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, […]
Going down
This from the monochrom website: In the age of data mining, a person’s sex life may contain less embarrassing details than their web search history. Does it make sense that the former is a tightly guarded secret while the latter is shared with anonymous corporations daily? Even though a sexual nature is one of the […]
Cunning stunt
A consumers’ co-operative whose aim is to enable ordinary working people to buy things they would not otherwise be able to afford; one which exists to provide a service for its members rather than generate profits for shareholders. A good thing, yes? It gets better. This consumers’ co-op also has an altruistic, ethical agenda for […]
Relieved to be British
Many American funerary practices are so barking mad I don’t bother writing about them. This blog is Britcentric not because it is xenophobic or incurious but simply because it confines itself to goings-on of relevance to Brits. Sure, we’ve picked up one or two bad habits from the US. Embalming may or may not be […]
The only way round is through
Once upon a time people dreaded dying. They couldn’t be sure it would be painless. They dreaded being dead, too. Some feared the unknown. Others lamented the end of their existence. A very few people had no fear whatever of being dead because they trusted in a joy-drenched afterlife. But even these people dreaded dying. […]
What’s the youth of them?
First it was young women in the dismal trade who grabbed the prurient gaze of the media — that intriguing juxtaposition of beauty and beastliness, fragrance and foetor; the tantalising question: What makes a nice girl want to hang out with corpses? It makes for good photos. Slim young black-clad cane-wielding lovelies can induce a certain […]
Variants, please
There’s quite a good joke here — it must be an old one but I’ve not come across it before — in this week’s Spectator by Robin Oakley. It goes: Asked why he had sent a wreath in the shape of a lifebelt, a friend at the funeral of the man who had drowned replied, […]
One to see
There’s an exhibition on at Compton Verney, 13 November til 12 December, entitled Kurt Tong: In Case it Rains in Heaven. It’s a photographic celebration of the Chinese custom of burning paper consumer goods of all sorts — clothes, cars, iPods — in order to provide for the dead person in the afterlife. It’s a custom that probably […]
It won’t make you dead
Gail Rubin is a writer and blogger in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I’ve just looked up Albuquerque on google maps. It’s a long way from a decent beach. Gail has written a book, A Good Goodbye: Funeral Planning for Those Who Don’t Plan to Die, which will be published at the end of this month. She […]
