Independent reviews were a great help to me and my Celebrate People colleagues.
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‘We’re having a celebration of life’ is in danger of becoming a cliché.
Humanists believe we should celebrate the one life we have, but we also believe that grieving and mourning are fundamental to the healing process. Celebration isn’t obligatory, and it would be wrong to think that’s what a humanist funeral has to be.
Jen & Phil’s Lockdown Wedding Celebration
You don’t need to be surrounded by guests or be at a castle to still have a special day. “Celebrate your love for each other on that day and celebrate why it is that you want to get married.”
Rites of Passage
Can you imagine attending your own funeral? The old joke is that it’s the best party you’ll never go to, but that may no longer be true.Last year, in his Channel 4 series Grayson Perry helped to create a ‘living funeral’ for Roch, a man who’d been living with Motor Neurone disease, and it was […]
Speaking at Funerals
I saw a story the other day that took me aback a bit. Father Joseph Anthony Toal is the Roman Catholic Bishop of Motherwell and he found himself all over the papers when an instruction he’d sent to his clergy was leaked to a journalist. He even made the Daily Telegraph. He told his priests to refuse requests […]
Griefcast
I was pleased to see that Cariad Lloyd’s podcast on death won three prizes at the British Podcast Awards last week. Griefcast first came to my attention in 2016, thanks to this article in The Guardian, and it’s since notched up more than 30 episodes. Lloyd is a 35-year-old actress, comedian and writer from London whose father died of pancreatic […]
Remembrance Friday
I was honoured to be asked to deliver a Remembrance address to the staff of the Scottish Government at St. Andrew’s House in Edinburgh yesterday. As no humanist has ever been invited to be part of an official event of this kind, it meant a lot, and it seemed very fitting that it happened 99 years […]
A celebrant’s role is not always about celebration
I was pleased to see my article in The Scotsman earlier this week: if you’d like to read it please click here
Grieving: it’s time for Option B
I was very moved by this interview with Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg in The Observer, where she talks about how she coped with going to sleep beside her 47 year old husband, and waking up to discover that he was dead.Journalist Decca Aitkenhead is one of our best writers, and while she wasn’t entirely won […]
Funeral Photography
Sounds wrong doesn’t it? It’s just not done. But I think it should be. Katische Haberfeld is a photographer and advocate of ‘death literacy’ and she wrote a good piece in the Huffington Post that sets out her argument. You can read it here