Miscellaneous
Top 20 Pop Songs Requested at Funerals in 2012
The Co-operative FuneralCare of England recently came out with a “Top 20 Pop Songs Requested at Funerals” list based on requests made at 30,000 services over the last 12 months.
Before I get to the Top 20 list, FuneralCare has this to say, which I think is really interesting:
Figures show that pop music has replaced traditional hymns at two-thirds of British funerals. In 2005, hymns accounted for 41 per cent of funeral music requests, but in the past 12 months the figure has fallen to 30 per cent.
The Top 20 pop songs requested at funerals in 2012 are:
1. Frank Sinatra – ‘My Way’
2. Sarah Brightman/Andrea Bocelli – ‘Time To Say Goodbye’
3. Bette Midler – ‘Wind Beneath My Wings’
4. Eva Cassidy – ‘Over The Rainbow’
5. Robbie Williams – ‘Angels’
6. Westlife – ‘You Raise Me Up’
7. Gerry & The Pacemakers – ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’
8. Vera Lynn – ‘We’ll Meet Again’
9. Celine Dion – ‘My Heart Will Go On’
10. Nat King Cole – ‘Unforgettable’
11. Tina Turner – ‘The Best’
12. Whitney Houston/Dolly Parton – ‘I Will Always Love You’
13. Monty Python – ‘Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life’ (Note: I don’t think this song would make America’s top 20, but maybe I’m wrong).
14. Luther Vandross – ‘Dance With My Father’
15. Louis Armstrong – ‘Wonderful World’
16. Daniel O’Donnell – ‘Danny Boy’
17. Eva Cassidy – ‘Fields Of Gold’
18. Righteous Brothers (and various) – ‘Unchained Melody’
19. Westlife – ‘Flying Without Wings’
20. Eva Cassidy – ‘Songbird’
WHAT SONG(S) DO YOU WANT AT YOUR FUNERAL SERVICE?
Some Pics of the Adoption Finalization
Yesterday, October 18th, our adoption of Jeremiah Michael Wilde was legally finalized … seven months and two days after his birth. This — our adoption story — has taken years of heartache as we embraced infertility, prayer and stress.
In fact, the stress was apart of our adoption story up to the VERY end.
Due to a large “Apostles Conference” that was taking place next door to the Court House, we were hard pressed to find a parking spot. It took us about 25 minutes to find a spot and we literally run three blocks to the Court House to make our 10 AM appointment. And as we ran, we were witnessed to like two or three times by “apostles.”
So, yesterday I was converted about two or three times and I got to adopt my son! Awesome day.
We were allowed to invite our families to the court room. They sat in the back while Nicki and I were each separately called to take the stand.
We placed our left hand on the Bible and raised our right, solemnly swearing to tell the truth. The judge asked both Nicki and I, “Will you care for Jeremiah as your own?” Yes. We had said “yes” in our hearts since the day we found out about him.
Fifteen minutes later it was over.
Jeremiah is our son.
We’ve been waiting for him for years.
The wait is over.
We took some pictures at the courthouse with our family. We took some pictures at a park on the way home. We had the fams over again for dinner and we took some more pictures. We celebrated the goodness. We celebrated the sacrifice of a young girl, whose gift continues to give us joy. We celebrated the life that will now be lived in our family.
Death Perspectives: Funeral Director and Atheist
Today I’d like to start a series of irregular guest posts called “Death Perspectives”, where people from different religious and non-religious perspectives share how they understand death as informed by their religion. And I’m happy that my first guest post is from a fellow funeral director, Heather Hernandez.
After you read her post, ask her questions about how her perspective informs her views of dying, death and funerals. She’s very eloquent and can help you understand how an Atheist views death.
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It is a quiet moment, the one during a funeral service or a rosary or a mass. Someone – priest, preacher, family member – has asked us to bow our heads in prayer. I interlace my fingers, hands clasped in front of me. As I listen to the silence of people around me as they focus on their commune with God, I take the moment for a deep breath and a concentrated effort for the purity of blank meditation. My eyes are open, and I scan the room from the back corner. I’m not communicating with anyone but my own inner monologue. I hear the echo of “amen” as the prayer concludes, but not from my own throat.
I am an atheist.
I am a funeral director.
