In junior high, I watched my teacher drop a rat brain into alcohol, and the alcohol seemed to eat away at the brain. So alcohol kills brain cells, right? Well, not exactly. The alcohol that you drink enters your bloodstream, and doesn’t actually attack your brain directly. Of course, there are other ways for alcohol to injure your brain: for example, binge drinking can lead to decrease in breathing and injury to your brain that way.
More things that don’t kill you here.
Parents of the children of Newtown:
Our hearts are with you. We know from experience how lost you must feel. We also know how there is a system in place where you feel you are being kept from the one thing that need above all else – to be with your child.
We want you to know that you have the right to touch and see and be with your child, and to bring him and her home to say goodbye, without further intervention. We want you to know that you have the right to ask the Medical Examiner to release your child to your arms, so that you may say goodbye on your own terms and in your own time. You had no choice in what has happened; you do have the choice to care for your child at home.
Here are some facts:
You still have some power even if you feel powerless.
This is your child and not the state’s possession.
You have right to see and touch your child right now.
You can determine what happens to their bodies.
You can voice opposition to an autopsy on religious grounds.
Embalming is not necessary and not required by law and is only a further invasion of the body of your child.
Please accept these words from those who only wish you some comfort.
We offer them in love and peace.
Statement by the National Home Funeral Alliance
You loved Millaa Millaa’s coffin-shaped dunny, remember?
Well, it’s going to be done in.
Built by the Chamber of Commerce on council-owned land, it has been condemned on the trivial grounds that it lacks planning permission and falls foul of any number of building and plumbing regs.
90 per cent of Millaa Millaa’s population petitioned in favour of the facility, which offers relief to the bereaved, but their pleas have left the bureaucrats unmoved.
Fans of Yuli Somme, who makes the beautiful Leafcocoons, crafts other lovely stuff from her felt offcuts. Nothing goes to waste in her workshop.
Here at the GFG-Batesville Shard, when the temperatures drop, we swear by Yuli’s fabulous foot felts — insoles for our shoes. They are brilliantly comfy and cosy — there’s nothing like them.
If you work from home with the heat off during the day, and/or if you spend periods of time in cold crematoria and cemeteries, they don’t half stop your toes from going numb. And they make your feet feel snug as can be.
At £6 a pair, £15 for three, they’re really good value. Buy some and you will celebrate your good fortune until you curl said (toasty) toes up.
Yuli says:
Keep your feet snug and warm inside your shoes or boots with these cosy foot felts. You can choose small (up to size 5), medium (up to size 8) and large (up to size 12) and you cut them to size. Please email for sizes beyond 12. Remember to compost the off-cuts! They are also excellent for long distance walking. A friend of mine did the whole of the South West Coastal footpath in them, and said that nothing else worked so well at preventing blisters. Hooray for wool!
Check out Yuli’s tea cosies, tuffets, bags and hot water bottle covers. Great for Christmas presents.
“If we are fortunate enough to die consciously, then we should take full advantage of opportunities to create peace for all parties. Our last words and intentions matter so much to those left behind. We should be careful how we leave.”
Q: Alright – so I’ve got a dwarf that I thought was awesome who has died. I want to build a nice memorial to him, but he liked coffins (he really did. he even engraved one in the floor =P) and I’d like to stick him in one of those as well. Is that possible? Or will a dwarf who’s been memorialized be skipped over for a coffin?
In similar veins, is it possible to memorialize a dwarf after they are already in a coffin? And can a dwarf who’s had a tomb prepared while they were living be given a memorial to put inside their tomb?
A: After some messing around I’ve determined that dwarfs can get both treatments and it doesn’t matter the order in which they are done. Dwarfs who are already interred in my catacombs have their names available when engraving slabs as memorials, and dwarfs who I gave memorials to have since been buried as their remains have been found.
Additionally, Dwarfs who have memorials are still listed as options in the Engrave Memorial Slab menu, which also lists whether or not the dwarf has any existing memorials. I assume that this means I can engrave multiple memorials to the same dwarf, though I haven’t tried it.
I’ve got a feeling it’s time for a change of direction here at the blog.
It doesn’t cost me a great deal of brainpower to keep it going, but it does cost an awful lot of time scouring the internet, panning for gold. Conscientiousness can play funny tricks with a chap. I sit here feeling under a neurotic obligation to bring you, every day, something serious and thought-provoking plus, if poss, two or three other intriguing/amusing stories. It’s all getting a bit OCD.
Today, for example, I’ve got, lined up, a piece about funeral pyres, a quote, a short film about the Dia de los Muertos that you’ll need your 3-D glasses to enjoy, a story about a man killed by a fish, and a piece of music. But I’m stopping myself from posting them. And I’m not going to angst about where the rest of the week’s stories are going to come from. This is essential therapy.
I’d always hoped that the blog would evolve into a sort of Speakers’ Corner and host news and views from all sorts of people. That mostly hasn’t happened — and a huge light went out when Lyra Mollington died.
As a result, I’ve a feeling that what we’ve become, the Daily Glut — your daily deathmag, more and more of the same old same old — is not what you want any more.
If the format’s tired and dated, the content unread, I could be spending my time more usefully (you already are).
When the blog began, in 2008, it was quite the dashing radical. Today, more than 2,000 posts later, it may have morphed into a repetitious old bore.
Do let me know what you’d like from now on — if anything. We are no strangers to mortality.
The function of a blog, after all, is to be useful.
Posted by Richard Rawlinson
The picketing of military funerals in the US by the Westboro Baptist cult is well-documented.
Less so are increasing incidents in Holland of Muslim youths disrupting non-Muslim funerals. One undertaker says youths on bikes stop processions and bang on the roof of the hearse, shouting ‘One dog less’ or ‘Jews, Jews’.
