Eulogy magazine provides advice, support, encouragement and a much needed laugh when you need it most. We have set out to challenge the convention that death, the process of grief and bereavement cannot be sensibly articulated or discussed as part of life. We have no religious remit, nor any social or political agenda. Eulogy is simply – ‘The world’s first magazine to celebrate life and death’.
In Kerala, South India, people regularly visit the dying in their local community to provide them with physical and emotional support. Here, care for the dying is both a part of daily life – something young people give their time to – and a sufficiently glamorous cause for India’s celebrities. Bollywood stars attend fundraising events for projects such as Neighbourhood Network in Palliative Care, while the state’s poorest people donate Rupees and rice when they can. Back in the UK, we are dying lonelier than ever, usually in a hospital, while a distressed relative runs down a corridor to find a doctor. Macmillan nurses were set up to provide some of the humane face-to-face care for the dying, and over 100,000 people volunteer in hospices every year, but they can’t possibly help everyone dealing with death. In the UK, we seem to close the book on life without reconciliation. Worse – we leave it in the hospital waiting room. As in Kerala, we need to be brave enough to make death part of life.
What food do you serve the guests at a funeral? Vol au vents, stale crisps? How about jelly? As part of the general renaissance of traditional English food, jellies have been on the up of late, appearing at trendy events, weddings, and now funerals. Driving the trend, jellymongers Bompass and Parr offer a bespoke funeral jelly-making service. The company’s pyramid-shaped funeral jellies debuted at Bistrotheque (trendy East London restaurant) on the day of Michael Jackson’s funeral and were made out of black cherry, champagne and set with 24 carat gold. What we’re seeing here is that funerals are being treated more like a celebration of life, as they are in other parts of the world (see Social story). As Michael Hutchence put it, “It’s my party, and I’ll die if I want to.”
Rather than having your ashes scattered when you die, why not press them into a vinyl record instead? This is new service from a company called And Vinyly, created by a former 90s techno artist who thought he was “getting a bit old”. And Vinyly offers to turn your remains into your favourite track, a recording of yourself or specially composed music from their music production team and band ‘House of Fix’. And Vinyly also has a design team and in-house artist to create bespoke album covers. This follows artist Nadine Jarvis’ concept for a set of pencils made from the carbon of a cremated human body. 240 pencils can be made from an average body of ash – a lifetime supply of pencils for those left behind. And similarly, Dutch Designer Wieki Somers who has turned human ashes into “useful objects” including a toaster and vacuum cleaner. The idea behind all this is about rethinking the way we commemorate people and dispose of human bodies.
A survey commissioned by Sun Life Direct, which sells life insurance and funeral plans, has produced statistics to help sell their pre plan funeral products. The survey found that 30m Brits admitted to feeling frustrated and stranded when talking about death. It even claimed that the emotional stress involved in us avoiding the issue and leaving funeral plans to the last minute is dangerous to one’s mental health, with 41% of people still worrying about a love one’s funeral months after it has taken place. The insurance industry has not figured out a way to sell end-of-life related products in a straightforward, modern way, worried that it will be seen to be profiting from death. A far better approach is The Co-Op campaign. The company collaborated with poet laureate Andrew Motion to provide a booklet entitled ‘How to write a Eulogy guide’, bringing the subject of death into a cultural and literary context. In the current mood of austerity, ageing population, and realisation that good things have to end, death is acquiring a new cultural relevance and proactive debate. The subject of death needs to catch up.
Once, when someone died, we tended their memories tangibly – by laying flowers on a grave or visiting the site where ashes were scattered. For the “Facebook Generation”, the dead are not just remembered online, they’re silent partners in an ongoing, virtually uninterrupted dialogue. Friends and family are happy to tend to the social network pages of the dead, leaving messages and posting pictures. There is also a new breed of “online memorial” sites such as muchloved.com and gonetoosoon.com, where you can pay your respects for free – regardless of whether you knew the person – and areas where you can make donations and “light candles” or “plant flowers” to commemorate someone. It might seem peculiar, until we consider the real life alternative. Many people find funeral homes and graveyards grim and depressing. What’s more they are often in inaccessible parts of town, with inconvenient opening hours. At the very least, online memorials allow the bereaved to remember at a time of their choosing and pay tribute in a variety of media. Many are also religiously neutral.
