Life is very special. It needs to be treasured. We are so privileged to be human beings and have the brains to think with, the eyes to see with, the ears to hear with and the emotion to feel love with.
I am not talking here about the passionate love of lovers: I am speaking about our love of our parents, our siblings, our partners and above all our children. This is such a tender gift and the great privilege of being a human being. This is what human civilisation is about. This is our heaven on earth and life as it was meant to evolve.
Think how much you treasure the people you love; the joy of being with them; the pain of being apart from them; therefore, the importance of their presence. The pain of argument with them and the relief of making that right again. This is what life should be about. This is also what the finality of a death in your family is about.
Funeral services are for the living as well as a mark of respect and love for the deceased and the fashion of death is determined by the fashion of life.
Therefore, some of today’s ‘I, me, mine, selfish consumerism’ would have appeared to cloud some folks’ judgement as they look for the cheapest unattended funeral deals, having got confused over life’s priorities – next summer’s holiday in Majorca vs. a decent funeral for dad.
Then this is made worse by the profit motive of those funeral directors who do not readily make available cheaper alternatives to the expensive and today largely inappropriate, Victorian traditional funeral.
Worse, apparently some of us even think that grief can be avoided altogether by just not bothering with a funeral service for their loved one.
Accordingly, some believe that both money and pain can be saved by having their dearest loves, upon their death, transported perhaps hundreds of miles away to be housed in a warehouse before joining a mass conveyor belt of coffins waiting to be cremated.
Here there is no service. There is no proper farewell. There is no time to pay homage and say thank you to the very person that they loved so much!
Is this who some of us have become? Wanting the sort of disposal of a cherished loved one as we might for the family pet and thus avoid the chance to come to terms with what has happened and face it so that the healing process can begin.
Grief simply can’t be avoided by pretending that a funeral service can be substituted in remembrance of mum by going down to the pub for a pint and some ‘lovely sausage rolls’ with other members of the family.
Even a memorial service in church is inadequate because the screaming omission is a coffin containing that dearly loved person.
Can you imagine Winston Churchill’s funeral, the Queen’s funeral or Princess Diana’s funeral being just a memorial service? Of course not – they were too important and loved for that. And so, what about your dad? Isn’t he at least just as important to you?
Did I hear you say what about the cost? What about it? The cost of a small locally attended service can be virtually the same as a distance unattended cremation and a locally performed direct cremation even cheaper than distance conveyor belt direct cremation – if there are no mourners who wish to attend the service.
Therefore, you just must demand to have what you find appropriate for you, and the chances are that the same can be supplied by any funeral director who is truly professional.
So, while some funeral directors may fail to explain about cheaper local alternatives to the expensive concept of having to sit in one big black car and follow another big black car to the crematorium: and while the picture painted in most distance direct cremation TV adverts is that of actors talking about what is not shown on the screen – and therefore could be a mirage: it is you who has the choice to select what is appropriate for your family and you don’t have to buy either of these packages if you don’t feel it is what your family needs. Choose what your family wants instead.
The fall from grace of religion over the last 50 years with the indigenous population of Great Britain has left an emotional, moral and code of conduct void that the Woke hypocritical and the ‘I, me, mine’ material societies has filled to the damnation of our humanity to others and the pollution of our minds with ultimate materialistic selfishness while paying lip-service to the often idiotic politically correct niceties which disguise the morally bankrupt world we now live in.
So, do we measure up to our parents in all of this? Do we heck! Maybe, it is time we all looked in the mirror and tried to recapture the real values of life and humanity that are slowly being lost before it is too late.
