The Green Funeral Company’s Rupert Callender offers an ecological alternative to traditional funerals. This issue, following his participation in The Toxteth Day Of The Dead, Ru talks about new ways of thinking about keeping the stories of our dead alive in our mouths and hearts.
BY the time this is printed, the third Toxteth Day of the Dead will have passed, the 23rd of November, when we lay the bricks of those who have been MuMufied this year.
I can now safely reveal that this, the third Toxteth Day of the Dead was not held as the others were, in Toxteth Liverpool as you might expect, but at Snake Pass in the Pennines, one of the highest points in the country, and also almost the geographical centre of the country.
Confusing perhaps, but not when you are in an artistic partnership with Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty, those two renegade artists who caused so much outrage when they retired from the music business at the height of their success as the band the KLF, and marked that retirement by deleting their musical back catalogue and burning one million pounds.
That was all a long time ago, and something both of them would rather not talk about, not least because the destruction of that money in the past sometimes returns to haunts their present, but also because they ceaselessly move forward with their art.
Which is why, 23 years after the burning, they approached myself and my then wife and undertaking partner Claire to see whether we would form a hybrid of an art project, a company, and a monument for national mourning.
The idea is simple, if mad. We are building a pyramid of bricks, 23ft high, and each brick contains a portion of somebody’s cremated bones. The pyramid will require over 34,000 bricks to complete, and will not be done in our lifetimes. The pyramid hopefully will be settled in Toxteth, but at the moment, with around 40 bricks laid, it is still somewhat mobile, hence our brick laying ceremony taking place at Snake Pass.
The Toxteth Day of the Dead has become a state of mind, rather than a geographical place.
Bill and Jimmy have long been obsessed with pyramids, but this is no frivolous endeavour; the first brick laid was Jimmy’s brother, a Totnes man. This is for real.
It is an attempt to start a ritual ball rolling that has no specific religious traditions associated with it, but can instead gather meaning as it grows upwards, each brick a life, each life a treasure to the world.
And it has started to grow some ritual skin. It has been both playful, creative, silly, and incredibly moving and solemn. The family of each person who is “MuMufied”, the name we have given the process of becoming a boney brick attends, and for some of them, it is more powerful that the original funeral itself. People crave meaning, and most funerals have so little meaning that they leave you feeling empty and cheated, so revisiting their grief as part of a slowly growing semi anonymous monument complete with an ever evolving carnival of the dead is a chance to heal some long festering wounds.
We created a similar but also very different ceremony when we ran Sharpham Meadow Natural Burial Ground for the Sharpham Trust, around the fire pit which we dug and which has become the ritual heart of the ground.
We invited the families of everyone buried there on All Souls Day, the 2nd of November, and lit an enormous fire, and read out the names of all who lay there, and invited the families to throw a pine cone in and talk about their dead. It was incredibly moving and powerful, and was written about by two separate but brilliant authors in their books, Tom Cox’s “21 Century Yokel”, and Peter Ross’s “A Tomb with a View.” I thoroughly recommend both of them.
It has become impractical now, first with Covid restrictions, and also due to the sheer number of people buried there, but we keep looking for other ways to keep inventing new ways of keeping the stories of our dead alive in our mouths and our hearts, to keep our love for them burning strong.
Meanwhile, we are in, as Jimmy Cauty puts it, “A band that doesn’t make records, but build pyramids out of dead people.” and that suits me just fine.
* Visit www.thegreenfuneralcompany.co.uk or email enquiry@thegreenfuneralcompany.co.uk or call 07759 890 639.