May 1, 2020 | Burial and cemeteries, End of life choices, Funeral, Funeral options, Love projects, Remembering, Ritual
How to make death a love project to mark the end of life is quite a question at the moment. Mourners can’t be physically close up. In hospitals there are tough restrictions on visitor admission. It’s really difficult, and yet I’d like to highlight in...
Feb 6, 2020 | Funeral, Memorial, Remembering
Talking with my friend Kara – she’s 30 – some time back, it dawned on me that she didn’t know how to go to a funeral. That stopped me in my tracks. I had to take a moment and think about it. How does one know and what’s important? Her friend’s dad had been...
Jan 22, 2020 | Burial and cemeteries, Green funeral, Love projects, Remembering, Ritual
In the first week of December Gai and I visited Hannah in the forest. On the way down the hill we picked rich deep red frangipani blossoms. Very Hannah we agreed. A little further on we met Hutcho and Jeremy and the bulldozer driver Jeff. They asked where we were...
Feb 8, 2019 | Remembering, Ritual
Hundreds of people headed to the Exhibition Buildings on Monday evening this week. Ten years on the Victorian Government was holding a ceremony to honour the victims and survivors of the 2009 bushfires. I took away three lessons for a great ceremony. Yes, as with the...
Sep 6, 2016 | Having a vigil and laying out the body, Memorial, Remembering
by Jennifer Downs I spent a week with Jennifer Downs in Baltimore, Maryland in 2012. I was attending ‘home funeral’ training with Final Passages. An acupuncturist, Steiner educator and political activist, Jennifer’s tagline is ‘Wake up to your...
Apr 11, 2016 | Funeral options, Memorial, Remembering
All the sadness in love and loss. We can only experience it. And yet there’s also a pull to make sense of it. The journey to make loss meaningful can be painfully long. Somehow memorials play a role in this. Then as time passes, there’s something left, something to...
