Cost of living? What about the cost of being dead?

The spiralling price of funerals is a symptom of the triumph of the market and the accompanying poverty of civic life

 

• 
• • Zoe Williams
  • The Guardian, Tuesday 21 January 2014 18.36 GMT

There is 'always the tacit suggestion that if you cared a tiny bit more, you would pay a tiny bit extra. It is, again, the things we don't talk about that cost us the most, the reckoning that happens in the dark.' Illustration by Belle Mellor

"F uneral poverty" – that's the phrase they use at the National Association of Funeral Directors. Like "fuel poverty", "heat poverty" and "child poverty", this is just a long way of saying "poverty": another way to express the situation in which an event or thing that everybody will sometime need is nevertheless hopelessly out of reach of a fair proportion of them. One in five people can't afford funerals – given that the "cost of dying" now averages £7,622, the number of people who are knocked sideways by it financially, for years afterwards, probably considerably exceeds 20%.

That phrase "the cost of dying" has sacrificed accuracy for tact. This is the cost of being dead: the funeral, the cars, probate, the flowers that say "Best Dad Ever", the burial or cremation. If you factor in the costs before death, it's eye-popping. People rarely drop down dead. They have protracted illnesses, they seem like they're going to die and then don't; all emergencies are real, and to count the cost of anything would be sacrilege, and a fast track to bankruptcy.

This inability to tether the process to reality is an offshoot of being unable to talk about death: any discussion of the realities around it is seen to cheapen it. Death, when it eventually arrives, comes at the end of galloping spending, like typhoid at the end of a winter of malnutrition. If they say it costs seven grand, that is a good deal less than it has actually cost.

Why is this news? Because it's not simply expensive, it is "inflation busting", having gone up by 80% since 2004. It sounds like a lot; in fact, energy costs are still worse, having more than doubled over the same period. But that comparison doesn't help, merely ramming home the unaffordability of life in a world where costs soar and wages plateau.

There are a couple of reasons specific to the funeral business for these price rises, however, and both say something about the market generally. First, the cost of a burial plot has increased, as the cost of land has gone up. This makes it a postcode lottery, in which a death in rural Wales will be slightly less crippling than one in Wimbledon; but all postcodes have stayed in the slipstream of inflation, whether their land value has gone up or not. This is at the outermost ripple of the situation we've created for ourselves in which our land is worth much more than anything we earn or do or produce. Can we afford to be buried? Can we afford town halls? Zoos? Can students afford to live near universities?

Basically, no. Those days when a city was built to serve its inhabitants, with the commonly used areas in the middle and the private housing round the edge – those days when the centre of town contained things useful to a population, things like fire stations and schools? Those days are over. Those days have been sold to a Russian oligarch, whose nationality is, of course, not relevant from a racist point of view; it is there to underline how physically distant are the people whose interests are being served by the new equations.

An interesting side point is that councils, ratcheting up burial costs to keep pace with the value of the land, rack up cremation costs at the same time. Well, duh, why wouldn't you? You're in charge; it's not as though anyone can shop around. And here, bad ethics have chased out good ethics, since the latter are the instincts from which the private sector protects itself with competition. Councils shouldn't have to dream up checks and balances to stop themselves ripping off the communities they serve.

But even where competition does thrive, in the funeral industry itself, you see the spectacle of the ceremonial rip-off, wedding economics done sotto voce. Everybody makes poor financial decisions when they're recently bereaved. We put a notice in the Times for my dad, saying, "After a short and ultimately quite half-hearted fight with cancer, Mark Williams has died". Dropped 400 quid making a weak joke at a dead man's expense. And in the Times!

But that doesn't excuse the relentless upselling of the funeral director, the stupid lacquers and extra-price finishes, and always the tacit suggestion that if you cared a tiny bit more, you would pay a tiny bit extra. It is, again, the things we don't talk about that cost us the most, the reckoning that happens in the dark.

"What do people do," John Humphrys asked on BBC radio's Today programme, of Kate Woodthorpe from the University of Bath, "if they just can't afford a funeral?" The council does it, naturally – someone has to. The deceased themselves are too dead to fail. Humphrys and Woodthorpe then reminisced, briefly, about the days when a "pauper's funeral" was a source of shame, when people's own sense of propriety prevailed.

This is a classic manoeuvre – you take financial pressures that are quintessentially modern and then nostalgically lament the fact that people don't deal with them as they would have in the olden days. Expensive heating? In the olden days, they would have worn more jumpers. Unaffordable funerals? They would have saved harder. Food poverty? They would have eaten more potatoes.

