What would you like to see on your TV?
When media people phone the press office here at the GFG-Batesville Shard, their requests for information often conform to whatever they suppose to be trending. “We’re doing something on living funerals. Are these catching on?” “No.” “We’re doing a documentary about the dying process and we want to film someone actually dying. Can you help […]
Always go to the funeral
I believe in always going to the funeral. My father taught me that. “Always go to the funeral” means that I have to do the right thing when I really, really don’t feel like it In going to funerals, I’ve come to believe that while I wait to make a grand heroic gesture, I should just stick […]
Quote of the day
“It is costly to our society in general, quite beyond the church, not to observe the death of a person in a way that witnesses to the dignity of the person and the meaning of life and death.” Thomas G Long Source
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, […]
We need to talk about funerals
Posted by Vale But, I hear you say, we do already. All the time. Interminably. And, of course, we do. This website springs from the Good Funeral Guide and the blog is full of discussions about new ways to dispose of bodies, about wild and wonderful flights of imagination in the services that are being […]
Godsmacked
It could have been a funeral-home scene out of a “Sopranos” episode. At the wake for crime author Philip Carlo, Tony Danza angrily interrupted the priest, claiming he was talking too much about God and not enough about the best-selling biographer of mass murderers. “Tony, who was one of Carlo’s closest friends, walked right up to […]
Death in the community
This put a spring in my step. It is extracted from a letter to the Irish Times: I never cease to be amazed at how we Irish continue to celebrate and embrace death so excellently. The morgue is now giving way to families’ increasing desire to bring the body home for a wake, not just […]
Showing up and just being there
This is Tom Lynch: There’s this wonderful essay that was written — I have it framed in the hallway there; the woman’s name, I think, is Sullivan who wrote it. She talks about how in her life the difference was not between doing good and evil. It was just doing the next right thing. I […]
Desert flowers
Why do people go to funerals? After all, the dead person won’t be there—not in spirit. I always think, when I survey a crowd at a funeral, that these people are being as unselfish as people can possibly be—and what a very rare thing that is. What’s the motivation? To be there for the dead […]
