The GFG Blog
2010Mar
No Service By Request
Charles
Mar
24
3 comments
I am extremely grateful to Gordon Thurston for this thorough and thoughtful analysis of the growing rejection in parts of both the US and Canada of the traditional practice of holding a funeral with the body of the person who has died present, and the preference, instead, either for a
Faith-lite?
Charles
Mar
24
1 comment
The Movement for Reform Judaism has just published its new funeral service. It contains material – readings, poems – recommended by, among others, the devotedly atheist Claire Rayner. The purpose is, according to Rabbi Jonathan Magonet, to “allow more options to make it easier for rabbis taking the service to
In the midst of death, let there be life
Charles
Mar
23
No Comments
When someone asks, “Read any good books recently?” I often reply, “Yes. Read any good graveyards?” Graveyards comprise a compelling variety of distilled biography. The lives they describe may be humdrum, but that only makes them easier to relate to. Just to read the names on the headstones and monuments
Funeral minus ex
Charles
Mar
22
2 comments
Here’s a situation familiar to all funeral directors and celebrants and to an increasing number of bereaved people. A reader writes to Virginia Ironside at the Independent: Dear Virginia, I had been married to my husband for 30 years when he suddenly seemed to have a brainstorm – he left
A custom more honoured in the breach
Charles
Mar
22
1 comment
There are those who make a distinction between traditional and alternative funerals and suppose alternative funeral directors to be, like their clients, boho, treehugger, oddball shroomers who live in La-La Land towns like Totnes or Stroud “where they’re all like that”. The label doesn’t fit. It’s not one they use.
Funerals for the faithless
Charles
Mar
21
1 comment
I don’t want to have a cheap pop at atheists. But I do like this – because it makes me chuckle. It’s the way it’s written. So I just back from my great uncles funeral. I never knew him as a faithful or church going type of guy, but I
Real funeral
Charles
Mar
20
No Comments
I like this. It’s a report of a funeral in Arkansas: Friends bid farewell to Jim Powell at a memorial service this afternoon at Second Baptist Church. The retired Gazette editorial page editor died Wednesday at 90. Glenn Beck would have hated it. Ray Higgins and Matt Cook eulogized Jim
The Importance of Being Dead
Charles
Mar
19
2 comments
Sherwin Nuland: The reason there’s interest in people like Aubrey de Grey and the other life extenders has to do with the temper of our age, which I think of as narcissistic… Aubrey de Grey: It’s not a question of living to a thousand or living to two hundred, even
