The world of death has given birth to very few websites of any value or beauty. Most undertakers are technodunces; many do not even rise to email.What’s more, there is very little discussion of death and dying going on in this country (the UK) just now. I have far more responses to this blog from […]
Habeas corpus
I was emailed last night by someone who wants to visit their dead parent at the undertaker’s. The undertaker won’t make an appointment. The client thinks the undertaker is prevaricating. The undertaker tells the client that the customary time to visit a dead person is the day before the funeral. This is not soon enough […]
Evansabove
In December 2006, Boyd Evans, 20, a talented, stylish, popular hairdresser, died after a car crash along with his partner, Nathan. Boyd’s mother, Teresa, set about trying to get his clothes and things back: “I had wanted every last thing close to Boyd in his last moments.” The hospital prevaricated, then told her they […]
Don’t trash the ash
There – just over there. See them? That conspiratorial huddle, furtive, watchful. Burglars? Satanists? What are they up to?Chances are they’re only bereaved people waiting for the coast to clear before they can scatter some cremated remains. It’s difficult to do that in public, openly. It might distress people. It’s not yet a socially okay […]
He died as a fool
One more post about how we should speak of and to our dead people. All of us, probably, cling to the superstition that we should not speak ill of them — not too ill, anyway (just mildly critically, perhaps). To do so could have calamitous, possibly supernatural, consequences. Hush and awe hold us in their […]
Can’t act. Can’t dance. Can’t sing a little
A funeral is theatre. Yes? The protagonist is a dead person in a box who hogs centre stage and utters not a word of dialogue throughout. Unusual theatre as theatre goes, but theatre all the same, I think we can assert. To what genre does it belong? Tragedy, of course (for all that, in conventional […]
Posthumous charisma
Kathryn Flett wrote in this Sunday’s Observer about a funeral she went to. Her account is testimony to the value of a funeral. She says: “The send-off was standing room only, with moving speeches, singing, essential tears, equally essential laughter and a cardboard eco-coffin covered in stickers and scrawled personal messages from family and friends […]
Louder than words
I’ve been mentoring a fledgling funeral celebrant. The occasion of her first funeral was quite an event. She had formed a relationship of warmth and trust with the wife of the man who had died and she had written a good tribute, full of personal touches. She is nothing if not a hard worker, and […]
A Happy New Year to the FSJ
It’s a busy business, an undertaker’s, at this time of the year. Jan and Feb are the popular months to die, and why wouldn’t they be? Nature imparts no vitality. The spirit ebbs with the seeping daylight. In between the bagged bodies coming in and the boxed bodies going out there are families to see, […]
