Burying Jed Kesey
Here’s an extract from an account of the funeral of Ken Kesey: It was the least maudlin memorial service and funeral I’ve ever been to—his family and community loved him and shared his disinterest in sentimentality. At the burial at his farm his corpse was right there in front of us. People filed by and […]
Quickie Wednesday
Interesting piece from Canada on home funerals in which a ‘death midwife’ (gotta find a better term than that!) acknowledges that funeral directors can, in the right circumstances, do the job as well as her. She’s right, of course. Good funeral directors are not the enemy. Read it From Pam Vetter’s newsletter, this tragic account […]
Not just for the skint
Nice home funeral story here: When Cathleen, a registered nurse, passed away at Hinds Hospice in Fresno, no mortuary was called due to previous planning. The Fresno County Coroner’s Office transported her to their facility and kept her until her funeral Jan. 26. The morning of her funeral, she was placed in a silk-lined pine […]
No Grey Suits
Another home funeral story today. It’s beautiful. And the account was written by a man. So much of what read about home funerals is by women, so it’s good to have this balance. It’s called No Grey Suits. Grey Suits = funeral home staff. You can download it as a pdf (all 52 pages […]
Nice story
Very nice story of the heartwarmingest sort here.
Terms for conditions
The natural death movement in the UK was pioneered by the good old Natural Death Centre. Its philosophy grew out of the natural childbirth movement and its principles are broadly the same. It believes that by taking control and keeping interventions by strangers to a minimum, we improve the quality of dying for the dying […]
Home funeral stories
Some good and inspiring home funeral stories here.
There’s no place like it
There’s an excellent series of photos on the Undertaken With Love Flickr site telling the story of a home funeral. It’s thought provoking in any number of ways. See how engaged the children are. And you can see from everyone’s faces how emotionally healthy the whole business is. Now, I know I bang on a […]
Check out the Undertaken With Love flickr site
It was the Natural Death Centre (NDC) which first advocated a return to the ancient, not long lost practice of caring for our own dead, and it was John Bradfield who did the bulk of the research into what you can legally do and what you can’t*. This re-birth of ancient practice was branded the […]
The surprising satisfactions of a home funeral
For all that the funeral industry is aware of pressure to change, and has readied itself for that, and for all that newspapers like to run features about nice, funny coffins, nothing has essentially changed. Death occurs. A stranger – a funeral director – accompanied by another stranger, his or her assistant, come to take […]