All those things may be true, but that era was never characterised by acquiescence. The same people who were too proud for a pauper's funeral would have been too proud to be priced out of their own civic space, out of their own life cycle.

Why Atheists need rituals too

To move many away from religion, atheism has to weave itself into the social fabric and shed its image of dour grumpiness

• 
• • Suzanne Moore for New Humanist, part of the Guardian Comment Network
  • theguardian.com, Friday 27 December 2013 12.59 GMT

A billboard sponsored by the American Atheists organisation in New York. Photograph: Richard Levine/Demotix/Corbis

The last time I put my own atheism through the spin cycle rather than simply wiping it clean was when I wanted to make a ceremony after the birth of my third child. Would it be a blessing? From who? What does the common notion of a new baby as a gift mean? How would we make it meaningful to the people we invited who were from different faiths? And, importantly, what would it look like?

One of the problems I have with the New Atheism is that it fixates on ethics, ignoring aesthetics at its peril. It tends also towards atomisation, relying on abstracts such as "civic law" to conjure a collective experience. But I love ritual, because it is through ritual that we remake and strengthen our social bonds. As I write, down the road there is a memorial being held for Lou Reed, hosted by the local Unitarian church. Most people there will have no belief in God but will feel glad to be part of a shared appreciation of a man whose god was rock'n'roll.

When it came to making a ceremony, I really did not want the austerity of some humanist events I have attended, where I feel the sensual world is rejected. This is what I mean about aesthetics. Do we cede them to the religious and just look like a bunch of Calvinists? I found myself turning to flowers, flames and incense. Is there anything more beautiful than the offerings made all over the world, of tiny flames and blossom on leaves floating on water?

Already, I am revealing a kind of neo-paganism that hardcore rationalist will find unacceptable. But they find most human things unacceptable. For me, not believing in God does not mean one has to forgo poetry, magic, the chaos of ritual, the remaking of shared bonds. I fear ultra-orthodox atheism has come to resemble a rigid and patriarchal faith itself.

This is not about reclaiming "feeling" as female and reason as male. Put simply, it seems to be fundamentally human to seek narratives, find patterns and create rituals to include others in the meanings we make. If we want a more secular society – and we most certainly do – there is nothing wrong with making it look and feel good.

Yet as I attend yet another overpoweringly religious funeral of a woman who was not religious – as I did recently – I see that people do not know what else to do. They turn to organised religion's hatch 'em, match 'em and dispatch 'em certainties. For while humanists work hard to create new ceremonies, many find them vapid. Funerals are problematic, as one is bound by law to dispose of the body in a certain way. I always remember the startled look of the platitudinous young vicar who visited our house after my grandad died, when my mum said, "Don't come round here with your mumbo-jumbo. If I had my way I'd put him in the vegetable patch with some lime on him."

Unless someone has planned their own funeral it can be difficult, but naming or partnership ceremonies are a chance to think about what it is we are celebrating. A new person, love, being part of a community. For my daughter's, we pieced together what we wanted, but I found some of the humanist suggestions strange. "Odd parents" for godparents? No thanks. I guess it's just a matter of taste.

What, then, makes ceremony powerful? It is the recognition of common humanity; and it is very hard to do this without borrowing from traditional symbols. We need to create a space outside of everyday life to do this. We can call it sacred space but the demarcation of special times or spaces is not the prerogative only of the religious. One of the best ceremonies of late was the opening of the Olympics, where Danny Boyle created a massive spectacle that communicated shared values in a non-religious way. It was big-budget joy. Most of us don't have such a budget but there has to be some nuance here. We may not have God. We may find the fuzziness of new age thinking with its emphasis on "nature" and "spirit" impure, but to dismiss the human need to express transcendence and connection with others as stupid is itself stupid.

Our ceremony had flowers and fires and Dylan, a Baptist minister and the Jabberwocky, half-Mexican siblings and symbols, a Catholic grandparent reading her prayer, a Muslim godparent and kids off their heads on helium at the party. A right old mishmash, then, but our mishmash.

In saying this I realise I am not a good atheist. Rather like mothering, perhaps I can only be a good enough one. But to move many away from religion, a viable atheism has to weave itself into the social fabric and shed this image of dour grumpiness. What can be richer than the celebration of our common humanity? Here is magic, colour, poetry. Life.

