Crow funerals

Crow funeral, Crowder fantasy funeral, and what to look for in spring.

This is the final part of ‘Crow eats death’. Don’t worry if you haven’t read parts 1 and 2, this one can be read alone. The way that I wrote this out ended up being like four separate pieces, one for each season, so I will be posting them separately over the course of the year.

I covered a lot of what counts as a ‘crow funeral’ in parts 1 and 2 of this, but to recap; a crow finds a dead crow and makes an alarm call, other crows gather around the Corvus corpse and stick around for a bit (often making a lot of noise) and then fly off again.

Almost everything I have learnt about crow funerals has been from listening to or reading crow funeral expert Dr Kaeli Swift. You can (and should) listen to the whole episode of the Ologies podcast where she talks to Alie Ward about corvid thanatology - here.

Why do crows have ‘funerals’?

There’s a risk associated with approaching a corpse, says Swift. You can contract a deadly disease, get mobbed by stinging insects, or perhaps get offed by whatever killed the other animal. This is why she and her co-author John Marzluff, also of the University of Washington, believe crows perform these so-called funeral rituals—the animals are trying to learn about threats in the area. - Audubon magazine.

Apparently sometimes the crows will leave sticks, or even bits of shiny things (like a Twix wrapper for instance) with the body. Dr Swift says that occasionally a pair of crows will fuck right next to their deceased crow comrade. This is a crow funeral then - brief, noisy, sometimes horny¹, and everyone comes dressed in black.

What to look for in spring - A Crowder fantasy funeral - the third day

What kind of control freak wants to plan the minutia of a party that they will never get to attend (whilst living at least)? Me, I do. To the best of my knowledge I am not dying any time soon². This does not stop me from thinking about exactly what kind of funeral I would like to have, in great detail, once I do shuffle off into the underworld.

I have a friend called Bobby who I sometimes send updated funeral plans to. I’m a big fan of Bobby but he’s not a particularly close friend, and there have been at least two different summer Olympics (neither of which I watched, so I don’t know why I chose this event to mark the passing of time) since I last saw him in person. I figured that my closest friends wouldn’t want to be regularly reminded of my mortality, but if Bobby outlives me then he can just forward them the emails when I do die. If I write it out here instead, for posterity, then I can leave Bobby’s poor inbox alone.

Dress code - I love those funerals where the dress code is bright and colourful because “we’re celebrating their life, not mourning their death”. I love them, but that’s not what I want for my own funeral. I want it to be something that gothy 15 year old me would have loved. You should do as the crows do, and dress all in black. Please feel free to wear mourning veils, for no other reason than they look hot and you should make an effort to dress sexy at my funeral.

Songs (the most important part?) -

PJ Harvey - 50ft Queenie - If I ever become a professional (or amateur) wrestler, this would be my entrance song. Because it is very unlikely that I will ever become a wrestler (although I do sometimes google “how old is too old to train to become a wrestler?”), this can instead be used as my coffin’s entrance song.

Lisa O’Neill - All of this is chance - The opening lines (which are actually the opening lines from Patrick Kavanagh’s poem ‘The Great Hunger’) are “clay is the word and clay is the flesh” and this would feel especially appropriate since I want to be buried in heavy clay soil.

Leonard Cohen - Avalanche - It wouldn’t be a Sarah Crowder funeral without a Leonard Cohen song, but it was hard to choose which one. I know that Bird on the Wire would probably be a better choice, but Avalanche is one of my favourites and I’m not going to miss an opportunity to get everyone I love to sit in a room and be made to listen to it.

Townes Van Zandt - Black crow blues - Heartbreaking song to end on, but it’s my party and you’ll cry if I want you to. Please note I would like someone to tape over every time that he says “black Texas mud” and sing “upper Weald clay” over it.

The mourners - There are two kind of fantasy funerals I have. The first is one where the eulogies are very honest, even if they reveal the gap between how I thought I was being perceived and how I really was (to my ghost, who will be present). The other is an over the top praise fest, the highlights of which are the declarations of undying love. Every man and woman I’ve ever made eyes at, including baristas in LA and strangers on the tube, realises that they’ve always been in love with me. They live out the rest of their lives, or at least the next year, dressed in Victorian mourning wear.

The venue - Saint John the Baptist church, Okewood hill.

The church was built in the 13th century, supposedly on the site where a Roman villa had once stood, and a Druid temple before that. My maternal grandparents were married here, my great granny Queenie was baptised here, and I grew up half a mile away and would often cycle or walk through the woods to come here.

In his book ‘Portrait of Surrey’, Basil Cracknell says St John the Baptist’s must without a doubt be “the loneliest church in the county”. One of the few times that I have seen another person there, we got talking and they turned out to also be a descendant of my great granny Queenie.

My favourite gravestone in Okewood churchyard, from 1784.

