On the Streets: Graffiti Memorials

8/26/09 
At a recent industry conference, I heard several stories of children carving their initials into trees used as evidence of our natural need for being remembered. This wasn't an official discussion topic, just casual conversations among funeral professionals, but it got me thinking.

What can we learn from graffiti memorials?

Rest in peace - until we meet again

I don't endorse or condone the alteration of another's property without their permission, and I'd be the first person to complain if our funeral home was vandalized. Right or wrong though, graffiti sometimes speaks for those who lack the means, but not the creativity to communicate something important. What these pieces tell me, is that there is a basic human need to memorialize our dead. It is important enough that some people risk jail time to paint a piece that says, "this person mattered to me, this life was important and I want everyone to know about it, I remember a unique person who changed my life, my loss is painful and it matters".

The young man who memorialized his friend on this wall is facing criminal charges. He apologized to the business owners, but also said of his friend "he was one of the most beautiful people I've ever known"

When New Zealand Green Activist Rod Donald died, a supporter put up this message, but not everyone in the party was pleased about it.

The writing on the wall

The families in our society choose more and more to deal with grieving on their own. Funeral processions and services are described as gaudy, or just for show. People say they want to remember on their own, to celebrate rather than mourn. I think that the graffiti shown here should remind us that there is a strong need for us to have a public facet to our grief experience. We need people to acknowledge what has been lost and understand that our lives have been touched and changed.

A familiar face is no longer in all the places we once saw it.

What happens when we do not allow ourselves a public expression of our loss at a funeral or memorial service? We have an un-met need. We don't get the support and empathy of our friends and neighbors. We have something burning in the back of our throat, but we haven't let it out, so we find ourselves unable to really move beyond it.

I'm not crazy about graffiti, but it does allow those without a voice to be heard, and maybe there would be less of it on the walls and trains of our world if families took the time and effort to have meaningful funerals.

Graffiti can be used for protest as well as memorialization. In January, I posted a story on Ghost Bikes, bicycles that are painted white and chained to the places where bicyclists have been killed by automobiles. Here are two more ways that victims are memorialized on the streets of the world. The photos above are from a public awareness campaign in Portugal, reminding pedestrians and motorists alike that 1/4 of the victims of traffic fatalities are pedestrians. The names of pedestrians who have died make up the bars in these crosswalks. Strictly speaking, this is not graffiti because permission was given for the installations. In fact, an insurance company sponsored the campaign.

This photo is from Guatemala, where white crosses were painted on the streets on July 11, 2009 to protest and to remember.

"Today, the principle roads of the city appeared painted with white crosses, an action of the Civic National Movement to remember the victims of violence and impunity." Prensa Libre http://bit.ly/BKrM6

via Boing Boing http://www.boingboing.net/2009/06/11/guatemala-white-cros.html

So what can we learn from graffiti memorials?

Each life matters and each loss needs to be acknowleged.

R.I.P.

A Fitting Tribute

12/15/2009

Photos via Mansfield News Journal

What makes a funeral or memorial service meaningful? What makes a tribute fitting and moving? This is an issue that has been of great concern to caring funeral directors for many years now, as we strive to meet the changing needs of families. Many different products have come along from candles to casket corners to photo slideshows and dove releases, all offering an opportunity to personalize the funeral experience. These products can be meaningful for some families, but they have a tendency of becoming just one more cookie cutter.

In my professional opinion, creating a meaningful and fitting tribute involves a lot of listening, responding creatively, and enlisting the participation of family and friends. A loving and meaningful expression by the survivors is facilitated, not just sold, and the value of the funeral director is his or her ability to offer experience and ideas, not just products.

A wonderful example of a meaningful tribute comes to us from Shiloh, Ohio, where friends got together in bitter cold temperatures to dig by hand, the grave of retired sexton Pete Ferrell. Mr. Ferrell was a friendly giving man who dug hundreds and hundreds of graves by hand over his 50 year career. Even after the use of modern excavating equipment became common, he insisted on digging by hand because he thought it was a better method.

The tribute is appropriate to Mr. Farrell's life, work and personality. The participation of his friends makes it an act of love, and a healing and uplifting experience for them. How often do you see people digging a grave by hand in frigid temperatures with big smiles on their faces? These people will never forget their experience. They have acknowledged the reality of the situation, and fully embraced an active role in respectfully laying their friend to rest. Mr. Ferrell would surely be proud, and the survivors have worked through their grief in a positive way. That's what makes a fitting tribute.

To read the wonderful article by Dave Polcyn and for more photos, visit

The Mansfield News Journal

For more stories about meaningful services, visit:

Inspiring Services

Life after Death: Kenneth O'Halloran

JANUARY 13, 2011

Irish photographer Kenneth O'Halloran's series "Life after Death" focuses on the artist's father, an aging undertaker.  Like many Irish undertakers, and the undertakers of Americas past, the elder O'Halloran's livelihood was  supplemented by plying another trade.  In his case it was a drapery shop.  In the case of my great grandfather, a second generation Irish American in late 19th Century Iowa, it was a hardware store.

