Quote of the day
“Thank you so much for coming. Unlike the rest of you, I don’t have to get up in the morning.” Rob Buckman, doctor author, actor, comedian and broadcaster, who died last October after a career which was devoted to improving the way medics counsel the terminally ill. He left instructions for this message to be played […]
Ashroom
A fancy gaff? No, a tomb. The tomb of Maharajah Ranjit Singh, aka The Lion of the Punjab. His ashes repose in the middle, on the spot where he was cremated, in a marble urn shaped like a lotus. There are eleven other urns, those of his four wives and seven other women who threw themselves […]
Purifying flame
In Lucknow, India, Rajan Yadav is standing for Assembly elections on a manifesto of rooting out corruption. He wants to consign corruption to the funeral pyre, he says, and he is underlining this by conducting his campaign from a cremation ground. To make the symbolism complete, he has nicknamed himself Arthi Baba, the name given to […]
Crematoria need to offer a drop-off service. Will they?
We can speculate why it is that, in so-called advanced societies, the conventional funeral as an event is something dead people are increasingly bypassing. The point is that it’s happening, and demand for direct cremation (deathbed to incinerator) is growing. It is growing especially among educated liberal thinkers, precisely the constituency which was the first […]
