The GFG Blog
2009Jan
Habeas corpus
Charles
Jan
21
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I was emailed last night by someone who wants to visit their dead parent at the undertaker’s. The undertaker won’t make an appointment. The client thinks the undertaker is prevaricating. The undertaker tells the client that the customary time to visit a dead person is the day before the funeral.
Evansabove
Charles
Jan
20
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In December 2006, Boyd Evans, 20, a talented, stylish, popular hairdresser, died after a car crash along with his partner, Nathan. Boyd’s mother, Teresa, set about trying to get his clothes and things back: “I had wanted every last thing close to Boyd in his last moments.” The hospital
Don’t trash the ash
Charles
Jan
19
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http://www.flickr.com/photos/siobhanbyrne/798944733/page2/ 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
He died as a fool
Charles
Jan
16
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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
Can’t act. Can’t dance. Can’t sing a little
Charles
Jan
13
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http://www.flickr.com/photos/22834080@N06/2194157320/ 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
Posthumous charisma
Charles
Jan
12
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Photo by KQED QUEST on Flickr 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
Louder than words
Charles
Jan
09
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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
A Happy New Year to the FSJ
Charles
Jan
05
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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
2008Dec
Where beauty softens grief
Charles
Dec
12
No Comments
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
The truth, the half truth and nothing of the truth
Charles
Dec
11
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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.
