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Behind the long ribbon of the cemetery wall all is quiet and damp and very grey. Rising from the ground at a hundred different angles, the headstones of Kensal Green, north-west London, are softened by lichen, moss and mildew. Beyond the older graves, this sombre scene is suddenly brightened by tropical splashes of colour: artificial yellow tulips, plastic poinsettia, fake lily of the valley, great sprays of plastic roses and other indeterminate artificial shrubs and flowers in vivid orange, purple and red. The proliferation of plastic flowers bedecking ever more elaborate graveside memorials, featuring Pooh bears, T-shirts, flags, pictures and poems and windchimes and windmills, has sprung from a growing individualism, the mourning of Princess Diana, the spread of foreign traditions and even health and safety regulations that forbid glass and metal in graveyards. For many people these vibrant, personal displays are a vital expression of their relationship with the deceased. For others they are kitsch, shouty and intrusive. This week a grieving family criticised strict rules forbidding artificial flowers in winter imposed by the vicar of St James' Church, Quedgeley, near Gloucester, after silk flowers laid in memory of Rebecca Eales, who died in 1988 when she was three weeks old, were repeatedly removed from her grave. "What this vicar has done to me is made me feel that I have not wanted to visit my daughter's grave," Rebecca's mother, Elizabeth Mills, told a local newspaper. "When he took the basket of flowers weeks after her death and disposed of them, only leaving a note, the hurt was beyond belief." The Rev Geoff Stickland said that unlike many churches he has always enforced rules against fake flowers and these rules fall within Diocesan guidelines. "The metaphor of flowers is the beauty that weathers and decays. That is why we always put real flowers in the churchyard where they are associated with funerals. Plastic ones don't decay, so the metaphor gets lost," he said. He has previously banned the playing of pop songs at funerals in his parish, a trend he also attributed to the death of Princess Diana. Traditionalists may be discomforted by new responses to death but, in its own calm way, Kensal Green cemetery is a wonderful illustration of changing patterns of mourning. Its rows of tall, forbidding Victorian graves would please lovers of austerity and yet they are also testimony to competitive bereavement in which wealthy families sought to out-do each other with the size of memorials – Romantic-era busts and angels and broken pillars. Modern graves are far more humble – and more individualistic. In Kensal Green, they feature everything from a rain-soaked toy Eeyore left for a – presumably grumpy – grandad to framed pictures of dogs, snow globes, Chelsea T-shirts, caps and earmuffs. One is adorned with a picture of a sunset, a poem for "mum" and a small half-drunk bottle of Glenfiddich. A memorial to a 21-year-old boy is dominated by a T-shirt hanging from a wooden cross with "playboy" on it; around his headstone is a lantern, a model flute-player on top of a wind chime, a poem and great splashes of colour from plastic floral arrangements. Dr Kate Woodthorpe, a lecturer in sociology at the University of Bath, says such decorations are mourners "staking their claim" and emphasising that their loved one was important – and an individual. She believes that disputes similar to the one in Quedgeley are commonplace and emphasise the need for cemetery managers to have clear, consistent rules. "There are competing expectations about grief. For some people it's about moving on. For others it's about an ongoing relationship," she says. "There is a view of stages of grief that ends with 'letting go'. Some people don't do that. They never will let go, and that is OK." While some may view the near- permanence of plastic flowers as a form of part-time mourning (or a consequence of the bereaved living far away from the cemetery of their loved ones) many of these plastic gardens are tended with great devotion. In Kensal Green, numerous graves have Christmas decorations and cards to the dead, painstakingly wrapped in clingfilm. As one inscription defiantly puts it: "To live in hearts we leave behind is not to die". In the far corner of the cemetery, Eileen and Ray Buckley are arranging new plastic flowers around the grave of their daughter, Monica, a nurse who died 15 years ago, aged just 25. They visit "more or less" every day, and routinely beautify any neglected graves nearby with their leftover plastic flowers, which Eileen buys from Poundstretcher. "Try putting natural flowers in the wintertime and see how long they last. There is nothing so ugly as dead flowers," says Eileen, pointing to a huge arrangement of real flowers laid last Friday; they are already composting into a soggy pulp. "Let's hope this vicar gets sorted out," adds Ray. "You put what you can afford on the graves – we are pensioners." Mary Keane has freshened up the grave of her husband, Christopher, who died in 1998, with neatly symmetrical arrangements of realistic-looking plastic daisies. She also has two "candles", which are LED lights that will flicker away for three months. "For the winter, plastic flowers look beautiful," she says. "We put fresh flowers on birthdays and anniversaries but the rest of the time they are plastic. I think they look lovely." "Silly vicar," finishes Eileen Buckley firmly.