It is a unique thing to be a person without faith working in an industry where faith is often a driving force for what we do. Our funeral rites and rituals have a basis in religion more often than not, and I interact with people from all walks of religion on a daily basis. I appreciate that my families have beliefs to give them solace, faith to warm their hearts and dull the sharp sting of grief to an ache.
I am not usually an evangelical atheist. I would never dream of stepping outside of my role as a funeral director to criticize someone else’s rituals or step on their hopes of an afterlife. Lately, I only feel the need to speak up about my beliefs because non-believers are often painted in a negative light, as amoral and non-contributive to society and our communities. I look at myself and I don’t see that.
I am a military wife supporting a husband about to deploy to Afghanistan.
I am an animal-lover who stopped four lanes of traffic to rescue two terrified stray dogs.
I am a volunteer at my local library, teaching adults how to read.
The way that I choose to live is directly affected by my atheism. It’s hard for me to look at my husband, my parents, my sisters and my best friends and realize that in my reality there is no afterlife. There’s no light at the end of the tunnel or Heaven where we meet up and spend the rest of eternity in each others’ company.
What I do get is the realization that the here and now is all I get. I have to enjoy every single second that I get here, every breath I take, every opportunity to reach out and hold my husband’s hand or call my parents and tell them I love them. I don’t believe that I get a do-over or forgiveness to wipe the slate clean, and I am therefore my own harshest critic. I want to be remembered as someone who always did the right thing the right way, who served others and loved as hard as she could.
I am an atheist, but sometimes, even though I’m not thanking God, I take that quick moment of silence during the Lord’s Prayer to reflect and appreciate how grateful I am for the time I do have and all the wonderful ways I can spend it.
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Heather Hernandez is a mid-20s graduate of mortuary college, navigating the complexities of death care as a first generation funeral director. When she’s not running services, she’s also a wife, a dog-lover, and an amateur taxidermist. You can read her blog at http://mortuaryreport.com/ or check out her taxidermied mice and other artwork at http://www.etsy.com/shop/mortuaryreport.
Why I’m a Political Atheist: Part 1
I’m okay with people who divinize political power. I used to be one. After reading my fair share of classic and modern political philosophy, I became disillusioned and lost my faith in the power of Politics.
I stay up-to-date on the debates and I vote according to my conscious, but I do so with vapidity.
I don’t believe in the power of the federal government to affect internal change. I haven’t seen it change people in my city, in my home town, on my street. I’ve seen my friends change my city, I’ve seen concerned citizens transform my hometown, but not Washington.
I don’t get stirred at the groupthink evangelistic DNC and RNC conventions where the faithful worship in blind faith … where the fundamentalists gather and pat themselves on the back.
I’ve cut my personal ties to the symbolic immortality that so many within politics seek. If I die, and my political ideology isn’t in power, I’ll be okay. If I die and America isn’t the America of our forefathers, I will still rest in peace. I don’t smoke the opium of politics that promises my tribe’s eternal life if we can only gain back control from the “others.”
All the pie-in-the-sky political talk seems to limit what the faithful do in their own town. The faithful post their token facebook messages, they stick their candidate’s signs in their front yard and may even work with their party’s local chapter, but they’re so idealistically minded that they’re no local good. Where are the faithful when someone next door goes hungry? I’ll tell you where: they’re so busy siting on their easy chair watching CNN, MSN or FOX that they haven’t even noticed the poverty on their own street.
If they spent half the time acting on their ideals instead of talking about them they might actually begin to see the change they’re looking for. Hypocrites. Have you ever met a VERY political person who you would consider a great person? Isn’t it generally assumed that politics turns good people into liars and irrational egoists who breath in their own self made delusional promises?
It seems that politics takes the energy of the many and places it at the feet of the few. And if the many would take their own energy and instead invest it in things they cared about on a local level, the few would take heed and then the system would change.
The faithful will say that political atheists like me aren’t good for society … for civilization … for Washington. And they might be right. I’m not good for Washington. But, if they want to tell it to my face they can find me on the streets of Parkesburg, where I mentor at-risk youth, helping them graduate high school, succeed in the work place and seek higher education.
What really gets me, though, is that those who believe in the power of politics really believe that their brand of laws and government can cause lasting change. As government is the only way to change.
