A new wave of undertakers is working to put some life into the business of death. With some trepidation, Euan Ferguson starts planning a celebratory send-off of his own
Death: The Great Adventure. Either the most exciting sentence ever written ? if, um, true ? or one spitting bitter, sarcastic brimstone, probably written near the writer’s end, while surely rather scared and angry. And how we approach the end, for most of us do have the time to “approach” it, if we’re not so unbearably unfortunate as to be mown down in a random instant, can say a lot about how we have lived our lives.
About 1,800 people will die in Britain today. Worldwide, 70,000 over a 12-hour span this Sunday. Dying is something we, as a species, do a lot, even if we keep evolving better ways to keep from doing so. It’s all around us, not least just under our feet. Where the National Gallery now stands, on what was once a tiny burial ground for St Martin-in-the-Fields, an estimated 70,000 bodies ? about the same as our worldwide death toll today ? are packed on top of each other.
They were packed on top of each other in different times, of course. When death was part of the weekly lives of most, particularly the poor, and communities would join in assisting the laying-out of the body. In the 200 years since Dickens’s birth, we have changed drastically our attitudes to death; and today, in 2012, things are beginning to change again.
In the 20th century, squeamishness bloomed. Partly because of advances in medicine, particularly the understanding of hygiene: these kept many more people alive for much longer but concomitantly left the rest of us less willing to look, to hear, to think about it, when someone did succumb. Then, in the 20th century, the teenager was invented, not that long after the Victorian cult of childhood had been invented: golden innocent children replacing, for many, God, in an age of exponential secularisation. My theory, for what it’s worth, is that the slow combination of the two made us increasingly fearful of the end ? and with fear comes denial, horror, flight. If it ever was mentioned, any humour surrounding it would be as black as the Earl of Hell’s waistcoat. Britishly, we became a generation of deniers.
Yet more and more of us are today accepting the challenge to confront own deaths. And to do so with style, honesty, and a humour which is not black. New ideas abound of celebratory, individualised send-offs, and I wanted to find out more about this “new death”: maybe even plan a funeral, a kind of designered last day which might let some people who quite liked me share a smile or a story or a glass.
The idea had seemed fun at the time. Of course, the more I thought about it, seriously thought, the deeper, darker and substantially less “fun” it became. As soon, however, as you begin to think clunkingly seriously, 4am seriously, about it all ? who the day is really for and, perhaps more crucially, what happens to me when the world’s door slams shut behind me, and, if I don’t have another chance to live, have I left enough good things or good thoughts to live on a little? ? well, I tell you, those spirallings drive a soul to insomnia.
I began at the Southbank Centre, which this January hosted a weekend event entitled Death: a Festival for the Living. If I was going to go on what Mr Simon Cowell’s business juggernaut would undoubtedly call a “journey”, this was a truly good place to start. It was packed, sold out, at £12 a pop. Mobbed. There were smiling, kind, wizened old women, yes, but mostly they were helping six-year-old girls glue glittery flowers on to a be-crêped coffin at the Natural Death Centre’s stall, both old and young patched with accidental glue and giggles.
There was a huge blackboard wall on which the visiting world had been invited to chalk their answers to “Before I Die I Want To?” The answers were poignant, fun, mad. “Work at Disneyworld.” “Make a trillion pse.” “Write an amazing song.” “Make a difference.” “Never go to Bruges again.” “Fall in love again.” “Make sure everything is tidy.” “Be sure I mattered.” “Conquer death.” “Make a chocolate haunted house.” “Own a giraffe.” “Meet my stepbrother.” There were many wishes to travel ? mostly Venice, Hawaii, the moon. Someone had chalked: “Before I die I want to find a good reason not to.” I still can’t quite decide if that’s upliftingly optimistic or the diametric opposite.
There was an intriguing, wildly popular, exhibition of mad coffins (satiny, faintly bling, in the shapes of Mercs and cocoa-pods) from Ghana, where one tribe near Accra has always openly celebrated death, and from Nottingham, where a company called Crazy Coffins has been doing increasingly fine business in recent years. Bespoke coffins in the shapes of trams, skips, kites, guitars. And one which I found frankly unsettling in the shape of a skateboard. Not ordered, as the others had been, by the eventual recipient, but by the young lad’s parents. After he died in a skateboarding accident. I tried not to be reminded of Bill Hicks’s angry anti-Christian taunt of whether Christ would really like to be remembered by a billion replicas of the cross on which he’d perished.
That shiver apart, it was an intelligent, celebratory weekend. And so I began to think, and make telephone calls. Because all things must pass and everything must go.
