Death is cruel and death is ugly
What happens to the human body when the last spark of life has gone? Most people would probably answer: it is cremated or laid in a coffin to decompose under the ground. However, a closer look reveals this to be a very limited view. For there is in fact a wide range of possibilities between […]
funeralcomparison.co.uk
A reader has written to me to draw my attention to funeralcomparison.co.uk. Is it, he asks, a scam? I’d not come across it before. If you go to the site you’ll find that it enables you to, in their words, “find the exact funeral requirements you require in-line with your budget. You can search from over […]
Death in the community
This put a spring in my step. It is extracted from a letter to the Irish Times: I never cease to be amazed at how we Irish continue to celebrate and embrace death so excellently. The morgue is now giving way to families’ increasing desire to bring the body home for a wake, not just […]
Unmasking the wolves
Over in the US, Service Corporation International (SCI) the multinational deathcare conglomerate which, here in the UK, begat Dignity, is in hot water. Again. One of its funeral homes, trading under the name of Stanetsky Memorial Chapels, mixed up two bodies. When they realised what they’d done, it seems that they illegally exhumed the one […]
Head-in-noose funeral plans
There was a good and much-needed hatchet job on whole-life insurance in the Daily Mail last month: Funeral plans aggressively advertised to older people – often during daytime TV ads – have been exposed as a raw deal. More than 4.5 million people hold these plans — otherwise known as whole of life policies — which pay out […]
Monday shorts
Death Ref got there first Time was when I could tuck a story away for a slow news day and not give a thought to any other death blogger getting there first. Can’t do that any more. The story I had been saving up for today has, I see, already been aired on the excellent […]
The labourer is worthy his/her hire
While I was well out of it last week on my guano-spattered rock set in a silver sea, the militant wing of this blog’s readership did a number on Lovingly Managed. It seems to have ended in either mutual exasperation or bewilderment. Probably a bit of both. Heavy breathing, for sure. Perhaps the greatest dialectical […]
The aloneness of the bereaved
I was struck by this post by a blogger in Canada concerning the aloneness of the bereaved. In this case, it’s Helmut Schmidt, former Chancellor of Germany, at the funeral of his wife of 64 years, Loki. She died on 21 October aged 91. The funeral was on 1 November.
No going back
That modern death has failed to find its place on the continuum of ordinary life events is something we all recognise and more or less vehemently deplore. For most a funeral is a hermetically sealed, isolated (or devastated) worst-day-of-my-life episode rarely to be recalled, and only then with a shudder. We quarantine the bereaved and […]
It’s what she would have wanted
Here’s a new poem by Wendy Cope published in the current Spectator. I hope she’ll forgive the flagrant breach of copyright and see this instead as a promo. Its sentiments are very contemporary. My Funeral I hope I can trust you, friends, not to use our relationship As an excuse for an unsolicited ego-trip. I […]
