Memento mori
An interesting thread here in a US forum about the custom of stopping to show respect for a hearse passing. I don’t suppose it’s a custom to be found anywhere in Britain any more. Pity. Any reminder that the bell tolls for every single one of us can’t be a bad thing. “We slowly drove, […]
Helpers fail, comforts flee
I enjoyed this piece by David Nobbs, creator of Reginald Perrin, in yesterday’s Observer. Here are some extracts. My mother died on 7 August 1995. I didn’t realise, that day, my life had changed … My mother died, as she had lived, unselfishly. After she’d died, my wife Susan and I were just in time […]
The undertaker’s understrapper
When my friend PoshUndertaker first opened to the public, business was slow. When he went on holiday he’d ask me to mind the shop for him. I’d say yes like a shot, confident that nothing more would come in than a lot of importunate calls from people flogging stuff. There was always the possibility, of […]
MEMO’s fossil bell
Have I written about the MEMO project before? I can’t remember. Here’s what it does: MEMO is an educational charity dedicated to building an ongoing memorial to extinct species. The memorial will be a stone monument bearing the images of all the species of plants and animals known to have gone extinct in modern times … […]
Better dead than alive
Going through my stats, researching for a blog post, I saw that someone had clicked through a link I did not recognise. So I clicked through myself and found this wonderful account of embalming excellence at Harlem-based Owens Funeral Home “where beauty softens grief” . I used it in a blog post so long ago […]
Better read than dead
When Eulogy magazine came out in June there was excitement and chatter and speculation. Would it catch on? How long would it last? The lowest estimate I was aware of was a curmudgeonly six issues, volunteered by a funeral director in the west country. In the event, it seems to have underperformed more grievously. There […]
The difference between you and it
Jonathan Taylor, the mercurial genius who from time to time gilds this dull little blog with his inspired intelligence, glorious whimsy and beauty of spirit, once observed that the time between death and the funeral gives people the time to get the heads around the difference between ‘you and it’ – between a living person […]
Cruel and all too usual
There’s a good, long piece in the Huffington Post by Lloyd I Sederer, a doctor, describing his mother’s decline and death. He describes a problem which is going to become more and more common. Longevity is not all it’s cracked up to be. If we are lucky enough live into ripe old age, our dying […]
Geek watch: no service by request
I always enjoy my weekly perusal of my favourite obits page in the Victoria Times Colonist, BC, Canada because (as you may know) I wonder if it describes a trend in the end-of-life event business which will cross the Atlantic. There are also some finely wrought word portraits of those who have died. Eleven deaths […]
Rite and trite
There’s an interesting article in yesterday’s Guardian about funeral rites in the Church of England Book of Common Prayer (BCP). Here are some tasters: Life expectancy in Tudor England was mid thirties, and about a third of children died before attaining the age of ten. Mortality was very much in the air and on the […]
