Delayed Cremation after Committal in Church
Over
the last few years I have noticed that I am being asked
more frequently to do the committal in church, at the end
of a funeral service, and for the body to be taken
unaccompanied to the crematorium for what the funeral
directors call ‘private cremation’. On some
occasions I have discovered that the coffin was actually
removed to the funeral director’s premises and taken
later to the crematorium, even a day later. However
respectful the handling and storage involved, something
inside me is unhappy about delaying the journey to the
crematorium and I have found myself wondering why.
Clearly
the body of the deceased isn’t going to be concerned
about having to wait before cremation. And if we take Tom
Wright’s comment that ‘the soul’ should be
seen as shorthand for how we talk about the person in the
presence of God (For all the saints: 2003, page 72),
then a temporal break in the proceedings isn’t going
to affect this relationship one dot or iota. The person’s
eternal salvation is not dependant on the committal and
what follows. So why does it jar with my senses?
There
are advantages in not having to accompany the coffin on
what some people call the final journey. For over-worked
clergy who can have difficulty finding the space to drive
an extra half an hour for a 2 minute committal at a
crematorium and half an hour back again, the committal in
church provides an obvious time saving. This can be
particularly acute in rural areas where the journey
involved can mean the funeral takes up the best part of
half a day. For the family or chief mourners, travelling
to the crematorium can mean missing some of those who
attended the funeral and who slip away before they return
to whatever reception has been arranged. Some seem to
find the journey an unnecessary burden. Some of course
find it a final act of love which they bear out of a
sense of duty and devotion; even providing a moment of
privacy in an otherwise very public occasion of grief.
Some feel that it would just not be right not to
accompany the coffin for this final moment.
It
is not the ‘travelling alone’ that I find jars,
though. If there is going to be a later burial of
cremated remains then the final moment will be deferred
and there will be a ‘laying to rest’ when this
is carried out. Even when that is not taking place, a
final moment can be created in the church and we have
learnt so much about the importance of closure, the
moment when the finality of death is reinforced and
confronted. Taking the coffin out during a final hymn or
piece of music provides a moment of the inescapable truth
that the person has died, that they have gone.
The
reality of finding a slot at the crematorium that
coincides with the funeral director’s schedule, the
church diary and clergy availability, let alone mourners
travelling some distance, can mean that separating the
committal from the actual moment of cremation opens up
possibilities that would otherwise have been closed. This
can affect the period of time the bereaved have to wait
for the funeral by several days. Coffins are also not
necessarily cremated straight away even when the
committal takes place at the crematorium. The 1999 code
of practice for The Federation of British Cremation
Authorities says that “all cremations will be
completed within 24 hours of the receipt of the coffin at
the Crematorium. A body not cremated on the same day…
may only be retained overnight on the written consent of
the Applicant for cremation or in exceptional
circumstances…” The expectation is that the
cremation will take place with only a minimal delay, but
a delay of a few hours is not unacceptable.
So
some delay is built into the process already and the
final journey motif is in one sense only a matter of
geography. It is the size of the delay that I think
causes me concern and what taking the body back to the
funeral director’s premises says about the funeral
service.
In
her book ‘Using Common Worship Funerals’ (2000),
Anne Horton talks about a funeral service being based on
the journey from the earthly to the heavenly (page 4). To
interject a hiatus into the final journey for the body
can diminish for the mourners the impact of the finality
of the committal. One funeral director mentioned to me
recently that he had told the family that the coffin
would be in their chapel for a few hours after the
service so if they wanted to come across to see it again
they could do so. I replied that I felt the committal was
the final moment they saw the coffin and said good-bye to
the body and it was important that this wasn’t
interfered with; that the function this fulfils in the
grieving process was not interfered with.
I
am concerned that as this practice grows we don’t
inadvertently, through trying to make things more
convenient, rob people of their final moment; that we don’t
stop the funeral and the committal being a final moment.
Death
interrupts us. It interrupts life and it interrupts the
normal course of things. This sounds obvious, but the
days when people would stop in respect for a funeral
procession to pass by, to acknowledge the passing, are by
and large long gone. There is a cultural denial about
death. So many poems and sympathy cards talk as if
nothing has happened. We are also subjected to great
pressures on our time and squeeze time so that we can fit
important moments into another agenda.
So
much of our Western society works on the assumption that
we can fix everything and control everything. Anything
that disrupts this fallacy is regarded as an affront. And
death is the ultimate affront. One of the powerful
messages of death is that it is uncontrollable.
And
yet we know that there are real balances to be weighed.
On the one hand managing clergy stress is a real issue,
but we also want to offer appropriate and conscientious
pastoral care. The bereaved want to offer the final acts
of love and yet also prevent unnecessary burdens that
reduce the opportunity mourners have to be together. We
have to balance finding a date with giving the
obligations around death their due space. In all this
balancing it is worth keeping an eye open to the cultural
tendencies that creep around us so that we don’t
find ourselves being drawn into colluding with them.
The
committal prayer, though, is not just a socio-psychological
mechanism of saying ‘good-bye’ with religious
language. Consigning the body to cremation or burial with
prayer is part of how Christians do things. Too big a gap
between the prayer of committal and the cremation
disrupts the Christian notion of actions being carried
out in prayer. It is how we live and so it is how we do
death too. The fundamental unity of this needs to be
upheld. Secular agendas just don’t get this.
The
only committal that is not dissected at some point is a
burial in a grave in the churchyard or cemetery
immediately after the service. Everything else involves
some kind of delay between the words and the actions. But
if there is to be a delay it needs to be seen as a
holding place, a kind of ante-chamber to the cremation
process. It should be kept to a minimum, within the same
day, so as to prevent the final moment being disrupted
and to prevent the grieving process being interfered with.
The prayer of committal is how Christians do things and
the unity of prayer and action needs to be maintained and
respected.
© Ian Black 2005
Ian
Black served his curacy in our parish before moving to The
Brents and Davington with Oare and Luddenham as Priest-in-Charge.
Ian is now Vicar of Whitkirk, Yorkshire
