Finding Valhalla
A friend writes. She is to be interviewed for the talking wireless. They’re going to want her take on Viking funerals. What, she wonders, are my views on Viking funerals? Can you, I wonder, help? Interesting territory. We think of the classic Viking funeral as a blazing longship, bearing the corpse of a chieftain, […]
Too good to be real
I have tried, in the Good Funeral Guide, not to cover topics already dealt with by others. Instead, I have incorporated lots of signposts to best sources of information and best archives of resources – poems, music, ceremony ideas. There’s lots of stuff out there about eulogies, most of it guff. But TheFuneralSite has some […]
Adventurous ashes
When Ralph B White died two years ago his friends at the Adventurers Club of Los Angeles set about taking portions of his ashes to all manner of furthest flung parts of the globe. “Rather than have people mourn him, he wanted to give people incentive to go have adventures,” said Rosaly Lopes, who was […]
What does dying feel like?
Eighteen months ago Tony Judt was, by his own description, “a 61-year-old, very healthy, very fit, very independent, travelling sports-playing guy”. He had a slight shortness of breath walking up hills and found himself hitting the wrong keys when he typed, nothing more. Then in September 2008 he was diagnosed with motor neurone disease, a […]
Counting the cost
Here in the UK we are all following, intently or wearily, the furore created by the declaration of intent by Anjem Choudary and Islam4UK to hold a procession through the streets of Wootton Basset “not in memory of the occupying and merciless British military, but rather the real war dead who have been shunned by […]
Exhuming the past
Far and away the most powerful image of 1979’s Winter of Discontent, when one and a half million public sector workers went on strike, was that of the dead lying unburied. There’s a peculiar horror in that; it blends dishonour with decomposition most potently. Bloated rubbish bags, bloated corpses. Bluebottles. Stench. The unburied dead of […]
The sound of muesli
Did you ever come across promession? It is the brainchild of Susanne Wiighe-Masak, an environmentalist Swede. It offers, or promises to offer, an eco-friendly alternative to cremation. In Susanne’s words, this is how it works: Within a week and a half after death, the corpse is frozen to minus 18 degrees Celsius and then submerged […]
You can look at her feet sticking out right here
“America,” said Oscar Wilde, “has been discovered before, but it has always been hushed up.” I don’t want to give offence to any of my many US readers. But for people in the UK who sometimes get frustrated with the way we do funerals over here, it’s worth reflecting that one of the reasons, perhaps […]
Websites where you can plan your own funeral
A cheerful email arrives from Sue Kruskopf, telling me that I ought to know about her do-it-yourself funeral planning website My Wonderful Life, of which she is the co-founder. It was “created after the death of my co-founder’s husband. It is free and you can not only plan your own funeral but leave letters to […]
Sex and death
I’ve never been able to get the connection between sex and death. I once met an academic at a conference who was heavily into it, but in a visceral rather than a cerebral way, so it seemed. That there’s a whole psychopathology here is not in doubt. It’s passed me by, leaving me feeling […]
