Billy: Tony, d’you ever think about death?
Tony: Fuck off!
Billy: Nanight then.
—Billy Elliott, 2000
On a major TV channel broadcast in this country, on an evening drama show, two characters are looking up at a tree. When the camera pans up to the top of the branches, the viewer sees a hanging, blackened corpse, realistically human and dead. On the ground, it shows a patch of gloopy fluid that has supposedly dripped from the decomposing body. A crow is shown, pecking at the body’s head. Then it pecks an eyeball. The camera spares no detail. Within a few seconds, the head falls off and hits the ground.
In a small churchyard in the north of England, several dozen gravestones lie flat on the grass. They’ve been this way for five years now, since some kids who were bored of twocking kicked them over instead. Next door in the crematorium, the same kids, probably, leave syringes in the bushes, but the lawns are green and the memorial plaques neat.
String a spectrum between that hanging body, those flattened gravestones and those lawns, and it will hold the whole of the 21st century British way of death. But don’t expect it to be a straight line.
Though the TV show is broadcast at 10pm on a weekday night, its gruesomeness and hard-faced realism is not by now unusual. This is how, in the early twenty-first century, most of us see death – up close, impersonal and fictional, and in gory detail. Holby City, Casualty, any prime time cop show: Gorism, as one cultural critic has described it, is how death is served up to us daily, and we’re loving it.
There is no shortage of death elsewhere either. Not just in the carefully lit and sweetly instrumentalised mortuary shots that are now the bread-and-butter of TV drama. Not only the obscene body counts in any Hollywood action film. Reality follows fiction, too: Death or dead bodies fill half of the front pages of major newspapers, according to one study, even in a time of no wars or mass murders.
We tolerate and venerate death in art – Damien Hirst’s dead sharks; Bill Viola’s Nantes Triptych, a film of his mother dying; Ron Muerck’s Dead Dad – and pay money to see plastinated people, their skin removed, their bodies shaped into odd contorting positions by a German who wears a dodgy hat. In recent years, terrestrial TV has broadcast live autopsies and shown several people with terminal illnesses dying on-camera. There are enough of us who visit sites related to the dead (Ground Zero, Princess Diana’s Althorp island) for a new category of leisure – thanatourism – to have been invented. There is enough academic curiosity about death for the University of Bath to have set up the new Centre for Death and Society.
Death in our rational secular society can sell and entertain, educate and titillate. An observer might think because of this that we’re at ease with it. But this casual acceptance of death on telly and in art galleries sits oddly with the fact that British people tolerate having the world’s worst and messiest legislation for disposing of their dead. A society obsessed with demanding rights and respect offers no protest about the fact that no state burial authority is legally obliged to provide its citizens with a resting place. A country obsessed with Health and Safety and risk is unperturbed by the astonishing truth that anyone can set up in business as an undertaker or cemetery manager, so that your loved one’s coffin could be provided by someone who was a mechanic the day before, and be lowered into the ground or cremated by a former parks attendant the day after. Property programmes proliferate on TV, but no-one cares enough about the location, location, location of the dead to protest that the residents of the London boroughs of Hackney, Tower Hamlets and Camden, for example, can’t be buried in their own borough because there’s no space.
In the same society that stomachs live autopsies on TV, the retention by Alder Hey hospital of tissue and organs caused uproar. Councils’ inability to bury their residents is met with passivity, but when the vicar of Brightlingsea declared the churchyard to be full, his good parishioners were sufficiently excised to push dog excrement through his letterbox and make him death threats. What’s going on?
“There are lots of contradictory messages,” says the sociologist Tony Walter, one of the select band of academics and professionals who make death their business and vocation. “Dying, funerals, grieving – everything is up for grabs.” “It’s all happening in a fragmented way,” agrees fellow sociologist Dr. Glennys Howarth, who directs Bath’s Centre for Death and Society. “But death has definitely been put back on the agenda.” It may be a certainty that the average evening’s television will produce at least one corpse, but outside fiction and newspapers, death is in flux.
Not death itself, of course. It is still – until cryonics fans learn how to reanimate frozen corpses – life’s sure thing, as sure as the other constant about death, that how humans react to and deal with their dead is what makes them human. Monkeys manage sex and love, but only humans have, over time and depending on geography and faith, sent off their dead with some attempt to make meaning of it. So much so, that experts in pre-history use graves and cemeteries as a marker for whether a life form was human.
In 1839, as the Victorian medical doctor and burial reformer George Walker wrote in his groundbreaking Gatherings from Graveyards, “it would be tedious to point out how much the customs of different nations have varied upon the subject of burials.” It would. But the burial, burning or otherwise disposal of a society’s dead has happened since the beginning. Everyone does it and has done it, whether by leaving their dead to be eaten by vultures; burning them on funeral pyres; mummifying them in tombs or burying them in earth.
All these rites have been dreamed up to mark a transition both of the dead person, on their way somehow to somewhere else, and of the mourning humans left alive and behind, who must readjust to the hole in society left by the absence of the dead. Customs for dealing with the dead resist most generalisations – the differences between English and French habits are as wide as the Channel is not; the deep and abiding similarities of the US and the UK, so dear to Bush and Blair, are nonsensical in the face of the American obsessions with embalming, couching (propping the dead up on a chaise longue, dead head on hand) and open casket viewing, which we find odd, and of our overwhelming preference for cremation, which they do.
It was only 123 years ago, for example, that Welsh doctor and druid William Price placed his dead son, whose name was Jesu Grist, in a cask half-filled with paraffin oil and set him alight on top of a Welsh hillside, as everyone was coming home from church, so that everyone could see. He was stopped and prosecuted, but Price’s DIY cremation, along with an active pro-cremation lobby, began the revolution. Back then, everyone was buried. After the two World Wars, cremation picked up. In war-time, there wasn’t the money to send all the bodies home, and people got used to having no-one to bury. The simplicity suited them. There was so much death, people were sick of it. Cremation seemed cleaner, more sanitised. It helped to push death away. Now, 70% of Britons choose to be cremated. In some areas – Bournemouth, for example, and some parts of London – it’s 80%.
But the cleanliness of cremation was a self-comforting delusion. Not just because cremation has turned out to be more polluter than cleanser, as the man-made fibres and plastics of coffins and caskets and linings were found to turn into toxic emissions. But because it helped post-war Britain luxuriate in an increasingly common fiction. Death was beatable. “In the middle of the 20th century,” says Tony Walter, “most infectious diseases, which had killed most humans, had been beaten. People believe in progress and science and the future. There was the belief that science had conquered nature, the sense that science had beaten death, but also the sense that people knew it hadn’t, so it was pushed under the carpet.” If death was made invisible and pushed away, wrote the French social historian Philippe Ariès, in two monumental explorations of death published in the 1970s, it was because of this essential failure; that death continues to exist in a society that prides itself on having eliminated suffering. Increasing secularism had banished the need for hell and sin; medicine had taken care of physical pain. “Death should have disappeared along with disease but it persists; it is not even any longer in retreat.” We deal with this in two ways; by making it mundane, “by reducing it to an ordinary thing, as insignificant as necessarym” and by making it taboo. Invisible, and unsayable.
