Season’s greetings
As the health of the old year fails and expiration beckons, the Good Funeral Guide is going to put its feet up for a few days and, with the assistance of good food and good whisky (Glendronach for choice), join the living in celebrating the solsticial festivities. Thank you, loyal and occasionally infuriated reader, […]
Christmas quiz
Do you work at a crematorium or a cemetery? Are you a priest or a secular celebrant or a funeral director who leads or collaborates in the creation of funeral ceremonies? If you are one of the above, you may like to lend your brain to science for as long as it takes to fill […]
What needs to be done
Here’s a guest post by Jonathan Taylor. He’s posted before, here and here. He’s a loyal and regular commenter and contributor to debate. Indeed, he puts the fizz into much that we discuss. In his post; Doing what needs to be done, saying what needs to be said Charles raises the point that the recently […]
Human rites
They call it a rite of passage, a funeral, but I’m not so sure that that’s the right term for it. Is a funeral directly comparable with other rites of passage? We mark coming of age and matrimony with rituals which speak of transition—what scholastic folk call liminality. But, though we can push a young […]
Vast cars
What is this thing with undertakers and their hearses and limousines? Are we talking customer focus here, or idolatry? I really don’t know the answer—I mean that. As the UN climate talks in Copenhagen reach their climax, and at a time when people are finding it more and more difficult to stump up the […]
Doing what needs to be done, saying what needs to be said
In his excellent book Accompany Them With Singing (read it before you die or I’ll kill you), Thomas G Long says this: “When someone dies, Christians, like all other humans, look around at the immediate environment and ask: What do we have to do? What seems fitting to do? What do we believe we are […]
Carla
I don’t know if you follow Carla Zilbersmith’s blog. It’s not an easy read. She’s very clever and talented and funny, a brilliant writer, the kind of person you like and admire a lot, and she’s dying of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), which in the UK we call motor neurone disease (MND). She writes about […]
Period piece
Back in 1995 the funeral industry had been in a state of low level excitement and terror for some fifteen years. Conglomerates were stalking the land, seeking whom they might devour. Their talk of economies of scale made perfectly good sense. The little old family firms looked a bit like polar bears today. One of […]
Why do we do it?
David Barrington is an independent funeral director in Liverpool. We swap emails from time to time, and I asked him if he’d like to be my guest on this blog. I’m very pleased that he has accepted the invitation. And I very much hope that we shall hear from him again. Over to you, David. […]
The Undertaking
The Undertaking is a documentary about Lynch and Sons, the funeral home in Milford, Michigan, which is also home to Thomas Lynch, the man whose writings and poetry have greatly influenced the thinking of so many of us in the UK. It’s a marvellous piece of work. Watch it in its entirety, free, here.
