Chowing down with the antecedents
Debate about attitudes to death, funerals and the commemoration of the dead has largely been colonised by a section of the liberally-educated chattering sector of the middle class. They’re the ones most likely to opinionate about this stuff; they’re the ones who like to think think they can get their heads around it. They are intellectual […]
Driven to distraction?
Posted by Vale I am a celebrant of the tribe of IOCF (lapsed). We have a short creed that describes a Civil Funeral, it goes: A Civil Funeral is driven by the wishes, beliefs and values of the deceased and their family, not by the beliefs or ideology of the person conducting the funeral. It sits […]
De mortuis nil nisi bonum
Pace the spirit of the age, a celebration-of-life funeral does not fit everybody. Nasty, bad, horrible people die, too. We refrain from holding celebration-of-death funerals for them, preferring instead to curtail, allude and acknowledge, to a degree, often disguising our meaning between the lines. Difficult people die, too. They often mean different things to different […]
EXCLUSIVE: It’s going to be one wacky sendoff for Downton’s Matthew
The GFG can exclusively reveal that Downton star Matthew Crawley will be cremated in a way-out guerilla funeral on the ancestral estate in a ritual created by the grief-stricken family. Devotees of toff-soap Downton Abbey were left dazed and heartbroken at the end of the 2012 Christmas special when heir Matthew Crawley was violently killed […]
Is competition among celebrants killing off the fittest?
The funeral was in full swing and the celebrant was midway through that thing about life being a river that gets wider and wider when his phone went off in his trousers pocket. He furtively squeezed it into silence as he stumbled on. It may have been something by Kahlil Gibran. The phone shrilled out […]
You want a physicist to speak at your funeral
You want a physicist to speak at your funeral. You want the physicist to talk to your grieving family about the conservation of energy, so they will understand that your energy has not died. You want the physicist to remind your sobbing mother about the first law of thermodynamics; that no energy gets created in […]
The extraordinariness of ordinary people
“I just love the work. Much of it isn’t anything to do with being at the cutting edge of any ‘new’ movement, but about listening to people, giving them attention and valuing a person’s life that I am told was just ordinary.” Sue Goodrum, celebrant.
Chaos theory
“A contemporary theologian has described mercy as “entering into the chaos of another.” [Source] Is there a better definition of what those who work for the bereaved do?
What goes around…
Here’s most of an article in the Spectator, 5 January, by Peter Jones. It quotes a letter by Seneca the Younger (AD 1-65) describing the pagan idea of religious feeling. Given the disposition of most Britons towards matters of faith, you’ll possibly reckon this amazingly contemporary. After discussing the divine spirit ‘which guards us and […]
RIP CMJ
“Tony Greig died of a heart attack on Saturday. It was probably for him a merciful release because the late stage of any cancer is often hell on earth.” So wrote Christopher Martin-Jenkins in The Times on 31 December. He knew what he was writing about. He died of cancer himself on New Year’s Day. […]
