21 March 2013 – The Good Funeral Guide

More than meets the eye

Yesterday’s Mail, among others, carried the pic, above, of Ronnie Biggs greeting the press at the funeral of fellow train robber Bruce Reynolds attended by the great and good of the criminal underworld. Check out the scene here.

Bruce Reynolds’ son Nick is a member of the Alabama Three whose song Woke Up This Morning is the title music to the Sopranos. There’s a neat symmetry there, perhaps.

You may recall that Nick is also a sculptor and specialist in death masks. We last brought you to his attention back in 2010 in this post, which describes the cast he took of a freshly executed prisoner in the US. Don’t just glide over that link and pass on. Check it out. It’s an extraordinary story. Here it is again.

Nick is one of the essayists in the latest Natural Death Handbook and a friend of its compiler, Rupert Callender, whom Nick has appointed official undertaker to the ‘Bamas.

Now check out that Nick story.

Does failure feel like grief?

Posted by Richard Rawlinson

Not so long ago, The Independent’s left-wing young writer Johann Hari fell from being an award-winning media star when he was exposed as a self-promoting liar and cheat. The Economist was not convinced by his apology for plagiariasm.

It’s now the turn of right-wing, young digital hack Milo Yiannopoulus. His mainstream profile may not be as high as Hari’s but he’s well-known in the blogosphere. Having cut his teeth at the Telegraph (and Catholic Herald), he went on to launch The Kernel, an online magazine about technology start-up companies, and was named one of the 100 most influential people in Britain’s digital economy by Wired.

His company has just declared bankruptcy. Yiannopoulus’s detractors, of which there are many as he has a pugilistic style (he even fell out with Stephen Fry on Twitter), are no doubt gloating. Here’s The Guardian last year.

For all the precocity of a Hari or Yiannopoulus, the latter starts his redeeming process with a persuasively repentant and reflective blog in which he wonders if failure might feel like grief.

Worth a read in my opinion, here.

Finding words of comfort is tricky after a career crisis, relationship break-up or bereavement. You can say, ‘sorry to hear about your news. I sympathise at this difficult time’. But only with the career crisis can you say ‘you will come out of suffering stronger and better’ without meriting a slap across the face. Time may indeed heal, but grief is very different from self pity following injury to lifestyle, reputation, ego or bank account, self-inflicted or otherwise.