Wise words
Ru’s opening words to the assembled guests struck a chord with many who were there, so we thought we’d put them on the blog for the whole world to read. Over to you Rupert. “Welcome everyone to the Good Funeral Awards 2016! It started off, as so many good things do, in a sweaty basement […]
Bring on the empty corpses
Book review: Smoke Gets In Your Eyes by Caitlin Doughty Caitlin Doughty, graduate in medieval history and author of a sunny thesis entitled The Suppression of Demonic Births in Late Medieval Witchcraft Theory, rejects a promising career in academia in favour of one as a corpse handler and incinerator of the dead. Anticipating bewilderment she asks, […]
Lawrence’s story
The following story is not new and it has been published elsewhere. I’d not seen it, and perhaps you hadn’t, either. It was sent to me by Lawrence’s mother, Virginia Prifti. “Lawrence’s death and cremation was incredibly powerful for us as a family. We decided to take control, organise our own goodbyes and keep Lawrence […]
Imagine this: when someone dies we don’t hand them over to strangers
When the GFG, in conjunction with the Plunkett Foundation, announced a community funerals initiative back in 2012, we supposed that someone might pick it up and run with it. The Plunkett Foundation, far cleverer than us, was pretty confident they would. They contacted all their community shops and community pubs and we waited with bated breath […]
Owl you need is love
The natural death movement in the UK of the early 90s was very much a child of its time. Its parents were the natural childbirth movement and the environmental movement. The happy coupling resulted in the birth of twins: the DIY funeral and natural burial. The natural burial movement grew strappingly, but the DIY […]
It’s legal to care for your own
Kimberlyrenee Gamboa’s son Kyle took his own life by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge in September, three weeks into his senior year in high school. A seemingly happy 18-year-old with lots of friends and into competitive lasertag, Kyle’s death was such a shock, his mother said, she doesn’t know how she’d have managed it […]
Kingfisher Funerals get behind home funeralists
Kingfisher Funerals of St Neots have bought a Flexmort body-cooling system for people who want to care for their dead at home. Andrew Hickson, who founded the business in 2010, tells us: “We have seen a marked increase in requests from the family of someone who has died, who do not want the person removed […]
What taught Chuck about death?
We like Chuck Lakin at the GFG. We’ve blogged about him here and here. Here’s his reply to the question ‘When did you begin learning about death?’ The precipitating incident was the death of my own father. This was in 1979 and he was home for the last six week of his life, and I’m […]
Forward into the past
Most progressive initiatives in the world of death and funerals are characterised by a spirit of ‘Stop the clock, I want to go back’. Up in Tyneside, Michele Rutherford (DipFD) has just launched a retro initiative. It’s for those people who don’t want men in black macs taking away the person who has died, but […]
EXCLUSIVE: It’s going to be one wacky sendoff for Downton’s Matthew
The GFG can exclusively reveal that Downton star Matthew Crawley will be cremated in a way-out guerilla funeral on the ancestral estate in a ritual created by the grief-stricken family. Devotees of toff-soap Downton Abbey were left dazed and heartbroken at the end of the 2012 Christmas special when heir Matthew Crawley was violently killed […]
