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Modern Funeral Customs

Star Wars' baddie Darth Vader had the last word as he conducted a Halloween-themed fancy dress funeral.

About 100 mourners, many dressed as witches, gathered in Luton to remember Lorna Johnson, 56, at a service led by funeral director Brett Houghton.

Her son, Neil Johnson, said his mother loved Halloween and would have wanted "a party" to mark her death.

The life of Mrs Johnson, who died from lung cancer, was remembered to the music of country star Dolly Parton.

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-beds-bucks-herts-33548095
 

Rise of the alternative funeral: beaches, buses and anything but black

The traditionally sombre funeral is being challenged by a surge in popularity for so-called destination funerals held in gardens, sports venues and beauty spots, research suggests.

Mourners are likely to dispense with the traditional hearse, choosing buses, motorbikes, horse-drawn carriages and even white vans instead, according to the research carried out among Co-operative Funeralcare’s 2,500 funeral directors, and a separate poll of 2,000 UK adults.

Nearly half (49%) of Co-op funeral directors said they had arranged a service in a location other than a church or a crematorium in the last 12 months. More than a third of adults (37%) said they would consider an alternative location for their own sendoff.

Locations mooted included a lake or river (25%), the countryside (20%), at home or in the garden (17%), at a beach or out at sea (20%).
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I do quite fancy being planted under a tree. Or rather having a tree planted on top of me. Small rottable container for what is left after the medical science bit and then into an orchard!
 
I would love to rot and fertilise, and/or be given to med students. But somewhere in those processes, I would want people to hear "For All the Saints" with an excellent swelling organ (ha har). Just respecting the main thing in dead Prots rituals, I guess:

For all the saints, who from their labors rest,
Who Thee by faith before the world confessed,
Thy Name, O Jesus, be forever blessed.
Alleluia, Alleluia!
But lo! there breaks a yet more glorious day;
The saints triumphant rise in bright array;
The King of glory passes on His way.
Alleluia, Alleluia!
From earth’s wide bounds, from ocean’s farthest coast,
Through gates of pearl streams in the countless host,
And singing to Father, Son and Holy Ghost:
Alleluia, Alleluia!

And I'm an atheist, but this get me every time.
 
When someone close to me died some years ago some of his friends asked to scatter his ashes in various places. I said yes to all of them and didn't ask where they were going. He's everywhere. He'd have liked that.
 
GerdaWordyer said:
I would love to rot and fertilise, and/or be given to med students. But somewhere in those processes, I would want people to hear "For All the Saints" with an excellent swelling organ (ha har). Just respecting the main thing in dead Prots rituals, I guess:

For all the saints, who from their labors rest,
Who Thee by faith before the world confessed,
Thy Name, O Jesus, be forever blessed.
Alleluia, Alleluia!
But lo! there breaks a yet more glorious day;
The saints triumphant rise in bright array;
The King of glory passes on His way.
Alleluia, Alleluia!
From earth’s wide bounds, from ocean’s farthest coast,
Through gates of pearl streams in the countless host,
And singing to Father, Son and Holy Ghost:
Alleluia, Alleluia!

And I'm an atheist, but this gets me every time.
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Is anyone else sentimental to want a bit of dead Prot ritual? Anyone teary about Jewish customs? Anyone reverent/guilty about Catholic rites? Sentiment just gets me. Am I being cheezy?
 
I do quite like the words during the committal to the ground bit. Despite being an atheist my whole life.

The recent funeral I went to was at a huge, imposing cathedral (she was very well connected and also a committed christian - which also helped as her parish priest took the ceremony and for once, words were being spoken by someone who'd actually know the dead person!) but they'd actually buried her in a small parish churchyard she'd always loved, earlier in the day - and there was something odd but somehow better about not having to look at a coffin, but still being a full funeral service. As seeing the coffin is the bit I always find the hardest. I couldn't even look at my dad's. It was a relief not to see my friend's although I will be going up there soon, to say my goodbyes. So no committal to the ground, but every hymn and the readings pretty well had all been chosen by my friend - who'd known she was dying for years.

The modern C of E ritual seems to be words spoken by a vicar who never even once met the person they're eulogising and have had to meet other people and take notes. One ceremony of a much loved in-law, I went to in 2009, the vicar pretty well did a 'join the dots' thing where she read from crib notes and you could almost hear her saying "insert name here". The poor dead man was trundled down the graveyard on a gurney and then the committal was rushed as the gravedigger had parked his JCB nearby and was sat in it balefully eating sandwiches and glaring at us, willing us to bugger off. I've buried hamsters with more ceremony.

