The depths they go to
In Palmerston, New Zealand, permission to inter ashes in a new natural burial ground has been put on hold. The council wants a period of consultation in order to arrive at a “a better understanding of what sort of natural burial ground people want” in the light of the assertion by a councillor that “cremation […]
Fit for a mariner’s ashes
A delightful email arrives from Annie Leigh, who is Eco Urns. With it come some delicious photos of a bespoke ashes urn Annie has just made for a client. The client wanted an urn that could be ‘launched’ at sea. She wanted her husband’s ketch — and she wanted his favourite colour, blue. So Annie […]
Please, sir, can I have the skeleton?
The case of Christopher Harris vs Woodstock Town Council focussed the not inconsiderable minds of the GFG workforce on the vital necessity of forwarding all tricky legal enquiries straight to Teresa Evans, thence to John Bradfield if necessary. While we are often to be found curled up with a copy of Davies Law of Burial, […]
Busybody nonsense update
A quick update on the attempt by Christopher Harris to persuade Woodstock council to abandon its requirement that ‘all interments [of ashes] … must be arranged by an approved professional firm’ We foregathered in the council chamber. Green baize-covered table, mace thereon, oil portraits of worthies from various lost ages, Union Jack, evening sunlight streaming […]
Busybody nonsense
Christopher Harris Some time this evening Christopher Harris will deliver the following speech to Woodstock Town Council, calling upon it to strike out its requirement that the interment of his father’s ashes be superintended by a funeral director. Here’s another example of someone tenaciously pursuing the rights of the bereaved with an important test case. […]
As you get older your friends start to die.
Posted by Sue Gill We’ve been to some truly awful funerals and I’m sure we’re not alone in that. Sometimes the ceremonies were healing, but more often they were formulaic and irrelevant, and we left feeling sometimes angry, sometimes guilty, frequently in despair. That’s what compelled us to write the Dead Good Funerals Book, to offer […]
Ash astray
A man suffered humiliation and distress at the hands of an airport security agent when she insisted on opening a jar containing his grandfather’s remains and then dropped them on the floor. John Gross, of Indianapolis, was trying to bring Mario Mark Marcaletti’s ashes home from Florida and had them in his bag in a […]
Mourning glory
By our funeral historian, Richard Rawlinson Ashes into Glass is a jewellery company that inserts cremation ashes into crystal glass rings, pendants, earring and cufflinks. See the results here “It has helped me feel a little calmer about losing my dear Mum by knowing that a little part of her is always with me,” says Teresa Evans […]
Library of dust
Posted by Vale Oregon State Insane Asylum closed in the 1970s after operating for nearly a hundred years. Over that time inmates died, were cremated and their remains, stored in copper canisters, were stored uncollected. The photographer David Maisel has made a photographic record of them. He writes: The approximately 3,500 copper canisters have a […]
Muriel’s ashes
It was the Jubilee weekend and a year since we had all gathered around Muriel’s hospital bed as she told the Doctors that she wanted no more treatment, no interventions, no resuscitation. She told us she had had a wonderful life, she was ready to go, that she wanted to be cremated and she wanted her […]
