LoveReading Says
Stirringly honest, and engaging as a result, Rupert Callender’s What Remains? is an intimate autobiographical account of his experiences as a “punk undertaker”.
Harnessing his own grief for his parents, and drawing on lessons learned from rave culture and ritual magic, the author and his partner set up the Green Funeral Company in Devon with the noble aim of better serving the grieving. There’s tremendous rawness to the experiences recounted, with an ethos of compassion and responsibility always shining through: “A funeral dictates how our grief is lived. Done badly and a hangnail of pain is torn that will catch on the everyday emotional matter of our lives and never heals. Done well, it allows you to move through the lifelong consequences of loss in a normal and healthy way.”
Poignantly accurate on how most of us experience the lead up to funerals (“the day of the funeral of someone you love is a deeply hallucinatory experience, utterly unreal”), this fascinating book challenges views on how funerals should be conducted, shaking off the idea that we have to follow Victorian ceremonies that often alienate the living from the crucial ritual of saying goodbye to their loved ones.
Joanne Owen
Find This Book In
What Remains? Life, Death and the Human Art of Undertaking Synopsis
Death is not my friend, neither is it my enemy; it is my destiny.
When he became an undertaker, Rupert Callender undertook to deal with the dead for the sake of the living. What Remains? is the brilliant, unforgettable story of the life and work of the world's first punk undertaker - but it is also a book about ordinary, everyday humanity and our capacity to face death with courage and compassion. To say goodbye to the people we love in our own way.
And in becoming the world's first 'punk undertaker' and establishing the Green Funeral Company in Devon, Ru Callender and his partner Claire challenged the stilted, traditional, structured world of the funeral industry: fusing what he had learned from his own deeply personal experiences with death, with the surprising and profound answers and raw emotion he discovered in rave culture and ritual magick.
From his unresolved grief for his parents and his cultural ancestors to political and religious non-conformists, social outlaws, experimental pioneers and acid house culture, Ru Callender has taken an outsider 'DIY' ethos to help people navigate grief and death. He has carried coffins across windswept beaches, sat in pubs with caskets on beer-stained tables, helped children fire flaming arrows into their father's funeral pyre, turned modern occult rituals into performance art and, with the KLF, is building the People's Pyramid of bony bricks in Liverpool.
What Remains? is a deeply moving book that will change the way readers think about life, death and the all-important end-of-life experience. As Ru memorably says, 'Death has shown me unimaginable horror, the unbreakable core of love and courage that lies at the heart of what it means to be human.'
About This Edition