It is fashionable, still, to say that death today is taboo. The art company Welfare State International made a career out of putting on performances and exhibiting artwork “about this major cultural taboo.” Co-operative Funeralcare, the biggest supplier of pre-need funeral plans in the country, points out that only 1% of the population has made any arrangement for his/her funeral, compared to 70% of people in Holland, because, according to their marketing director, “people don’t want to talk about death. It’s more of a taboo in this country.”
Our modern habits are held up in comparison with those of the Victorians, with their strict coded rituals and their mourning cards and teapots, with their openness about death. We come off poorly, it is said, with our 15 minute funeral services in soulless crematoria, our unsentimental, secular send-offs. We are found wanting. On average, we stop visiting graves after only five years. In a socially and geographically mobile society, we have spurned the sentimental and monumental aesthetic of the Victorian cemetery, all weeping and weeping willows, for a process that leaves us with nothing but ashes, with no site to mourn. We are the direct descendants of the war-time stoics, who packed up their troubles in kit bags and moved on, upper lip untroubled. Even the professionals aren’t immune to this silence about death. At the 2004 conference of the Institute for Cemetery and Crematorium Management, I sat through several hours of lectures before anyone mentioned the word “dead.” Cemetery managers routinely describe themselves as “local authority officials.” Telling the truth, for Dr. Ian Hussein, director of the City of London Crematorium and Cemetery, “is the death of the conversation. Or people will make fun of it, with the same old gags – ‘ that’s a dead good job’ ‘ you must be dying to get to work.’” The University of Bath might now have made death mainstream, but professors who study death get a mixed reaction. “If you say you’re writing about afterlife beliefs,” says Walter, who ran an innovative Msc in Death Studies at Reading University in the 1990s, “people will say ‘that’s fascinating,’ If you say you’re writing about dying and bereavement, no-one wants to know.”
In 1991, Walter wrote an important journal article called Taboo or not Taboo. He dismisses it, now, because times have moved so fast, it’s out-dated. But he doesn’t think death is a taboo subject. “I think the word taboo is problematic,” agrees Dr. Jenny Hockey, whose Environments of Memory research project at the University of Sheffield explores what people do with cremated remains. “But we have certainly come through a time when death is hidden.”
In 1965, the social anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer wrote that sex and death had swapped places between Victorian times to now. Death was public then, and sex was private and shameful. Now, he wrote, the corpse was the new pornography. In the way the cadaver is used to titillate, this is true. But also because, like pornography, death is everywhere and people still choose not to see it. In 1975, bereavement expert Elizabeth Kübler Ross wrote that death was “a dreaded and unspeakable issue to be avoided by every means possible in our society.” Where once we died at home and lay in the front room, the curtains closed to cool a decaying body, now 80% of us die away from home, in hospitals, hospices or other institutions. Where once a neighbourhood had a laying-out woman, who came to wash and dress the corpse, now all is done by professionals, from the doctors who try to stop death – and decide when it happens – to the funeral directors who manage our mourning. Though 600,000 people die in Britain every year, only a minority of the population are affected at a time. This minority, chooses – or is not given the choice to – see a corpse. Though we live in snap-happy times, there are no Victorian-style memento mori photographs of our dead stuck with magnets to our Smeg fridges. The wealth of death on TV is only possible, writes Douglas Davies in A Brief History of Death, because it “symbolizes to a great degree the nature of death in contemporary Britain; everyone knows that it is there but largely invisible. It is safe when viewed in comfort.” It can be viewed in comfort because it’s not real. Outside the TV comfort zone, the average Briton is more insulated from real dead bodies than ever before in history.
In this, I am statistically anomalous. A quick poll of peers revealed that, though well-travelled, most had gone through at least 30 years of life without seeing death. I managed five years, until my father died in the back yard. I remember his body on the cobbles and being kept in at school play-time, like grief was contagious. The next bodies I saw were in a mortuary in northern Italy, because during the course of writing a magazine about death, it was decided the editorial staff should see what they were writing about. My childhood experience gave me no great wisdom, and I was as scared as the rest, cowering behind the double doors in the cool corridor, waiting to be admitted. The anticipation was worse than the roomful of dead people. Not because the mortuary assistant took ghoulish pleasure in telling us to touch the woman with the bloated stomach who had died of cancer, or showing us the man who had turned slightly green. Not because of the equally ghoulish sight, in this rich, thrustingly modern city in Italy’s industrial heartland, of each corpse’s little finger being tied to a bell-pull, and of the little room nearby where a panel of bells, familiar from any great house’s kitchen, waited in case anyone wasn’t really dead and started ringing. But the bodies were not fearsome, because there was no-one in them.
My latest dead body was more recent. He was burning in a cremator in a cemetery in Bournemouth. Cemetery manager Julie Dunk had offered a tour of the premises, but she was hesitant about this part. She didn’t want to upset me. She told me of her first time looking through a cremator’s spy-hole, and how her knees had trembled. Despite my father, despite the mortuary, my knees did the same. I heard nothing of what she was telling me, until I looked through the spy-hole and saw flames engulfing a rib-cage. Black on orange. My knees stopped trembling. It looked peaceful. It looked cleansing. It was not upsetting. It looked like everything anyone who has ever promoted cremation would want me to think.
All these bodies make me unusual. In Victorian Britain, I would have been anomalous too, for not having seen more of them. George Walker’s Gatherings from Graveyards gave scandalous insight into the atrocious state of the capital’s church burial grounds, the only sites then set aside for disposal of the dead. He saw bodies buried just beneath the surface. He saw churchyards so full, they had been piled with earth into which new bodies were buried, up to the height of the first floor windows of the houses crowded round the churchyards. He wrote of a young woman who, “amongst a heap of rubbish recognised the finger of her mother, who had been buried there a short time previous.” At Whitechapel Church, he reported, “the ground [was] so densely crowded as to present one entire mass of human bones and putrefaction.
He wrote of stench and putrescence, and of gravediggers killed by the “miasma” of decaying corpses. He wrote that London stank of death, and he was right. The industrial revolution had swollen urban populations. Some cities had increased by a third in 15 years. People lived in crowded conditions where disease liked to be. More people were living, and more people died. Even so, wrote Walker, there is no excuse. “These remains of what once were gay, perhaps virtuous and eminent, are treated with ruthless indifference.”
