Remember me this way

[Gob]

with a cheap tacky windchime...

council-run graveyard is trying to stop the spread of wind chimes and plastic ornaments. But should you have the right to put whatever you want on your loved one's resting place?
A tree in a graveyard in Colchester, Essex, is at the centre of a bitter battle over how people are allowed to commemorate the dead.

On this tree hang hearts, mobiles, pendants and dozens and dozens of wind chimes. The surrounding patch of graveyard is full of plots - mostly for children - festooned with artificial flowers, plastic ornaments, teddy bears and solar lights.

In one national newspaper it was dubbed the "'Poundland' cemetery", referring to the discount chain, and the dispute has seen the council issue an ultimatum, giving grieving parents until 1 March to remove much of the adornments from graves and the surrounding area.



A cacophony of wind chimes disrupting Remembrance Day events prompted action to be taken, says Councillor Martin Hunt, deputy leader of Colchester Council and responsible for the graveyard.

"It became so overwhelming that we started to get complaints from people who wanted to mourn in quiet."

The new regulations ban wind chimes and other objects being hung in trees, but do allow objects to be placed on graves, but with a limit of two wind chimes and two solar lights. They represent a compromise, Cllr Hunt says.

"The people who put them there say they should be allowed to mourn in the way they want to, but they are stopping people from mourning."

Some of the features that have been used have gone too far, he says.



"Having a child's grave with a train set going around it seems to be over the top. If you have got lots and lots of solar lights on a grave that creates light pollution."

And it's not just in Essex that this battle is going on. Other councils are opting for strict graveyard rules.

North East Lincolnshire Council has put restrictions in the document that parents must sign before taking a plot in a new children's section.

The rules says no "pottery, glass or metal ware, plastic, bricks, blocks, wire mesh, wooden, concrete, iron or plastic fences are permitted unless manufactured expressly as a receptacle for flowers or incorporated in the memorial".

And there are church graveyards that go even further, not allowing any kind of artificial flowers.

But where did this trend for a profusion of grave memorabilia come from? And why does it upset some people?

"People need to make loss concrete," says sociologist professor Deborah Steinberg, author of Mourning Diana: Nation, Culture and the Performance of Grief. "They need to evoke the person they are missing. There are lots of different gestures that do that for people."

Contrary to what some might expect, the creation of these mini-shrines in graveyards goes back further than the death of Diana and the change in public grieving that period of mourning denoted, Prof Steinberg says. It is also possible to observe a cultural change in the shrines placed at road death sites.

"I've been to lots of graveyards where I've seen tons of memorabilia, plastic windmills and so on. The disapproval of it has a history about decorum and appropriate behaviour and the aesthetics of mourning."

There is an undercurrent of class conflict in the battles to restrict grave displays, suggests Tony Walter, professor of death studies at the University of Bath.

"Taste wars have broken out in the British cemetery, and these taste wars are to some extent class wars.

"It is generally different social classes who go for minimal grave inscriptions and flowers planted for minimal maintenance on the one hand, or who go for photos, teddy bears, wind chimes, plastic flowers, real flowers left in their cellophane wrappers etc, on the other hand."

For Marlon Sherman, who spends as much time as he can at the grave of his eight-year-old son in the Colchester cemetery, it is upsetting to hear his son's grave and the surrounding plots' ornaments dubbed "offensive or tacky".

The tree next to his son's grave has the highest concentration of wind chimes of any in the cemetery. He has liked the noise they make ever since first passing the spot.

"I took notice - it was a very warm place and it felt loved. That's where I wanted my son to be," says Mr Sherman, who has a tattoo of the date of his son's death on the inside of one wrist.

"I can't take my son down to the shop to buy him a comic or sweets or play with him. I've got to make the best of what I've got and that is a piece of stone. I talk to him. It makes me feel better."

The area which has the plastic windmills and the toy lorries and the profusion of flowers is one tiny part of a 50-acre plus site.

But the council has been convinced that it causes additional discomfort for other grieving families, and says a survey of plot owners proved this.

"The vast majority said they wanted them banned altogether," says Cllr Hunt. Instead there has been a compromise. "We have agonised over it."

Ultimately it is a battle over the parameters of free expression in perhaps the most sensitive public spaces we have.

Whatever the cultural shift that has led people to show their grief by adorning graves, it is what gives many people comfort.

"There is no right or wrong in all this," says Prof Walter. "But it means that cemetery and churchyard management requires great sensitivity and tact, trying to achieve in death a tolerance of others' tastes and a class harmony that we fail to achieve in life."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-12396991

It's bad enough being dead, without your relatives showering your grave with cheap tat!

[BoSoxGal]

I doubt that the dead give a hoot one way or t'other.

