Absentee of the day
In death she left her body to science, thereby avoiding a funeral from which she would have wanted, her family knew from experience, to exclude so many enemies. From Janey Buchan’s obituary, here.
Hold up, hold on, stop crying your heart out
In a comment stream following a provocative post by someone or another, probably Richard, our religious correspondent, I suggested that because death generates chaotic feelings, many of which seek to vent themselves in disorderly behaviour, funerals ought to accommodate this. Our brilliant and erudite new commenter, Jenny Uzzell, reckons there’s no call for it. Well, […]
The hotrod hearse has arrived!
He’s one of life’s good guys, is David Hicks, whose brainchild the hotrod hearse is. Here’s his story: The Final Cruise Company was created when the life of a friend was cruelly taken on 29th May 2010. I had known Martin for a number of years, through my occupation working on Hotrods and he will be dearly […]
If only they knew
Funeral flowers skipped for landfill at Coychurch crematorium. Why don’t they compost them? Because they’re full of wire and oasis; it would take too long to deconstruct them. Which is why natural burial guru Ken West calls this ‘grieving waste’.
Quote of the day
“Britain, the only country in the world where at funerals the bereaved are congratulated on the degree to which they have so far supressed their emotions.” Source
Memory tables
We’ve talked recently here about shrines and memorials and remembrancing. Here’s a very nice idea from Shirley, over at the Modern Mourner, in a blog post titled Why can’t memorials be more like weddings? It’s a memory table. You put choice things, invested with meaning, on it — arranged beautifully, of course. What would you […]
In shivering memory
This day, one hundred years ago, Captain Scott and his team of plucky amateurs arrived at the South Pole – and saw that “the worst had happened”. Yes, the dashed pros, the cads, had beaten them to it by over a month. Amundsen got there on 14 December. The memory lingers, and with it a […]
Being dead gets you thinking
Hellraiser Charlie Sheen, no stranger to drug, alcohol and domestic abuse, claims to have turned his life around under the influence of having played lead corpse in two fictional funerals in 2011. He says, “It was a little bizarre to watch your own funeral and it certainly gets you thinking.” Could become a useful therapeutic […]
Quote of the day
“Last week, I attended the funeral of one of my uncles. His irresponsible lifestyle, which included eating meat, smoking, drinking alcohol and ignoring sell by dates, resulted in his life being cut short at the age of 94.” Source
To ritualise or not to ritualise…
By Richard Rawlinson Ed’s note: Richard wrote this for us at a time when the market in blog posts about ritual was approaching saturation. There’s good stuff here, so we’re posting it now, timeless seasonal greeting and all. …that remains the question. In order to express a meaning you need to establish what the meaning […]
