Fusion funerals: Cockneys, immigrants and Hackney hipsters
Posted by Richard Rawlinson The story of T. Cribb & Sons is one of business resilience in the cultural quicksand of London’s East End. A family-run firm of undertakers since 1881, its heritage is Cockney: close-knit, white, working class communities celebratory of both their roots and the material trappings of wealth: pie and mash and the […]
Each to their own
Darius, a king of ancient Persia, was intrigued by the variety of cultures he met in his travels. He had found, for example, that the Callatians, who lived in India, ate the bodies of their dead fathers. The Greeks, of course, did not do that – the Greeks practised cremation and regarded the funeral pyre […]
Corpse roads – then and now
Back in the middle ages, established churches hung on to their right to bury the dead when new churches were built nearby to serve a growing population. Burial rights brought in revenue. This meant that parishioners of churches without a right to bury their dead were compelled to take them to a church which did […]
An essay in melancholy
Last week I passed an empty hearse going the other way. It set me musing. Freed from its solemn duties, no longer slowed by a weighty coffin and all the gravitas attendant upon such a thing, emptied of flowers and no longer the misty-eyed focus of profoundly sad people, it had about it none of […]
In the borderlands
Posted by Jenny Uzzell There is a very useful word frequently used by anthropologists and students of religion and mythology to describe something that is neither one thing nor the other; something that is ‘in between’. The word is ‘liminal’. Classic examples of things that are ‘liminal’ are marshes or other places at the water’s edge, […]
The presence of the dead is essential
We bear mortality by bearing mortals — the living and the dead — to the brink of a uniquely changed reality: Heaven or Valhalla or Whatever Is Next. We commit and commend them into the nothingness or somethingness, into the presence of God or God’s absence. Whatever afterlife there is or isn’t, human beings have […]
The Protestant death ethic
WHEN any person departeth this life, let the dead body, upon the day of burial, be decently attended from the house to the place appointed for publick burial, and there immediately interred, without any ceremony. And because the custom of kneeling down, and praying by or towards the dead corpse, and other such usages, in […]
Requiem for the topper and the silver-knobbed cane?
Writing in the spring 2013 issue of the Institute of Cemetery and Crematorium Management Journal, the editor, Bob Coates, writes: What was once the abnormal is now the normal with respect to funeral ceremonies on our premises … Less enamoured, however, may be the funeral director. Some may find the frankness of discussion, particularly over […]
A eulogy sandwich is not enough to nourish grief
As Jenny Uzell embarks on a series of posts which will consider the knotty question, What Is A Funeral For? it’s worth reflecting on what has been a game of two halves, funeralwise, in the last fortnight. Two people have expressed contrasting approaches to a funeral. First, there was Dave Smith, who arranged the funeral […]
Validating the unverifiable
Last year’s TV documentaries revealed shocking scenes in funeral home mortuaries which horrified undertakers as much as they did the public. But just as the documentaries did not rouse the public to descend in angry mobs on their nearest funeral home, so they failed, also, to rouse good undertakers to fight back by demonstrating convincingly […]
