What a wonderful thing!
Hat tip Michael Jarvis From the Daily Telegraph 26 August 2013.
A eulogy sandwich is not enough to nourish grief
As Jenny Uzell embarks on a series of posts which will consider the knotty question, What Is A Funeral For? it’s worth reflecting on what has been a game of two halves, funeralwise, in the last fortnight. Two people have expressed contrasting approaches to a funeral. First, there was Dave Smith, who arranged the funeral […]
A wee whiff of Auld Reekie
The stopping train takes more or less forever to get to Edinburgh through the fertile fracking fields of the desolate north-east. I’d been invited to look round Scotmid Co-operative Funeral Directors. Scotmid is a small, independent members’ co-operative dating back to 1859. It owns 10 funeral homes. Like all co-operatives, it both co-operates and competes with […]
A take on the afterlife
Posted by Richard Rawlinson, our religious correspondent Heaven, Hell and Purgatory are states of a human soul, not places as often represented in human language. In Summa Theologiae, St. Thomas Aquinas, writes: ‘Incorporeal things are not in place after a manner known to us, in which way we say that bodies are in place; but they […]
The Purpose of Funerals: Overview
The first in a major series of posts by guest blogger Jenny Uzell, scholar and undertaker One of the highlights of the National Funeral Exhibition for me earlier this year (other than the chance to contemplate, yet again, the many ways in which my life has taken an unexpected turn for the bizarre) was hearing […]
Absence of belief is not the be-all and end-all
In an article in the Telegraph, atheist Brendan O’Neill asks: When did atheists become so teeth-gratingly annoying? Surely non-believers in God weren’t always the colossal pains in the collective backside that they are today? Surely there was a time when you could say to someone “I am an atheist” without them instantly assuming you were […]
Funeral plans and the ‘peace of mind’ delusion
It may be that the media are beginning to wake up to the inadequacies of pay-now-die-later funeral plans. The Times has a piece today which, chances are, you won’t be able to read online because you haven’t got a key to the paywall. So I’ll summarise. It highlights third-party costs that funeral plans generally do […]
The way we were
Elderly people reflect on their reflections of themselves when young. Entitled ‘Reflections’, it is the work of Tom Hussey. Hat-tip to Caitlin Doughty, who posted a link to this on her Facebook page the other day. Please note that here at the GFG we now post most of our stuff on Facebook these days. If […]
Good Funeral Awards 2013 — The Longlist
From Brian Jenner over at GoodFuneralAwards The judging panel of the Good Funeral Awards have sifted through more than 600 nominations for this year’s Good Funeral Awards and have longlisted the following. The judges have requested that their deliberations remain secret. While they appreciate that many people will be disappointed, they wish to remind everyone […]
Bah humbug! Blame Dickens for undertaker-phobia
Posted by Richard Rawlinson Imagine picking up a well-thumbed penny novel by an unknown Victorian author at your secondhand bookshop and, on starting to read it, discovering to your surprise that a family of undertakers is depicted in a favourable light. We’re used to Charles Dickens, who loathed undertakers as much as he despised Jews […]
