’t really want to deal with death that much. But death can be a meaningful experience that families share. It allows the grief to be hands-on. And what people don’t realize is that they can do more by themselves than they thought. In some states you can be your own funeral director. I’ve become trained as a home funeral guide, so I can guide other people through this: bathing the body, keeping the body preserved for a few hours or overnight before it’s moved. There’s a way to use dry ice to cool the body down so it doesn’t begin to decompose. I’m there as a support, as a counselor, somebody to reassure you that you’re doing fine.

Monty Python Song Now Number One for Funerals

They came of age in the “swinging sixties,” and now baby boomers are dying as they lived: ditching tradition and replacing it with Monty Python, pop songs and even fancy dress at their funerals.

The generation who grew up with the surreal comedians’ sketches and films is believed to be behind a surge in demand for the song Always Look On the Bright Side of Life at funerals, making it the most popular number to bow out to.

With its famously chirpy lyrics about the absurdity of life and the finality of death, the hit from the irreverent 1979 film Monty Python’s Life of Brian rose from the 13th most commonly chosen song three years ago to the top spot this year, research by The Co-operative Funeralcare revealed.

The more traditional choices of The Lord is My Shepherd and Abide with Me were pushed into second and third place respectively as the Python member behind the song, Eric Idle, proved that comedy conquers all.

Hits by Queen also proved popular choices of funeral music, with nine songs by the band - including Who Wants to Live Forever and Don’t Stop Me Now - among the most commonly chosen.


Notoriously sung from a position of crucifixion at the end of The Life of Brian, it’s become a plucky English anthem, even performed at the 2012 Olympics, and a twinkly stiff-upper-lip send-off. In November 2014, a study by a chain of funeral directors found the 1979 Life of Brian song had overtaken Frank Sinatra's My Way as the preferred choice of music.

Elvis Presley was the most requested solo singer.

Baby boomers jazz up their funerals with Monty Python and fancy dress

Plan Your Funeral -- Now

A mortician urges us to acknowledge that death is inevitable and make our wishes known:

Every mortician I know has a bevy of similar horror stories—but they’re probably not the stories you’re imagining. They are not stories about zombies. Our stories are much worse because they actually come true. We can recount in detail the terrifying tales of what goes wrong if you die unexpectedly and your family is unprepared to make your funeral arrangements. I know most of you don’t think you’re going to die, but I’m here with some rough news: Death is the appointment none of us can cancel.

Most important--talk to your family and get the right forms signed:

First and foremost: paperwork! Without a legal document authorizing someone specific to handle your funeral arrangements, there’s an order of priority for people who are authorized to make these decisions for you. Your legal spouse comes first. If you don’t have a spouse, your adult children come next. After that are your parents and then your siblings. In fact, there’s a legal hierarchy that you can follow all the way down to your second cousins, if need be.
Luckily, paperwork is an easy way to supersede the next-of-kin list. You can specify exactly who you want to make your funeral arrangements and honor your wishes in a legal document. The most effective document to accomplish this is called a Durable Power of Attorney for Health Care (DPOAHC). This document also allows for your designated agent to make medical decisions for you, which makes it different from a regular ol’ Durable Power of Attorney. You can have one drawn up with a lawyer or you can simply get one online, but there needs to be an included paragraph that specifies you are also designating your agent the right to control your funeral arrangements.

... 

Poignant Pictures of Death Rituals

“It’s the one thing that we definitely have in common all over the world, that we’re going to die,” he says. Yet although many of the ideas behind death rituals are the same—the desire to honor a dead person’s life, or give them a safe passage to the other side—the specific practices and beliefs that go along with them vary incredibly by region and religion. These photos take you to death rituals around the world: to Ghana, where a poultry farmer is buried in a casket that looks like a chicken; to Haiti, where a dead priestess’ spirit is called out of her body; and to Madagascar, where bodies are taken out of their graves every seven years.

Poignant Pictures of Death Rituals:

Do You Need a Funeral Home? DIY Funerals

"Of the nearly 2.5 million people who will die in the United States this year, 99 percent will travel through a funeral home. That’s a big problem, according to Joshua Slocum of the Funeral Consumers Alliance (FCA), a political lobbying group based in Burlington, Vermont. The $11 billion “death-care” industry, he says, is taking advantage of bereaved consumers at a time when they are most vulnerable—even going so far as to purposely mislead people into thinking embalming is mandated by law (it isn’t). The FCA’s goal is to change the way Americans deal with the dead, and it promotes do-it-yourself funerals that consist of a cardboard box, family, and little else. Vocativ spoke with several proponents of home funerals, and followed along with one family as it prepared to lay their mother to rest. "

via Connecting Directors

The Inspired Funeral

"Planning for your own death and getting acquainted both with what is traditional and what is newly possible in today’s end-of-life rituals can be a spiritual practice that helps you face your own mortality with courage and in a way that reflects your most deeply-held values. Sadly, people who postpone funeral discussions are too frequently confronted with decisions involving thousands of dollars as they hold tissues in their hands.

