Don’t trash the ash
There – just over there. See them? That conspiratorial huddle, furtive, watchful. Burglars? Satanists? What are they up to?Chances are they’re only bereaved people waiting for the coast to clear before they can scatter some cremated remains. It’s difficult to do that in public, openly. It might distress people. It’s not yet a socially okay […]
He died as a fool
One more post about how we should speak of and to our dead people. All of us, probably, cling to the superstition that we should not speak ill of them — not too ill, anyway (just mildly critically, perhaps). To do so could have calamitous, possibly supernatural, consequences. Hush and awe hold us in their […]
Can’t act. Can’t dance. Can’t sing a little
A funeral is theatre. Yes? The protagonist is a dead person in a box who hogs centre stage and utters not a word of dialogue throughout. Unusual theatre as theatre goes, but theatre all the same, I think we can assert. To what genre does it belong? Tragedy, of course (for all that, in conventional […]
Posthumous charisma
Kathryn Flett wrote in this Sunday’s Observer about a funeral she went to. Her account is testimony to the value of a funeral. She says: “The send-off was standing room only, with moving speeches, singing, essential tears, equally essential laughter and a cardboard eco-coffin covered in stickers and scrawled personal messages from family and friends […]
Louder than words
I’ve been mentoring a fledgling funeral celebrant. The occasion of her first funeral was quite an event. She had formed a relationship of warmth and trust with the wife of the man who had died and she had written a good tribute, full of personal touches. She is nothing if not a hard worker, and […]
A Happy New Year to the FSJ
It’s a busy business, an undertaker’s, at this time of the year. Jan and Feb are the popular months to die, and why wouldn’t they be? Nature imparts no vitality. The spirit ebbs with the seeping daylight. In between the bagged bodies coming in and the boxed bodies going out there are families to see, […]
Where beauty softens grief
I’m indebted to Pam Vetter for pointing me to an article about post-mortem cosmetic procedures. This is not a big issue in the UK as it is in the US (Pam lives in LA), but it goes on here all the same. Funeral directors earn gratitude for presenting bodies looking as if they quite like […]
The truth, the half truth and nothing of the truth
The dead man’s father, a Jehovah’s Witness, had been estranged from his funny, funloving, humanist son for years. Now that his boy was dead, he wanted to reclaim him and give him a proper Jehovah’s Witness funeral. We talked about this, the dead man’s widow and I; we explored compromises. We wanted to include the […]
Stinker
I’ve blogged about Direct Funeral Services in the past, and it’s worth doing again. He’s still at it, that nice Mr Sage. He’s a blagger, the sort who ought to be horsewhipped. See the recent BBC Watchdog report here. I’ve had a number of emails from his victims. Be warned.
Helluva guy
“My words fly up, my thoughts remain below…”Thus wicked King Claudius in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. He was speaking of his own spiritual quandary, but in many burial grounds the memorials possibly feel he speaks for them, too. I’m not thinking of those blameless, plain stones whose simple inscriptions testify to sincere, humble faith and assert the […]
