Beyond wordless
David Aaronovitch tells a tale in today’s Times which seems to speak volumes about, uh, attitudes to death, or families, or Britishness or… something, such that I thought I must share it with you. The background is that the Aaronovich family dog, a Kerry Blue, has been diagnosed with cancer and will die soon. When […]
Funeralcare for sale?
The capital shortfall at the Co-operative Bank is estimated to be somewhere between £1–1.8 billion. This debt has been downgraded by Moody’s to junk status. The Co-op is going to have to sell assets in order to pay it off. Here’s the news for Funeralworld. Today’s Daily Telegraph speculates as follows: Further asset disposals are […]
Thinking the unsinkable
In October 2008, in a piece about direct cremation, I wrote this: In the UK we are culturally conditioned to believe that a funeral for a body is indispensable. Could that change? In July 2009 I wrote: I never thought [direct cremation] would jump the Atlantic, but it has. We now have our first direct cremation service over here and it’s busy. Simplicity […]
Undertakers overcharge, situation normal
You may or not have been up early enough to catch the ITV Daybreak piece on funerals on Thursday morning. The GFG media monitoring team wasn’t. It was at the seaside. Had it not been for a call from Rosie at the Natural Death Centre we would have missed it altogether. Impelled by a strong […]
Tea and Sympathy
One of the most wonderful things about being a celebrant is being introduced to music and artists we’ve never heard before. Tea and Sympathy by Janis Ian I don’t want to ride the milk train anymore I’ll go to bed at nine and waken with the dawn And lunch at half past noon and dinner […]
Bloggledegook
Around 200 dedicated normal funeral sites have been created in the British, and the industry in the British isles includes a program code of training used through The Organization of Natural Funeral Coffee grounds. Ha Ken Gulf, professional cemetery via 1961-2006, and life-long amateur naturalist, launched wood land funeral as a principle to the City […]
When death is no longer the worst thing that can happen to you
It’s not the worthy efforts of the members of the Dying Matters coalition that have raised awareness of the need to talk about death and dying. What’s actually got more and more of us talking is our personal experiences of the difficult and protracted end-of-life suffering of members of our families. Alongside twenty-first century death […]
Funeral attendance in a transient, modern world
Posted by Richard Rawlinson (who is 100 today) The love between husband and wife or parent and child is natural, bred into us over millions of years. Not so friendship, apparently. Until farms and villages started to appear around 35,000 years ago, people allegedly refused to talk to each other, networks of friends being anathema. Fast […]
What taught Chuck about death?
We like Chuck Lakin at the GFG. We’ve blogged about him here and here. Here’s his reply to the question ‘When did you begin learning about death?’ The precipitating incident was the death of my own father. This was in 1979 and he was home for the last six week of his life, and I’m […]
An intimate and loving burial
When Alex Dudley-Smith’s mother died this month, she set about organising a fitting sendoff for her. Here is her account of what she did. The unexpected death of my mother meant we were not prepared in any way for the organisation and costs of a funeral. This is the first time I’ve been responsible for […]
