An Instinct for Kindness
From the review in the Guardian: Last year Chris Larner took his ex-wife Allyson – with whom he had remained good friends – to the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland where she ended her life. It was a life that had become unbearable because of the constant pain, indignities and limits imposed upon her by multiple sclerosis, a […]
Useful advice for senior citizens
Ever wondered about what to look for in a nursing home? We know. It’s a pre-need question and just like funeral planning we all like to think we wont need it. Or maybe we’ll get lucky and die first. But life expectancy is only another way to say hanging around. Street corners are too chilly […]
Plumbline and square – the Masonic funeral
Some Masons call their funeral ceremony an Orientation, but these days the service itself can be like a secular ceremony – apart, of course, from the Masonic ‘paraphernalia’. Masons are a great deal more open about their ceremonies than they used to be, but much of what they do still seems esoteric and mysterious. Borderzine […]
Death Cafe
Do you follow Death Cafe? If you don’t, you really ought to pop across and check it out; it’s brilliant. It doesn’t have have an agenda or a campaigning platform; it doesn’t address itself to a particular constituency or type or sect. It believes, I hope I’m right in surmising, that death should be part of general discourse. So […]
Pauper funeral
From the Toronto Globe and Mail: I was standing in the parlour of a Toronto funeral home, waiting for the friends of the homeless man we were about to bury. The funeral director was supposed to be retired, but he had stayed on to see the business through the transition to a new owner. Together, […]
Signs of the times – undertakers as event managers
Funerary customs are on the move in Germany, which seems to be emerging as the country to watch at the moment. Undertakers are becoming a little like event managers. People who are not religious and don’t go to church expect undertakers to organize a ritual for the funeral. In recent years the culture of mourning […]
Death Row
On Texas’s death row, there are no contact visits at all– no hand-holding, no embraces. There is a strange little ritual when a Texas prisoner who still has family and friends is executed: his or her loved ones rush to the Huntsville funeral home which holds the contract with the prison, to touch the dead […]
Back to business after the ‘blitz’
Posted by Richard Rawlinson It may be the 300th anniversary of the completion of Sir Christopher Wren’s St Paul’s Cathedral but 2011 will be remembered as the year the great building closed to the public for the first time since the Blitz due to health and safety fears after anti-capitalist protesters set up camp on […]
Quote of the week
“A crematorium would stink up the neighborhood. Essentially, we would be breathing dead people.” Stephen Thorburn of Las Vegas in response to a proposed crematorium in his neighbourhood.
You have 30 seconds – impress me
You’re the first internet based funeral service. You want to make sure people know you are different and you have 30 seconds of TV time to get your message across. How would you do it? Yesterday we presented the advertisement that Basic Funerals in Canada created. You can see it here. We thought it was […]
