A custom more honoured in the breach
There are those who make a distinction between traditional and alternative funerals and suppose alternative funeral directors to be, like their clients, boho, treehugger, oddball shroomers who live in La-La Land towns like Totnes or Stroud “where they’re all like that”. The label doesn’t fit. It’s not one they use. Theirs is not an exclusive […]
Thank you
I know this blog has around 3,000 readers (and rising). I have no idea who any but a tiny fraction actually are. Google Analytics tells me that most of them are in the UK, and around 500 live in the US. The rest are scattered around the globe, and it’s these who, when I check […]
Funerals for the faithless
I don’t want to have a cheap pop at atheists. But I do like this – because it makes me chuckle. It’s the way it’s written. So I just back from my great uncles funeral. I never knew him as a faithful or church going type of guy, but I never knew him as an […]
Real funeral
I like this. It’s a report of a funeral in Arkansas: Friends bid farewell to Jim Powell at a memorial service this afternoon at Second Baptist Church. The retired Gazette editorial page editor died Wednesday at 90. Glenn Beck would have hated it. Ray Higgins and Matt Cook eulogized Jim in a manner keeping with […]
A party for a parting
Jonathan posted an interesting thought the other day: “if no-one had portrayed the pseudovictoriana we associate with funerals, can you think of anyone who would have invented it for themselves?.” It raises the question: if we were to start again with a clean sheet, how would we do them? It’s a big question. Do funerals […]
The Importance of Being Dead
Sherwin Nuland: The reason there’s interest in people like Aubrey de Grey and the other life extenders has to do with the temper of our age, which I think of as narcissistic… Aubrey de Grey: It’s not a question of living to a thousand or living to two hundred, even – I mean, I don’t […]
Saif-breaking
I was going to wait for a major distracting event – a natural disaster, a royal wedding, the execution of Lord Ashcroft – but I figure this afternoon’s as good as any for burying good news, so here goes: the results of the research conducted by Ipos Mori on behalf of Saif into funeral costs […]
News from the Loved One
We may or we may not grow bored with people who tease and tantalise our appetites for new stuff we don’t actually need. Whether you’re the sort of person whose ears prick up when the ads come on, or whether, like me, you go fill your glass with yet more red wine, we accept that […]
Heightened emotion
My Dead Girlfriend is a Canadian blog written by a man with a to-die-for name, Abra Cadaver. How we all wish we’d thought of that. He’s more of an occasional blogger, these days. But when he reaches for his keyboard he’s really worth reading. If you haven’t wandered through his archive, do. But start with […]
A trappist funeral
From the Salt Lake Tribune: Brother Felix McHale, one of the founders of Utah’s 63-year-old Trappist monastery, was sent out of this world Tuesday the same way he lived: simply. After a funeral Mass in the chapel at the Abbey of the Holy Trinity, Felix was lowered into his grave on a plywood slab, taking […]
