Monday shorts
Death Ref got there first Time was when I could tuck a story away for a slow news day and not give a thought to any other death blogger getting there first. Can’t do that any more. The story I had been saving up for today has, I see, already been aired on the excellent […]
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 […]
Cross patch
We must hope that spending cuts will result in the excision of not just waste but also the sort of local authority insensitivity which manifests as brainless heartlessness. Here’s an example from Somerset as told by the Daily Mail: Liz Maggs placed a 26-inch high wooden cross bearing a personal inscription on Rosemary Maggs’ burial […]
A Good Send Off
A Good Send Off was the title of this year’s Centre for Death and Society (CDAS) annual conference. Well, part of the title – the snappy part. In full it read: A Good Send Off: Local, Regional & National Variations in how the British Dispose of their Dead. It took place last Saturday in Bath. […]
In the midst of death, let there be life
When someone asks, “Read any good books recently?” I often reply, “Yes. Read any good graveyards?” Graveyards comprise a compelling variety of distilled biography. The lives they describe may be humdrum, but that only makes them easier to relate to. Just to read the names on the headstones and monuments is, I feel, an act […]
Everything is only for a day
Immortality and eternity have meaning as concepts but they don’t translate into reality, not here on transient Earth. If you don’t believe that, go and visit a mature cemetery – or ask Ozymandias, poor, baffled chap. Time teaches us this lesson every fleeting minute, but we set our faces against it—heroically or idiotically, it’s sometimes […]