The gangs are school age. The response of the police to complaints has been that the Islamic schools need protection, and that the yobs are too young to understand their behaviour is wrong. It makes you wonder what social responsibility they’re being taught in the classroom, and at home for that matter.
It also makes you wonder why liberal society is so tolerant when it comes to such disdain for our democratic values. Enter the British Muslims for Secular Democracy (BMSD). This courageous group of men and women have protested in London against a pro-Sharia march by fundamentalist group Islam4UK. To counter banners such as ‘Islam will dominate the world: Freedom can go to Hell’, the BMSD has retorted with slogans such as ‘Freedom of speech will rule the world’.
As Muslims condemning radical Islamist sexism, racism and homophobia, they risk becoming targets of violence but, unlike non-Muslim liberals, they are less concerned about being accused of ‘Islamophobia’ or some other form of political incorrectness.
And there lies the reason for our silence and hesitation to condemn extremism. Ironically, there was another group of protesters against the Islam4UK. A few members of the English Defence League were making their stand, too. When interviewed by a journalist, they leapt at the opportunity to claim they were not neo-Nazi football hooligans, that they supported women’s rights and gay rights, and that they just wanted to protest against radical Islamists whose supporters bombed London, and attacked the funeral processions of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.
It might be true that the EDL does not have its origins in the Hitler cults, but they are certainly not to be trusted as true allies of the good folk of the BMSD. EDL members have attacked Muslims because they are Muslims, and indeed anyone Muslim, Sikh, Hindu or atheist with a brown skin. They pick on anyone they see as being in the ‘wrong’ team.
It’s groups such as EDL that make non-racists reluctant to criticise Islamic hate. We should stand up to both by spporting the British Muslims for Secular Democracy (see here http://www.bmsd.org.uk/index.
If you’ve never seen this little booklet you’ve missed something. It’s a brilliant, brief, warm, intelligent and helpful guide for anyone looking after a dying person — the sorts of things they might expect to have to cope with.
The contents contain insights into how a dying person may be feeling; how to talk about what’s happening with the dying person and how to listen to them; what the dying process looks like; end of life experiences…
You can download and read it for yourself free, online, here.
You can buy the just-out Kindle version here.
Highly recommended.
The senior management team here at the GFG-Batesville Shard have spoken at some length to Sue White, above, about her new magazine venture, Farewell Magazine. We were impressed. Farewell Magazine is described below in a press release we have just had from her people:
Funerals and dying are taboo subjects in today’s society, but one woman has set about changing that, following the death of her own father.
Sue White has spent the last seven years in the wedding industry, but is now launching Farewell Magazine, a quarterly publication designed to demystify the funeral trade.
The 54-year-old from Chesterfield, in Derbyshire, is giving up her high-flying career as director of White Media, helping to organise 20 wedding fairs a year across the East Midlands and North of England.
Instead she plans to look death in the face and unveil the new magazine which will provide practical, emotional and professional advice for people grieving, preparing for death or simply intrigued by what the options are.
Sue said: “I have spent the majority of my planning career working in the weddings industry, which is very much about planning the happiest day of someone’s life. But when I lost my own dear dad I realized that as a nation we are totally unprepared for what can be the saddest day of our lives.
“Because we don’t talk about death, or funerals, when it comes to planning a loved one’s send-off often we have no idea what they might have wanted, or how to go about organizing it.
“I felt there was a total lack of information about palliative care, funeral planning and memorial ideas and that it was about time we started talking about dying, instead of pretending that it’s not going to happen. Death is inevitable, yet few of us consider it until confrontation is absolutely unavoidable.
“I also felt it was time to lift the lid on the funeral industry – let’s find out what’s changing, what’s innovative and above all what options are available to us when the time comes.”
Sue was inspired to make the move from weddings to funerals when her own father James Gault, an RAF war hero, passed away in August 2011.
The publication is not the first magazine Sue has published – she has spent five years producing a regional title, White Weddings Magazine which is sold at 370 independent outlets, including John Lewis and Debenhams.
Farewell Magazine, which comes out end of January, will be stocked at more than 120 branches of WH Smith and be available in more than 3,000 funeral homes, crematoriums and cemeteries, as well as hospitals, hospices and solicitors practices nationwide.
Each edition will feature inspiring real life stories of people who made a difference, take a look behind the scenes in the funeral industry, help readers create a meaningful and memorable funeral ceremony or memorial and profile innovative and pioneering new services.
The first issue looks at the process of turning ashes into diamonds, introduces motorcycle funerals, explains what to do when someone dies and pays tribute to an inspirational seven-year-old who touched the hearts of his whole community.
In an era when many long-standing publications are downsizing, Sue is passionate that there is a gap in the market for a title offering an advertising platform for the funeral trade.
Advertisers already signed up include Golden Leaves Funeral Plans, Cooperative Funerals and Colourful Coffins.
Sue added: “We firmly believe there is demand from both readers and advertisers and we’re in an unrivalled position to launch this magazine, with nothing else like it in the marketplace.
“We have been delighted by the positive response from the industry which has whole-heartedly bought into the concept of Farewell Magazine and supported the new publication by investing long term from issue one.
“There is a gap in the market for a publication that’s both inspirational and informative, something with substance, featuring engaging, well-written stories that our readers will identify with, particularly if they are looking for avenues of inspiration and guidance towards the end of their life.
“The time has come to start talking about death and put aside our own fears about dying. We’re all scared of the unknown, but death isthe one inevitable element of life.”
* Farewell Magazine has an initial circulation of 20,000 and a cover price of £3.95. It is also available for subscription at home and abroad via the website, www.farewell-magazine.co.uk