Join journalist and NY-licensed funeral director Amy Cunningham as she explains fascinating (uplifting!) new trends in today’s funeral business and offers timely, helpful information on such topics as: how to plan a reasonably-priced, back-to-basics funeral or memorial service; the “green burial” movement and green cemeteries near New York City; new thinking on the burial shroud; cremation’s pros and cons; biodegradable caskets; blended-faith/alternative ceremonies; and much more."



The Inspired Funeral

At Their Request, There Will Be No Service | Eunice Friesen | TEDxGrande...

Hey Funeral Directors, Get the Hell Out of the Way! | The Order of the Good Death

I love this description of different ways that this funeral director worked with families to make the funeral process individual and meaningful, like this one:

A family came to me recently after they lost their son in a tragic accident. All they wanted was to create some kind of meaning in the face of the total chaos of emotion that they were swimming through. They had gone to another low cost funeral home that had no interest in listening to the family’s questions or entertaining any kind of notion out of the standard operating procedure: pick-up, cremate, return ashes.

The family only had a couple of needs: They wanted to be sure they got their son back from the mysterious cremation process, and they wanted to make the container that he was going to be cremated in. It wasn’t a very tall order – they just needed us to walk them through the exact process of identification, transport and cremation, so they could have the assurance that at every point there was a procedure to identify him. The family did not want to use the cardboard container used for most cremations, as they strongly felt their son needed something more personal. After 45 minutes of brainstorming options the dad came up with a brilliant idea – he was going to handcraft a surfboard shaped cremation tray. The family could come together to decorate the surfboard and write messages on it. What they came back with was beyond my wildest expectations. It was a beautifully handcrafted surfboard that was perfect to be used as a cremation tray. It was decorated with as much precision, love and care as anyone could ever muster and it was covered in loving handwritten messages to send him off on his next journey. This wasn’t another numbered body being shuttled into the cremation chamber, this was a life cut way too short, and he was riding a stunning example of craftsmanship and dedication on a wave of love to the other side.

Hey Funeral Directors, Get the Hell Out of the Way! | The Order of the Good Death

'Today We Are His Family': Teen Volunteers Mourn Those Who Died Alone : NPR

 "The students, dressed in jackets and ties, carry the plain wooden coffin, and take part in a short memorial. They read together, as a group:

"Dear Lord, thank you for opening our hearts and minds to this corporal work of mercy. We are here to bear witness to the life and passing of Nicholas Miller.
"He died alone with no family to comfort him.
"But today we are his family, we are here as his sons
"We are honored to stand together before him now, to commemorate his life, and to remember him in death, as we commend his soul to his eternal rest."
Each of the young men in turn read a poem, verse of scripture, or passage about death. Emmett Dalton, 18, reads "A Reflection On An Autumn Day," which ends "death can take away what we have, but it cannot rob us of who we are."

"



'Today We Are His Family': Teen Volunteers Mourn Those Who Died Alone : NPR

Natural Burial (letter to the editors, New Yorker)

A part of the death industry that was skirted in Rebecca Mead’s article about the artisanal funeral director Caitlin Doughty is the cemetery (“Our Bodies, Ourselves,” November 30th). At a cemetery, there are concrete vaults, coffins made from exotic materials, and headstones that have been transported from across the country; perpetual mowing, irrigation, and leaking toxins become one’s environmental legacy. Contrast that with a natural burial: the unembalmed body is wrapped in a simple shroud and laid to rest in a three-to-four-foot-deep hand-dug hole, marked only with materials found on site and a small metal surveyor’s disk, and decorated with native wildflowers. When a natural burial site is overseen by a nonprofit land trust or a public-park system where the proceeds purchase more conservation land and restore the landscape to a meadow or a forest, the environmental legacy of the departed extends to land that is protected as sacred burial ground, which even the most cynical developer or government will not dare disturb. So rather than become a puff of crematory air pollution, each of us can partially compensate for our living environmental footprint by occupying and securing special ground, one death at a time.
 Robert Hutchinson, gravedigger
Prairie Creek Conservation Cemetery
Alachua County, Fla. 

The Mail (January 4, 2016) - The New Yorker

Connections After Death: Kelli Swazey's TEDx Talk

In Tana Toraja, weddings and births aren’t the social gatherings that knit society together. In this part of Indonesia, big, raucous funerals form the center of social life. Anthropologist Kelli Swazey takes a look at this culture, in which the bodies of dead relatives are cared for even years after they have passed. While it sounds strange to Western sensibilities, she says, this could actually be a truer reflection of the fact that relationships with loved ones don’t simply end when breathing does. (Filmed at TEDMED.)

