My ear was bent the other day about the current fashion for music at a crematorium funeral as the coffin descends from the catafalque. Apparently it has become noticeably more common over the past 6 months or so. My friend got quite angry about it - 'It's sentiment, not grief', and 'People want it because that's what they see on the TV in the soaps.' I couldn't possibly comment on the last as I don't watch soaps and don't have a TV most of the time anyway. (Although I can watch again via the internet, I suppose.) Technically it adds to the complexity of choreographing a funeral, both for the crematorium staff and also for the officiant, who has the job of making sure that eveything that is needed happens without rush and with dignity within the timeslot allocated, which can be as little as 20 mins at some crems.
I have some sympathy for the first point my friend made - I suspect that we have become unused to death and funerals in real life compared with our forebears. But we see a lot of them on the TV and in films and then we can only respond with sentiment, not grief as it isn't 'our' funeral. In fact, it's no one's funeral but a depiction of a funeral. So it wouldn't be surprising if sentiment gets mixed up in our real funerals more than perhaps it should. And these fictional funerals become our model for real funerals.
Picking up from a previous post, our local freebie paper recently carried a comment column by David Self this week about funerals. Quoting from it:
'Some of the saddest sights in Fenland are the wayside shrines at the scenes of road accidents. What [they] prove is that we no longer know how to mark a death. We've forgotten the old customs and resorted to ordering teddy bear or wreaths of yellow chrysanthemums and suffer uncomfortable half-hours in crematoria. Less than 100 years ago the death of a girl was marked by a procession through the village, her white-painted coffin carried by her school friends dressed also in white. Lads were buried in black-painted ones, carried by their mates dressed in their darkest clothes and black sashes. It was what you did. It gave you something to do.'
And David finishes with 'And if we revived the custom of having the coffin in the front room until the funeral and making the children visit it, they would grow up understanding the reality of death...'
I must be geting old because I think that he might be on to something here.
I have some sympathy for the first point my friend made - I suspect that we have become unused to death and funerals in real life compared with our forebears. But we see a lot of them on the TV and in films and then we can only respond with sentiment, not grief as it isn't 'our' funeral. In fact, it's no one's funeral but a depiction of a funeral. So it wouldn't be surprising if sentiment gets mixed up in our real funerals more than perhaps it should. And these fictional funerals become our model for real funerals.
Picking up from a previous post, our local freebie paper recently carried a comment column by David Self this week about funerals. Quoting from it:
'Some of the saddest sights in Fenland are the wayside shrines at the scenes of road accidents. What [they] prove is that we no longer know how to mark a death. We've forgotten the old customs and resorted to ordering teddy bear or wreaths of yellow chrysanthemums and suffer uncomfortable half-hours in crematoria. Less than 100 years ago the death of a girl was marked by a procession through the village, her white-painted coffin carried by her school friends dressed also in white. Lads were buried in black-painted ones, carried by their mates dressed in their darkest clothes and black sashes. It was what you did. It gave you something to do.'
And David finishes with 'And if we revived the custom of having the coffin in the front room until the funeral and making the children visit it, they would grow up understanding the reality of death...'
I must be geting old because I think that he might be on to something here.
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