What would you like to see on your TV?
When media people phone the press office here at the GFG-Batesville Shard, their requests for information often conform to whatever they suppose to be trending. “We’re doing something on living funerals. Are these catching on?” “No.” “We’re doing a documentary about the dying process and we want to film someone actually dying. Can you help […]
Doing the rite thing
On Monday, in response to this: … we get to carry on without the benefit of a formal ceremony or other ritual observance after near-bereavement experiences like the breakdown of a relationship, or redundancy, or a child leaving home. We resolve those privately. Kathryn Edwards wrote: … from my ritualist perspective … how is it that we […]
We need no more out of town death malls
Q: What’s Big Money to do? The industry big beasts, Dignity and Co-op, can’t make scale pay except by hiking prices (this may be incompetence). And funeral plans are beginning to look… well, decidedly subprime. A: Burn, baby, burn! Yes, buying and building crematoria is the Next Big Thing in Funeralworld. Already we’re in the […]
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 […]
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 eloquence of silence
Posted by Georgina Pugh On Friday the autumn sun was just too much – I had to leave my cave like dwelling and head out somewhere you can touch the sky. On the advice of a friend I found myself at the edge of the North York Moors, just past the aptly named ‘surprise view’ at […]
Mozart v Rogers & Hammerstein
I was at a funeral for a much loved gentleman last week – he wasn’t into opera at all, but had heard Mozart on The Shawshank Redemption and loved it. He was a great believer in daring to dream. The whole room was surprised when we played an excerpt from the Marriage of Figaro as the […]
Temporary temples
Posted by Rupert Callender If the sun shines in between the deluge, the next few days should see armies of combine harvesters moving across the land, particularly in Wiltshire, the UK’s breadbasket, bringing in the harvest, and bringing this year’s crop circle season to a close, too. After a slow start it has built to be […]
What a smashing funeral!
Posted by Richard Rawlinson I’m revisiting a post by Charles in January about whether a funeral can ever accommodate the venting of chaotic feelings generated by death. If so, what behaviour can be ‘officially’ appropriated: formalised wailing, hurling plates against a wall, a punch bag in the vestibule, or even a bout of fisticuffs between mourners? […]
As you get older your friends start to die.
Posted by Sue Gill We’ve been to some truly awful funerals and I’m sure we’re not alone in that. Sometimes the ceremonies were healing, but more often they were formulaic and irrelevant, and we left feeling sometimes angry, sometimes guilty, frequently in despair. That’s what compelled us to write the Dead Good Funerals Book, to offer […]
