Hardening of the heart
What happens to the minds of those who deal with death every day? How do they cope with the endless procession of grieving people and dead bodies? Is it emotionally healthy to specialise in death? Isn’t undertaking something best combined with a therapeutic something else – a little landscape gardening or, in the case of […]
A custom more honoured in the breach
There are those who make a distinction between traditional and alternative funerals and suppose alternative funeral directors to be, like their clients, boho, treehugger, oddball shroomers who live in La-La Land towns like Totnes or Stroud “where they’re all like that”. The label doesn’t fit. It’s not one they use. Theirs is not an exclusive […]
Attitudes to undertakers
There’s a very interesting blog developing over at Funerary Ramblings. If you’ve not been there, pop across. Today’s ramblings take an amble through attitudes to undertakers. It’s very good. So here’s to you, Funerary Rambler. You’ve probably not come across our Jake Thackray. Here are the words: I am a grave-digger, a […]
Love Life and Death in a Day
My thanks to Andrew Plume for pointing me to this excellent documentary on Channel 4, Love, Life and Death in a Day. First broadcast in Feb ’09 it follows births, marriages and funerals in Bristol on Midsummer’s Day, and features Rachel and Liz of Bristol South Funeral Service, whom I am booked to go and […]
Ambivalence 1
Interesting, isn’t it, how two contrary opinions need not be mutually exclusive? When one opinion does not displace the other you’re left either tonguetied with indecision or, if they merge, ambivalent. Ambivalence may be seen as fence-sitting, but I think that’s simplistic. To honour two opposed points of view equally seems to me to be […]
Window dressing
Funeral directors are often criticised for their inertia and, to be sure, many of them, not all, move forward with foot-dragging reluctance. The most evident manifestation of this is their cod-Victorian attire. They are, they seem to be saying, neither of us, nor of our century. If they seem to inhabit a parallel and altogether […]
On whose authority?
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. That’ll be good enough for the mortuary. If a funeral director whom they’ve never seen before turns up, they may […]
Doing what needs to be done, saying what needs to be said
In his excellent book Accompany Them With Singing (read it before you die or I’ll kill you), Thomas G Long says this: “When someone dies, Christians, like all other humans, look around at the immediate environment and ask: What do we have to do? What seems fitting to do? What do we believe we are […]
Period piece
Back in 1995 the funeral industry had been in a state of low level excitement and terror for some fifteen years. Conglomerates were stalking the land, seeking whom they might devour. Their talk of economies of scale made perfectly good sense. The little old family firms looked a bit like polar bears today. One of […]
Why do we do it?
David Barrington is an independent funeral director in Liverpool. We swap emails from time to time, and I asked him if he’d like to be my guest on this blog. I’m very pleased that he has accepted the invitation. And I very much hope that we shall hear from him again. Over to you, David. […]
