Should she or shouldn’t she?
When Charlotte Raven was diagnosed with Huntington’s, an incurable degenerative disease, there seemed only one option: suicide. But would deciding how and when to die really give her back the control she desperately craved? And what about the consequences for her husband and young daughter? In 2006, 18 months after the birth of my baby, […]
Thing or person?
I was called to perform an emergency Taharah – the ritual cleansing and preparation of a body for burial. I was the rabbi of a large congregation, and although I had participated in Taharot in this funeral home, I had never been summoned for an “emergency Taharah.” The manager of the funeral home, a friend, […]
Different cultures, different customs
Phero Tran Tieu’s Funeral from Joseph Pham on Vimeo.
Why do atheists have dead bodies at funerals?
The question Can you have a funeral without a body? is not as useful as the question Why would you have a dead body at a funeral? Yes, yes, you can’t have a wedding or a civil partnership without the happy couple, and you can’t have a baby naming without a baby, so how can […]
Brilliant new website for grievers and undertakers
Welcome This site is dedicated to supporting the bereaved and paying tribute to the loved ones we have lost. It is designed to assist you with funeral planning, sharing memories and coping with grief. We are here to help you to: find an obituary set up a free memorial site view global tragedies check lists […]
Why do atheists believe in heaven?
All faith groups have sects to be ashamed of, the ones who want to string up gays, stone women taken in adultery, that sort of nonsense. Let’s not get into one of those complacent debates about how it could be that faiths based in love can spawn such hatred. We might, though, consider drawing […]
Finding Valhalla
A friend writes. She is to be interviewed for the talking wireless. They’re going to want her take on Viking funerals. What, she wonders, are my views on Viking funerals? Can you, I wonder, help? Interesting territory. We think of the classic Viking funeral as a blazing longship, bearing the corpse of a chieftain, […]
Too good to be real
I have tried, in the Good Funeral Guide, not to cover topics already dealt with by others. Instead, I have incorporated lots of signposts to best sources of information and best archives of resources – poems, music, ceremony ideas. There’s lots of stuff out there about eulogies, most of it guff. But TheFuneralSite has some […]
Adventurous ashes
When Ralph B White died two years ago his friends at the Adventurers Club of Los Angeles set about taking portions of his ashes to all manner of furthest flung parts of the globe. “Rather than have people mourn him, he wanted to give people incentive to go have adventures,” said Rosaly Lopes, who was […]
What does dying feel like?
Eighteen months ago Tony Judt was, by his own description, “a 61-year-old, very healthy, very fit, very independent, travelling sports-playing guy”. He had a slight shortness of breath walking up hills and found himself hitting the wrong keys when he typed, nothing more. Then in September 2008 he was diagnosed with motor neurone disease, a […]
