Death with dignity

Posted by Charles When Meg Holmes was diagnosed with brain cancer in 2009 her husband Andrew started a blog so that he could update friends about her condition. Meg died on 1 October. The following post describes her death. My wife Meg died on the morning of Saturday October 1st in the loving company of […]

The real thing

Gail Rubin is now on Day 19 of her 30 funerals in 30 days. Over on her The Family Plot blog she is delighting her many fans with a full account of each as it happens. The appeal of what she is doing is broad. She is compiling an important social document, an account of […]

Is this the most tasteless competition of all time?

Over at Theaodeadpool.com they have an annual competition. The idea is to guess who will die in the next year (they’ve got to be famous enough to merit a newspaper obituary). Editorially, it is GFG policy to present you with everything that’s going on out there. Personally, we’re squirming more than somewhat.  Here is an […]

Isle of the Dead

This concert will be a fantastic interweaving of myth, music and magic telling the story of the ancient Sumerian Goddess Inanna and her descent to the underworld to aid her suffering sister Erešhkigal. In leaving her realm of the heavens to face the darkness of the underworldfrom which there is no return, she faces death, […]

The consolations of a Catholic funeral

Here’s an extract from good and powerful piece in the Catholic Herald by Siri Abrahamson In the midst of a grey, damp winter, at the end of a healthy and normal pregnancy, our second child, a daughter, dies at birth. Despite 20 minutes of attempted resuscitation in the delivery room, she never draws breath outside […]

A cortège of daughters

A cortege of daughters  A quite ordinary funeral: the corpse  Unknown to the priest.  The twenty-third psalm.  The readings by serious businessmen  One who nearly tripped on the unaccustomed pew.  The kneelers and the sitters like sheep and goats.  But by some prior determination a row  Of daughters and daughters-in-law rose  To act as pall-bearers […]

Quote of the week

James Horwill, the Australia rugby captain, puts the World Cup semi-finals into perspective. Before every match, he winds white tape around his left forearm and writes two names on it with a black marker pen, Macca and Ponto. They were his close friends of his from childhood who, a week before he was due to […]

Who are the real rotters here?

Is this a Welsh thing, or is it beginning to happen all over the UK? In Wales, according to a BBC news article, the number of public health funerals is alleged to have doubled in a decade. This is contradicted by the view of the Local Government Association. In a survey dated 2010 it reports: […]

Meet St Pancras

  St Pancras was beheaded in 304 during Diocletian’s persecution when he was only 14 years old. His skeleton was clothed in armour in 1777. He now resides at the Church of St Nikolaus in Wil, Switzerland.

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