And what did you want?
There’s a sprightly piece about funerals in this week’s Spectator. Its content is not available free online, so I’ll transcribe the best bits and hope that I’m not infringing copyright but, rather, advertising the magazine. It’s by James Delingpole. If I’d written a film it would have been called Four Funerals and a Wedding, because […]
Cosmic laughter
If people cry at weddings why should they not laugh at funerals? If the person who has died made them laugh when he/she was alive, then laughter is a very proper way of commemorating them. We find all sorts of things funny because humour is not just a way of expressing jollity, it is also […]
FUNERIA
Aesthetics. Taste. What’s naff, what’s ravishing? We’ve been there before in this blog and we’ll go there again. Bandit country. The clothing, merchandise and interior decor of death is dignified, is magnificent, is horrible. It’s whatever you think it is. Undertakers’ frock coats.Traditional coffins with their sonorous names: Arundel, Chatsworth, Montacute. Chapels of rest. Hearses. […]
More than just a matter of tone
This is an interesting blog post. Here’s a taster: What I hate most at funerals is the tone used by the officiant (almost wrote: the presiding officer). No matter what the religious faith may be, the person in front of the congregation speaks as if he knew … I think it’s the tone of voice […]
Pets and people together forever
It’s intriguing to see what grabs the attention of people, especially when it’s something you don’t, yourself, reckon to be at all eyebrow-raising. Down in Cornwall, Penny Lally at Penwith Woodland Burial Place is burying pets with their owners. So remarkable is this reckoned to be that the story has whizzed round the world in […]
Does mass burial horrify you?
Interesting piece in USA Today on mass graves in Haiti and the importance people attach to marking the spot where their dead are laid – a physical point of connection. “We are hard-wired to want to know where our dead are, whether we believe in a superior being or not,” asserts Curtis Rostad, an Indiana […]
Letting go
Obachan Funeral 2008 from Steven S Friedman on Vimeo. There’s a thought provoking post over at Mindfulness and Mortality about the role of the body at a funeral. Among many other interesting ideas, blogger Gloriamundi articulates this: Somehow, people have to let a body go. It’s very difficult to do, because the life of the […]
On whose authority?
It’s an interesting fact that a funeral director can go to a hospital mortuary and collect a dead person to bring back to their funeral home on the verbal instruction of that dead person’s executor. That’ll be good enough for the mortuary. If a funeral director whom they’ve never seen before turns up, they may […]
Funeralcare screwupdate
Naughty scenes, it seems, recently shattered the reverent if gloomy atmosphere of George Pettit and Son, undertakers to the good people of Chester. At the staff Christmas party all manner of impropriety seems to have been committed. In an admirably tight-lipped and understated report, the Sunday People spells out in caps the words STRIPPING, THONG, […]