Mark Steel: You can't just shut us up now that Margaret Thatcher's dead

Maybe a more modern way of broadcasting the news would have been for Davina McCall to announce it, saying: “She’s gone, but let’s have a look at some of her best bits.” Then we could see her denouncing Nelson Mandela as a terrorist and befriending General Pinochet.

Instead it began as expected, with the Hurds, Howes and Archers phoning in their “remarkables” and “historics”, and we were reminded how she brought down the Berlin Wall and rescued Britain, then an article in The Times claimed she was responsible for ending apartheid, and it seemed by today we’d be hearing she stopped Gibraltar being invaded by Daleks and made  our goldfish feel proud to be British and took  8 for 35 against Australia to win the Ashes.

“Even those who disagreed with her, respected her as a conviction politician”, it was said many times, as if everyone would participate in the mourning. But soon it was impossible to pretend there was a respectful consensus, not because of the odd party in the street, but from a widespread and considered contempt. In many areas it must have been confusing for Jehovah’s Witnesses, as every time they knocked on a door and asked, “Have you heard the good news”, they’d be told “Yes mate, I have, do you want to come in for a beer?”

Before long came the complaints, such as Tony Blair saying: “Even if you disagree with someone very strongly, at the moment of their passing you should show some respect.” Presumably then, when Bin Laden was killed, Blair’s statement was: “Although I didn’t agree with Osama’s policies, he was a conviction terrorist, a colourful character whose short films were not only fun but educational as well. He will be sadly missed.”

The disrespect was inevitable, as millions were opposed to her not because they disagreed with her, but because she’d helped to ruin their lives. If someone robs your house, you don’t say: “I disagreed with the burglar’s policy, of tying me to a chair with gaffer tape and stripping the place bare, even taking the pickled onions, which I consider to be divisive. But I did admire his convictions.”

For example, a Chilean woman living in Britain was quoted in The Nationmagazine, saying: “The Thatcher government directly supported Pinochet’s murderous regime, financially, via military support, even military training. Members of my family were tortured and murdered under Pinochet, who was one of Thatcher’s closest allies and friend. Those of us celebrating are the ones who suffered deeply.” Yes, but she was able to buy shares in British Gas so she was better off in other ways. In so many areas, the party that insists we show compassion for their departed heroine made a virtue of showing none when she was their leader. She didn’t just create unemployment, she gloried in it. Her supporters in the City revelled in their unearned wealth all the more because they could jeer at those with nothing.

But this week Thatcher fans have been unrestrained in their abuse for anyone not displaying “compassion”. Maybe we should give them the benefit of the doubt and accept they’ve just discovered it. They’re all going to the doctors saying: “I’ve been getting this strange sort of caring feeling towards someone who isn’t me. Do I need antibiotics?” If they’re puzzled as to why there isn’t universal sadness this week, maybe they should visit Corby. It’s a town that was built in the 1930s, entirely round a steelworks, and thousands of unemployed Scots moved there for the work. As a result its people still have a strong Scottish accent, even though it’s in Northamptonshire.

But in 1980 Margaret Thatcher’s government shut down most of the steel industry, as part of her plan to break the unions, and the effect on Corby was like someone taking control of the Lake District and concreting in the lakes.

I was there to record a radio show about the town, and met Don and Irene, both in their seventies, at the Grampian Club. Don’s father had walked to Corby from Larkhall, near Glasgow, in 1932. I mentioned the steel strike and plant closure to Don, but he gestured as if it had somehow passed him by. It would have to be mentioned in the show, so I tried to find someone in the town with a story, an anecdote, something. But no one wanted to say a thing about it. During the recording, I asked if anyone had a story to tell from those days, but no one did, until it felt as if the whole audience collectively passed a motion that went: “I think you’d best move on to another subject, Mark.”

Afterwards in the bar, Irene told me: “We weren’t being rude, love, when we didn’t have a lot to say about the closure. But it wasn’t an easy time. Don marched from Corby to London with a banner. It made him angry about everything, we split up for a year because it was too much to live with. But we were lucky, two of our closest friends committed suicide in the months after the closure. So people would rather forget about those times really. But apart from that we really enjoyed the show.”

Still, even those who disagree with her policies, will surely commend her achievements.

Strangely, it’s now her supporters who are insulting her memory, with a funeral paid for by the taxpayer. Surely it would be more fitting to leave her where she is, and say: “If you can’t stand on your own two feet, you can't expect help from the state.”