Uncle Arthur
Posted by Ariadne For an altar there was the chest of drawers in the corner by the window. Flowers, candles, drawings and sea urchin shells collected from the beach. The bedroom had turquoise walls or perhaps they were white and it’s just memory doing the decorating. When everything was right and ready, I made my […]
Burial views from a faraway country
Posted by Kathryn Edwards Serbia’s been generating news of late, featuring the Old Carnivore and the Young Herbivore (as one local commentator has characterised the players). While Djokovic nibbles the Wimbledon lawn and Mladic huffs and postures in the Hague court, there’s been a lot of grave-digging taking place in a former meadow just outside […]
Monday brain gym
Posted by Charles Cowling Coming soon, A Giving Tribute — ‘the caring alternative to funeral flowers’ — a project I wholeheartedly endorse. Over in Canada, “Cartoonist Adrian Raeside once placed an obituary in the Times Colonist in which he asked mourners to send singlemalt scotch and Cuban cigars in lieu of flowers.” [Source] What’s your alternative […]
Good short life, short good death
Posted by Charles Cowling I HAVE wonderful friends … one, from Texas, put a hand on my thinning shoulder, and appeared to study the ground where we were standing. He had flown in to see me. “We need to go buy you a pistol, don’t we?” he asked quietly. He meant to shoot myself with. […]
RT @GoodFunerals
Posted by Charles Cowling What is the well dressed corpse wearing? Clothes which co-decompose: http://bit.ly/jOJlxm Aussie undertakers strategise for the future. Better experience, better service. Full marks. http://bit.ly/m8t88b Music therapy for the dying. Touching. http://nyti.ms/mzIjDW Queenslanders urged to employ industry regulator to weed out “rouge [sic] or ‘cowboy’ operators.” http://bit.ly/leMNWF From the US: “for-profit health chains are cynically […]
The Work of the People
By Vale Some words seem problematic for the secularist. There was a good to-and-fro recently about ‘ritual’ on the blog a while ago and, in Funerals Without God, Jane Wilson says (a little sniffily to my mind) that Humanists talk about ‘ceremonies’ rather than ‘services’ because ceremonies are about celebration and mutual support while ‘service’ merely […]
Sage endorsement?
By Jonathan Taylor From ‘Why We Die’, by Dr Richard Steinpach. Arthur Koestler (Der Mensch: Irrlaufer der Evolution) says: “ ‘Self-assertion versus Integration… exists in biology, psychology, ecology, and wherever we encounter complex hierarchical systems, thus practically everywhere we look. In the living animal or the living plant each part must assert its individuality just as in […]
RT @GoodFunerals
Gladd bag suicide kit By Charles Cowling They done her in. So claims the director of the new Diana movie – http://ind.pn/ifoEFe All the Goth death stuff you could probably ever want – http://bit.ly/9Xp6YI Will the Tories flunk doing the right thing to fix the growing old age care crisis? It […]
They’re on Targets!
By Andrew Hickson, independent funeral director in St Neots, Cambridgeshire, first published on his blog http://stneotsfuneraldirector.blogspot.com on 22nd June. I sat with a client earlier this week, arranging his wife’s funeral. We built up a rapport during our short time together, and as part of making the arrangements I gave the gentleman an estimate of the funeral expenses, […]
