Parish notices
First, an event, Dying to Live. It is organised by Archa Robinson at Living and Dying Consciously and is billed as: Suitable for anyone facing death in the next 90 yrs… a reflective, meditative, poignant, life changing and fun weekend ! Here’s more: We live in a society conditioned to deny death. It’s a taboo subject […]
What’s in a coffin?
At Musgrove Willow you can go and watch the coffin being made — and even lend a hand. There’s a big coffin show on at Chiltern Woodland Burial Park this weekend. I can’t make it, sad to say. If you can, it looks good. And Chiltern is a lovely place. Coffins are what visitors to […]
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. […]
Greening grief
The GFG motored purposefully south yesterday afternoon to Chiltern Woodland Burial Park. It was a three-birds-with-one-stone mission: to have a look at this well-heeled natural burial ground; to hear the great Dr Bill Webster talk about grief; and to meet up with Louise from Sentiment and Jon from MuchLoved, two of Funeralworld’s Good Guys. I […]
Going Out Green
Rupert Callender made this observation of Dan Cruickshank’s The Art of Dying: I was surprised by how little thought Dan had apparently given the matter. I thought everyone mused endlessly about their own deaths. I don’t know that they do, Rupert. When, over in the US, Bob Butz was asked by his publisher to write […]
All shades of green in the green shade
Progressive movements in the world of funerals mostly march resolutely forwards into the past. The past is that place where they did things properly, the place we need to return to if we are to reclaim the care of our dead and the rituals of their passing; the place we must to return to if […]
Annihilating all that’s made / To a green thought in a green shade
I had to go to Wales to see the burial ground at Usk Castle Chase because it’s just been garlanded with the title of Green Burial Ground of the Year 2008. Wales doesn’t know it’s Wales, of course: that’s simply the name its present tenants have given it. But it is a ‘country’ with a […]