The scandal caused by his writings – which Gladstone wrote about in his diary – combined with a popular and reasonable fear of body snatchers and anatomists. In Walker’s time, the body snatchers Burke and Hare were every child’s bogeyman. (The reaction to the recent theft of broadcaster Alistair Cooke’s body parts, by contrast, has been strangely muted.) Re-use, it was decided, should be banned forever, and the 1857 Burial Act saw to it. Human remains would be buried for perpetuity. No remains, once buried, could ever be dug up again without a special licence. Cemeteries would be built outside urban areas, and the Church would no longer have sole responsibility for the dead. The bodies would from now on rest in spacious lawns far from town centres, with enough space to accord the dead some dignity and the living good health. The problem seemed sorted.
And so it was, for a while. The Victorians left us an excellent legacy in sanitation of all sorts, from Sir Joseph Bazalgette’s London sewer system, to thousands of carefully-planned and spacious cemeteries that they thought would last forever. But the provision is running out, and the 1857 Burial Act is the reason why. In 2001, the House of Commons Environment, Transport and Regional Affairs Committee issued an authoritative and damning report on the state of our cemeteries. The introduction began as the report meant to go on. “The burial crisis of the 1850s rushed through “an unthinking series of legislative enactments that ensured an effective short-term solution to the problems of the day, but left Britain with a disastrous long-term legacy.” Even a schoolchild could see the economic lunacy of guaranteeing a burial plot in perpetuity, but only demanding a one-off burial fee. The cemetery was doomed to be from the beginning “a wasting asset.” How could it be otherwise?
‘If it hadn’t been for cremation,” says Ian Hussein, “we’d have had a burial crisis years ago.” Cremation frees up space, because it produces 6 pounds of ashes that can be scattered, not 15 stone of flesh and bones and a heavy coffin that takes up room and can’t be moved. It also brings in money, being cheaper and more popular. Despite a 1989 Audit Commission report telling cemetery managers it was bad practice to use cremation income to offset their other costs, this is the practice, and it is economically inevitable. Testifying to the Select Committee, Carlisle cemetery manager Ken West – the only man awarded an MBE for bereavement services – put it plainly. In 2001, a burial fee of £400 would cost the cemetery £700 over 50 years. Over 100 years, it approaches £5000. “Cemeteries have been in a dependency culture for 150 years,” said West. “[there are] deficits, cemeteries wiped out as wasted spaces, denigrated and reduced […] to places where you put somebody in with a mowing machine and that’s the end of it.”
Cemeteries are neglected, and the people who run them feel equally unloved. Ian Hussein is responsible for a staff of 88, half a million dead bodies, 200 acres and 7 miles of roads. “And when I tell people what I do,” he says, “they say, ‘oh all you do is dig holes.’” An employee of a War Graves cemetery in Belgium defined his work as “horticulture around masonry.” If only it were so easy. “The problem is,” says Julie Dunk, “is that our service fits everywhere and nowhere. There are elements of ground maintenance, so we’re with parks. There are environmental elements, so we’re in environmental services. There are people elements, so it’s social services. There are financial issues, so we’re with financial services.” Yet in a 1994 report on the management of old cemetery land, researchers Julie Rugg and Julie Dunk found that a quarter of local authorities had no principal cemetery officer. The person responsible for ensuring the dignified disposal of the dead often was also responsible for open spaces, allotments or pest control. Only 21% of cemetery officers had a diploma. It’s been known for the officer in charge of the disposal of human dead to work in the council’s Tourism department. And tourism usually takes up more of his time.
There’s nothing wrong with not being trained to start with. The bereavement services industry, as the death business is known, is full of people who drifted into it and stayed, attracted by the pastoral parts of the job, by the fact that they could help people. Ian Hussein used to work in pest control. Julie Dunk was an academic researching cemeteries. She started working at the cemetery “because I liked all the people I met who were doing this job”. She likes the financial headaches and bureaucracy less. Many cemetery managers have a joke that the only time they’ll see an elected council member is in a hearse. They call themselves the Cinderella service: unpaid, unloved, best kept out of sight. “Being a cemetery manager,” says Hussein, “means you’re undervalued, underappreciated and poorly respected. Making people happy, meeting their needs is the satisfying part of the job. But being a cemetery manager also means you’re the devil reincarnated. You’re never in the press unless you’ve done something wrong, and usually you haven’t.” Usually, the headlines are to do with removing things from graves, like cans of beer left for dead drinkers, or soft toys or railings that could cause safety problems. “People want to treat the cemetery as their own garden,” says Hussein, “but it’s not.” Glass items get filled with rain in summer, then freeze, expand and shatter in summer. People can fall on railings. The war graves aesthetic which now stands in for what a tidy cemetery should look like – flat green lawns, clean white crosses – is kept that way because Britain chooses to fund and donate to the War Graves Commission far more lavishly than to its resting places for the peacetime dead. “I read that the War Graves Commission have one member of staff for every 200 graves,” says Ken West. When he ran Carlisle cemetery (he’s now at Croydon), he had one staff-member per 5000 graves. More than horticulture around masonry, the average British churchyard or cemetery is horticulture around kerbstones, teddy bears, glass jars, spiked railings and ceramic gnomes.
Such battles arise because in the bureaucratic muddle that is how we currently deal with the dead is a central absurdity: People who are lying in graves, in bodily or ash form, don’t own the land they’re lying in. Nor do their relatives. An ashes or burial plot is only leased, not bought. The lease might be for 50 years or 100 or perpetuity, but it’s never for ever. (Private cemeteries who offer perpetuity are just putting off the inevitable, says Ken West, who has seen a new mausoleum being built on ground that clearly had bone fragments in it, and was obviously a cleared area of unclaimed graves.) Only the headstone belongs to the family, which leads to the headline-generating situation of cemetery managers being entitled to remove objects from graves, and being able to lay down headstones judged to be unsafe, if a family cannot be found to pay the cost of making them safer. A Health and Safety Executive memo led to what the HSE later called “over-zealous behaviour by indiscriminate authorities,” who laid down hundreds of stones at a time. The HSE does not, said its chairman in a Mounbatten Lecture last year, “ban conkers or require gravestones to be covered in yellow binliners.” Yet the image of a “burly gravediggers going round knocking unsafe memorials over,” in the words of the National Association of Cemetery Friends, persists enough for MPs to protest regularly in the commons on behalf of their outraged constituents, and to wonder when the government will get round to producing its promised safe practice on unsafe memorials, which is currently in the same place as any other reform to do with death: Parliamentary purgatory.