What is “it” that the government can change anyway? And in what way can “it” change? Can the government change the “it” of supposed godlessness in the families of America? Many red bleeding “Christian” republicans think it can. They want God back in the government … because they assume that God likes to work through law?
Can the government change the “it” of poverty in those in the lower class? Many blue hearted liberals think it can. They want the federal government to solve social ills that are intrinsically local and internal by nature. Like trying to catch a whale with a bear trap, they think social ills can be healed by programs and finances.
At this time in the political season, through the drum of political facebook posts, the incessant coverage from CNN, MSN, and FOX, I dig my heels into the ground and become more convinced of my position: I’m an atheist. The all-powerful god of politics doesn’t exist. And he has no power to cause lasting change. If he does exist, he has such limited power that he’s doesn’t deserve the adoration he’s receiving. There’s no historical proof, no proof in personal experience and no reason to believe in the deity of political power.
I’m a political atheist because at the end of the day, politics can’t transform, they can only guide.
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Postscript: This is a provocative piece that uses some broad strokes. I’ll remove the black and white tone of this piece in “Part 2.”
Ritual: The Muscle Memory of Grief
Over the past couple months, I’ve been contemplating why the West (America, Europe, etc.) has so much aversion to death, while other — less “developed — cultures see death as less alien. I’ve come up with two major reasons:
One. Modernity.
Our modern world takes death care away from families and puts it in the hands of “professionals”, thus industrializing death. Instead of the dying dwelling at our homes, we give them to nursing homes. For more of my thoughts on this, here’s an article I wrote.
The modern world also likes providing answers to life’s questions. So when death comes with its silence and mystery, we are rendered uncomfortable.
Two. We lack ritual. There’s three reasons why there’s a lack of ritual:
1.) We tend to be individualistic, which isn’t necessarily bad, but it produces a lack of community.
2). We tend to dislike tradition.
3.) We are becoming post-religious.
The following is my (rather poor) attempt to explain why the lack of ritual increases our aversion to death.
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Muscle memory is what separates the professionals from the amateurs.
Muscle memory is what enables musicians to thoughtlessly play complicated music with near perfection.
Muscle memory is the product of laborious habit that makes incredibly difficult tasks seem like minutia.
I just came back from indoor rock climbing.
I’ve seen athletic and strong newbies come to the gym and they look like fools trying to climb routes. Falling down on their bums, scraping their arms up and getting all nervous when they get to the top of the route.
Climbing is both strength and technique muscle memory. And while newbies may be strong and athletic, if they don’t know how to move their bodies on the wall, they’re destined to fall and fail.
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Grief is similar. The walls of bereavement are very intimidating to even the spiritually and psychologically strong. It doesn’t matter how whole you are, you will fall and you will fail.
Unless you enter through the trodden paths of ritual.
The muscle memory of grief is ritual. Ritual allows us to take the incredibly difficult task of mourning and find a way to persevere, even when it seems we shouldn’t.
Muscle memory is usually something you or I create through practice. I climb routes at the climbing gym, my muscles get used to moving a certain way.
You practice the guitar day in and day out and your fingers move like jazz.
This is where the whole muscle memory analogy starts to fall apart when we relate it to grief.
While a professional’s muscle memory is something he or she created, death ritual muscle memory is something our community has created and it can only be “learned” within community.
You didn’t create it. It’s something we inherit … or something we can join.
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This from Alla Bozarth in “Life Is Goodbye, Life is Hello: Grieving Well Through All Kinds of Loss”:
Funerals are the rituals we create to help us face the reality of death, to give us a way of expressing our response to that reality with other persons, and to protect us from the full impact of the meaning of death for ourselves.
The problem is this: so many of us have disconnected ourselves from community, tradition and a religion that we’ve never received the graces of grief ritual.
If we have community in place,
if we embrace tradition in times of death
and we’re willing to involve the motion and movement of religion,
we may find life and meaning in a task that many onlookers see as insurmountable.
Ritual doesn’t allow you to overcome grief (grief may never be overcome). It doesn’t allow you to work through your grief faster. Nor does make death more tolerable. And it certainly won’t make you a “professional.”
Ritual allows you to confront a seemingly impossible task in the context of community.
Why is the West so adverse to death? Because devoid of ritual, confronting death is like asking me to play Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 23.
