The makes-you-proud-to-be-British way of death
Alice Pitman, in the Christmas edition of the Oldie magazine, describes her extremely unwell 88 year-old mother rising to the occasion in hospital: Eventually a porter came and perfunctorily wheeled her to theatre. [We] followed down an interminably long corridor, the Aged P issuing instructions over her shoulder about what we were to do if […]
Spot the coffin
After last year’s annus horribilis, when the whiff of anything funereal on the telly had undertakers diving behind the sofa, it’s nice to see things return to normal. Soaps are always a good source of funerals as are, of course, dead celebs. For the anoraks of Funeralworld, it’s fun to sit back and play spot-the-hearse. […]
Carry the coffin, it’ll help you carry on
The Coffinmaker from Dan McComb on Vimeo. “I think one of the most important aspects of the coffin is that it can be carried. And I think we’re meant to carry each other, and I think carrying someone you love, committing them, is very important for us that we deal with death; we want to […]
Corpse roads – then and now
Back in the middle ages, established churches hung on to their right to bury the dead when new churches were built nearby to serve a growing population. Burial rights brought in revenue. This meant that parishioners of churches without a right to bury their dead were compelled to take them to a church which did […]
Pebbles in the press
Davina Kemble’s pebble coffin has been featured in the Wiltshire Gazette and Herald. She’ll be on BBC Wiltshire next Thursday afternoon. If you click on the cutting it will leap up to a larger, more readable size.
Work is love made visible
“I think one of the most important aspects of the coffin is that it can be carried. And I think we’re meant to carry each other, and I think carrying someone you love, committing them, is very important for us that we deal with death; we want to know that we have played our part […]
What taught Chuck about death?
We like Chuck Lakin at the GFG. We’ve blogged about him here and here. Here’s his reply to the question ‘When did you begin learning about death?’ The precipitating incident was the death of my own father. This was in 1979 and he was home for the last six week of his life, and I’m […]
Diabolical liberties, that’s what they’re taking
“Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye make clean the outside of the cup and of the platter, but within they are full of extortion and excess.” Matthew 23:25 It seems appropriate to wax biblical in the matter of undertakers’ mark-ups for, verily, the people do tremble with ire and their eyeballs do start from their sockets […]
The opposite of death isn’t life; the opposite of death is birth
We’ve written about Chuck Lakin here before. He’s a retired librarian and active woodworker with a line in plain pine coffins. Above all, he’s a lovely guy. He recently held a make-your-own-coffin workshop in his home town of Waterville, Maine. No one came. Lakin, 67, said he had planned to walk people through the process […]
That bloody box
“This was a funeral that celebrated unity. Like all other funerals. That bloody box: the awful finality: the dreadful unduckable certainty that life has to come to an end. So of course it was the same today. We knew she was dead, and all of us, no matter how little interest we take in politics, […]
