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...
Feb 13, 2015 | Green funeral, Having a vigil and laying out the body, Home funeral, Remembering
In this post I use the word vigil, but not in a religious sense. I’ve made vigil the topic for the Sustainable Funeral event at this year’s Sustainable Living Festival (SLF) event. I think of a vigil as a continuous, intimate thread of care. Some want to...
