Death as a Fateful Moment? The Reflexive Individual and Scottish Funeral Practices



The not so reflexive Edinburgh funeral

7.1 As with the Isle of Lewis funeral, this was one arranged by a widower after the death of his wife,
although in this case the death was unexpected. Janet was taken ill on a Monday and she died two days
later in hospital with Graham at her side. Janet was an Edinburgh native whose family had lived in the city
for generations, while Graham had moved to the city during the 1960s. Graham and Janet had two adult
children, a son and a daughter. While their son Jeremy lived locally and helped his father plan the funeral,
their daughter Caroline lived in the United States and she had to fly home to Scotland for the funeral.
Janet’s funeral was a cremation, ‘she had always said she wanted a cremation, and certainly both her
mother and her father were cremated’, said Graham. However, unlike most Edinburgh cremations Graham
decided that they should go to the crematorium first and then hold what he called ‘a service of
thanksgiving’ in church afterwards. Of this decision Graham said:

It’s always seemed to me the tidiest way of doing it, if that makes sense. I’ve been to others
where you’ve got the service and then...if you don't want to go to the crematorium, then
you're hanging around...whereas this went boom, boom, boom, really from the crematorium
to the church to the hotel. It just seemed such a tidy way to do it.

7.2 After Janet’s death Graham informed the family solicitor, before contacting a funeral director
recommended by a friend. This friend was a florist and he did the flowers for Janet’s funeral ‘and they were
beautiful’, and the funeral director was also ‘very good...and took care of everything’, said Graham. The
most difficult decision he had to make was to decide who should conduct the funeral. Both Janet and
Graham were Christians and attended church, but Janet had fallen out with their local minister and at the
time of her death she was seeking a new congregation to attend on a regular basis. Graham took the time,
therefore, to shop around to find a minister of whom he thought Janet would have approved and he
ultimately asked a lay, or unordained, preacher to take both the funeral service at the crematorium and the
service of thanksgiving in a non-conformist church.

7.3 The funeral service was for ‘family and invited friends...what I put in the notice was private family
cremation’, Graham said. During this service there were ‘a couple of hymns, reading from the Bible and
then the actual committal’. The lay preacher was the only person to speak at either service because,
Graham said, ‘we didn't have any audience participation, I’m not keen on that’. Graham did not want to put
either of his children through the ordeal of speaking at their mother’s funeral. ‘Jeremy...isn’t very good at
putting himself forward, and I wouldn’t have wanted to inflict it on him...that’s not his metier at all,’ said
Graham, while ‘Caroline would have done it splendidly, but I didn’t really feel it was fair on her’.

7.4 The thanksgiving service was attended by people representing the different aspects of Janet’s life,
notably her family, her work and her interests, so that, Graham said, ‘the church was full to overflowing’.
Graham requested that instead of flowers, donations should be made to a charitable trust set up when
Janet’s father died, and ‘we were able to raise over a thousand quid’. After the service of thanksgiving for
Janet’s life there was a wake held in a hotel in the centre of Edinburgh to which ‘my mother-in-law, she
used to go every Sunday for lunch...and we had kept up that tradition, so that's where her wake was’.
Graham arranged a bus to take people there, because parking in the city centre was so difficult.

7.5 Graham had known that Janet favoured cremation, but apart from that they had not discussed her
preferences for her funeral. He said, ‘I don't think she actually deliberately spoke about it, but I knew what
her favourite hymns are. Yes, we talked about it without talking about it, if you know what I mean’. With
regard to his own future funeral Graham said, ‘I’m very ambivalent, thinking about myself now, but I’ve
thought about it and I can’t make up my mind...of course it’s not something I talk over very easily with (my
son)’.

7.6 The process by which Graham made decisions about Janet’s funeral and thanksgiving service may be
described as a blend of situations in which he behaved like a reflexive individual and occasions when he
followed traditional authorities. He shopped around to find an appropriate individual to conduct the funeral,
and in order to do this he had to reflect upon his wife’s beliefs and emotions and reflexively select a
representative of an expert system to take charge of the funeral service. The expert system of which he
made use, however, was the traditional authority of the Christian church, of which both Graham and Janet
were adherents. During both the funeral service and the service of thanksgiving the lay preacher was the
only person to speak, in the manner of Edinburgh funerals that took place before the 1990s, as remarked
by the Church of Scotland minister quoted above. However, using the crematorium solely for a private
funeral is an unusual thing to do, particularly when this was carried out immediately before the service of
thanksgiving which was attended by many mourners. Making that choice depended upon Graham reflecting
on his own previous experience of attending funerals and deciding that this would be what he termed a
‘tidier way of doing it’.

7.7 Janet’s service of thanksgiving was personalised to her in the sense that there was a eulogy given to
her and the hymns that were sung were her favourites. For an Edinburgh funeral this is expected practice,
and those conducting funerals routinely ask about the life of the person who died so that they can write a
tribute, while funeral directors habitually ask bereaved families about musical choices (Howarth 1996).
Graham made use of the traditional authority of the church, but he chose the church and lay preacher in a
reflexive fashion more redolent of late modernity (Giddens 1991). The funeral tea was held in the hotel to
which Janet’s family had traditionally gone for Sunday lunch, the florist he chose was a friend who always
provided the family’s flowers, and cremation was usual practice in Janet’s family. Graham thus honoured
the traditions of the family into which he had married, tacitly acknowledging the continuing influence of the
family as an institution (Gilding 2010).

http://www.socresonline.org.uk/16/3/22.html

31/08/2011




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