Eat up your greens
GFG hero Thomas Long questions the value of happy funerals. “To start at the end – to start at the celebration … without processing the sadness, jumps over steps and in effect paralyses us … If one really wants to be sure that one will remain sadder for longer than necessary, then pretend to be […]
Intolerant of intolerance
Posted by Richard Rawlinson The picketing of military funerals in the US by the Westboro Baptist cult is well-documented. Less so are increasing incidents in Holland of Muslim youths disrupting non-Muslim funerals. One undertaker says youths on bikes stop processions and bang on the roof of the hearse, shouting ‘One dog less’ or ‘Jews, Jews’. The […]
What makes for a ‘bad’ funeral celebrant?
Posted by Carole Renshaw, a civil celebrant The market of Humanists and Celebrants seems to be growing! I’m sure more are spilling out of the training programmes……….than they are withdrawing or giving up the cause! The plethora of new websites……new training provider logos………new leaflets………gives us some confidence that numbers in the profession are on […]
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 […]
