Parta Quies
Oldie readers of this blog will know who I mean by Katharine Whitehorn. Journalist (Observer, mostly). Irreverent, no-nonsense, funny, nice. She’s now Saga magazine’s agony aunt. I’ve just stumbled on the poem she wants to be read at her funeral. It’s by AE Housman and it’s called Parta Quies. I’d not come across it before. […]
The sacred and the propane
It was a deepseated thing, this duty we felt we owed our dead. A sacred duty – literally. It goes back to the beginning of time. Throughout human history the dead body has always been treated in accordance with sacred diktat, its valedictory hullabaloos performed by shaman or sorcerer, soothsayer or priest. For the full […]
Normalising death
Back in 2008 neuropsychiatrist Peter Fenwick, in his book The Art of Dying, made this observation: ‘There are plenty of papers about palliative care and pain control, but very few about the mental states during the dying process.’ It’s something that’s often discussed, the un-joined-upness of dying and death, even in hospices. The National Council […]
Hard graft
The alternative to government regulation of the funeral industry is not self-regulation (too flabby) but implacable consumer scrutiny. That’s the libertarian way of looking at it, it’s a case I like to argue, and I concede that it may be ineffectually idealistic. If only consumers knew. If only they knew what goes on behind the […]
Godsmacked
It could have been a funeral-home scene out of a “Sopranos” episode. At the wake for crime author Philip Carlo, Tony Danza angrily interrupted the priest, claiming he was talking too much about God and not enough about the best-selling biographer of mass murderers. “Tony, who was one of Carlo’s closest friends, walked right up to […]
LGBT
Partners Mike Konigsfeld and Tom Brandl in Cologne, Germany have designed a coffin for gay male funerals. If you look carefully you can see that it is festooned with muscly naked men. There’s no doubting the business sense behind the idea. As Mike says, “People are cutting back in the recession but the one group […]
If only they knew…
There’s a new blog over in the US which describes itself as “a revealing look from beneath the veil of silence. The purpose of this blog is to bring truth to funeral consumers, which is often masked by an industry driven by profits. What makes this site different? The creator is a licensed funeral director […]
Demos report: Dying for Change
There’s a report just out from Demos on death and dying (why don’t we get chronological and say dying and death?). It’s by Charles Leadbeater, somewhat of a hero of mine, and Jake Garber. It’s called Dying for Change. It comes out at the same time as the National Council of Palliative Care’s The Missing […]
Respect
I know you all enjoy a good mobster funeral. Here’s one in Montreal, scheduled for today. A regular attendee of Mob and other funerals in a landmark Little Italy church issued a fearless prediction on the eve of Monday’s 11 a.m. service for Nicolo Rizzuto Sr. “It’ll be full,” Tony Romano, 81, said confidently Sunday […]
Broken survivors
Superb if gruelling documentary examining end of life issues from PBS. One of the contributors is Judith E Nelson, professor of medicine at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine and associate director of Mount Sinai Hospital’s Intensive Care Unit: The burdens of intensive care can be very, very heavy, and the outcomes are often not […]