Should fake flowers be banned from cemeteries? | Life and style | The Guardian

"Try putting natural flowers in the wintertime and see how long they last. There is nothing so ugly as dead flowers,"

So you come back and take them away again. Or, as they do in France, buy something in a pot that doesn't need much looking after. Heather's popular.

Personally I reckon less is more. When I shuffle off I want people to see my name alone and think "holy fuck, I remember that maniac", not for my remaining relatives to be obliged to create an Egyptian Hall of Tastelessness out of plush toys in an attempt to distinguish me from the millions of others.

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There is no accounting for rituals. It does not actually matter to the people who are dead what is put on their graves, or even if they have graves at all. I have a certain sympathy with the Zoroastrian practice of having my bones picked clean by vultures (after I die, I emphasise). But there is a worrying shortage of vultures.

Grave rituals will be for those I leave behind, not for me. The vicar of St James' Church, Quedgeley, seems to have no appreciation of other people's feelings. Is there any test to screen out people with Asbergers syndrome from becoming Anglican priests?

I actually kind of sympathise with reactionary clergy. I wouldn't go so far as to ban this sort of thing, but I'd look pretty weary every time it happened, and probably mutter bits from 2 Kings 9.

I think a large part of the reason rituals get to be rituals is because they're satisfying to watch and participate in and have appreciable aesthetic qualities. If you want something more person you're almost certainly going to get something more crappy, unless you're a professional stage director and this stuff is actually your job. Sure My Heart Will Go On followed by a reading from The Lion King might be more personal (but not that personal - every other person seems to pick them these days) but it'll have far less of an effect on those around than a formal funeral following the liturgy or a sung mass or whatever, because the latter were designed for being effective at funerals while the former weren't.

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Death and loss belong to us all | Mark Vernon | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

