On Saturday November 24th Greenwood Funerals played a key role in staging an unusual funeral. Around two hundred people walked slowly through Frome behind a coffin symbolising a Funeral for Extinct Species. Traffic was diverted and many curious onlookers were riveted as we walked past. It was both a moment of pure theatre and [...]
I was visiting friends in Totnes recently and decided to go and look at the Sharpham Meadow Natural Burial Ground. It forms part of the Sharpham Trust estate on a hillside overlooking the River Dart. The location is stunning and there is a simple round rustic cob building which provides a sheltered space in which [...]
Have you even been to an Irish Wake? I have just read “My Father’s Wake” by Kevin Toolis. The book is subtitled “How the Irish Teach Us to Love, Live and Die”. It is a powerful book written by someone who has engaged head-on with the harsh reality of death in many of the most [...]
Coming to Terms with Our Mortality Meretta Hart writes in response to our blog on Talking about Death and Dying, the greatest challenge for me has been to accept that one day I will not exist or be here in this body. Here she reflects on her experience of coming to terms with her [...]
Talking about Death and Dying Most of us wish to avoid talking about death and dying. Usually it is circumstance in the form of illness, an accident or a close encounter with death that forces us to face up to the reality of death. Until then, facing our mortality is not high on our [...]
Doing Things Differently as a Funeral Director Until recently, funeral directors were local family owned businesses serving the community. Although their names may carry on, many formerly independent funeral directors have now been taken over by the big players in the funeral industry like Co-op Funeralcare and Dignity. Arranging funerals has ceased to be [...]
Creating the Right Funeral for Friends and Family In the funeral world, everyone tends to assume that we can have either religious funerals or humanist, non-religious funerals. Why? I think it's because as a society we love simple choices between one thing or another when often the reality is more nuanced and complex. Strictly, [...]
Why Do Good Funerals Matter? When I meet people who I don’t know for the first time in a social setting and I say what what I do for a living as a funeral director and celebrant, they often tell me about a funeral which they remember. Usually it’s a family member like a parent [...]
How to Choose the Best Funeral Poems The poet Brian Patten makes the observation that a lot of people say they don’t like poetry but at times of stress end up going to poetry. What poetry does best, he adds, is to remind us of things that are important when the world emotionally overtakes [...]
Taking Charge of the Funeral From time to time when I have a few minutes to spare I think about my own funeral and DIY funerals in general. Often it’s on a car journey when I am by myself or in the middle of the night when I can’t sleep. I am still not a [...]
