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Feature
The death of funerals
by Matt Nippert
New Zealanders are personalising death, embracing celebrants and shedding the casket-and-burial rituals of our forebears.
Kevin Ireland realised one afternoon that he didn’t like funerals. Earlier that day, the poet and his wife of 40 years, Caroline, had attended a funeral, and afterwards – at their wooden Devonport house – they decided when death came they’d dispense with a formal funeral service altogether. The funeral as we know it, says Ireland, deserves to die.
“I think it has outlived – if I can use that word – its usefulness.”
Ireland, winner of the Prime Minister’s Award for Poetry in 2004 and wearer of a grumpy-old-man moustache that belies his amiable quick wit, has seen enough of his friends die to become something of a funeral critic. “I’ve noticed – because I’ve been a regular attendee at so many of them – that there is a certain kind of theatricality at many of them, and I don’t trust the tone.”
He says open-mic sessions to allow public grieving often turn funerals “into a shambles”.
“Now, everybody just gets up and babbles. Some of it is very moving, some of it is intensely personal, but a lot of it is sheer self-advertisement and self-recommendation and self-glorification. I actually feel offended at some of the speeches nowadays at funerals.”
And the tradition of open coffins and embalmed and made-up cadavers doesn’t sit well with Ireland. “It’s a waxworks dummy – which is a parody of a living person – lying in an open coffin, which I find gross, offensive and ridiculous. You’re not looking at a real person, or the person you knew in life.”
Instead, the Irelands planned to hold a party to celebrate either of their passings. Speeches would be strictly managed, there would be booze and food, and an otherwise-morbid event would become an occasion to remember good times and good works.
“As one gets older, one goes to more and more funerals and fewer and fewer parties,” says Ireland. “And this seems to me to be an ideal way of combining the two and having a good time instead of continually going to have a morbid time.”
In a way, Kevin and Caroline’s chat about death was fortunately timed. On November 26 last year, three months after that discussion, Caroline fell unexpectedly ill and was taken to hospital.
“Brain haemorrhage,” Ireland explains, his normally gravelly voice dropping to a whisper. “From which there was no recovery.” Admitted to hospital at 10.00pm, Caroline died at 10 past eight the following morning.
Ireland’s stand against formal funerals is increasingly reflected elsewhere in society, says Otago University’s Cyril Schäfer. The anthropology lecturer has made funeral customs his academic speciality, and says New Zealanders – to a larger degree than elsewhere in the Western world – are personalising death, embracing celebrants and shedding the casket-and-burial rituals of our forebears.
“A third of the population don’t have any institutional affiliation with religious groups – and you see that very clearly in funerals. Most New Zealanders don’t attend a church service regularly, and if church wasn’t a part of their life, it’s usually not reflected in a funeral service.
“One of the things that’s really clear is that people want to have more control and more of an input. It’s not necessarily a matter of going against the church, but wanting to have more of a say. There’s been quite a pervasive belief that religious funerals equate to impersonal funerals.”
And New Zealand is also at the forefront of moving away from the tradition of coffins, gravediggers and tombstones. Schäfer says in parts of the southern United States – strongly religious regions – burials account for 90% of funerals, compared with just 30% in New Zealand, where cremation remains the popular choice.
The shift away from church leaders presiding over funerals has opened the door to funeral celebrants who, according to Schäfer’s statistics, now conduct 65% of funerals in urban areas. “The funeral celebrant is a very novel idea,” says Schäfer, so much so that delegations of church officials and funeral directors from the US are sent to New Zealand to understand how to run their business differently.
It’s the personalisation of our funerals that interests outsiders, says Schäfer. “For example, you have people who loved fishing, and that will become a theme of a funeral. There’ll be related music, the readings will be influenced by the sea. And finally what happens is that the cremated remains will be taken to a very personalised spot – scattered at sea at their favourite fishing spot.
“This is certainly the case for baby boomers whose parents are dying – and who themselves are going to die in the near future.”
When she died, Phoebe Caroline Ireland was 75, but despite being just a tad older than the baby boomers, the celebration of her life held at North Shore Cricket Club’s pavilion on December 7 typifies the new way of marking someone’s death.
“Hundreds turned up,” says Kevin. “We had 14 people prepare the feast – it took them two hours to do that, including three chefs. A nephew brought down a whole load of smoked snapper from up north. Everyone contributed amazing amounts of food; there was food for the multitudes. Some people brought wonderful wines and, of course, the bar was open and we ran a tab.”
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