Sweet story
Very sweet story from New Zealand: An elderly Levin couple together for more than 60 years died within hours of each other in circumstances that Shakespeare could not have written better, their daughter says. With only hours to live, Marion Bray-Gunn, 84, was being taken from Palmerston North hospital on Tuesday so she could die […]
Clothes line
When people bring the clothes to the funeral home that they want their dead person dressed in they rarely bring them in a nice little suitcase or smart receptacle, they mostly bring them in a crumpled carrier bag. What does this say?
Not so first as he thinks
From Australia’s Herald Sun: A CANCER victim yesterday became the first person to be buried upright at Australia’s only vertical cemetery. Allan Heywood lost his battle with cancer last Tuesday and was buried in the unusual, space-saving grave in the new vertical cemetery outside Camperdown in western Victoria. “It’s nice to be first at something. […]
Generalising from the particular
I enjoyed this article from the Catholic Herald by Francis Phillips: I was at a Requiem Mass this morning; nothing unusual in that, of course. Yet this Mass was highly unusual in this respect: there was no panegyric of the dead. The deceased man had made it clear to his widow before he died that […]
Claire’s last word
Everyone looks at other people differently according to what they do. Hairdressers scan your hair, dentists your teeth, snobs your shoes… Undertakers? Why, they measure you for your coffin of course. Surveying a funeral, the preoccupations of an undertaker are quite different from those of anybody else. Ordinary folk take in the procession, the flowers, […]
Indy undertakers on the counter-attack
Saif’s IPSOS-Mori price comparison survey published in February 2010 was dynamite. It showed that independents are generally cheaper than two big beasts of the industry, Co-operative Funeralcare and Dignity. Had Saif got the message out to the funeral-buying public it would have hit the big beasts’ bottom line bigtime. But the message never got out, […]
Sarah Walton’s memorial birds and birdbaths
Sarah Walton, a potter of 35 years’ standing, whose work can be found in 13 museums in Britain, is a great favourite of the Good Funeral Guide. We admire and like her work enormously. Here, she tells us about her work: For years I’ve sold my Birdbaths as simply that. Only recently has it occurred […]
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 […]
A real funeral
When Fiona Hughes died of cancer in September ’10, her sister Dina, her family, and Melanie, Fiona’s daughter, followed their hearts and gave her a colourful, creative, fear-free and happily sad funeral which embodied the customs, culture and language of her family (if not those of their funeral director). She wrote the following uplifting account […]
Dem bones
Here’s one of those ‘only in America’ stories: The owner of Memory Gardens Cemetery says he did nothing wrong disposing of human remains that were used for medical research. A resident called police after finding the piles of bones out in the open on cemetery property … Parker says he’s sorry if people are hurt, […]
