Habeas corpse
Funeral arrangements for many Brits must take into account the sometimes violently conflicting wishes, needs and loyalties of the various members of blended families. Compromise can sometimes be hard to reach, the more so when one party sets out to hijack the funeral and do it their way. It’s worse for Ghanaians. There, it’s the […]
Mellified man and the wonder of Wikipedia
Posted by Vale Wikipedia – that glorious monument to collaboration and, sometimes, hearsay – has some marvellously strange pages. One of my favourites is the Mellified man. This is claimed to be an ancient process of preserving bodies through use of honey.Li, a Chinese pharmacologist reports that, “some elderly men in Arabia, nearing the end […]
Meeting client expectations
Death with dignity
Posted by Charles When Meg Holmes was diagnosed with brain cancer in 2009 her husband Andrew started a blog so that he could update friends about her condition. Meg died on 1 October. The following post describes her death. My wife Meg died on the morning of Saturday October 1st in the loving company of […]
The real thing
Gail Rubin is now on Day 19 of her 30 funerals in 30 days. Over on her The Family Plot blog she is delighting her many fans with a full account of each as it happens. The appeal of what she is doing is broad. She is compiling an important social document, an account of […]
Is this the most tasteless competition of all time?
Over at Theaodeadpool.com they have an annual competition. The idea is to guess who will die in the next year (they’ve got to be famous enough to merit a newspaper obituary). Editorially, it is GFG policy to present you with everything that’s going on out there. Personally, we’re squirming more than somewhat. Here is an […]
Isle of the Dead
This concert will be a fantastic interweaving of myth, music and magic telling the story of the ancient Sumerian Goddess Inanna and her descent to the underworld to aid her suffering sister Erešhkigal. In leaving her realm of the heavens to face the darkness of the underworldfrom which there is no return, she faces death, […]
The consolations of a Catholic funeral
Here’s an extract from good and powerful piece in the Catholic Herald by Siri Abrahamson In the midst of a grey, damp winter, at the end of a healthy and normal pregnancy, our second child, a daughter, dies at birth. Despite 20 minutes of attempted resuscitation in the delivery room, she never draws breath outside […]
A cortège of daughters
A cortege of daughters A quite ordinary funeral: the corpse Unknown to the priest. The twenty-third psalm. The readings by serious businessmen One who nearly tripped on the unaccustomed pew. The kneelers and the sitters like sheep and goats. But by some prior determination a row Of daughters and daughters-in-law rose To act as pall-bearers […]
Quote of the week
James Horwill, the Australia rugby captain, puts the World Cup semi-finals into perspective. Before every match, he winds white tape around his left forearm and writes two names on it with a black marker pen, Macca and Ponto. They were his close friends of his from childhood who, a week before he was due to […]