The obviously missing presence at the Southbank’s death festival, the gargantuan elephant absented from the room, was religion. The hope of an afterlife. It was all an affable, upbeat, ridiculously friendly but undeniably secular affair. A cheerful shrug of, “When you’re dead, you’re dead.” A report last year from Co-operative Funeralcare, Britain’s largest funeral provider, which had gleaned the info from its more than 850 funeral homes, concluded that more than half of the country’s funerals are now “a celebration of life”, rather than a standard churchy gloomfest, quite possibly conducted by someone who had never known the deceased. There has been a huge increase in humanist funerals. The number conducted by celebrants from the British Humanist Association (BHA) grew by 50% between 2004 and 2011, while the C of E’s church funerals dropped from 233,000 in 2000 to 177,000 in 2009. According to Humanist Society Scotland, whose celebrants were doing just 142 funerals in 1998, the figure in 2010 was 3,145.
“People are simply less prepared to be hypocritical,” says Barbara Chandler, of the BHA. “They want a celebration. Something centred on the life which was lived, not necessarily the life which is ? or is it? Really? ? to come.”
Barbara’s own arrangements: “Mine? I’m not letting my family get their hands on one bit of my body. I’ve made arrangements for most of it. I’ve ordered them to have a huge party.”
I speak to Rupert Callender, a trustee of the Natural Death Centre. There had been a lot of this kind of natural green homebody stuff during the festival, about how you can actually get a coffin for about £150, and avoid spending the last five years of life waking at horrific hours worrying how to afford to bury yourself.
And try as I’d like to dismiss all the greeny stuff, it makes a lot of sense, because we can’t simply stuff 70,000 bodies under a small ploughman’s patch any more. An awful lot of people have been busy dying since the beginning of time, but not before they’ve bred many, many more, to die, and we’re running out of patches, and our bodies are full of new things. My local council’s funeral website has page after page devoted to metal recycling and something called “mercury abatement” and all that.
Anyway, Rupert, down in Devon, was faintly aggrieved by the way in which standard undertakers worked ? contract, sign here, sad smile, £4,500 bill, families being shanghaied into “package funerals” with ritzy add-ons they neither wanted nor could afford ? and thus decided, some may say drastically, to become an undertaker himself. He and his wife run the Green Funeral Company and, in fact, I’d rather like, perhaps not yet, to be buried by him.
All he wants to do, he says, is offer “honesty and partnership” to bereaved families. And, while the Natural Death Centre is very good on concrete (wrong word I know) aspects such as sustainability and natural burial grounds, it strikes me that the real strength of Rupert and his like-minded colleagues, the new wave of undertakers, is taking the blackness out of death: making funeral parlours a place to have a conversation, before a celebration.
I talk to Rupert, with a certain reluctance, about planning my own funeral. I could get a cardboard coffin for under £200. “With real handles. The traditional coffins have plastic screw-on handles which won’t hold, thus the shoulder-high carrying, which can be truly awkward. Handles are better. We conducted a funeral recently at which there was a 90-year-old woman and her great-great-granddaughter both helping carry the coffin up the hill. It was lovely.” He speaks great sense, too, about cremations, which 72% of people now choose. “There’s a grim rush. Half-hour windows. We cremated someone recently but did it differently: had the coffin there, in the pub in Portsmouth, his daughter behind the bar as she’d wanted, and the party went on all day. All night I think, actually. In the morning I and some of the family went to the crematorium, brief, in and out and away: the day had been done the day before. And we didn’t as undertakers carry the coffin out of the pub ourselves. We got people to hand it up this very narrow bar room, person to person.”
I think I’d quite like that. A cardboard or papier-mâché or wicker coffin, carried not into a cemetery but a natural burial centre ? it could be the corner of a friend’s orchard; the law is staggeringly liberal on this ? and maybe someone might plant a seed. And read Louis MacNeice’s London Rain, and have a dram of Caol Ila, because that’s what I’d like to do myself, even though the associated sentiments might be exactly what are putting me in the ground ? but, and but, this is my overarching confusion over the day of the funeral. Is it for the deceased, to plan, if not exactly to participate in, or for those who are left?
“This is one new problem,” Rupert tells me. “It’s one thing religion has done rather well: make the day speak about the deceased, but leave a lesson for those left behind. Ideally I’d like the natural death movement to move on from it being about the individual ? yes, have much of that, but somehow, if we can, speak to all of us at the same time.”
And when Rupert goes, how will he go? “Oh, a shallow grave, in something biodegradable. And they can plant a tree above, and then there can be a? molecular afterlife. Or, or, maybe a funeral pyre. I love the honesty. And there are moves now to have this re-legalised. There’s a case at the end of the month.”