The result, in the words of Ian Hussein, “is a flipping big problem.” He first brought up all the issues – the lack of space, the lack of money – in a speech in 1993. His own cemetery, being huge, had enough space for years. But others didn’t. Several London boroughs will soon run out of space. In Willesden New Cemetery in Brent, new burials are only possible by adding several feet of topsoil to the ground level and burying people in that. “This isn’t about the posh cemeteries,” says Hussein, whose lush and spacious premises are the envy of the industry. “It’s about your bog standard one in South Shields.” It’s about cemeteries like the one in Withernsea, where 300 headstones were kicked over in one night (and police later questioned two boys aged 9 and 11). It’s about All Hallows churchyard in the Nottinghamshire village of Gedling, where local residents have set up volunteer patrols after kids knocked down headstones. It’s about disused private cemeteries taken over by local authorities in the 1970s and 1980s, which were promptly cleared with bulldozers. It’s about today’s cemeteries where overenthusiastic and insensitive cemetery managers, believing themselves required by the Health and Safety Executive to lay down unsafe gravestones (the HSE says it was just advice, not requirement), laid down thousands.
It’s about, above all, a lack of money and a lack of a future. Though written in dry government-speak, the language of the Select Committee’s final report reflected its MPs’ genuine shock. “We did not come to the subject of cemeteries expecting to find that all was well. Even so, we were taken aback by the sheer magnitude of the problems.”
In his 1993 paper, Ian Hussein proposed a solution. Like most cemetery managers, he wanted to be allowed to re-use already occupied graves, using the “lift and deepen” method, whereby bodies in existing graves that are unclaimed by relatives would be exhumed, put in a smaller container (as their bodies will be reduced to bones) and reburied at a greater depth, freeing up space on top for more burials. Under current law, that’s illegal. (“Unless you’re Tesco or a Sainsbury’s,” sniffs one cemetery manager, because the government issues on average one exhumation licence a week “in connection with the development of the burial ground for other purposes”).
Under existing London legislation, Hussein can use up existing space in existing graves – reclaiming them, but not re-using them – but he can’t touch the remains. It’s not enough. “This is D-Day,” says Julie Dunk. “We really are at crisis point.” Cremation has delayed D-Day, not beaten it. Cremation rates have probably peaked, says Dr. Peter Jupp, chairman of the Cremation Society Council, and ethnic minorities who dislike cremation – Jews, Muslims, Afro-Caribbeans – aren’t going away. Burial, Tony Walter told the select committee, should be reasonably local, accessible, safe to visit and the burial ground should be sustainable. It should also be a choice. “It’s all ‘let the dead rest in peace,’” says Julie Rugg, “but the alternative is an old lady who gets on a bus and changes three times to go and see her husband’s grave, because all the cemeteries near her have closed.” She’ll also be paying more. In my local borough of Hackney, if I choose burial by a local authority, I can pay £4127 for a grave, burial and the cheapest headstone in Greenwich, for example, or four times the rate Greenwich residents pay. In a Funeral Costs Survey commissioned this year by the insurers American Life, the highest quote for burial, in London Southgate, was £6140. It’s not good enough, says Ken West, and it’s going to get worse. “We can only be businesses if we sting the customer. The going rate for a grave for 2 is £2000 and in a few years it’ll be more. We’re forcing people towards cremation.”
By most reckonings, this is a crisis. Yet so far, the government has spent 13 years not coming to a decision on it. “It’s the yuk factor,” says Oxford MP Dr. Evan Harris, one of the few sitting members of Parliament to dare to bring up the d word. “For some reason, the government thinks the public can’t stomach talking about death. And they think it won’t win votes.” It won’t, technically, as most disposal is dealt with at local authority level or by churches. But that doesn’t excuse the extraordinary policy stagnation of a government.
A Burial and Cemeteries Advisory Group was set up after the Select Committee Report, though its progress has been as glacially slow as the government’s. A consultation exercise and report was promised. Last year, Tory MP Tony Wright complained in the House that “there is still no advice. We have reports. We have advisory groups. We have sub-groups of advisory groups. We have consultation papers. What we do not have is policy or good practice guidance to inform the activities of burial authorities as they embark upon the safety testing of memorials.” Responsibility for burial and cremation policy was shifted late last year from the Home Office to the Department of Constitutional Affairs, though most burial authorities are local authorities, and so some aspects of death come under the banner of the Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions. New death minister Harriet Harman promptly showed that change has not speeded up from its usual deathly slow pace by promising to publish the results of the consultation into re-use “sometime later this year.” And you can be sure, says Evan Harris, that when she does announce it, it’ll be at the end of a day’s business in the Commons. In the graveyard shift. “On these sorts of issues,” says Harris, “abortion, euthanasia, re-use of graves – the government is reluctant to have them debated. It’s an overreaction due to mawkishness.”
There’s always some excuse, says Dr. Julie Rugg, who runs the Cemetery Research Group at the University of York. “In 2001, they said they couldn’t make an announcement after 9/11. Then they said it was the Iraq war. Then because of the election. There’s always something. But the Church of England has been doing re-use for centuries. Gravediggers will tell you they’re always shoving bones aside.” Church burial grounds are governed by ecclesiastical law. The church handbook allows for re-use after 50 years, and no-one’s protested much about that. The problem, says Rugg, is that people only care intermittently. The Cemetery Research Group was set up in response to Westminster Council notoriously selling off three cemeteries for 5p each in 1987. It caused a scandal, and then it went away (and the council bought the cemeteries back five years later for £4.2 million). Day to day, “most people don’t notice cemeteries unless they walk past one.” Despite a revival of interest in Victorian cemetery aesthetics, and various active Friends groups saving this or that cemetery or burial ground, the vast of Britons only go to a cemetery for a funeral. Now that most are cremated, they can avoid grave plots – and the cold, freezing funerals on Welsh hillsides that Aneurin Bevan famously complained of – altogether.
Even so, the British public probably have a greater stomach than they’re given credit for, at least about re-using graves. In 1995, the academics Douglas Davies and Alastair Shaw conducted 1603 in-depth interviews with people about re-use. Over half said they would be in favour, if the body was undisturbed for at least 75 years. A survey by Co-operative Funeralcare was less optimistic, finding that six out of ten respondents were against the idea, but also less in-depth. The reaction of the parishioners of Brightlingsea, who hounded their vicar out of town when he said the churchyard was full, may give pause for thought. “The tabloids always treat it as “the council wants to dig up granny,” says Julie Dunk. “But when you put a reasoned argument to people, they’re fine. Most people couldn’t give a monkey’s as long as it’s 100 years. They think that’s what happens anyway.”
