Death in the community
Beyond the unappetising business of flogging pre-need plans to the tottering classes, undertakers do next to nothing to educate the public about funerals. They seek to be seen as public-spirited. They do good stunts, raise money for the hospice here, the air ambulance there. But how many stage events to raise awareness of the […]
ARKA funeral day this Saturday in Lewes
Bringing Death to Life – 27th August 2011 All Saints Arts and Youth Centre, Friars Walk, Lewes. Free Entry ARKA Original Funerals of Brighton opened its new office in Lansdown Place Lewes, in July this year, with the ceremonies and celebrant company, Light on Life. ARKA Original Funerals and Light on Life are recognised […]
We need to talk about funerals
Posted by Vale But, I hear you say, we do already. All the time. Interminably. And, of course, we do. This website springs from the Good Funeral Guide and the blog is full of discussions about new ways to dispose of bodies, about wild and wonderful flights of imagination in the services that are being […]
What hospitals advise the bereaved
If dying really is “an awfully big adventure” an NHS hospital seems an unpropitious point of departure. Most of us don’t want to die in one; most of us (58 per cent) will. Most of us think home is the best place. What’s not so well known is that many of those who have cared […]
Picking up the patriarch’s ashes
James Showers, sole proprietor of the Family Tree Funeral Company, undertaker to the discerning decendents of Gloucestershire, has been badgering me to rediscover something he lost on his computer. He thought it might be on mine, since I once sent it to him. It’s not. But by dint of indefatigable googling I have unearthed it. […]
Storm in a teacup
You may have seen the story in the papers. Briefly, a Salisbury undertaker (1 hearse, 1 other vehicle, a Rover estate) arrives at his funeral venue in Tamworth, 150 miles away, and looks about for somewhere for his staff and himself to take a break. He tries the church. Locked. He tries the cemetery. No […]
Meet Angeline Gragasin and Caitlin Doughty
I know a number of you drop in around this time (10.30 am) hoping there may be a new post because you need a little light displacement activity. Well, I’ve got you something that’s anything but little and light. Two short films here by Angeline Gragasin starring/narrated by Caitlin Doughty “documenting the life of a […]
On whose authority (2)
Back on 1 Feb 2010 I wrote a post which began: It’s an interesting fact that a funeral director can go to a hospital mortuary and collect a dead person to bring back to their funeral home on the verbal instruction of that dead person’s executor. It attracted a lively discussion. You can read it all […]
Who needs ’em?
In their new book, Final Rights (they gave me a sneak preview), Joshua Slocum, Executive Director of the Funeral Consumers Alliance, and Lisa Carlson, Executive Director of the Funeral Ethics Organisation, will publish state by state tables demonstrating how many excess funeral directors there are in the US. They base their calculation on the head […]
Exclusive! Dover undertaker achieves UK first.
I was going to blog today about the public meeting at Redditch town hall to debate the contentious matter of whether or not the crem should be used to heat a nearby swimming pool. I wanted to give you a blow-by-blow account. But in the event it was a non-event. There were perhaps thirty people […]
