Month: March 2014

Bereavement Workplace Leave.

The debate over employee sanctioned bereavement leave is a difficult one. On the one hand you have people who insist that bereavement leave should be a standard part of the employee benefit package, like maternity leave. On the other, you have those who say that regulating bereavement leave is much trickier and will be more difficult for businesses to implement and should be left well enough alone. They are both kind of right and kind of wrong. Bereavement and Maternity Leave Expectant mothers and fathers can count on being given at least a few weeks (though, in most cases it ... Read more

Cruse Grieving Services.

Cruse started out as a small local service focused on helping widows and their children through the bereavement process and now Cruse Bereavement Care is the most highly respected bereavement care charity in the United Kingdom. It offers bereavement services, support and counseling to people across England, Northern Ireland, Wales and (via its sister charity) Scotland. In addition to helping individual people deal with grief, Cruse has also been contracted by larger organizations. They were flown to New York after 9/11 to help support Brits living in the states. The Metro Police contracted them to help lend support after the London ... Read more

Children and Funerals.

Trying to talk to children—especially very young children—about funerals can be incredibly stressful. As adults, we worry about causing too much stress or allowing our children to feel too much pain. It is our instinct to shield them from death and the grief that follows it for as long as possible. The primary problem with this is that, if we don’t tell them about death, the grieving process and how funerals and memorial services work, our kids are going to fill in the blanks for themselves. You already know how creative a child’s imagination can be. Do you really want ... Read more

Dakhmas: Towers of Silence

The Zoroastrians believe that death is evil triumphing over good and, once the body is dead, demons have the ability to contaminate the corpse.  As the bodies could pollute everything due to their uncleanliness, a system of funerary rites was developed to ensure the body was disposed of as safely as possible. Hence the Dakhmas, or Towers of Silence, were born over 3000 years ago. Towers of Silence were cylindrical structures built of concentric stone slabs circling a central pit, and were typically built at the tops of hills.   The corpses of the deceased were placed onto one of four concentric ... Read more

Ghana’s Fantasy Coffins

Funerary tourist attractions?  It may seem like a long stretch, but the fantasy coffin market in Ghana has brought in tourists from all over the world eager to catch a glimpse or two of the weird and wonderful caskets.  If ever you’ve thought of wishing a loved one a fond farewell in a coffin shaped as a lion, plane, mobile telephone, bottle of beer, or a large shoe, you will find these odd creations and more, in Accra, the capital city of Ghana. Joseph Ashong, known as Paa Joe locally, began making custom fantasy coffins in the 1950s at the ... Read more

New Orleans Jazz Funeral

New Orleans Louisiana is famous for its music, food, and voodoo, among other things, so it comes as no surprise that within the rich tapestry of New Orleans culture and history, there exists an equally rich funeral procession.  The jazz funeral incorporates New Orleans’ unique history of music with the city’s long-standing superstition of the dead, as well as the type of flair that only The Big Easy can manage. Unlike your typical service, the jazz funeral has an entire brass band waiting quietly outside for the church service to end and the coffin to be brought to the hearse. ... Read more

Space Burial

If you’re looking for a more futuristic way to say goodbye to your loved ones, why not blast their remains into space?  That is exactly the funerary service that’s been catching on thanks to private ventures like Elysium Space and Celestis, Inc. For just under two-thousand dollars, you too can send off a “symbolic portion” of a loved one’s ashes into orbit. After your loved one’s ash sample is loaded into a tiny capsule, the capsule is attached to a spacecraft along with those of others paying for service.  The spacecraft will be launched into orbit and remain in orbit ... Read more

Hanging Coffins of the Bo People

On a Cliffside in Sichuan province of southwest China hang over three hundred coffins, all of them several hundred feet up a sheer rock face.  While various forms of coffin hanging existed around China, Indonesia, and the Philippines, this particular location was done by the Bo people of southwest China. The Bo people flourished in Hemp Pond Valley for approximately four hundred years, three thousand years ago until mysteriously disappearing, leaving only their hanging coffins and cliff wall paintings. A small minority, the Bo people existed at a time when southern China was experiencing, famine, crop devastation, and more.   Their ... Read more

Sokushinbutsu: Buddhist Self-Mummification

Over one thousand years ago a priest known as Kuukai founded the Buddhist sect of Shingon in Northern Japan. Based on the sect’s belief that physical punishment was the path to enlightenment, the practice of Sokushinbutsu, or self-mummification, was born: a decade-long process of slowly poisoning the body in the hopes of achieving successful mummification of the tissues.   It is widely held that hundreds of Buddhist monks may have attempted self-mummification, but only around two dozen self-mummified bodies have been discovered to date. Monks who embarked down the path of self-mummification endured as much as ten years of torturous physical ... Read more

Famadihana: The Turning of the Bones

Every two to seven years, families of the Malagasy people of Madagascar gather for famadihana ceremonies to honour their deceased loved ones.   Known as “turning of the bones,” these ceremonies, which take place at the family crypt, are cause for joyous celebration.   The remains of the loved ones are brought out from the crypt, sprayed with perfume and wine, and wrapped in silk.  This vital part of their culture is how the Malagasy people maintain connection with the deceased. Famadihana is a huge two day festival in which the entire extended family travels in from far and wide to attend.   ... Read more

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