My mother in law's funeral, in the 1990s, was the same. Creaky taped music, (cliched choice) and then a vicar who'd never met her in her life, having to talk about an utter stranger for ten minutes.

My dad is on a funeral director's shelf, waiting for my stepmother to die, so their ashes can be mixed (ew). The instructions are then that my stepfamily is taking half and my brother and I are taking half, and we can put them in a place that meant something to them and to us. My brother and I haven't really even discussed where that will be. As my stepmother was much loathed, it will be horrible to think we'll be partly responsible for her as well but I have already pretty well decided to take dad to a place that meant something to my mother - his first wife - and him and us when we were kids. And stepmother will be along for the ride.
 
I always suspect that priests and vicars would really like to say, "Never saw you in church before today so you are going to the other place!"

Some of the eulogies are a struggle since even relatives find it hard to say anything nice about some family members.

It often comes down to, "He was a husband, a father and a very thrifty man." or "She was popular with people who liked her." "He enjoyed football quite a lot." or "She had a cake for every occasion."

I think I'd better write my own. :evil:
 
JamesWhitehead said:
Some of the eulogies are a struggle since even relatives find it hard to say anything nice about some family members.
...
I think I'd better write my own. :evil:
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Mine will read 'She liked cats, beer and farting. Now bugger off to the Crown where there's enough cash behind the bar to get everybody smashed enough to forget all about her!'
 
I guess this can go here
Why did China hold a cremation competition?
By Tessa Wong BBC News

Earlier this week the Chinese government hosted an unusual competition. More than 50 of the country's best battled it out to be crowned the country's top cremator.

It was the first-ever national contest for cremation workers, but its very existence cuts to the heart of Chinese ideas about death, land use and a desire to instil national pride in a stigmatised vocation.

How do you win a cremation competition?
Details on the actual challenges were scant in state media reports, which said contestants had to show "technical operational skills" and take an examination on vocational knowledge.
The civil affairs ministry did not respond to the BBC's request for details.
But a document on its website (in Chinese) lists key national standards which include: furnace preparation, receiving and cremating the body, collecting the ashes, and maintaining and fixing equipment.

A ministry spokesman told Xinhua news agency that an important aspect of being a cremation worker was to have "a diligent attitude, and send off the deceased in a peaceful and holistic manner".
Family members should also receive their loved ones' ashes in as pure a form as possible - "as white as ivory and without any kind of impurity".
The top three winners were from the crematorium associated with Beijing's famed Babaoshan cemetery, and another one in the city of Nanchang.

State media featured the stories of several who took part in the competition.
They spoke of the long hours and the difficulties of working all day in rooms that can reach up to 50 Celsius in temperature and managing 600 Celsius furnaces.

"Usually we have to work 10 to 12 hours in each shift. When there's a peak in our workload, we can get up to 250 to 260 bodies a day, we wouldn't know when we'd knock off," said Liu Yong who works in a Shanghai crematorium.

Cao Lianxing from Jiangsu said cremation workers needed to be highly skilled.
"The bones need to be burnt completely while maintaining their white purity, there cannot be any black smoke. Once the day is done, we have to wait for the furnace to cool down so we can clean it to prevent the remains from clogging it up," he said.
He added that his crematorium, which only has 10 workers, sees more than 10,000 bodies a year.

etc...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-35196868
 
I've decided I want the Mama Cass song "One Way Ticket" simply because it's upbeat and has the opening lines:

"Call the village band out, bid me goodbye, everyone stand outside and cry, never thought so many thought me so dear, I'd be happy any place but here"!
 
Tigerhawk said:
I shall go into the crematorium (only when it's time, and not before hand, so stop pushing!) to the tune of the Baby Elephant Walk!
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Baby elephants seem to be cropping up a lot recently. Jameswhitehead had a dream about one earlier this week (I suggested it represented Donald TRUMP!), and yesterday on TV Valerie Singleton was Len Goodman's guest on Holiday of my lifetime - and they had to play the old Blue Peter clip of a baby elephant that pooped on the studio floor! :D
 
Donald Trump is not represented by an elephant, but an ASS...

While Americans may be stupid, they are not so stupid as to vote into office such a pompous, egotistical, megalomanic such as The Trump...

Although, I do wonder if they really are that stupid!
 
I can't fathom the cycle of fashion? I do like a good old graveyard, with mourning angel statues and headstones and footstones and little iron fences. It's a shame that so many urban graveyards in the U.S. limit markers to boring flat little things, simply to accommodate the damned lawn mowers. But in the U.S. it does seem that rural graveyards don't limit the tributes. I admit here that I watch cheesy true crime TV pretty often, and rural victim's families favor garish large headstones with computer-engraved embellishments and added photos. They look cheesy and creepy to me, but perhaps they will charm our great-grandchildren.
 
