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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Friendship
A delightful account here from the funeral in the chapel of King’s College, Cambridge, of Sir Frank Kermode, eminent literary critic and, most important, very nice man, by John Naughton. It was, says Naughton, “elegant, moving, celebratory and only slightly elegaic. I think he would have approved.” Fittingly, “Afterwards, there was a splendid tea in […]
Making the best of old age
On a slow news day, I quite enjoyed this piece by Jane Miller in my favourite newspaper: Many of us have been possessed at times by thoughts that the life we are living is not the real one, but some botched job we somehow fell into, provisionally as it were, fine for the time being, […]
Teen Undertaker
The media loves death and funerals — wacky music, funky coffins, all that sort of stuff. Best of all, the media loves to find people working in the funeral industry who do not conform to the common conception of deathworker as inhabitant of a dark and terrifying otherworld. Normal people; people like us. Better still, […]
Who we are is what we mean to others
Here are some extracts from a cheering story in the Newburyport News, Massachusetts which has set me thinking about the nature of identity and community. My father, Arthur Allen, died at the age of 63 on Aug. 2. My dad was the embodiment of compassion, duty, style and bravery. He was the guy fighting for […]
Two new websites I like a lot
Two interesting new websites for you today. Both are labours of love, and both are run by nice, intelligent people. The first is homegrown ScatteringAshes.co.uk. It’s a resource for people who, once they’ve got the ashes back from the funeral director in one of those plastic cartons, wonder what on earth to do with them. […]
Tahara
In his excellent book Curtains, Tom Jokinen quotes US undertaker BT Hathaway on the subject of home funerals. Hathaway reckons a home funeral suits “the 5 per cent who have money, time, resources, education and political and emotional will.” With preconditions like these, how come it ever got as high as 5 per cent? Hathaway […]