“Perhaps those who are worrying about it,” says funeral historian Dr. Julian Litten,” should give thought to their own family – do you visit your grandparents? Do you even know where they’re buried? You go to a cemetery today and see swathes of unvisited monuments and the argument answers itself.” But in the 1970s and 1980s, as the Cemetery Research Group wrote in a memorandum to the Select Committee, “disused private cemeteries were taken over by local authorities who did clearing. The image of a “philistine on a bulldozer has endured.”
Along with considerable ignorance and assumption. Newspapers get mileage out of “Double-decker graves!” headlines, and “of course there should be some sense and sensibility,” says Litten, but if someone did a count of unmarked graves, the public would be absolutely astounded.”
There’s plenty of sense and sensibility next-door. France offers renewable grave plot leases of as little as 10 years. In Germany, families are given the option to renew their lease, and when that runs out, the grave is handed over to someone who does want it. Even in the sentimental Catholic state of Italy, where pictures of Padre Pio’s stigmata are commonly displayed in shops, the dead are removed after a short lease and put in an ossuary. Sentimentality and reverence has a place alongside practicality. In all these places, money keeps coming in, space is always available and no-one’s complaining.
But there are surprising pockets of practicality here, too. Ian Hussein has reclaimed over 1000 graves at the City of London. He was expecting to sell the plots with the plainest monuments, the least offensive and the easiest to stamp with new ownership. He was wrong. Since the scheme started six months ago, he’s sold six reclaimed graves. Three that he sold in one month all had prominent inscriptions, though the headstones had been reversed. All were spruced up and in very des-res funereal locations on the roadside, for a third of the price. Perhaps a nation obsessed with property values has finally returned to applying them to the dead.
In 1977, Philippe Ariès found that the English had a suppression of mourning “not due to the frivolity of survivors but to a merciless coercion applied by society [that] refuses to participate in the emotion of the bereaved.” Death could be denied in practice, “even if one accepts its reality in principle.” That was true then. But now it would be hard to be so definitive. “Things really started changing 10 years ago,” says Julie Rugg. After the post-war stoicism, there is thawing. “After 50 years of peace and affluence,” says Tony Walter, “people have time to explore their emotions and feelings. Families are wondering about the right way to grieve.”
Only 20 years ago, remembers John Harris, whose family runs the venerable East London funeral firm T. Cribb & Son, “there was definitely a conveyor belt funeral. They called us a disposal service and that’s what we were. There was a funeral every 20 minutes. You can’t say goodbye to someone who’s lived 80 years in 20 minutes.” This was possible, wrote the Economist in 1997, because “the funeral industry thrives on the acumen of its managers, but also because of three features of the market: ignorance, sentiment and taboo.” The stereotype of the black-suited undertaker, representative of the dismal trade, prevailed. “Many people are totally in the hands of the funeral industry,” wrote Colin Brown of the Consumers’ Association in the mid 1990s. “Right through from the GP or hospital, police, maybe coroner, funeral directors, clergy, cremation or burial staff, monumental masons, the whole lot. People had no idea what the boundaries are between their legal, medical and personal rights and obligations, and their responsibilities. They don’t know what is standard practice.” The funeral is a distress purchase. In a way, it’s the easiest sell going. “People don’t know what to expect,” wrote the Office of Fair Trading in a 2001 report. “[They] spend little time thinking about their purchase and feel under pressure to sort everything out quickly.” In the words of one grieving relative, ““Price is the sort of last thing you want to mention. You’re plunging in feet first, but you’re too upset to ask any more questions than you have to.”
Complaints, consequently, were few. The OFT reported that “funeral directors were generally found to be flexible, sensitive and patient.” They still are, according to Brian Parsons, editor of the Funeral Services Journal, who says that funeral firms often survey their clients “and they get a high rate of positive response.” Funeral directors are, admittedly, entirely self-regulated, through three trade associations (the cemetery industry, meanwhile, has the Charter for the Bereaved code of practice). There are concerns about some cemetery and crem managers who are a little too cosy with favoured funeral directors. There are concerns about the reach of Dignity UK, which used to be owned by US funereal monolith Service Corporation International. Dignity has only 13% of the market, but its ownership of mortuaries, funeral parlours, cemeteries and crematoria, of the whole chain of death, has caused some to wonder whether it has a monopoly, but a vertical one. There are, always, concerns with cost. The average price of a “simple” burial, according to the Survey of Funeral Costs commissioned by American Life insurance company, has risen 61% in five years, to £2048.
Ken West, meanwhile, sitting in his kitchen near Croydon with his wife Anne, a former midwife (leading to the nicknames Hatch and Dispatch or Sperm and Worm) is suspicious of an increasing tendency to embalm. “In the 1960s there was no embalming. Now some funeral directors call it “hygienic treatment” and the funeral director says, “we’d like to hygienically treat the body” and what family is going to say no? Very few people ask what it is. Embalming is an American practice and it’s not good for the environment.” He has seen coffins seeping formaldehyde onto bearers’ shoulders. He knows one funeral director who is convinced his cancer has come from years of working with formaldehyde. He concedes that there are cases where embalming is useful – if someone has died abroad, or if a body has been lying around, undiscovered, or if there needs to be a delay. But there is too much of it, in his view, and has said so in public, notably during a public discussion with an embalmer at the ICCM conference that most attendees still remember.
Nonetheless, according to most death industry practitioners, the funeral service industry works, partly because good service ensures good business, and the business has to be good when it is tough. Funeral directors are castigated for expensive funerals (though journalists are less outraged by much more costly weddings), but they regularly write off bad debt. In 1998, £20 million in unpaid debt was written off. (Two-thirds allow a gentlemanly 28 days for payment, and some allow 90.) Competition is fierce, too, and hampered by the perceived unreadiness of the public to tolerate funeral parlour advertising outside yellow page directories. In 2000, when the Burymeright.com website, where subscribers can record their funeral wishes, produced a cinema ad, it was immediately banned by the Broadcast Advertising Clearance Centre. The British public’s mind now is considered broad enough to tolerate ads exhorting us to love our bums, but not to pre-consider our funeral needs or maple over cardboard caskets. to Though the French have their funeral products supermarkets run by Michel Leclerc, similar ventures over here, in Brighton and London, have failed. It’s a rare funeral parlour that displays the tools of its trade to passers-by, though one Co-operative Funeral Care franchise in East London is noted for its coffin in the window. The Co-op has poked at convention with its pre-need funeral plans, too, daring to send out direct marketing through the post, “though we were careful never to address it to an individual.” It’s a very sensitive subject, says Co-op marketing director Ian Mackie, who admits that the company instead uses the apparently more sensitive tactic of salesmen at funerals quietly suggesting to mourners that they might want to start thinking ahead.
