Is Fear Killing Compassion for Older People?
Posted by Jon Underwood, founder of the Death Café project “In this case, ignorance is not bliss. With death, ignorance is fear.” Caitlin Doughty – The Order of the Good Death The UK Commission on Improving Dignity in Care chose the 29th of February to drop their bombshell in the form of a draft report on how to […]
Publishing event of the year!
The Natural Death Handbook, Fifth Edition A thoroughly updated and revised edition of the Natural Death Centre‘s celebrated handbook. Now presented alongside a new collection of essays on death, dying and funeral practices by doctors, historians, authors, poets, theologians and artists including Richard Barnett, David Jay Brown, Dr Sheila Cassidy, Charles Cowling, Bill Drummond, Stephen Grasso, […]
Hard graft
The alternative to government regulation of the funeral industry is not self-regulation (too flabby) but implacable consumer scrutiny. That’s the libertarian way of looking at it, it’s a case I like to argue, and I concede that it may be ineffectually idealistic. If only consumers knew. If only they knew what goes on behind the […]
Demos report: Dying for Change
There’s a report just out from Demos on death and dying (why don’t we get chronological and say dying and death?). It’s by Charles Leadbeater, somewhat of a hero of mine, and Jake Garber. It’s called Dying for Change. It comes out at the same time as the National Council of Palliative Care’s The Missing […]
Who cares?
A while back, Claire Callender talked about what it’s like, as an undertaker, to ‘remove’ (industry term) a dead body from a care home. It’s something I talked about a lot yesterday with a friend who has an especially beautiful mind. It’s something he frets about, often talks about, something we both mean to do […]