Screw says no
Many celebrants will have had the experience of welcoming a convict at a funeral, together with the prison officer to whom he/she is shackled. Do, please, share your experience in a comment. In Australia, belt-tightening has led to a review of the cost of this service to the banged-up bereaved: The Department of Corrective […]
Requiem mass for Philpott children
Posted by Richard Rawlinson Before they were arrested and charged with the murder of their six children in a petrol-fuelled arson fire in their Derby council house last month, Mick and Mary Philpott started planning a funeral at the Anglican Derby Cathedral. With the tragedy making headline news, they chose this local landmark, rightly predicting a lot of […]
Publishing event of the year!
The Natural Death Handbook, Fifth Edition A thoroughly updated and revised edition of the Natural Death Centre‘s celebrated handbook. Now presented alongside a new collection of essays on death, dying and funeral practices by doctors, historians, authors, poets, theologians and artists including Richard Barnett, David Jay Brown, Dr Sheila Cassidy, Charles Cowling, Bill Drummond, Stephen Grasso, […]
Death Row
On Texas’s death row, there are no contact visits at all– no hand-holding, no embraces. There is a strange little ritual when a Texas prisoner who still has family and friends is executed: his or her loved ones rush to the Huntsville funeral home which holds the contract with the prison, to touch the dead […]
Prison Terminal
Prison Terminal is a moving cinema verité documentary that breaks through the walls of one of America’s oldest maximum security prisons to tell the story of the final months in the life of a terminally ill prisoner and the trained hospice volunteers—they themselves prisoners—who care for him. The film draws from footage shot over a […]
Afore ye go
If we live long enough, our dying will be punctuated by lasts which we may even be able to mark off, one by one — last time in the garden; last time I’ll see so-and-so. Even if we don’t mark off our lasts, our nearest and dearest probably will, retrospectively. Our most memorable last ought […]
Lifed off
As you read this Big Rinty is dying in Shepton Mallet prison. Big Rinty? You wouldn’t know of him unless you’d read Erwin James’ columns in the Guardian or his books. Big Rinty is one of the long-term prisoners with whom James became friends during the twenty years of his life sentence. Here’s James: Rinty […]
Dying inside (2)
A few days ago I blogged about death and dying inside prison. If it’s the sort of thing that interests you at all, you’ll be interested in a post over at Jailhouselawyer’s blog. In most British prisons there are old men in their late sixties and seventies, at least three-quarters of them very ill and […]
Dying inside
Our prison system is a seldom explored area of death and dying. In fact, little is known about what goes on in our prisons, mostly because people don’t care enough about those inside to be remotely interested in what happens to them. This doesn’t surprise me. Crime angers people. But I’ve spent time in prisons […]
Prison hospice
Prisons are places where people are defined by the worst thing they’ve ever done. The stigma sticks for the rest of their lives. We, free people define ourselves by the best we can be. If we hate sinners it is because we are not as they. But we are. There is darkness in all of […]