The market is harder now too, says John Harris, “because people shop around.” They come to his sedate and large premises in Beckton, handily placed next to Asda, and they increasingly use the same mechanism of choice in funerals that they would use unthinkingly next door. The evidence so far is anecdotal, and the OFT report only five years ago reported that 92% of people stuck with the first funeral director they found, but still, something is afoot, and the something is shopping. “Graves and funerals are full of stuff now,” says Julie Rugg of the Cemetery Research Group. “Every purchase is an experience of individuality. The Victorians had their mourning cards and teapots and we can buy containers for cremated remains at B&Q.”
Consumerism has seeped back into death. In all aspects of the bereavement and disposal process, there is now choice and more choice. Coffins have given way on one hand to the overpriced, overstuffed satin-lined caskets of America, and to the ecologically friendly wicker or cardboard coffin on the other. Funerals have gone from the 15 minute conveyor built to carefully prepared homages to the dead that mix Robbie Williams with Abide with me. A medieval Joe Bloggs wouldn’t recognise a modern funeral. He’d be confused by the tenses, because his own would have been all about his prospecs for the next life. There would have been candles burned, if his family were rich enough, to pray for his soul while he presumably lingered in purgatory. Everything was about his future existence, not the crappy, hard one he’d left behind. Up until Victorian times, says Dr. Peter Jupp, “funerals used to be about the prospective fulfilment of identity. People became most fully human in heaven.” Now, there are eulogies about the dead person’s life. There are songs he or she liked. Funerals look backwards. They celebrate a life lived, not a staging post to somewhere else. They are more of a full stop, and more of a help. “I’m sure the modern funeral assists enormously in the grieving process,” says Julien Litten.
At the 2004 Institute of Crematorium and Cemetery Management Conference, the men from Wesley Music were certainly doing good business. Their innovative software system enables crematoria and churches to download requested songs and prepared song-lists before the funeral. It is part of a revolution. Before, says Wesley director Neil Heskins, “People would rely on the minister to tell them what to have, and he’d reel off his favourite hymns and that would be it.” By the late 1990s, cemetery and crem managers noticed the change. At first, they were ill-equipped for it, so that families would turn up for the service bearing Cds and tapes, and a member of staff would have to spend all day cueing them on an ordinary ghetto-blaster. If they were scratched, or the audio levels didn’t match, or the CD was missing because the family had been playing it the night before, too bad. The software system smoothes things out, though perhaps not to everyone’s taste. Despite our secular tastes and poor church attendance, and though humanist celebrants are available, 98% of people still choose a religious minister to officiate at the funeral. Some of these church ministers are less flexible than others. Some balk at songs like A Road to Hell. Others wonder about the choice of Give me Joy in my Heart, whose third verse begins “Give me oil in my lamp keep me burning.” Father John McCormack, chaplain of St. Barnabas hospice in Worthing, thinks God “can take anything we throw at her.” But some clergy even ban My Way, ” because it has a line about ‘not as one who kneels’. The message is you don’t need God. It is entirely self-centred, but for the purposes of a bereaved family, if that song meant a lot, that’s what they should have.”
Partly, this is due to a younger generation unused to churches and hymns. Partly, it’s the spirit of the times. Choice rules. Though an almighty scandal broke out last year when Torquay crematorium was instructed to remove its cross for health and safety reasons, many crematoria now routinely have removable religious symbols. Some families want some of them, some want all, some want none. Some want to pick and mix. “There’s been cross-pollinisation of cultures,” says funeral director John Harris. “You can get a New Orleans jazz band at a Cof E funeral, hijacked from an Afro-Caribbean service. Hindus and Sikhs have loads of flowers now, which isn’t traditional.” Fusion funerals exist alongside a new vogue for Victorian ostentation. T. Cribb & Son’s Belgian black horses and carriage were retired in 1943. In 1973, they were brought back again, and now they’re used several hundred times a year, enough for Cribbs to run its own farm in Essex, and feed its dozen black horses on its own home-grown hay. Old can go with new: At Cribbs premises, antique horse-related paraphernalia fills display cabinets around the walls, and the tables hold brochures for the White Dove company, which will release white doves at a funeral for £95 a pair (and £10 for each additional pair).
If this nodding backward and forward is confusing, so is the breadth of disposal methods that are available. Ken West began the first woodland burial in Carlisle in 1993, after two single women told him they didn’t want to be buried in his cemetery, because they were worried that no-one would visit the grave, and his cemetery was boring, anyway. They didn’t want to be buried in their back gardens, though this is legal, as long as any body or ash burials are recorded on the deeds, because it lowers house prices by at least 20%. West, an ardent environmentalist, had already been working on the “living churchyard” concept, where parts of a churchyard are left to grow wild and get back to nature. The living churchyard satisfied his conviction that a place of rest didn’t have to be an environmentally damaging one, and confirmed his distaste for the modern cemetery aesthetic. “Mowing is a great killer of wildlife and it uses finite fuels.” The hostility he received about the living churchyard was puzzling, at first. People said it looked unkempt. They said he’d deliberately chosen to let grass grow wild on paupers’ graves. This was true, as the poor graves were the most unvisited. But the resistance, West decided, was about more than that. “I think people fear being out of control. They need to control nature.”
When he got the idea to apply the wildness of the living churchyard concept to burial, to enable people to be buried in less environmentally-damaging coffins in woodland, with no headstone and no pollution, there was equal umbrage from controlling interests. “I went to the National Association of Funeral Directors and said the words “woodland burial,” and a hush fell over the room.” Local funeral homes refused to sell him cardboard coffins, so he sourced and sold his won. Carlisle’s natural burial ground was begun in 1993. “I had to promise the authority there wouldn’t be any coffins on roof-racks. The first one I did was a coffin on a roof-rack.” There was also the funeral where the family wanted to honour their grandfather by writing his favourite expression on the cardboard coffin, so that at least one person has been sent into the next world in cardboard covered with “Shut that bloody door!” Neither funeral managed to derail woodland burial: There are 200 woodland burial sites across the country, and any funeral director sells cardboard coffins.
Some of woodland burials’ fans are people who would previously have chosen cremation, believing it to be green. Revelations that cremators actually produced toxic emissions were highlighted by the 1990 Environmental Protection Act. This required expensive filtration systems to be installed by cash-strapped crem authorities and alarmed green groups. Friends of the Earth publicly recommended burial instead. Now, again, the crematoria industry must figure out how to pay for expensive filtration systems that cut down on mercury emissions caused by our amalgam fillings. (The obvious solution of removing teeth before death has been judged too resonant of the Holocaust, and the British Dental Association has yet to offer to meet the cost of the fillings that were installed by their members.) Cremators could be greener in other ways, too. Down in Bournemouth’s cremator room, Julie Dunk talks wistfully of Swedes, who can store bodies then cremate them in three-day bursts, where the cremator is kept firing for 72 hours straight. Not like here, where cremators work 11am to 5pm, usually, which uses more gas by constantly having to heat up a cooled down cremator. Bournemouth’s gas bill is £80,000 a year, and it doesn’t have to be.