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You have to feel for the Reverend Geoff Stickland. He's the vicar who has repeatedly removed the artificial flowers from the grave of a child. They were being laid there by the child's parents, who are now so upset that they're reportedly considering exhuming the body of their young daughter. Stickland was obeying the parish rules. Real flowers only in graveyards. It's not just a question of taste and curbing the modern trend to adorn graves with all kinds of personal mementos. Graveyards are public places and so, harsh as it may seem, there are factors to consider other than the feelings of grieving relatives. Perhaps Stickland should have been more considerate or tactful. That's impossible to tell from a distance. But, in fact, there's something more at stake in the story. It's the shared dimension to grieving, something that's often forgotten in an age that has come to see loss as a largely private affair. There's been a big change in the practices of mourning over the last hundred years or so. Had you walked down a Victorian high street, where there are now bike shops or nail bars, you would have seen as many businesses trading in the paraphernalia of death – from black-bordered notepaper to dark and sombre clothing. It seems morbid now, another example of the neurotic excesses of the Victorian age, to be forgotten like their supposed fear of sex. But there was a wisdom in their death rites that we've arguably lost, namely a recognition that mourning cannot be done well alone. It requires a public dimension because the sadness of a death is not just about who you've lost. It is about what you've lost of yourself in losing them too. As Lacan observed, when someone dies, you don't just lose them, but you lose yourself as you were with them. If you were a husband and you lose your wife, you need to remake your place in the world as a single man. If you were a mother and you lose your child, you need to understand once more who you are apart from being a mother. It's about your relationship with the world, your role in the community. That's part of the pain. So it's helpful to have the community involved in your loss too, and not just personal family and private friends. As Darian Leader explores in his book, The New Black, finding yourself again is a social act – which perhaps explains why many cultures have professional mourners. It's the very artificiality of the professional mourner that allows them to take on a mediating role. Like the vicar or registrar who declares that you are now married, they announce to everyone else that something foundational is taking place, and that everyone is involved to a degree. Similarly, there's the ancient thought that nature mourns with you – the imperative that lies behind WH Auden's well-known lines in Funeral Blues: "Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun; Pour away the ocean and sweep up the woods." The mourner's world has to be remade and that requires a remaking of the world too. Or it's striking that in Hamlet, the prince only begins to mourn his loss when he finds the skull of poor Yorik and then sees Laertes ostentatiously mourning too. Hamlet's loss is externalised. The death of his father stops being his private obsession. It seems that many of the public aspects of mourning fell into disuse during the first world war. There were then just so many deaths that it ceased to be possible for them all to be performed appropriately in public. The war memorial was a substitute. What we're left with now is a thin of awareness about the public dimension to mourning. That comes to a head in these rows about graveyards. Those who mourn today are bound to be upset when they cannot leave tokens other than those that are publicly sanctioned. But as you'll know if you've ever walked through a well-maintained Victorian graveyard, as the evening begins to fall, the experience is profoundly cathartic. Your loss is not your own. It's shared by all humanity.

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Those who mourn today are bound to be upset when they cannot leave tokens other than those that are publicly sanctioned.

An anal-retentive priest determines what is to be "publicly sanctioned" by appeal to Victorian English principles? No wonder people are fleeing from the church.

I wouldn't say "publically sanctioned" more like "proven effective". If it was the public in charge it'd be The Lion King all the way.

You wouldn't leave the planning of a park or an art exhibition up to some random guy who knows nothing about it, after all. If you've got no aesthetic judgement whatsoever then planning this sort of thing necessarily involves a trade-off between personalisation and aesthetic qualities (ie. you can have something ugly that you designed yourself, or something good into which you had little input). Of course, if you've got no aesthetic judgement then you're not the best placed to make the decision in the first place, and you'll almost certainly go for personalisation simply by default.

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Use cremation and be done with it all...

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Little children trot happily towards the Gates of Hell:



Older people journey in several stages:



But it's all the same in the end.

Why The Lion King? I don't believe that it is at all popular here.

It's the Circle of Life stuff.