[@meric@nwom@n]

I hate wind chimes. Noise, and nothing more. That rest of that stuff makes it look like a tacky yard sale. Why not just cremate everyone and then you can keep them in your living room with all that tacky stuff.

[Crackpot]

THere are wind chimes that are actually tuned and sound quite nice. They cost quite a bit tho.

[rubato]

True, but not so nice that if every single dead kid got one it wouldn't sound like a hubcap* factory.

yrs,
rubato

*hubcaps were these metal things, well sometimes plastic, that were used to beautify car wheels in the eye of some putative beholder. For you youngsters.

[Sean]

Although wind chimes may be a step too far I believe they need to back the fuck off when it comes to toys etc on a child's grave. I cannot begin to imagine the grief involved with the death of your child but parents should be allowed to use reasonable means to help them to cope with that grief. Placing the child's favourite toy, be it a teddy bear or a train set on the grave seems reasonable to me.

[loCAtek]

Placing a limit on how far you can grieve ...really?

[thestoat]

Death has many uses ... a dumping ground for tat, heating swimming pools ...

A cash-strapped council has revealed plans to heat a swimming pool using furnaces at a nearby crematorium.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstop ... -pool.html

[Timster]

See? Crass yet practical. WTF is the problem? They are dead already. Oh yeah... that pesky planet earth running out of resources thing.

Cremation is a time honored tradition among many peoples. It's sanitary, doesn't take up space such as tillable ground for food production. Yanno, to help feed the teaming BILLIONS of reckless breeders that are exponentially populating and inhabiting the planet and exhausting and polluting what little resources are left. *cough* Besides a few superstitious/religious morons why shouldn't cremation be mandatory?

And why can't we use the heat/energy transfer from our passing to better human kind?

Seriously. We are all basically just energy signals. Molecules in motion. And when we die we do not lose that energy. It is simply shifted into another form. Just like photosynthesis. The sun feeds the... oh fuck it.

Now I've bored myself. You lot sort it out. I'm being cremated and toss into the headwaters of my favorite trout stream. You sad fucks can do whatever makes you happy.

But I'm telling you now that it won't be long and hard decisions will be having to be made and you may not have an option or say in the matter.

[rubato]

Although wind chimes may be a step too far I believe they need to back the fuck off when it comes to toys etc on a child's grave. I cannot begin to imagine the grief involved with the death of your child but parents should be allowed to use reasonable means to help them to cope with that grief. Placing the child's favourite toy, be it a teddy bear or a train set on the grave seems reasonable to me.

Just let them plant the kid in the backyard as long as they don't load him up with toxic formalin and shit and plant him a little deep so some future gardener doesn't turn him up. Won't hurt anybody.


yrs,
rubato

[rubato]

See? Crass yet practical. WTF is the problem? They are dead already. Oh yeah... that pesky planet earth running out of resources thing.

Cremation is a time honored tradition among many peoples. It's sanitary, doesn't take up space such as tillable ground for food production. Yanno, to help feed the teaming BILLIONS of reckless breeders that are exponentially populating and inhabiting the planet and exhausting and polluting what little resources are left. *cough* Besides a few superstitious/religious morons why shouldn't cremation be mandatory?
... "

Cremation uses a LOT of energy. Very inefficient.

Composting is the only way.

yrs,
rubato

[Timster]

See? Crass yet practical. WTF is the problem? They are dead already. Oh yeah... that pesky planet earth running out of resources thing.

Cremation is a time honored tradition among many peoples. It's sanitary, doesn't take up space such as tillable ground for food production. Yanno, to help feed the teaming BILLIONS of reckless breeders that are exponentially populating and inhabiting the planet and exhausting and polluting what little resources are left. *cough* Besides a few superstitious/religious morons why shouldn't cremation be mandatory?
... "

Cremation uses a LOT of energy. Very inefficient.

Composting is the only way.

yrs,
rubato

Really? I didn't realize that firewood was at such a premium. It is a renewable resource after all.

And the time it takes for all of the rotting corpses to decompose could be a bit of a logistical/health problem itself.

You really haven't thought this through have you?

[rubato]

"...

Really? I didn't realize that firewood was at such a premium. It is a renewable resource after all.

And the time it takes for all of the rotting corpses to decompose could be a bit of a logistical/health problem itself.

You really haven't thought this through have you?

Burning wood makes pollution.

Beetles and bugs are very efficient at recycling animals, and quiet too ...

yrs,
rubato

[oldr_n_wsr]

You have to get a fire pretty hot to burn the whole body down to ashes.

[Sue U]

You have to get a fire pretty hot to burn the whole body down to ashes.

" ... or, uh, so I've heard."

[thestoat]

Do you reckon it would be hot enough in Hell (or, as we say in England, Slough)?