O'Halloran's portrayal of death within the context of ordinary life, both touching and mundane, provides us with a perspective that has been lost in modern America.  These fascinating photos are made even more moving by the undeniable undercurrent of the Undertaker O'Halloran's advancing age and inevitable passing. 

  

My thanks to Kenneth for his kind permission in allowing me to share these images, and his words with my readers, all of which is his copyrighted property.  Enjoy, and please visit the Kenneth O'Halloran web site for more of this compelling work.  

"Though now a more secular society, Ireland still has remnants and relics of the old religious faith, even if many of its devoted followers are typically advanced in age - part of what might be termed a dying generation. The Catholic Church had been one of the country's mainstays. Falling Mass attendances, declining priest numbers and various damaging scandals have shaken the institution and weakened its grip. Despite this my father is a daily Mass-goer; his faith doesn't appear to have flinched."

"The house where I grew up in the west of Ireland is where my father now resides with his wife and their daughter Susan; all the rest of the family have flown the nest, some starting families of their own, one in New York where she has become part of the Irish Diaspora. The religious paraphernalia located throughout this house gives God a central presence and status not uncommon in Ireland at the time. We prayed as a family, like when the Angelus bells struck at noon and six in the evening. We knelt at night to say the Holy Rosary. Many of our rites of passage as children were rooted in Catholicism - our first communion, our confirmation, and so on."

"My father, who is 80, would not have seen anything remarkable in this. He was merely carrying on the tradition of his own father's generation. Having spent half his life working, he recently retired, closing his drapery store. His undertaker's business continues. For me and others in the family it meant that death was never far away or overtly mysterious. We became accustomed to the dead of our parish being prepared for the final ceremonies before burial. We would often come home from school to see who had died that day."

"If we truly wanted to make our father proud, we would have mastered the game he followed all his life: hurling. This ancient Irish sport, requiring great dexterity, courage and speed, can still weave a spell on him. Born in a rural community he has seen his own life change and now that of his children too. In recent years he lost a brother to whom he was close. Now I see him deriving great joy from his grandchildren. In their company he seems tranquil. At peace. His work done."

For More, visit http://kennethohalloran.com/

The Beautiful Death: Photos by Izima Kaoru

3/29/2009

Izima Kaoru: Landscapes With a Corpse

From the series "Tominaga Ai wears Prada"

http://www.galerieandreasbinder.de

In my experience, death is never glamorous.  The reality of our physical ends has too much to do with our earthly origins and functions to be attractive.  I recall reading in Kenneth Anger's Hollywood Babylon, the story of a movie star in the 1940s, whose career had gone south on her.  She desired a glamorous end, and so, dressed all in white lace, in perfect makeup, on a beautiful white bed in a beautifully appointed room, she swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills.  However, instead of turning into Snow White for the newspapers, sickness came before death and she died in the bathroom in a decidedly un-photogenic state.

Cautionary stories aside, death is something that needs to be pondered, meditated upon and accepted.  Perhaps those of us in the West can gain something from the Buddhist concept of death and life as two equally important parts of the same whole.  In our culture we concentrate only on the life and deny the death.  Perhaps by contemplating, since we each must one day die, what our ideal moment and place for death would be - even what we'd like to be wearing, we can gain a perspective that will enrich our experience and deal honestly and creatively with what is certain to come to us all.

To this end, I am happy to share selections from the series 'Landscapes with a Corpse" by photographer Izima Kaoru.  This work has challenged me to examine my ideas about death, the effects and significance of death on the world around us, and the significance of my own death and it's consequences.  The text and photos are  taken from the Andreas Binder Gallery, which represents Mr. Kaoru       

From the series "Kuroki Meisa wears Gucci"

http://www.galerieandreasbinder.de

Izima Kaoru encourages his female models to develop their own ideas about their transience and their death and translates these ideas into photographs. This eventually led to a series that was totally focused on the requests of his models and the scenario of death. Based on classic depictions of landscapes and interiors, each of his highly aesthetic photographs gradually zooms in on the victim who died in perfect beauty, even down to a detailed close-up of her face.. 

