What do atheists profess?
Posted by Richard Rawlinson, religious correspondent Vale makes interesting points in the thread beneath my Beyond the Abyss post, which discusses the gap between secularist individuality and religious communal ritual: We (I) believe that community and the communal celebration of key events is important – yet secularism, at least as it finds expression in the […]
The Letting Go
First published in the New York Times by SIDDHARTHA MUKHERJEE It had rained heavily the night before. The steep stone steps of the ghat are slick and slippery, and when my father pulls me onto the boat, the water feels more stable than the ground. The boatman rows out toward the open river, and the […]
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 […]
From the heroic to the heartfelt – obits in Iceland
Posted by Vale Can the obituaries published in Icelandic newspapers tell us anything about our changing attitudes to death and dying? Obituaries are a national pastime in Iceland. Every day the leading national newspaper – the Morgungblaðið – publishes pages and pages of them. And they are read avidly. One writer has even claimed that […]
Timing your exit
Posted by Charles Cowling Extracted from an article in yesterday’s New York Times: I hope you had the chance to read and reread Dudley Clendinen’s splendid essay, “The Good Short Life”. Clendinen is dying of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or A.L.S. If he uses all the available medical technology, it will leave him, in a few years’ […]
Funerals are for…
Four comments here from this article in yesterday’s Guardian. Organising the funeral for my 17 year old son, who died in an accident overseas in Sept 2008, was made vastly easier by the wonderfully kind funeral director and an equally wonderful C of E Canon – a Canon whose first words on meeting us were […]
Last post
Very much going viral at the moment is the last post of pioneer blogger, musician and technical writer Derek K Miller’s. He died aof cancer last Tuesday. Here’s a snatch: Here it is. I’m dead, and this is my last post to my blog. In advance, I asked that once my body finally shut down […]
The foetus and the corpse: where does identity begin and end?
There’s an interesting review in the London Review of Books (14 April) of After We Die: The Life and Times of the Human Cadaver by Norman Cantor. Here are just a few snapshots from the review by Steven Shapin. It’s not available online unless you hand over a wad at the subscription roadblock. In the […]
The grass withereth, and the flower thereof falleth away
Here’s an extract from the blog of a religious minister (clerk in holy orders, he terms himself). I like his rigour. Very bracing. You wouldn’t expect me to enjoy humanist funeral services very much. Perhaps ‘enjoyment’ isn’t the right word for funerals anyway, but you know what I mean. I’ve been to a couple and […]
Endgame
Interesting, isn’t it, how myopically self-absorbed people become when glancing forward to their demise. “Stick me in a binbag and put me out with the rubbish,” they say, men mostly. It’s right up there now in the top ten death clichés alongside “He’s gone to a better place,” “It’s only a shell,” and “She will […]
