Strictly Necessary Cookie should be enabled at all times so that we can save your preferences for cookie settings.
This website also uses cookies that can’t be disabled through this tab and will need to be disabled manually. The blog itself uses a commenting system by wpDiscuz which uses a cookie to remember some of the information you put in to save you inputting it every time. It also helps prevent comment spam.
The blog may also feature embedded items such as youtube videos which can set cookies to identify your device and approximate location to optimize bandwith and tailor ads as handled by google.
Our Directory also sets some cookies for the Map to function based on your selection and preferences.
Unfortunately the scripts for these features cannot be placed here for you to disallow the cookies manually, therefore the button on this tab will have no affect.
However if you wish to disable these cookie, you will need to disallow them manually in your browser.
For Google Chrome – Please follow this guide and add this website to the cookie block list: https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/61416?co=GENIE.Platform%3DDesktop&hl=en
Firefox: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/enable-and-disable-cookies-website-preferences
Safari: https://support.apple.com/kb/ph21411?locale=en_US
If you need any support with this, or use a different browser you can contact us for advice.
If you disable this cookie, we will not be able to save your preferences. This means that every time you visit this website you will need to enable or disable cookies again.
Not our experience Charles. We have collected more people from home than ever this year, and most folk have been quite happy to have us collect them at least twelve hours after. This brings with it its own headaches for those of us who will not embalm. Centrally heated houses with upstairs bedrooms are warm, and an unembalmed body needs to be cooled down as quickly as possible.
That’s interesting, Rupert. I guess you’d hope doctors would proffer advice to turn off the radiator. Difficult for you and potentially distressing for families otherwise.
I was prompted to put the question about this after chatting to a local funeral director. The 2am call is quite common hereabouts (the bed still warm).
Rupert, as your and Claire’s website suggests, you are the exception rather than the rule in that you actively encourage families to participate in everything involved in a funeral; so I’d suggest your clients are exceptional too.
Mainstream folk just arent used to corpses -and how they behave. Corpses are ‘alien’ to most.
(I am such mainstream folk)
It’s challenging to take resonsibility. It’s like health and going to the doctors: somehow we assume’they’know best. As if your health is something ‘they’ take better care of than oneself.
Thanks to reading this blog I have gained such an insite to dying, death ritual and how we dipose of human bodies. Why is this knowledge not part of mainstream education?
Ah, I guess that would give too much power to individuals, how dare we re-connect so powerfully with this sacred prosess -nature- ouselves?
What a valuable perspective from Sonya. How often, in our culture, do we find a specialist activity costed, marketed and then defended to the hilt against “amateurs?”
Sometimes we need specialists (dentists…)sometimes the specialists would be open to a challenge from the rest of us, in a way that would destroy their ring-fenced incomes.
E.g. celebrants like me. If people marshalled their resources well in advance – such as family members, books and the internet, the flowers in their gardens and hedgerows, their own music collections, their amateur musician friends – many more people could, I believe, run family funerals themselves, even if they needed undertakers to “deal with” the body. (I think I’m fairly mainstream too, in this area, Sonya!)
That’s not, of course, just about saving a few bob, it’s about ownership and creative identity, it’s about a fulfilling ritual that enables grieving people to move forward with new meanings for their grief.