GerdaWordyer said:
I can't fathom the cycle of fashion? I do like a good old graveyard, with mourning angel statues and headstones and footstones and little iron fences. It's a shame that so many urban graveyards in the U.S. limit markers to boring flat little things, simply to accommodate the damned lawn mowers. But in the U.S. it does seem that rural graveyards don't limit the tributes. I admit here that I watch cheesy true crime TV pretty often, and rural victim's families favor garish large headstones with computer-engraved embellishments and added photos. They look cheesy and creepy to me, but perhaps they will charm our great-grandchildren.
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Yeah, my dad's grave is in one of those bleak pepetual care cemeteries. It's such a characterless place, it just makes it even more depressing. That's why I'm going with tne one I mentioned here
How I would like my own funeral
I mean, if I die, that is. I'm still trying to find a way to work around that bit. ;)
 
rynner2 said:
Tigerhawk said: ↑
I shall go into the crematorium (only when it's time, and not before hand, so stop pushing!) to the tune of the Baby Elephant Walk!
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Baby elephants seem to be cropping up a lot recently. Jameswhitehead had a dream about one earlier this week (I suggested it represented Donald TRUMP!), and yesterday on TV Valerie Singleton was Len Goodman's guest on Holiday of my lifetime - and they had to play the old Blue Peter clip of a baby elephant that pooped on the studio floor! :D
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What is it now with baby elephants? Here's another one in the news!
Playful baby elephant sits on tourist's lap
This playful elephant was over the moon when he got to sit on a tourist's lap in Thailand
12:42PM GMT 22 Feb 2016
[video]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/wor...ayful-baby-elephant-sits-on-tourists-lap.html
 
Not sure if this belongs here, but it can always be moved...
Facebook will have more dead people than living ones by the end of the century, researcher claims
When you die, Facebook turns your page into a 'memorial' — leaving a kind of digital graveyard as more and more people pass away
Andrew Griffin

Facebook will become a digital graveyard by the end of the century, with more memorials to the dead than living users, according to a researcher.
The site could have accounts for more dead people than living ones by the end of 2098, according to Hachem Sadikki, a PhD candidate at the University of Massachusetts. That number is based on a model of the number of people joining Facebook and the number that are dying, he told Fusion.

The projection could be proven wrong on a number of points, especially since it assumes that Facebook’s growth will plateau and the life expectancy of its users will stay largely the same. But it shows how Facebook is populated with a growing number of pages for dead people.

When its user die, the site memorialises their page rather than deleting it. That means that people stay around on the site, albeit with a modified page that is intended to be used for people to leave memories and thoughts.
The only way that a profile can be fully deleted is by someone with the account details, who get rid of it like a normal account.

The calculation chimes with a post on Randall Monroe’s XKCD in 2013, which estimated that the site would have more dead than living members by either 2060 or 2130. The accurate number depended on how Facebook’s growth rates continue in the coming decades.
There were about 10 to 20 million people who created Facebook profiles and died since, he wrote then.

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-s...f-the-century-researcher-claims-a6917411.html

I don't use FB. How do they know you're dead, to 'memorialise' your page?
 
I found my favourite ancestor's grave (unmarked, but location carefully recorded) in the municipal cemetery in York. Even though York is bristling with churches, and used to have even more, by the 1830s they were only able to bury them a foot down or so, and realised they'd have to start a municipal cemetery. My ancestor came from the same parish where I now live, a few miles away but in old age had to live with his son, who happened to live in the city - so he ended up buried there, not with his family here.

Worse still, like many ordinary people in the 19thC with no NHS, etc, when elderly and ill he was taken to the workhouse hospital. People would have had no option but to do this - if they gave up work to care for a loved one, they'd lose their job and their home. Because he died in the workhouse hospital, he was buried in a public grave with 13 other people.

A public grave would be let open for about a month with the bodies placed in, and then closed when they got to about a dozen. This still cost a few shillings and so was not a pauper's grave.

(I managed to trace a number of his fellow passengers, just out of interest - their ages and lives were very varied).

When I went to find the grave site, the genealogists who are or were based there on a Friday, located the exact spot. And they told us that often the workhouse public graves became the most sought after spots in the cemeteries so you usually find the most spectacular, imposing gravestones right next to them. The reason? Public graves would never get a monument, leaving more space for the surrounding graves to go to town with fancy marble angels, etc.

The find the whole thing of 19thC death, absolutely fascinating.

