Who’s working for who?
Secular funeral celebrants cling to the fiction that they work for their clients. They don’t. Their clients get to choose the coffin they want (they might go for something really expensive) but they don’t get to choose their celebrant, they get lumped with their celebrant. Celebrants work for funeral directors, who hold them in dependency. That’s how […]
Would you credit it?
Here’s an interesting insight from the US into the robustness of the business model of Services Corporation International, the clumping, predatory and often bungling funeral chain which begat our very own Dignity Caring Funeral Services. Dignity is not a notably bungling organisation, but the challenges they both face are related: Because of the lack of […]
Blessed are the bad?
There’s an interesting piece (if you find this sort of thing interesting) in the Australian magazine Eureka Street, a very interesting looking publication promoted by the Australian Jesuits, but remarkably non-doctrinaire and broadminded in its treatment of things. The piece, by Andrew Hamilton, a theologian from Melbourne, debates the sort of funeral appropriate for child […]
What is a funeral for?
A survey of this blog’s favourite obits’ page in the Times Colonist in Victoria, on the west coast of Canada, yields features of interest. 12 deaths are recorded this week. So far as I can see, there’s not a single funeral among them. The breakdown reveals: 3 celebrations of life; 2 memorial services; 3 no […]
Much to celebrate?
When wireless listeners switched on for the BBC Home Service (now R4) news on Good Friday, 1930, the announcer began in familiar terms in his familiar dark brown voice: “This is the BBC Home Service. Here is the news. There is no news today.” The resulting startled gap was filled with 15 mins of pianoforte […]
Thought for the day
From Rebecca Solint’s A Fieldguide to Getting Lost: All through childhood you grow toward life and then in adolescence, at the height of life, you begin to grow toward death. This fatality is felt as an enlargement to be welcomed and embraced, for the young in this culture encounter adulthood as a prison, and death […]
Memo to self
Most people think of a memorial as a sole-purpose ‘something’, there to do exactly what the shot-blast lettering says it’s there to do. A headstone, for example. Headstones are self-absorbed, stand-alone symbols. They add nothing to their surrounding headstones, neither do they detract from them. They do not beautify the landscape; they may uglify it. […]
More lapidary obits
Here are some latest extracts from my favourite obituary pages, in the Times Colonist, Canada. What I admire about the best of these is their lapidary nature, their restraint, their decorum. Above all, I admire the careful thought that has gone into epitomising the person who has died. In just a few words a person’s nature is made palpable. […]
Partial eclipse of the Moonies
The Moonies, followers of that well-known oxymoron Sun Moon, want to create a one-acre natural burial ground in the village of Stanton Fitzwarren, near Swindon. It’s not just for Moonies; the villagers are welcome, too. The villagers aren’t happy, of course. The English are not natural-born embracers of change (or even of each other); they […]
Tarantara!
The Good Funeral Guide is published today! Available from all good bookshops, one or two very bad ones and all the usual online suspects.
