Patron saint of FDs, pray for us
Posted by Richard Rawlinson It’s a crying shame St Joseph of Arimathea shares his feast day with St Patrick on 17 March. The patron saint of funeral directors gets ignored in a wash of green and Guinness. But the world’s most famous undertaker is particularly special to Britain, and well worth your prayers seeking his intercession. […]
You can’t keep a bad man down
Everyone deserves a second chance, and if we believe what we read on the testimonials page of the Mary Mayer Funeral Home in Southend-on-Sea, then Mark Kerby, better known to readers of this blog as former jailbird and serial fraudster Richard Sage (everyone deserves a second name) is a reformed character. As if. ‘Mark’ has […]
The presence of the dead is essential
We bear mortality by bearing mortals — the living and the dead — to the brink of a uniquely changed reality: Heaven or Valhalla or Whatever Is Next. We commit and commend them into the nothingness or somethingness, into the presence of God or God’s absence. Whatever afterlife there is or isn’t, human beings have […]
Grim (Reaper) up north
Posted by Richard Rawlinson Manchester’s Southern Cemetery is the inspiration for Cemetery Gates by cheery northern pop combo The Smiths. It’s also the resting place of Man U manager Sir Matt Busby, Salford artist LS Lowry and Tony Wilson, founder of the Hacienda nightclub and Factory Records, which represented 1980s bands such as Joy Division. The […]
What’s next?
Don’t underestimate the insistence of the human ego on a negotiated immortality and the dread of losing even this. If all the people on earth die, and there are no more to come, it also means that my traces, my genes and the children who carry them, my influence on others, words I have written and […]
The Protestant death ethic
WHEN any person departeth this life, let the dead body, upon the day of burial, be decently attended from the house to the place appointed for publick burial, and there immediately interred, without any ceremony. And because the custom of kneeling down, and praying by or towards the dead corpse, and other such usages, in […]
The Other Taj Mahal
Received from Jo Vassie at Higher Ground Meadow, written by Times journalist Francis Elliot. To see photojournalist Simon de Trey-White’s full blog post with excellent and touching photos go here. Villagers made fun of former postmaster Faisal Quadri when he first began building a Taj Mahal replica on the land next to his house but no more, now he […]
Funerals as psychotwaddle
Writing about contemporary American memorial services (ashes optional), Thomas Long describes a funerary trend that some might discern in contemporary British celebration of life funerals — if you subscribe to his bracingly reactionary death-view: Even when they are crafted by caring people who are full of goodwill, these services often lack coherence. At their worst […]
Requiem for the topper and the silver-knobbed cane?
Writing in the spring 2013 issue of the Institute of Cemetery and Crematorium Management Journal, the editor, Bob Coates, writes: What was once the abnormal is now the normal with respect to funeral ceremonies on our premises … Less enamoured, however, may be the funeral director. Some may find the frankness of discussion, particularly over […]
Stuart Goodacre, Gravedigger of the Year, on the Beeb
Stuart Goodacre, Gravedigger of the Year 2013, appeared on R4’s Pick of the Week. He is the third winner of a Good Funeral Award to be interviewed on Britain’s premier spoken word wireless station. This isn’t silly-stuff publicity, it’s serious publicity. Start listening at 26.44. Hear the full interview on Radio Lincolnshire here. A good […]