ETA: I just remembered. I traced an infant who died in the workhouse hospital and was buried in the same grave as my relative. In later years, her family prospered and they ended up with one of the big fancy marble tombstones. It was at some distance from the public grave where their baby had been buried, all those years earlier, but I managed to find it and they had put her name on it, as well, so to all intents and purposes, it looks like she is buried with them. I found that really touching.
 
Who chooses not to have a funeral?
By Justin Parkinson BBC News Magazine

The writer Anita Brookner, who has died at the age of 87, requested that no funeral be held after her death. How common is this and what does it mean for friends and family?

When someone dies, the UK government's advice is given in three simple steps. First, get a death certificate from a GP or hospital doctor. Second, register the death. Third, arrange the funeral.
But the writer Anita Brookner, best known for her 1984 Booker Prize-winning novel Hotel du Lac, requested that step three didn't happen in her case, her death notice in the Times saying: "At Anita's request there will be no funeral."

In January, the musician David Bowie didn't have a funeral either - his body was cremated in New York without any of his friends or family present.
This type of ending, where a coffin goes straight from the place of death to the cremator, where it is burned, is known as a "direct cremation".

Catherine Powell, customer experience director at Pure Cremation, which offers services for England and Wales, estimates that 2,000 people a year are now making this choice.
The most common reason, she adds, is to enable a more "celebratory" event, such as a summer beach party or function at a golf club, to take place weeks or months later. However, some choose it for financial reasons - a direct cremation, including transport and coffin, costs just over £1,000, whereas an average funeral costs £3,600, according to research by Bath University's Institute for Policy Research.

A direct cremation involves a company moving the body from a hospital, hospice or home to the crematorium. As with a conventional funeral, the coffin travels along the aisle of the chapel to the cremator, but no ceremony takes place.
However, families and friends can come to watch the coffin's procession. They can touch it and request music to be played. One woman who attended alone "sang her heart out", says Powell, while the procession of one man's body was accompanied by his two daughters performing "air guitar". But there is no eulogy or other ceremonial aspect.

Some Christians have used the direct cremation service, in one case with friends of the deceased reciting scripture as the coffin passed through the crematorium. A religious memorial service took place months later.

UK funerals, in which mourners traditionally have worn black, have become less conventional. In some cases there is now a party theme, with attendees dressing up as, among other things, clowns, Vikings and Dr Who characters. Some might regard this as flippant behaviour, but supporters say they involve thoughtful, personalised ceremony - a tribute and a send-off.

The US-based website What's Your Grief offers "guilt-free alternatives" to funerals. These include erecting a "shrine" - a collection of photographs and mementos - in the home, holding birthday or anniversary memorials, planting a tree and setting up a memorial book. Of course, all of these can, and often do, happen if the deceased has a funeral too.

"What we offer isn't a cheap funeral - it's a simple cremation," says Powell. "That's not right for everybody, but it allows the later remembrance to be more personalised and planned. Often there's no time for some relatives and friends to get to funerals, so it gives them a chance to attend a memorial when one takes place at a better time. It offers more flexibility.

"The body is the part of the funeral process that people find most difficult to deal with. This takes away that worry for people."
A central question is whether seeing the body (in an open casket) or at least having it in the same room as the mourners is important. In recent years it's become more common to refer to a corpse as "just a shell", wrote William Hoy, clinical professor of medical humanities at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, but he questioned how widely this is actually believed.

He cited the concept of "liminality", described by the early-20th Century anthropologist Arnold van Gennep - that the immediate period following physical death is a "threshold" in which people aren't sure whether to describe them as dead or alive.
"The bereaved need support in two months, to be sure," Hoy wrote, "but they most certainly need the support of personally meaningful ceremonies in the early days after death."

etc...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-35812014
 
Actually, this is a great idea - while you're off being cremated, family and friends can go off and have the wake! It's not like you're going to be around to experience either a funeral (you're not going to hear what people say about you, and if they haven't said it to your face, it's a bit late now), and it cuts down on expenses, which takes some of the worry off the family...
 
Yesterday, while my mother was telling me of the death of another aunt of mine, she blurted out that she didn't want a funeral. just a cremation (this was due to the coroner asking if any of the family would be travelling for the funeral). I agree entirely with her, it's a waste of money that could go in bequests, or a waste of money that the family likely can't afford easily.
 
Monstrosa said:
Yesterday, while my mother was telling me of the death of another aunt of mine, she blurted out that she didn't want a funeral. just a cremation (this was due to the coroner asking if any of the family would be travelling for the funeral). I agree entirely with her, it's a waste of money that could go in bequests, or a waste of money that the family likely can't afford easily.
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I agree - I'm going to stipulate the same. None of the funeral stuff, have a party. But play some Led Zeppelin or I'll haunt you.
 
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