At the moment the mulberry tree will still be bare in the churchyard, blackbirds will be singing, snowdrops and primroses will be out, and the wild garlic will be shooting up in the woodland that surrounds the church. Ideally my funeral would be in early May though, the month Laurie Lee called “the flower-studded crown of spring”, when the ramsons have flowered and the bluebells are out and the air is both garlic-pungent and sweetly perfumed at once.

A tiny bit of the carpet of wild garlic by the church in May.

The wake and the burial - As much as I love Okewood church, I would actually prefer to be buried at Coppice (the tiny bit of land my extended family collectively own) so have the funeral at the church, and then the actual burial and the wake down the road.

Coppice is a 2 mile walk from the church, through the woods and past my old house and then across the field that the buzzards soar over. If you’re driving then you can go past my old school on one side of the road and the local pub on the other, and down Snakey lane. The school has been turned into a house now, and the pub is very much a local pub for local people.

What I really want (and have done since I was a kid) is a sky burial. Place my corpse on the roof of one of the old kilns in the brickworks behind Coppice, and let the buzzards and crows feast on my flesh. I can’t think of a higher honour for my body than for it to nourish birds, and to become part of them. I have always wanted to come back as a crow, but this way I could come back as many crows.

If a sky burial is asking too much (I think it probably is in England) then I’d like to be buried in one of the Loop Living Cocoon mycelium coffins and to have a birch tree planted on top of me (even if the birds eat my flesh, you can still bury my bones this way). Plant me and the tree next to the stream, by the meadowsweet, and the oak stump that the song thrush smashes her snail shells on. There exists no better motivation for me to treat my body as a temple than to think it might one day be helping to nourish a birch tree or a crow, treat it as a temple now so that it can be food for the gods one day.

Coppice, like Okewood church, is on thick Weald clay and it’s hard work digging in it, but digging a hole is great grief work, and there is a decent(ish) chance that you could find exciting fossils in the process of digging. Smokejacks clay pit is right next to Coppice, and is the site where the holotype specimen of the theropod dinosaur Baryonyx walkeri was found. Crocodile teeth, coprolites, and part of a Iguanodon have also been found here, and the SSSI citation says it is the “best Weald Clay reptile site currently available.”

The wake will be held at Coppice, as soon as the body is buried and the birch is planted. If Sophia outlives me (she eats better than I do, and has longevity in her genes) then she should build a fire in the firepit, as she is the best fire-builder that I know. Everyone can sit around that fire, under the frothy hawthorn trees, and cook sausages over the flames, and tell nice stories about me (pausing only to listen to the blackcaps, or to see if they can hear a cuckoo calling in the distance). I know it’s not stew-season in May, but I think my guests deserve a nice big stew with suet dumplings (heated over the fire) as well, and then pineapple upside down cake for pudding. Wash it all down with birch sap mead, knowing that I will one day be doing my bit to help make the sap.

A hawthorn tree at Coppice

The funeral favours/goody bags - When I was looking through my old emails to Bobby (from 2015), I found that I had slightly different music choices, and had also come up with a great idea regarding goody bags.

Daniel Johnston - don’t let the sun go down on your grievances, Leonard Cohen - bird on a wire, then as the pallbearers are taking the coffin out something by Vince Guaraldi, maybe “you’re in love, Charlie Brown”, so people feel a bit dancey while they are walking out. Will update with catering and contents of goodies bags.

When Bobby asked what I was going to put in the goody bags, I told him “I’m going to record myself saying my favourite people’s names and ooooooh in a ghostly way. So when they miss me they can pretend I’m haunting them.” These hauntings would be on cassette tapes, with old walkmans³ to play them on. There will also be a jar of my own homemade fermented wild garlic in there - a gift of a bit of my microbiome to yours (I’ll try to sense when my last spring on earth is and make enough of these for gifts), some funeral biscuits, and a small bag of peanuts to give to the crows (you may even end up feeding one of the crows I come back as).

The legacy - I always wanted to be canonised. Doesn’t Saint Sarah Crowder have a nice ring to it? But I fear that the same thing that has stopped me from becoming a wrestler will prevent me from performing any miracles before I die, namely my laziness. I also think my not being catholic might get in the way (of becoming a saint, not a wrestler).

Since canonisation is a long shot, it would be nice if I could die a hero’s death, maybe jumping in front of a bullet for a baby or fighting off terrorists (but aged 120). At the very least I would like people to remember me as being a bit taller than I really am (I’m 5ft 7 and a half, maybe you could try remembering me as 6ft 2?) and kind to crows.

Please tell me about your fantasy funeral in the comments if you feel inclined, or just pledge to remember me as tall.

1. Speaking of getting horny near your loved ones remains (not a great way to start a sentence I admit), I recently learned (from a Rosie Whinray post) that Percy Shelley and Mary Godwin had their first sexual encounter(s) in the graveyard where Mary’s mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, was buried. Very crow of them.

Northern Christmas, Southern Solstice

2. In fact I am hoping to live to 120, or at the very least to a lifespan as good as an evil old man.

3. Would the plural of walkman be walkmen actually?