Different cultures, different customs
Here’s how they do it in Swaziland: EZULWINI – The funeral of Ziggy Carvalho was turned into a ‘mini rally’ as mourners watched his friends showing off with their cars. This happened at KaBhelina yesterday morning during a short prayer held at his home. This was before his body was taken to the burial site […]
Thirty funerals in thirty days
Over in Albuquerque, Gail Rubin has set herself the task of attending and writing up thirty funerals in thirty days. She got under way on Saturday. It’s going to make for a very interesting social document. At this stage, of course, many of those whose funerals she will describe are as yet still alive…
Lovingly Managed responds to its critics and doubters
When I wrote this post I guessed what the responses were likely to be. The funeral industry does not like to be interloped. Catherine Corless of Lovingly Managed has posted the following comment and, for fear that you might miss it, I am re-posting it here: Well, we do seem to have ruffled a few […]
Letting go
Rhoda Partridge took up painting when she was 70. Now 90 she’s still hard at it. Her spirited life has also embraced scuba diving, gliding and ceramics. In an interview in this month’s Oldie magazine she is asked: Do you find that after 70 years you live in the shadow of death? She replies: Oh […]
Shovel-and-shoulder work
The words that follow are by Thomas Lynch, a hero to so many of us in the UK. (In the US there are those who reckon him paternalistic, but we don’t need to go into that. It’s complicated.) Funerals are about the living and the dead — the talk and the traffic between them … […]
Ghoul, calm and collected
For a death-averse people who shut their eyes tight to mortality, the Halloween look is not a good look. But children thrill to it; caring parents wickedly, gigglingly co-conspire. Much of the imagery is so graphically horrifying I’d have thought it would reduce children (and some adults) to lasting gibbering mental breakdown. But it doesn’t. May […]
The feminine touch
According to Hindu custom it has always been the duty of the eldest son or senior male relative to light a funeral pyre. Here in Britain, it is very rare indeed for a female to be one of the small group to witness a dead person being loaded into the cremator. But, I was interested […]
Really getting real
When Americans decide to do things differently, it seems to me, they make a clean break. Brits, on the other hand, carry over a lot of familiar stuff from the past. I mean, how often does a natural burial ground witness a scene like this? And which has the courage of its environmental convictions and […]
Sweet story
Very sweet story from New Zealand: An elderly Levin couple together for more than 60 years died within hours of each other in circumstances that Shakespeare could not have written better, their daughter says. With only hours to live, Marion Bray-Gunn, 84, was being taken from Palmerston North hospital on Tuesday so she could die […]
Clothes line
When people bring the clothes to the funeral home that they want their dead person dressed in they rarely bring them in a nice little suitcase or smart receptacle, they mostly bring them in a crumpled carrier bag. What does this say?