Many of Rupert’s sentiments are jovially echoed by David Crampton, who now runs Crazy Coffins (after designing textiles for M&S for 21 years). “There is change around. Fewer and fewer people want to be scared by the undertaker’s window. They don’t want it to be black-curtained, terrifying, macabre, imposing. I became good friends with some of those I’ve done special coffins for, learned why they loved that job or place or car, or whatever. I think people are facing up to death, and increasingly seeing it as a day of a celebration of life, rather than necessarily mournful or even pompous. Most of the funeral directors I work with now have open days. It’s all changing.”
Of the 80-odd bespoke coffins David’s done, which one does he best remember? “All of them. But one in particular, yes. Young man, about 20, who was dying of Aids. He wanted a coffin shaped like a coffee-table. I did it, with strong safety glass on the top, and he put it in his lounge. When he had friends or family round, he’d put the glasses or teacups on top. The message was: this is the coffin I’m going into. Acknowledge it, accept it ? I have. He was a brave young man.” David will himself go off in a coffin styled as a black patent dance shoe. He loves his ballroom.
Things are changing, but some things never change. Even humanist, secular, celebratory funerals differ according to circumstance: they’re still marking a death. I spoke to colleagues who had attended relatively recent humanist funerals and, while there was music and colour and some laughter in all, there is a difference between marking the end of a generous, wise woman in her 70s and that of a child.
And, for all the many upsides of the modern and secular funeral ? the celebration of the best and oddest and most wry and most delightful parts of a life, rather than a one-size-fits-all, any-colour-as-long-it’s-black, mournfest ? there are downsides. Chief among them the thought that there’s no afterlife. I spoke to the gentle and funny Terry Sanderson, president of the National Secular Society, about many death-things but, chiefly, what we might leave behind, given, in our opinion, this nigglingly annoying absence of an afterlife, and how we might live on, if we haven’t been somehow revered, brilliant, famous or, even once, loved.
“What hope? None. Sadly. It’s cruel, but that’s the way it is. You’ve gone. Even Leonardo, Beethoven will eventually be forgotten. The satisfying outcome for me will be oblivion, and it doesn’t bother me at all. Someone once said that ‘The living are just the dead having a holiday,’ and that suits me and I am glad for it, for the chance. Aren’t you?” This may sound odd but Terry actually cheered me up.
So: funerals are changing, their darknesses lightening, and we must reduce our snobbery in accordance. There’s a new openness and a glory to their planning, and to the idea of earlier acceptance. Carl Jung, interviewed near the end of his life, had some wise words. “Threatened with the complete end? consciousness disregards it. Life behaves as if it were going on and so I think it is better for old people to live on, to look forward to the next day, as if he had to spend centuries, and then he lives happily. When he is afraid and he doesn’t look forward, he looks back. He petrifies. He gets stiff and he dies before his time, but when he’s living on, looking forward to the great adventure that is ahead, then he lives.” Or, as Morgan Freeman’s character, Red, put it perhaps more succinctly in The Shawshank Redemption: “You either get busy living or you get busy dying.”
Ah, that great adventure. I needed to make an awkward, for which read naively stupid, call, out of fairness. To the Church of England, to find out whether there was an afterlife. Some bright, unlucky woman called Rachel had to respond, and did so with heroic understatement. “It’s quite a big question. Not sure if there’s an official answer. I suppose it comes down to whether you have faith. I don’t know if there’s an official answer. You could talk to some theologians. We’ll get back to you.”
I could indeed talk to them, and have, but where would I stop? I could call theologians and call upon their writings and keep writing this article until it hit five trillion words, and still find no answer. I did eventually get an emailed shilly-shallying answer, but sadly it wasn’t: “Yes. There is absolutely an afterlife. And that’s official. Details, and a pull-down menu for options for either chosen afterlife, Paradisum or Hades, are on our website.” I’m being glib, I know, about the most serious subject we’ll ever confront, but there’s simply no time nor room here to properly entertain religion: you’ve either got it or you ain’t or, actually, perhaps, like many, can see the good sides while resenting the nasty. But that’s a whole other article. Maybe even a book. Hmm. A book, maybe two, about creation, and the afterlife. Can’t really see it selling.
Whether or not you’ve got religion, you are, one day, going to get death. And now, personally, secularly, I’ll end up looking forward to it with terror, yet I’d hope some guts, and, now, with MacNeice, stylish chums with either thin knitted ties or sexy twinsets, cardboard with working handles, seeds. Maybe in fact a hymn: the overtones don’t make them not beautiful. And trust friends to mark it with an absolute lack of mawkishness but a justifiable love of pathos and bathos.
And I hope a story or two about me might survive for one or two generations, the most that most of us can ask. Oh, and maybe Delius’s Walk to the Paradise Garden, because it’s beautiful and might force some friends to think of me for a full seven minutes without texting, but that choice may change a hundred times (our own funerals are the Desert Island Discs for mere mortals). Maybe some quotes, mainly Woody Allen, who had the fine: “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying.”
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