Burying Jed Kesey
Here’s an extract from an account of the funeral of Ken Kesey: It was the least maudlin memorial service and funeral I’ve ever been to—his family and community loved him and shared his disinterest in sentimentality. At the burial at his farm his corpse was right there in front of us. People filed by and […]
Life Ain’t Always Beautiful
Here’s an unusually well-written blog: THE MY WIFE HAS CANCER BLOG. Had. She died on 29 March, and its author will shortly be wrapping it up. It’s a very good, if sometimes difficult, read. And there’s an interesting post on funeral costs. We’d find it hard to do anything like that so cheaply in this […]
Quickie Wednesday
Interesting piece from Canada on home funerals in which a ‘death midwife’ (gotta find a better term than that!) acknowledges that funeral directors can, in the right circumstances, do the job as well as her. She’s right, of course. Good funeral directors are not the enemy. Read it From Pam Vetter’s newsletter, this tragic account […]
Cash for corpses
You can tell how developed a society is by the price it puts on life. Could, rather. In the most developed societies there’s a re-evaluation going on. The Office of National Statistics calculates that death is now preceded by the unendurable prospect of an average 10 years’ chronic illness or dementia. It scares the hell […]
What about the workers?
Here’s a nice biz opp for someone in the UK: a jobs review site. Wossat? It’s a site where people leave anonymous reviews about the company they work for. Very useful for people thinking about working for that company. Over in the US they have a few of these sites. One of them is JobVent. […]
Time to privatise cremation?
Over in Apple Valley, Ca, Stephen Atmore, 11 years retired from the local phone company, has gone back to work. He’s opening a crematorium in a strip mall and trying to get his head around it: “I still wake up every morning asking myself why I am doing this.” Like a lot of people in […]
In life, in death…
Good to see that Malcolm McLaren will be going out in the anarchic style he did so much to popularise. We are all invited to observe a minute of mayhem at noon on Thursday. More funeral arrangements here.
Embracing the unacceptable
There’s a good piece over at Salon magazine which I’ve been holding over for a while to use on a slow news day in Deathworld. This is such a one. And what follows is a lot more nourishing than a bit of tittle-tattle. The piece is by Fred Branfan and is titled Choose Death. What […]
Co-operative Funeralcare – a case for care in the community?
Listeners to this week’s edition of Radio 4’s hilarious News Quiz hooted from the outset when the programme kicked off with this announcement from the Whitby Gazette: Does your Mum deserve an evening of pampering which will make her feel like a princess? The Whitby Gazette has teamed up with Co-operative Funeralcare to give […]
In the midst of life…
Following on from the last two days’ posts, here’s another on the same theme. It’s a story in today’s Sunday Telegraph. Sorry, no link, they don’t seem to have archived it yet. Residents near a funeral parlour in Tonbridge, Kent, claim they are being made miserable because covered bodies are wheeled on trollies past […]
