Websites where you can plan your own funeral
A cheerful email arrives from Sue Kruskopf, telling me that I ought to know about her do-it-yourself funeral planning website My Wonderful Life, of which she is the co-founder. It was “created after the death of my co-founder’s husband. It is free and you can not only plan your own funeral but leave letters to […]
Sex and death
I’ve never been able to get the connection between sex and death. I once met an academic at a conference who was heavily into it, but in a visceral rather than a cerebral way, so it seemed. That there’s a whole psychopathology here is not in doubt. It’s passed me by, leaving me feeling […]
The Bill
As the new year comes storming out of the blocks, so does the Good Funeral Guide, cheeks flushed by a few days in its rocky, island holiday home. So too does Reaper G, of course, for this is his busy time of the year. No seasonal best wishes for you, you pale loiterer. But to […]
Season’s greetings
As the health of the old year fails and expiration beckons, the Good Funeral Guide is going to put its feet up for a few days and, with the assistance of good food and good whisky (Glendronach for choice), join the living in celebrating the solsticial festivities. Thank you, loyal and occasionally infuriated reader, […]
Christmas quiz
Do you work at a crematorium or a cemetery? Are you a priest or a secular celebrant or a funeral director who leads or collaborates in the creation of funeral ceremonies? If you are one of the above, you may like to lend your brain to science for as long as it takes to fill […]
What needs to be done
Here’s a guest post by Jonathan Taylor. He’s posted before, here and here. He’s a loyal and regular commenter and contributor to debate. Indeed, he puts the fizz into much that we discuss. In his post; Doing what needs to be done, saying what needs to be said Charles raises the point that the recently […]
Human rites
They call it a rite of passage, a funeral, but I’m not so sure that that’s the right term for it. Is a funeral directly comparable with other rites of passage? We mark coming of age and matrimony with rituals which speak of transition—what scholastic folk call liminality. But, though we can push a young […]
Vast cars
What is this thing with undertakers and their hearses and limousines? Are we talking customer focus here, or idolatry? I really don’t know the answer—I mean that. As the UN climate talks in Copenhagen reach their climax, and at a time when people are finding it more and more difficult to stump up the […]
Doing what needs to be done, saying what needs to be said
In his excellent book Accompany Them With Singing (read it before you die or I’ll kill you), Thomas G Long says this: “When someone dies, Christians, like all other humans, look around at the immediate environment and ask: What do we have to do? What seems fitting to do? What do we believe we are […]
Carla
I don’t know if you follow Carla Zilbersmith’s blog. It’s not an easy read. She’s very clever and talented and funny, a brilliant writer, the kind of person you like and admire a lot, and she’s dying of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), which in the UK we call motor neurone disease (MND). She writes about […]
