Dead against it
“Families that live and purchased their homes there never once thought there would be a funeral home and the reminder of death on a daily basis.” Mayor Dennis Michael speaks for the townspeople of Rancho Cucamonga, California, in opposition to plans to open a funeral home.
Joy of Death Festival 2013
Plans for the Joy of Death Festival 2013 are cooking. Of course, we want it to be even braver, bigger, brighter and more brilliant than last year’s, where we staged talks by leading lights of Funeralworld, held the funeral industry’s first-ever Oscars, the Good Funeral Awards, hosted a Sky TV documentary film crew dedicated to the event […]
Quote of the day
“The end of life can be big drama, that’s for sure. In nearly a decade of doing this work, I’ve witnessed momentous final decisions; conversations carried on with mysterious, unseen figures; visions of the afterlife; and eleventh-hour forgiveness. We release each other–one back to the seen, known world and one into the unseen, unknown–and are […]
Never say die
Dying got so protracted and difficult it became necessary to invent the living will — a list of opt-ins and opt-outs during the last days/weeks/months. If you haven’t made one, you know you should. What a living will does not record, because it doesn’t need to, is something we also all need to decide for […]
Nearing the End of Life
If you’ve never seen this little booklet you’ve missed something. It’s a brilliant, brief, warm, intelligent and helpful guide for anyone looking after a dying person — the sorts of things they might expect to have to cope with. The contents contain insights into how a dying person may be feeling; how to talk about what’s happening […]
Putting the Church back into funerals
In an article in Saturday’s Times Nick Jowett, Vicar and Minister of St Andrew’s Psalter Lane Anglican-Methodist Church, Sheffield, proposes ways in which the Church might recover some of its lost share of the funeral market, in particular what he terms the ‘nominal Christian’ sector. He concedes that the Church bears some responsibility for the way things […]
Oldies in Need
The British are some of the most charitable people on Earth — if you measure their charitableness according to how much money they fork out for good causes. Today marks BBC Children in Need Day. There will be the customary telethon, razzmatazz, fevered fundraising, spinning figures and, if all goes to carefully-laid plan, ta-da, a record […]
Day out for the family skulls
From Wikipedia: Dia de los ñatitas (“Day of the Skulls”) is a festival celebrated in La Paz, Bolivia, on May 5. In pre–Columbian times, indigenous Andeans had a tradition of sharing a day with the bones of their ancestors on the third year after burial; however, only the skulls are used today. Traditionally, the skulls of family members are kept at […]
You are the referee
Here’s another pay-up-or-else story — true but anonymised and deliberately undated. A funeral director is refusing to hand over the ashes until the balance of the bill is settled — which it will be if the DSS claim is successful. Does he have the right to do this? You can’t arrest a corpse for debt […]
Another new death mag
The senior management team here at the GFG-Batesville Shard have spoken at some length to Sue White, above, about her new magazine venture, Farewell Magazine. We were impressed. Farewell Magazine is described below in a press release we have just had from her people: Funerals and dying are taboo subjects in today’s society, but one […]