How secular Americans are reshaping funeral rituals - Religion News Service

 "“A surge in the number of Americans that no longer identify with any religion has contributed to the decline of the historically traditional funeral in America — and the rise in cremation as the disposition of choice,” says the National Funeral Directors Association in its latest annual report.

For the past few years, the association has conducted surveys asking Americans 40 and older to rank the importance of including a religious component in the funeral for a loved one. The percentage of people responding that it is “not at all important” has more than doubled in the last three years, from 10 percent to 21 percent."



How secular Americans are reshaping funeral rituals - Religion News Service

One of Us -- Wendell Berry

One of Us  by Wendell Berry  Must another poor body, brought to its rest at last, be made the occasion of yet another sermon? Have we nothing to say of the dead that is not a dull mortal lesson to the living, our praise of Heaven blunted by this craven blaming of the earth? We must go with the body to the dark grave, and there at the edge turn back together—it is all that we can do—remembering her as she is now in our minds forever: how she gathered the chicks into her apron before the storm, and tossed the turkey hen over the fence, so that the little ones followed, peeping, out of the tall grass, safe from the lurking snake; how she was one of us, here with us, who is now gone.

Caitlin Doughty, Artisanal Undertaker - The New Yorker

An excellent article about the movement to reclaim the way we deal with death -- to literally bring it home.

Caitlin Doughty, who was about to open her first funeral parlor, in Los Angeles, gazed at a skull that she had put on display above the desk in her office. Although it was plaster, the skull was a provocative presence in a room where Doughty planned to receive grieving families. It was mid-June, and that afternoon John Gettys, a field representative of the California Cemetery and Funeral Bureau, was coming to give the business a final inspection. Doughty, who is thirty, said, “I want the office to look like me, but I don’t want it to look too Arty Death Hipster.” 

Caitlin Doughty, Artisanal Undertaker - The New Yorker:

The Taxonomy of the Jewish Casket

I read a lot about the history of Jewish burial traditions but that desktop research felt rather abstract. Stepping next to the casket assembly line made my exploration immediately more tangible, more matter of fact. I wondered how many future casket owners were unaware at this very moment that their caskets were being built right then, in front of my eyes. I was immediately carried away by the details. And when it comes to Jewish caskets, the devil is indeed in the details: According to Jewish law, a casket must be made of wood — it must be completely free of metal. This really complicates the production process, and that’s where metal detectors come in handy. What’s more, every Jewish casket has holes in the bottom so that the earth can come through the wood. With the wood comes the earth, and with the earth comes the ultimate decay of the body. A lot of Jewish burial traditions, I learned, are designed to help us come to terms with mortality in ways that purposefully avoid consumerism. So why does New England Caskets produce so many beautiful caskets that often cost several thousand dollars? Apparently, there is a market for that.

The Assimilation of Jewish Caskets

Interview with funeral director Amy Cunningham | storykeep.org

There is endless wisdom and compassion in this interview with my friend Amy Cunningham.



"One path to immortality could be our death process. We don’t get to crawl off like a cat and die under the deck. Our final days will be witnessed by our caretakers and those closest to us. I don’t want to have performance anxiety about it, but I hope my quest to have a healthy outlook and approach to death will favorably shape my two sons’ outlook. On it goes. Can we express gratitude, say goodbye, and yield to the inevitable with grace? My father was ninety-three when he said, “I’ve had a great life, and I don’t want to do all the fancy things these doctors are telling me to do. I’m tired. I love you. I’m ready. I’ve had it.” That was painful to hear, but it also made sense to me. He stopped taking his heart medication two weeks later, and died of a stroke in the care of hospice at home not long after that."





Interview with funeral director Amy Cunningham | storykeep.org



To learn more: Amy Cunningham's website

Reinventing Death for the Twenty-First Century

 "Increased longevity paired with ageing baby boomers means that our older population is growing at record speed — a phenomenon in developed countries from the UK to Japan. According to Professor David Clark, a researcher in end-of-life care at the University of Glasgow: “We’re seeing what we regard as a massive global issue. There’s a huge wave of dying, death and bereavement.” At the moment about one million people die each week around the world; within 40 years, that number is expected to double.



 Compounding the impact of this wave of death is the fact that, for many, the rituals, artefacts and meaning once found in religion no longer provide emotional solace. In the most recent UK census from 2011, the proportion of the population who reported they have no religion reached a quarter — growing to 25.1 per cent from 14.8 per cent a decade ago. A rising trend of agnosticism, atheism and non-affiliation with religion has also been surveyed in countries including France and the US.



 Dissatisfaction with legacy service providers and striking shifts in demographics have converged to make alternative ways of dealing with death — that universal experience — in demand. Today’s broadly secular society, especially one in which more of us will soon be dying than ever before, has to find contemporary strategies for death.



A new generation of designers are responding to this call, with novel and challenging ways of thinking. When well-designed technology can help improve our every living moment, why should it desert us in death?"



Reinventing Death for the Twenty-First Century — Medium

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