Cremains of the day
We’ve always liked Daisy coffins. They’re a quality product and use a range of lovely looking, renewable materials: water hyacinth, banana leaf, wicker — imported, of course. The people at Daisy are nice, too. Daisy don’t just make nice coffins, they also thoroughly understand design. They present themselves beautifully. They use an excellent graphic designer; their ads […]
Stoned
The dolts at The Co-operative Funeralcare have quarried another groundbreaking wheeze. Undistracted by the implosion of Thomas Cook, with which Co-op Travel ill-advisedly merged earlier this year, the blue-skies thinkers at Effcare have cooked up a… wait for it… headstone plan (which they inflatedly call a memorial masonry plan). Yes, now you can buy tomorrow’s […]
Marvellous!
Muriel Grimmett, Coventry’s first female funeral director, is still going strong at the grand old age of 80. She reckons to keep going for as long as her faculties will allow. She headed up Grimmett and Timms until 1996, when the firm was sold. She now works with the independent firm AJ Lloyd (recommended by […]
An Instinct for Kindness
From the review in the Guardian: Last year Chris Larner took his ex-wife Allyson – with whom he had remained good friends – to the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland where she ended her life. It was a life that had become unbearable because of the constant pain, indignities and limits imposed upon her by multiple sclerosis, a […]
Useful advice for senior citizens
Ever wondered about what to look for in a nursing home? We know. It’s a pre-need question and just like funeral planning we all like to think we wont need it. Or maybe we’ll get lucky and die first. But life expectancy is only another way to say hanging around. Street corners are too chilly […]
Plumbline and square – the Masonic funeral
Some Masons call their funeral ceremony an Orientation, but these days the service itself can be like a secular ceremony – apart, of course, from the Masonic ‘paraphernalia’. Masons are a great deal more open about their ceremonies than they used to be, but much of what they do still seems esoteric and mysterious. Borderzine […]
Death Cafe
Do you follow Death Cafe? If you don’t, you really ought to pop across and check it out; it’s brilliant. It doesn’t have have an agenda or a campaigning platform; it doesn’t address itself to a particular constituency or type or sect. It believes, I hope I’m right in surmising, that death should be part of general discourse. So […]
Pauper funeral
From the Toronto Globe and Mail: I was standing in the parlour of a Toronto funeral home, waiting for the friends of the homeless man we were about to bury. The funeral director was supposed to be retired, but he had stayed on to see the business through the transition to a new owner. Together, […]
Signs of the times – undertakers as event managers
Funerary customs are on the move in Germany, which seems to be emerging as the country to watch at the moment. Undertakers are becoming a little like event managers. People who are not religious and don’t go to church expect undertakers to organize a ritual for the funeral. In recent years the culture of mourning […]
Death Row
On Texas’s death row, there are no contact visits at all– no hand-holding, no embraces. There is a strange little ritual when a Texas prisoner who still has family and friends is executed: his or her loved ones rush to the Huntsville funeral home which holds the contract with the prison, to touch the dead […]