From the series "Erin O´Connor wears Vivienne Westwood"

http://www.galerieandreasbinder.de

Apart from the victim, all his scenarios are completely without humans, whether they are secluded streets, landscapes or rooms. They are devoid of any form of life, and nothing else exists. The viewer first experiences this state of desertion through a photograph taken from a distance. We are under the impression that the dead woman is looking at her own body, which is no more than a shell. Death is celebrated by Izima Kaoru in style, as a special event. In doing so he refers to three classic genres: Japanese landscape photographs with the traditional aesthetic element of transience, scene-of-crime photos with their documentary quality - an influence that cannot be denied in Kaoru's scenes - and fashion photography "with its demonstratively erotic and situational artificiality"

From the series "Koike Eiko wears Gianni Versace"

http://www.galerieandreasbinder.de

Izima Kaoru himself puts it like this: "Death is inevitable for everyone. Even the fear of death can hardly be avoided by anyone. Nevertheless, it is possible to come to terms with death or with the idea of dying, to work through it in a lengthy process and ultimately to accept it."

In Buddhism the practice of meditating on death is seen as a means of detaching oneself from the diversions of life. Izima Kaoru’s models hardly present themselves as renouncing life, yet Izima does ask us to consider that feigning death will help them towards accepting it. Whether this is correct or not, it is certainly true that death is seen differently in traditional Japanese culture than in the West.

To understand the context of these photographic series, we need to grasp the artist's method of depiction: he certainly does not see himself as a reporter or photographer who wishes to illustrate reports on unusual deaths or human relationship dramas through the presentation of shocking imagery. Rather, he wants to stage death in the context of enticement and temptation and to do so with attention to the most minute detail. He has well and truly mastered the art of depiction. Obviously, his scenes of death in these “Landscapes with a Corpse” are imaginary. Yet they refer to a long tradition of romantic themes, tragic ends and "beautiful deaths".

 for more of the photos and the text, visit http://www.galerieandreasbinder.de

Promession: A Return to the Living Soil

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 30, 2008

Promessa Organic AB of Sweden is developing a new method of disposition for the dead called 'promession'. Promession is described as an environmentally friendly form of burial, and could in fact be the greenest of green disposition options. In addition to its green credentials, promession is offered as a more ethical option than cremation or burial. Susanne Wiigh-Mäsak, biologist and head of operations at Promessa Organic AB recently gave a very interesting and inspiring presentation at the 90th annual convention of the Cremation Association of North America (CANA) and agreed to discuss promession with me for this post.
The process of promession involves a promator, freezing human remains in liquid nitrogen (a byproduct of the compressed oxygen produced already for medical purposes.) Once frozen, the casket and remains are agitated with a shaking motion from a table below them, causing them to shatter into tiny pieces. These pieces are then freeze dried to remove all the moisture from them. Metals are then separated, and after being laid in a biodegradable coffin can be buried, returning all the nutritious components to the soil.
I asked Ms. Wiigh-Mäsak how she came to develop this process. She is both a biologist, and an engineer, and has been keenly interested in gardening and science since youth. A special interest has been composting, and she is careful to point out the difference between decomposition and rotting. According to Ms.Wiigh-Mäsak, proper composting involves decomposition, which requires the same conditions that sustain life: air, proper moisture and proper temperature. These conditions allow for a substance to break down to the nutrient level that can replenish the earth's living soil, and are necessary for enzymes and microorganisms to do their work as well. The alternative to decomposition, says Wiigh-Mäsak, is rotting. Rotting occurs when the remains are too large for the air and soil to act upon their surface readily enough to break down in a positive manner. In the case of rot, the body's substances return to the earth, but not in a form that is enriching and replenishing to the living soil.
Because of her deep interest in composting, Ms. Wiigh-Mäsak was struck by the idea that kitchen scraps are treated with more reverence than the bodies of our loved ones. The nutrients of an apple core, that have been taken from the earth, can be returned to it through proper composting techniques, but the six and a half billion human bodies that have drawn life from the living soil are destined to burn off, rot away or lock away their nutrients, rather than return them in a positive way to the earth.

1. The corpse is frozen down to -18 °C.

2. The coffin with the deceased is lowered into liquid nitrogen. The body becomes very firm and brittle.
3. The coffin and the body are exposed to a light vibration, disintegrating into dust.
4. Mercury and other metals are separated using an induced magnetic field.

5. 25 - 30 kg of the powder now remains. This is put into a coffin made from maize starch or potato starch.

6. The starch coffin is buried shallowly and will turn into compost in 6 - 12 months' time. A tree can be planted on the grave. It will then absorb the nutrients given off.

Combining her interests in biology and engineering Ms.Wiigh-Mäsak developed the promession concept. She argues that this process in essential for the health of the living soil as well as an appealing and respectful disposition of the dead. According to Ms. Wiigh-Mäsak, even direct burial in a shroud is not as positive for the earth because the mass of the body, and the amount of moisture left in it prevents proper decomposition and results in rotting. What is truly different about promession is the process whereby the body is broken down to a point where the proper composting and a positive return to the living soil is accomplished.
Ms. Wiigh-Mäsak describes the actual physical process of promession to be something that is appealing to witness, a process that even a small child could watch and not be disturbed or frightened.