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Is a graveyard a public amenity or an arena of self-expression? An Essex council recently ordered grieving families to remove ‘decorations’ from the tombs of their dead children. ‘One councillor claimed that it looked like Poundland,’ said Anne Lee, who was asked to remove the wind chimes from her daughter’s grave. ‘But we think they’re beautiful.’ Is a council a better judge of what is right and fitting in funerary monuments than at least some of the citizenry? Municipal cemeteries are among the many achievements of our Victorian forefathers. They are usually still well maintained. In many towns they are by far the best and most peaceful place to walk; and they are also highly instructive, from more than one point of view. Recently, for example, I spent a few hours in such a cemetery in the West Country. That death has long been a subject of importance but difficulty for human beings is suggested by the number of expressions for it inscribed on tombstones in this cemetery between 1880 and 1930. Here is a non-comprehensive list (the cemetery was very large and I did not examine every tombstone): Died, Passed away, Fell Asleep, Departed this Life, Was Called to Higher Service, At Rest, Entered into Eternal Life, Was Gently Translated, Called Home, Passed into Higher Service, Entered into the Homeland, Suddenly Fell Asleep, At Peace, Was Changed… There is surely an embarrassment in this profusion of expressions, as if the nature of something so deeply undesirable and undesired as death could be altered into something nicer by a change in terminology. One hears in it Matthew Arnold’s long, melancholy withdrawing roar of religious belief; we struggle over words when we are uncertain what we want to say or what we mean. My eye was caught in the cemetery by a distant area in which the subdued shades of green and grey and black natural to a cemetery suddenly burst into bright, metallic primary colours. I saw helium balloons waving in the breeze, and as I approached I heard the whirl of little plastic windmills. It was the area set aside for the tombs of children. The death of children now seems anomalous to us, as for most of human history it was not. Edward Gibbon, for example, tells us in his Autobiography that he was the only one of seven children to have survived infancy, and even he was often expected to die. The Gibbon family was worse than average for the age, but by no means unusual. Now it seems completely against the natural order of things that a child should die before his parents, and when he does so it is therefore all the more tragic. So it is not surprising if the mourning for the death of a child should be more pronounced than in Gibbon’s day. Yet it seemed to me that some other shift had occurred that was visible in the children’s section of this municipal cemetery. There was an extravagance and kitschiness to the commemoration of dead children that is of recent origin, and struck a false note. In simplicity is feeling. I was much moved, for example, by a small tomb which gave the name and dates of a child who died aged three months in 1964, by the side of which had recently been placed some fresh flowers. By 1964, of course, the death of a child was already unexpected and anomalous, a tragedy rather than a natural event that, however regrettable, was normal: and this is proved by the fact that 46 years later the parents, now probably in their seventies, remember the child with grief still in their hearts. It takes very little effort of the imagination, surely, to visualise the couple at the cemetery, dignified and undemonstrative, with their small bunch of flowers. But if we move on to more recent infant deaths, we find a significant change. There has been a Disneyfication of death, in many cases literally. Golden-yellow figures of Winnie the Pooh, always in the crude Disney version and never in the subtler and tender E.H. Shepard version, are engraved on many black shiny tombstones (the favourite national material for tombstones now, the funerary equivalent of the fitted kitchen). There are many Mickey Mice on or scattered about the tombs; there was a Mickey Mouse on the tomb of the only child with a Muslim name in the cemetery (a reassuring example of acculturation at work). Some of the tombstones are actually in the shape of teddy bears; the main literary influence on the inscribed sentiments appears to be that of Hallmark cards: Fly where only angels sing Or: Our little man who was born asleep but awoke as an angel Also now visible is a spirit of competition: he grieves most who grieves most conspicuously and leaves the most plastic detritus on and around the tomb of the departed. In this instance, there was a clear winner of the competition, at least for the time being — the relatives of a child who lived for two weeks and had now just ‘celebrated’ his first birthday. The victory was no doubt so complete because the extravagance was recent; the crown will soon enough pass to others. There were more toys on his tomb than I received during my entire childhood (and I was not deprived), including some soft toys now rather sodden by the rain. Helium balloons, wishing the infant many happy returns, were tied all around the grave, waving in the air; there were plastic windmills; bouquets of flowers in baskets; a birthday cake with a candle; and many birthday cards, not from the parents alone. One said ‘Happy birthday little one, wish you could of been here’. Another, from a ‘friend’, claimed that not a day passed without her thinking long about ‘you, little one’. How is it that the fraudulence of this emotionality, its sheer inauthenticity, not to say mendacity, is invisible to those who indulge in it? Here indeed is a puzzle for psychologists. I am reminded of those people who cannot see the fraudulence of American television evangelists the moment they appear on the screen. It is as if we, or at least some of us, are in the process of becoming people without inwardness, who measure their own feelings by outward manifestations only. So many teddy bears, so much grief. How and why have we become like this? Theodore Dalrymple is the author of Spoilt Rotten: The Toxic Cult of Sentimentality, published by Gibson Square.

The Disneyfication of death | The Spectator

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