FUNERALS YOUR WAY


Book Description

Sarah Jones started her career as a surgeon in the NHS and then worked with adults with learning difficulties and challenging behaviour. Fulfilling a life-long ambition she opened Full Circle Funerals, an award-winning independent funeral director, in 2016. Sarah wrote this book because she sees the benefits of people being able to create funerals that are right for them. After reading this short book, you will be able to articulate your own wishes, have a meaningful conversation with others, and will feel more confident when arranging a funeral for someone who has died.




Saying Goodbye Your Way


Book Description

Funerary arrangements are detailed in this sensitive yet realistic guide to making the important, difficult decisions necessary when a loved one dies, or when preparing for one's own departure. The logistics of planning memorial services and other ceremonies are discussed, and frank explanations are provided regarding cremation and interment. Special emphasis is placed on helping individuals understand the options available and become informed consumers, even while making what are often difficult, highly emotional choices. Prearrangement options for individuals planning for the future are discussed in detail, including where to buy caskets and monuments and whom to notify when death occurs.




What a Way to Go


Book Description

A&E Biography meets Tales from the Crypt in this fun but respectful survey of the amazing lives and astonishing funerals of two dozen twentieth-century icons from politics, art, and pop culture. In more than 50 rare photographs and thoroughly researched profiles, What a Way to Go showcases all the colorful details of each subject's death, funeral service, and burial. From Muppet creator Jim Henson's upbeat service, attended by Big Bird, to Babe Ruth lying in state at Yankee Stadium as vendors sold hot dogs to waiting mourners--it's all here, the moving and the macabre. JFK, Notorious B.I.G., Elvis Presley, Chairman Mao, Eva Peron, the Ayatollah Khomeini, and many more find fitting tribute in this compulsively readable, visually lavish, richly entertaining celebration of our enduring fascination with the famous and the strange pageantry of their demise.




Reimagining Death


Book Description

Honor your loved ones and the earth by choosing practical, spiritual, and eco-friendly after-death care Natural, legal, and innovative after-death care options are transforming the paradigm of the existing funeral industry, helping families and communities recover their instinctive capacity to care for a loved one after death and do so in creative and healing ways. Reimagining Death offers stories and guidance for home funeral vigils, advance after-death care directives, green burials, and conscious dying. When we bring art and beauty, meaningful ritual, and joy to ease our loss and sorrow, we are greening the gateway of death and returning home to ourselves, to the wisdom of our bodies, and to the earth.




The Right Way of Death: Restoring the American Funeral Business to Its True Calling


Book Description

Funeral service is dying. Cremation rates are sky-high, new competitors pop up every day, and an entire generation of funeral home owners are considering closing shop. But a thriving future is still possible. Eric Layer paints a vivid picture of what's threatening death care and everything mortuary owners need to know about how to save it.




The American Way of Death Revisited


Book Description

Only the scathing wit and searching intelligence of Jessica Mitford could turn an exposé of the American funeral industry into a book that is at once deadly serious and side-splittingly funny. When first published in 1963, this landmark of investigative journalism became a runaway bestseller and resulted in legislation to protect grieving families from the unscrupulous sales practices of those in "the dismal trade." Just before her death in 1996, Mitford thoroughly revised and updated her classic study. The American Way of Death Revisited confronts new trends, including the success of the profession's lobbyists in Washington, inflated cremation costs, the telemarketing of pay-in-advance graves, and the effects of monopolies in a death-care industry now dominated by multinational corporations. With its hard-nosed consumer activism and a satiric vision out of Evelyn Waugh's novel The Loved One, The American Way of Death Revisited will not fail to inform, delight, and disturb. "Brilliant--hilarious. . . . A must-read for anyone planning to throw a funeral in their lifetime."--New York Post "Witty and penetrating--it speaks the truth."--The Washington Post




Confessions of a Funeral Director


Book Description

“Wise, vulnerable, and surprisingly relatable . . . funny in all the right places and enormously helpful throughout. It will change how you think about death.” —Rachel Held Evans, New York Times–bestselling author of Searching for Sunday We are a people who deeply fear death. While humans are biologically wired to evade death for as long as possible, we have become too adept at hiding from it, vilifying it, and—when it can be avoided no longer—letting the professionals take over. Sixth-generation funeral director Caleb Wilde understands this reticence and fear. He had planned to get as far away from the family business as possible. He wanted to make a difference in the world, and how could he do that if all the people he worked with were . . . dead? Slowly, he discovered that caring for the deceased and their loved ones was making a difference—in other people’s lives to be sure, but it also seemed to be saving his own. A spirituality of death began to emerge as he observed the family who lovingly dressed their deceased father for his burial; the nursing home that honored a woman’s life by standing in procession as her body was taken away; the funeral that united a conflicted community. Through stories like these, told with equal parts humor and poignancy, Wilde’s candid memoir offers an intimate look into the business of death and a new perspective on living and dying. “Open[s] up conversations about life’s ultimate concerns.” —The Washington Post “As a look behind the closed doors of the death industry, as well as a candid exploration of Wilde’s own faith journey, this book is fascinating and compelling.” —National Catholic Reporter “[A] stunner of a debut.” —Rachel Held Evans, author of Inspired




To Serve the Living


Book Description

In the “hush harbors” of the slave quarters, African Americans first used funerals to bury their dead and to plan a path to freedom. Similarly, throughout the long struggle for racial equality in the 20th century, funeral directors aided the cause by honoring the dead while supporting the living. Here is their story.




Say Farewell Your Way


Book Description

There are three situations in which you may find yourself planning a funeral and hence reading this book: OCoA loved one has passed away suddenly; OCoA loved one has been diagnosed as terminally ill; OCoYou wish to pre-plan your own funeral. Despite the fact that human beings have a 100% mortality rate, most people in Ireland act as if even talking about end-of-life planning causes people to die A funeral is both a beginning and an ending, where the end symbolises that the journey from birth to death has been completed and the beginning symbolises the recovery and renewal process for the loved ones still living. The main purpose of this book is to encourage conversation about death, dying, funerals and loss in Ireland today and, hopefully, to open your minds to the endless possibilities there are when it comes to funerals. It aims to inspire independent individuals to celebrate and take control of the last memory they will leave loved ones. "




Grave Matters


Book Description

By the time Nate Fisher was laid to rest in a woodland grave sans coffin in the final season of Six Feet Under, Americans all across the country were starting to look outside the box when death came calling. Grave Matters follows families who found in "green" burial a more natural, more economic, and ultimately more meaningful alternative to the tired and toxic send-off on offer at the local funeral parlor. Eschewing chemical embalming and fancy caskets, elaborate and costly funerals, they have embraced a range of natural options, new and old, that are redefining a better American way of death. Environmental journalist Mark Harris examines this new green burial underground, leading you into natural cemeteries and domestic graveyards, taking you aboard boats from which ashes and memorial "reef balls" are cast into the sea. He follows a family that conducts a home funeral, one that delivers a loved one to the crematory, and another that hires a carpenter to build a pine coffin. In the morbidly fascinating tradition of Stiff, Grave Matters details the embalming process and the environmental aftermath of the standard funeral. Harris also traces the history of burial in America, from frontier cemeteries to the billion-dollar business it is today, reporting on real families who opted for more simple, natural returns. For readers who want to follow the examples of these families and, literally, give back from the grave, appendices detail everything you need to know, from exact costs and laws to natural burial providers and their contact information.