Shovel-and-shoulder work
The words that follow are by Thomas Lynch, a hero to so many of us in the UK. (In the US there are those who reckon him paternalistic, but we don’t need to go into that. It’s complicated.) Funerals are about the living and the dead — the talk and the traffic between them … […]
The feminine touch
According to Hindu custom it has always been the duty of the eldest son or senior male relative to light a funeral pyre. Here in Britain, it is very rare indeed for a female to be one of the small group to witness a dead person being loaded into the cremator. But, I was interested […]
Not so first as he thinks
From Australia’s Herald Sun: A CANCER victim yesterday became the first person to be buried upright at Australia’s only vertical cemetery. Allan Heywood lost his battle with cancer last Tuesday and was buried in the unusual, space-saving grave in the new vertical cemetery outside Camperdown in western Victoria. “It’s nice to be first at something. […]
It won’t make you dead
Gail Rubin is a writer and blogger in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I’ve just looked up Albuquerque on google maps. It’s a long way from a decent beach. Gail has written a book, A Good Goodbye: Funeral Planning for Those Who Don’t Plan to Die, which will be published at the end of this month. She […]
Site I like
There’s interesting work going on over in Boston, Massachusetts. Two women, Ruth Faas and Sue Cross, offer a range of services to the bereaved. They have a reading room where people can sit in comfort and find out about death and dying. They offer advice and contacts to those wanting a green or self-managed funeral. […]
Better read than dead
When Eulogy magazine came out in June there was excitement and chatter and speculation. Would it catch on? How long would it last? The lowest estimate I was aware of was a curmudgeonly six issues, volunteered by a funeral director in the west country. In the event, it seems to have underperformed more grievously. There […]
Rite and trite
There’s an interesting article in yesterday’s Guardian about funeral rites in the Church of England Book of Common Prayer (BCP). Here are some tasters: Life expectancy in Tudor England was mid thirties, and about a third of children died before attaining the age of ten. Mortality was very much in the air and on the […]
No way
Have you been following the hullabaloo which greeted the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Melbourne, Denis Hart, when he restated Church rules on funerals and reiterated the ban on ‘secular items’ at funerals – romantic ballads, pop or rock music, political songs, football club songs, that sort of stuff? He said: “At the funerals of children […]
They think it’s all over…
It’s interesting to note that two of the most important drivers for change in modern funerals have come, not from pro-active consumers or wild-eyed visionaries, but from urgent if mundane economic and environmental needs. They are, famously, natural burial and’ less famously, the held-over cremation. Ken West, for all that he is a visionary, made […]
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. […]
