The D-Word
There’s a new book out about dying and death. It’s called, appropriately, The D-Word. Now, there’s a heap of books out there about long-term care of the very ill; there’s another heap about bereavement. We don’t urgently need more of them. But there’s hardly anything out there about grim D. We do urgently need […]
Still, small voice of calm
The novelist Martin Amis has called for euthanasia booths on street corners, where elderly people can end their lives with “a martini and a medal”. The author of Time’s Arrow and London Fields even predicts a Britain torn by internal strife in the 2020s if the demographic timebomb of the ageing population is not tackled […]
Conspicuous combustion
No new technology devised for the improved disposal of dead bodies has managed to achieve both efficiency and spectacle. There’s a perfectly good reason for this: the brains behind cremation and cryomation and resomation never reckoned spectacle to be a selling point. After all, funerals in the UK are private events, most of them. When […]
German way of death
Interesting piece in the Earth Times on how Germans are doing funerals differently: Germany is experiencing a new type of culture of bereavement. People are moving away from the classic funeral with a priest and familiar rituals to one that confronts grief and death in a more personal way. “Germany’s funeral culture is experiencing […]
No Grey Suits
Another home funeral story today. It’s beautiful. And the account was written by a man. So much of what read about home funerals is by women, so it’s good to have this balance. It’s called No Grey Suits. Grey Suits = funeral home staff. You can download it as a pdf (all 52 pages […]
Earth, wind and pyre
The be-wigged hair-splitters are having a sprightly time of it in the Appeal Court, where Davender Ghai is demanding the right to be burned, when he’s dead, on an open air funeral pyre. This is a matter of concern not just to those Hindus who want what Baba Ghai wants, but to anyone who […]
Should she or shouldn’t she?
When Charlotte Raven was diagnosed with Huntington’s, an incurable degenerative disease, there seemed only one option: suicide. But would deciding how and when to die really give her back the control she desperately craved? And what about the consequences for her husband and young daughter? In 2006, 18 months after the birth of my baby, […]
Thing or person?
I was called to perform an emergency Taharah – the ritual cleansing and preparation of a body for burial. I was the rabbi of a large congregation, and although I had participated in Taharot in this funeral home, I had never been summoned for an “emergency Taharah.” The manager of the funeral home, a friend, […]
Different cultures, different customs
Phero Tran Tieu’s Funeral from Joseph Pham on Vimeo.
Why do atheists have dead bodies at funerals?
The question Can you have a funeral without a body? is not as useful as the question Why would you have a dead body at a funeral? Yes, yes, you can’t have a wedding or a civil partnership without the happy couple, and you can’t have a baby naming without a baby, so how can […]