Steve, Bournemouth’s cremation technician, has been doing his job for 20 years. He likes his job, though it gets the jokes, and he shows off the computer technology with pride. It looks fancy, and is produced by the German firm Facultieve Technologies, whose cremation equipment is as good as their name is weird. On one screen, Steve can switch between detailed graphic representations of what’s happening in the three cremators, with temperatures – 900 Celsius, usually – and emission information. The body in number one, he shows me, has been burning for 60 minutes at 900 Celsius, and is nearly done. The middle one shows that the coffin has burned, but the body is still going. The body in cremator number 3 has just arrived, and has at least 70 minutes to go. The surroundings are less aesthetically soothing than those of the pleasant chapels above. Upstairs, there is carpeting and soothing seating arrangements. Here, there are industrial brick walls and plain paint, because a planned overhaul has yet to take place, after a fire started when a cremator door jammed open, and the financial priority is the mercury filtration equipment, not the décor. But the dead are well-served by the living who choose to deal with them, better than people think. Steve gets tired of the misconceptions. “People who think they’re not getting their relative’s ashes, that we mix them up!” Instead, every body, once it emerges from the cremator, is placed in an individual tray, and the pieces of bone – their marrow burned out, so they’re feather-light and still bear the traces of veins – are ground up in a cremulator, something like a washing-machine drum but filled with large ball-bearings. Then each person goes into an individual container, which has an ID label on the inside and the outside. “Even when we had the fire,” says Steve, “and some of the plastic jars started melting, we didn’t mix anyone up.”
The other myth is the riches. Next to the cremulator, Steve sifts through the ashes for metal. He can spot a gold tooth at fifty paces, though to me it looks like a small dark indistinguished pellet. There are metal bits from shoes, and hip and joint replacements. There is not, though, enough to make anyone rich. “The amount of gold I’ve seen could have paid for a kitchen conversion, if that.” In fact, all the metal, including hip replacements, metal from shoes, teeth and anything else, is either sold and the proceeds given to charity, or buried in landfill. A new recycling scheme run by the Institute of Cemetery and Cremation Management has already got a quarter of creamtoria signed up.
The remains are given back to the families in an urn of their choice, or in the standard receptacle of thick plastic. A label bearing the person’s name is kept on the inside and on the outside, in case of mishap. After that, it’s up to the family what they do with them. And here, according to Dr. Jenny Hockey’s research into what happens to ashes, there have been equally seismic shifts. 30 years ago, only 12% of people took the ashes away from a crematorium. Most were content to have the ashes scattered on site. Some never bothered to pick them up. Some still don’t. But today, 60% of people take the ashes away, and what they do with them has been a revelation. It doesn’t take much reading of newspapers to get the picture. Ashes can be fired from rockets, made into rockets, buried in a garden, kept on the mantelpiece, dissolved in a salt urn in a river, made into jewellery. Everything is legal.
Emotionally, it’s an improvement, says Hockey. “In bereavement, it’s called Continuing Bonds. It’s considered OK, now, to keep contact with the dead.” Some of her interviewees kept their loved one’s ashes on their mantelpiece. They’d say “hi” to them when they entered the room. “Eventually, to match their internal journey of mourning, the ashes might make their way to somewhere more private.” Some interviewees had had ashes inserted into jewellery, and “they wore it when they went out, because it made them feel protected.” Many people bury ashes in the back garden, in a plastic bag so they can be removed when people move house, though an exhumation licence is needed. Ashes may be mobile, but place is still important. Some people choose to poke ashes into existing family graves, either legally or surreptitiously, to avoid paying a burial fee. They may bury the ashes altogether in a cremains grave, so they get the freedom of cremating a body, and the permanence of a resting place. Increasingly, though, they choose not to lay their dead with other dead, and this causes some problems. Not just the anecdotes that most parties or dinner table conversations can provide, of the old salt who wanted to be scattered at sea, and ended up blowing back into people’s champagne glasses. But not all is positive. “There are still aspects of death which are uncomfortable,” Hockey says. “People are shy about being seen to scatter ashes.” She mentions one man who spread his beloved’s ashes on the lawn of their favourite hotel, only to see them there in the morning, visibly there and visibly ashes.
This passion for strewing has detractors. In January, the Scottish Mountaineering Council begged mountain-lovers to stop spreading ashes and erecting plaques on its mountain-tops, because they were degrading the land and ruining the scenery. Last September, the owners of the West Somerset steam railway appealed to the relatives of train enthusiasts to stop putting their ashes on the tracks. At least eight mounds – and 6 pounds of ash makes a sizeable clump – and flowers had been found on the track since the summer. The train drivers were worried they’d run into an ash-spreading relative, for one. And, “as long as it is organised and done with reverence,” steam train director Malcolm Smith told a reporter, ashes can be shovelled into the engine.
All this permissiveness may suit our fragmented, socially and geographically mobile society. But does it suit our souls? The undertaker and poet Thomas Lynch wrote recently that modern funeral practices – hope over biography, laughter over tears – have left us “ritually adrift.” Hockey disagrees. “There is reverence, but it has taken a different form. It’s less about loss and more about people expressing themselves. There isn’t the same pressure put on to get on with life. There is more understanding.”
There is less of Ariès “merciless coercion.” Mourning codes have mostly disappeared, so that funerals that insist people don’t wear black cause more shock than funerals that do. (Disappeared, but not gone: After Observer writer Ruth Picardie died of cancer in 1997, her husband’s decision to remarry within a year provoked disapproving rumblings in some quarters and columns.) We mourn, still and of course. The content will probably never change, but the contours of our mourning have shifted.
