What the hell?
“Belief in life after death is as common in Britain as it was 30 years ago in spite of a sharp decline in church attendance” according to researchers at the University of Leicester. The story is in today’s Times. The stats in the Leicester report don’t tell us anything we didn’t already know, probably; not if […]
Bring on the empty corpses
Book review: Smoke Gets In Your Eyes by Caitlin Doughty Caitlin Doughty, graduate in medieval history and author of a sunny thesis entitled The Suppression of Demonic Births in Late Medieval Witchcraft Theory, rejects a promising career in academia in favour of one as a corpse handler and incinerator of the dead. Anticipating bewilderment she asks, […]
Always alive
“I met the poet James Turner in my twenties: no one reads him now, yet to me he is always alive … You too must have people like that in your lives, people who are not alive in the physical sense, but remain alive in some spiritual way, which you retain in your head, in […]
Et in Arcadia ego
Posted by Richard Rawlinson I first came across this Latin phrase as a teenager reading Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. Narrator Charles Ryder finds the words inscribed on a skull displayed in his bedroom. ‘Even in Arcadia, there I am,’ is the translation. Death, the great equaliser, prevails even in the most utopian lands, as certain in […]
“It’ll save you the bother when I’m dead.”
Jeremy Clarkson, writing in the Sunday Times about the death of his Mum: Right in the middle of all that brouhaha about sloping bridges and Eeny, Meeny, Miny, Moe, my mum died. So there I was, in Russia, in the middle of a Top Gear tour, trying to organise her funeral and tell the children […]
Imagine this: when someone dies we don’t hand them over to strangers
When the GFG, in conjunction with the Plunkett Foundation, announced a community funerals initiative back in 2012, we supposed that someone might pick it up and run with it. The Plunkett Foundation, far cleverer than us, was pretty confident they would. They contacted all their community shops and community pubs and we waited with bated breath […]
Why go there?
“If we want the deaths our lives deserve, we need to start talking about it,” advises a Times leader today. Yes, it’s Dying Matters Awareness week and all Funeralworld is a-flutter with wheezes to “start the conversation” and encourage people to make a will, jot down their end-of-life wishes and their funeral wishes, even […]
Die-alogue Cafe
First there was Death Café. Then Let’s Have Dinner and Talk About Death. Then Death Salon. Now there’s Die-alogue Cafe Die-alogue Café has been developed by an Australian academic, Stuart Carter. We’ve been talking to Stuart for some time. We like and respect him very much. His purpose is not to upstage other formats, but […]
Classic
When Pomponius Atticus [a friend of Cicero] fell ill, and medical attempts to prolong his existence merely prolonged his pain, he decided that the best solution was to starve himself to death. No need to petition a court in those days, citing the terminal deterioration in your ‘quality of life’: Atticus, being a Free Ancient. […]
Time to make way
A letter in last Thursday’s Times tells us something, perhaps, about the evolution of society’s thinking about dying, death, the competition for NHS resources, futile care and the declining value life holds for the ageing and the elderly both in the eyes of society and in their own eyes: Sir, It makes sense to limit […]
