Desecration of Mum’s grave was the last straw
Posted by Richard Rawlinson Julie Bailey, founder of the Cure the NHS campaign group, which exposed the Mid Staffordshire scandal, has closed her café in Stafford after “political activists” desecrated her mother’s grave. “I am having to leave my home, my livelihood and my friends because a few misinformed local political activists have fuelled a hate […]
Dying what comes naturally
On Thursday the GFG donated an entire day to the Natural Death Centre — an act of generosity which has earned us the highest self-praise. We agreed to deliver People’s Awards winners’ certificates to those owners and managers of natural burial grounds upon whom the People had bestowed them. As our 54-seater luxury executive coach […]
You tried
One for you celebrants. In a deceptively ‘unclever’ eulogy for James Gandolfini, David Chase, creator and head writer of the Sopranos, offered this thought about the subordinate value of coherence in speechmaking: I remember how you [Gandolfini] did speeches. I saw you do a lot of them at awards shows and stuff, and invariably you […]
‘Everyone has a plan til they get punched in the mouth.’ – Mike Tyson
Of all the products dreamt up in the secret, black and midnight minds of financial services sorcerers, the pay-now-die-later funeral plan must rank as one of the rankest. It stinks. It’s idiotic. A funeral plan purports to benefit consumers by enabling them to buy tomorrow’s funeral at today’s prices (or thereabouts). But it wasn’t invented […]
It’s all good at Clandon Wood
Friday and Saturday 21 and 22 June marked the opening of Clandon Wood natural burial ground in the Surrey Hills, south of Guildford. The moving spirit behind the venture is Simon Ferrar, a man whose meticulous research has made him really quite famous in Funeralworld. There can’t be anywhere he didn’t visit, nor any person […]
Life stories don’t tell half the story
For the living there is much pleasure to be derived from surveying a person’s life when the busy world is hushed, and the fever of life is over, and their work is done. Dead, in other words. Works in progress – biographies of the living – just don’t cut it. Death focuses the mind on […]
What would you like to see on your TV?
When media people phone the press office here at the GFG-Batesville Shard, their requests for information often conform to whatever they suppose to be trending. “We’re doing something on living funerals. Are these catching on?” “No.” “We’re doing a documentary about the dying process and we want to film someone actually dying. Can you help […]
I like large funerals, they’re so intimate
Posted by Richard Rawlinson “I like large parties, they’re so intimate. At small parties, there isn’t any privacy.” With this memorable quip in The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald captures the emptiness of Jordan Baker, one of the flappers who attend the parties at the mansion of Jay Gatsby. A great thing about The Great Gatsby […]
How they wear you down
I first heard from Lisa Mullan when she wrote to me on 23 Feb 2013: My father was told he had terminal lung cancer in May 2012 and had around 6 months to live. He subsequently purchased a Funeral Care Plan from the Cooperative Funeral Care, Plympton, Devon and requested he be buried at the […]
For Father’s Day
Posted by Kitty My dad died when he was 70. Just a few years earlier, he had been diagnosed with leukaemia. It was my sister who realised that something was wrong. He was yellow. He hadn’t noticed. Too busy enjoying his well-earned retirement. His doctor told him he would die with it rather than from it. […]