The two or one minute silence first left the confines of Remembrance Sunday, where it had remained for 60 years, after the Hillsborough Stadium disaster. Now, it’s commonplace. In Ireland, roadside memorials have been erected for hundreds of years, and now they’re here too, with approbation from some quarters, like traffic police who think they cause accidents when people stop to look at them, or neighbours who think the flowers get tatty, or Christians like funereal historian Julien Litten, who find them “utterly pagan.” Pagan, or punk rock? Geraldine Excell, a researcher at the University of Reading who has specialised in British roadside memorials thinks it’s more Lydon than Litten. “The roadside memorial has become to British mourning culture what punk rock was to the music scene back in the 1970′s. It’s a bottom-up anti establishment culture that has developed a code and culture of its own.” The religious Americans and secular Australians both use crosses at the roadside; the British use flowers, football scarves and laminated poems. The lamp-post or railing “is the ideal opportunity for the bereaved to announce their loss to a wider audience.” Of course, it’s not for everyone, and it doesn’t please everyone. “It’s usually a young, tragic death,” says Litten, pointing out that you don’t see laminated poems and floral bouquets at the entrance to hospital wards. This may be inconsistent, but it makes sense: A young person’s friends probably know the street better than a cemetery. They live in the street, so they mourn in the street. On a wider scale, says Tony Walter, it’s about who society accepts as the sacred dead, deserving of public reverence. “There is a new public negotiation about this and there’s a lot of disagreement. People who disagree with public memorialisation have never criticised the war remembrance or state funerals.The mourning of private individuals is illegitimate because they’re not the sacred dead.” But a democratic society that values children, he argues, can believe a child killed in a road accident is part of the sacred dead.
One person’s tatty bouquet is another’s shrine. The boundaries have gone, and in this individualistic, atomised society, new rituals are stepping in. The living are still stumbling around the fact that they die, and how to best deal with it. This will always be true, at least until those who believe in cryonics or transhumanism, who want to live forever or be resurrected, who think that death is not an inevitability of human life, see their convictions come true. There are many devotees signed up to cryonics organisations like Alcor, though the French authorities recently ruled that a couple who had frozen themselves in a DIY cryonics process in their Loire chateau should be removed and buried, for health reasons.
The case of the cryonicised couple was colourful, but the core struggle at its heart is increasingly commonplace. We don’t own our graveplots. Do we own our deaths? The “right-to-life” battles over Charlotte Wyatt and Baby MB show that nothing has been decided. Even within the seeming omnipotence of medicine, death is not a foregone conclusion. Different doctors have different deaths. In Cuba, a person with a functioning upper brain and dead brain-steam means death, but 70 miles away in Florida, the same person is considered to be alive. Perhaps because of this confusion, we are told that a “new drug saves lives” , though the headlines would more truthfully read “new drug puts off death for a bit longer.” Or for a lot longer: medicine may not have decided what qualifies as death or life, but its ability to diagnose a long-term terminal illness that won’t kill for decades gives many people the new situation of living for years with a certain terminal prognosis. Of course, we all have one of those: the human body starts dying at the age of 20. The playwright Samuel Beckett saw birth as the first stage of death. But a terminal diagnosis combined with years of life has nonetheless created a new space of awareness where there is room for columns and memoirs about dying, from Ruth Picardie, John Diamond and most recently the American businessman Eugene O’Neill.
In these times, death has been medicalised, but medicine is not omnipotent. When Diane Pretty took her “right-to-die” case to court, a poll found that 80% of the British public thought she should be allowed to take her own life. The French academic Claudine Herzlich, quoted in Kate Berridge’s Vigor Mortis, wonders if the social movement for euthanasia debate will be as important as that of abortion. “We know today that in some cases, people die [or do not die] because someone else has decided it was time. Are people going to demand to die when they are ready to die?”
The focus now is on the body more than the soul. The body, by now, is everything, because everything else has retreated. “Intellectually speaking,” wrote Professor Douglas Davies in his Re-use of Old Graves study, “it is not accidental that death became one of the most widely discussed topics of the 1990s. […] It is likely to be because the body itself has come to be the one shared reality common to all. The body replaces theologies or ideologies as the focus of life’s meaning.”
So the real dead body, slowly, is becoming as tolerated on TV as the fictional cadaver. In 1998, the BBC filmed the death of Herbie, a German man who died from stomach cancer. Since then, Channel 4 has shown 6 factual programmes dealing with death, dying and dissection of real bodies, from a live autopsy conducted by Gunther von Hagen, to Anatomy for Beginners, which showed – again with autopsies – what cancer, poison and other afflictions did to the human body. Channel 4′s head of science, education and religion, Hamish Mykura, calls this “a comprehensive and probing way of dealing with death,” and says that they now plan to go further still. Dust to Dust, a proposed 2 hour documentary, will show a real body decomposing in controlled conditions in an open-air mausoleum. As the donor has yet to die, there’s no transmission date, but the eminent forensic anthropologist Sue Black, for one, isn’t looking forward to it. “It’s distasteful and disrespectful,” she says, and it has no scientific relevance. “Put two bodies side by side and they’d decompose differently, so to dress this up as education or science is bunkum.” Mykura says there are plenty of scientists involved in the project (though several turned it down, including Sue Black). “Gaudy fictional death is everywhere,” he says, “but there’s little serious discourse. We are required in our remit to offer programmes that educate, innovate and appeal to diverse audiences. This programme is exactly in the crosshairs of all those things.”
Already, says Black, this “voyeurism” that claims to be educational damages real educational research. Normally, her department has so many people wanting to donate their bodies, it has to turn them away. For the last two years, that hasn’t happened. She’s had people phoning up saying they’d watched Von Hagen’s live autopsy and were withdrawing their offer to donate their body. “We try to persuade them that that’s not how we treat people, but it’s no use.”
Despite criticism, audience figures are enough for Channel 4 to keep pursuing death. For Evan Harris MP, who struggles to get death onto the government agenda, debate is better than silence. “I don’t think Von Hagen is the best ambassador,” says Harris, “but he’s better than nothing.”
But there is not nothing. We are not, perhaps, at ease with death enough to clamour to be propped for eternity up on the walls of a Capuchin crypt in our Sunday best, like the 19th century residents of Palermo. Today’s tolerance of tatty bouquets on railings would not stand for a making a clock out of bones, as the Capuchins of Rome did. There may be grounds, as Thomas Lynch wrote recently, for thinking that all this life-affirming funeral business is only self-protective trickery, “avoidance rather than confrontation, [where] everyone is welcome but the corpse,” which has left us “metaphorically impoverished and existentially vexed, approving of the good laugh but embarrassed by the good cry.”
Perhaps the wealth of lamp-post flowers proves Lynch wrong. Perhaps we have lost the old rituals, but the new ones are still in the making. “Dying has changed,” says Glennys Howarth of the Centre for Death Studies, “and so has the way we deal with it. These are very exciting times.” A medieval Briton could paint himself dancing with Death on a wall, because he and Death lived at such close quarters. We live further from our demise, and we are adjusting our focus.The French writer La Rochefoucauld wrote that neither the sun nor death could be looked at with a steady eye. Our eyes may not be steady – and those of our elected officials may be looking anywhere but in the direction of death – but at least we’re squinting.