So, how far away are we from having promession as an option to choose from? Promessa is currently preparing for operations in South Korea, where laws have been passed to allow for this form of disposition, and promession has been embraced by the Christian Church there. Sweden is also getting closer to allowing promession as an option. Leaders of many religious denominations have determined that promession is consistent with the tenets of their faith. As far as the future of promession in North America, laws must be passed to allow for promession, and Promessa is currently in the process of selecting licensees and promession providers.

For more information on Promessa AB and promession visit the web site at http://promessa.se/index_en.asp

Ghost Bikes

TUESDAY, JANUARY 13, 2009

A cousin to the Roadside Memorial is the Ghost Bike, or Ghostcycle. Ghost Bikes are memorials to those killed while riding their bicycles, and are placed at the scene of the accident. Ghost Bikes began is St. Louis and have spread as both memorial and protest, all over the world.

http://nymag.com/news/features/47819/

In June 2005, Kevin Caplicki was biking down Fifth Avenue in Park Slope when he came upon the body of cyclist Elizabeth Padilla, who, minutes before, had been killed by a delivery truck. Caplicki belonged to the street-art collective Visual Resistance, and at its next meeting, they decided to construct a memorial for Padilla. The group took a spare bike, painted it white, and chained it to a sign post near the accident. The installation no longer looked like a bicycle as much as the negative space where one should have been, as if it had been cut out of a photograph by an X-Acto knife. It became New York’s first Ghost Bike.
The idea can be traced to Patrick Van Der Tuin, a St. Louis bike mechanic who in 2003 installed a Ghost Bike at the site of an accident he witnessed in the neighborhood of Holly Hills. (The victim ultimately survived and befriended him.) After Van Der Tuin and his friends created fifteen more Ghost Bikes in the St. Louis area, the project was featured in Dirt Rag, a national cycling magazine. He was inundated with e-mails. “Some people were adamant that this was a bad idea,” Van Der Tuin says. “They thought that we were discouraging people from cycling.” But others were moved by the spectral sight of bicycles repurposed as tombstones. Ghost Bikes started to appear in Seattle, Chicago, San Francisco, and Pittsburgh and have since spread to 35 cities around the world. “I had no idea it was going to be a viral thing,” says Van Der Tuin. -from New York Magazinehttp://nymag.com/news/features/47819/

http://www.streetsblog.org/2006/12/05/eric-ng-memorial-bike-ride-this-saturday/

Eric Ng Memorial Bike Ride This Saturday
by Aaron Naparstek on December 5, 2006
There will be a memorial bike ride for Eric Ng, the cyclist killed by a drunk driver on the Hudson River Greenway last week. Details below. Also, here is a note from the Visual Resistance blog. VR are the guys who make the "ghost bikes:"
I've been making ghost bikes for strangers for a year and a half. Eric's is not the first that made me cry, but it's the first that made me hurt. A big group of Eric's friends spent the weekend mourning, talking, and, finally, making. We made a ghost bike for him on Saturday and sunflowers on Sunday. Eric's memorial plaque reads "Love & Rage” no resting in peace for this rock star.
We are planning for a memorial ride this Saturday, December 9th, meeting at 1pm in Washington Square Park and then proceeding to the site of Eric's death. Non-bikers can head straight to the site, on the West Side bike path near Clarkson St. Please bring flowers (especially sunflowers), sidewalk chalk, paint, whatever you want. There will be a memorial service after the ride with music and a slideshow, and a party later that night.

-from streetsblog http://www.streetsblog.org/2006/12/05/eric-ng-memorial-bike-ride-this-saturday/

http://thephoenix.com/Boston/News/40414-Kelly-Wallace-1983-2007/?rel=inf

Kelly Wallace, 1983-2007

Kelly Wallace was killed on May 6, after her bike was hit by a car in a crosswalk at the intersection of Cambridge Street and Harvard Avenue, in Allston. Near that spot, a stark white “ghost bike” stands in her memory, adorned with handwritten notes and a profusion of blooming flowers.http://thephoenix.com/Boston/News/40414-Kelly-Wallace-1983-2007/?rel=inf

http://www.ghostbikes.org/photos?page=1

Here is an explanatory excerpt from the Ghost Bike site:

Ghost Bikes are small and somber memorials for bicyclists who are killed or hit on the street. A bicycle is painted all white and locked to a street sign near the crash site, accompanied by a small plaque. They serve as reminders of the tragedy that took place on an otherwise anonymous street corner, and as quiet statements in support of cyclists' right to safe travel.

The first ghost bikes were created in St. Louis, Missouri in 2003, and they have since appeared in nearly 75 cities throughout the world. For those who create and install the memorials, the death of a fellow bicyclist hits home. We all travel the same unsafe streets and face the same risks; it could just as easily be any one of us. Each time we say we hope to never have to do it again -- but we remain committed to making these memorials as long as they are needed.http://www.ghostbikes.org/