Human rites
They call it a rite of passage, a funeral, but I’m not so sure that that’s the right term for it. Is a funeral directly comparable with other rites of passage? We mark coming of age and matrimony with rituals which speak of transition—what scholastic folk call liminality. But, though we can push a young […]
Vast cars
What is this thing with undertakers and their hearses and limousines? Are we talking customer focus here, or idolatry? I really don’t know the answer—I mean that. As the UN climate talks in Copenhagen reach their climax, and at a time when people are finding it more and more difficult to stump up the […]
Doing what needs to be done, saying what needs to be said
In his excellent book Accompany Them With Singing (read it before you die or I’ll kill you), Thomas G Long says this: “When someone dies, Christians, like all other humans, look around at the immediate environment and ask: What do we have to do? What seems fitting to do? What do we believe we are […]
Carla
I don’t know if you follow Carla Zilbersmith’s blog. It’s not an easy read. She’s very clever and talented and funny, a brilliant writer, the kind of person you like and admire a lot, and she’s dying of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), which in the UK we call motor neurone disease (MND). She writes about […]
Period piece
Back in 1995 the funeral industry had been in a state of low level excitement and terror for some fifteen years. Conglomerates were stalking the land, seeking whom they might devour. Their talk of economies of scale made perfectly good sense. The little old family firms looked a bit like polar bears today. One of […]
Why do we do it?
David Barrington is an independent funeral director in Liverpool. We swap emails from time to time, and I asked him if he’d like to be my guest on this blog. I’m very pleased that he has accepted the invitation. And I very much hope that we shall hear from him again. Over to you, David. […]
The Undertaking
The Undertaking is a documentary about Lynch and Sons, the funeral home in Milford, Michigan, which is also home to Thomas Lynch, the man whose writings and poetry have greatly influenced the thinking of so many of us in the UK. It’s a marvellous piece of work. Watch it in its entirety, free, here.
Gregarious grief
Undertakers seek to be well thought of in all sorts of oblique and coded ways. Instead of proclaiming a USP and telling the world why they reckon they’re the best, they do stuff they hope will have a spin-off. Much of this has to do with cosying up to their target market, the old […]
Haunting presence
Is there a psychologically satisfactory way of disposing of a dead person’s body? That’s a judgement only you can make. If you buy into a belief system you’ll probably have no difficulty because faith renders what must be done, the burning, the burying, the dissolution and the nature of it, rational and purposeful. Rational, that […]
Buy a box and make it better
I love this mission statement from Batesville, the big boy of US box manufacturers—the corp which coffined Michael Jackson: “At Batesville Casket Company, our mission is to assist funeral homes in creating meaningful funerals that help families honor the lives of those they love. We do this by providing superior funeral products and services that […]
