The year to July '96 has been an exhausting one for the Natural Death Centre, mainly providing advice on funerals by phone and by letter. Besides numerous phone calls every day, there are between 200 and 1,000 letters a week to answer.
The Centre's other projects include:
The Befriending Network, where volunteers visit the homes of those who have a life-threatening illness. The person who is ill, or the family, or any organisation involved, can ask the Befriending Network to make contact, and the volunteer then visits for a couple of hours each week. At present, the Network is still relatively small, based in Oxford and London. More volunteers are urgently needed to join the trainings, which start three times a year. My hope is that more doctors and priests and other neighbourhood opinion leaders will make contact who would like to activate Befriending Networks in their areas - with neighbours urged to help on a rota basis with errands and other assistance for those caring for a person who is dying at home.
The Association of Nature Reserve Burial Grounds continues to grow rapidly. Last year at this time there were 17 woodland burial grounds open. Now there are 33. This is so obviously the way forward that it will only be a short time before such funerals become the norm. The advantages are very numerous: it is a way of giving the body back to nature; it leads to the planting of more trees, which can only benefit the planet; it avoids the burning of over 400,000 wooden coffins each year and the associated pollution; it provides an income for farmers, for land that would otherwise be set-aside; it avoids filling the countryside with headstones; it is relatively low cost; all the sites allow families to conduct the funeral without using funeral directors, thus allowing for more personal funerals; and all accept cardboard coffins. All those who are members of environmental organisations are likely to prefer this option.
The Natural Death Centre is about to start editing a new edition of the Natural Death Handbook. Please let the Centre know your recommendations or warnings about particular funeral directors, funeral suppliers, cemeteries and crematoria.
The Centre's main fundraising book, Poem for the Day - 366 Poems Old and New Worth Learning by Heart, which I am proud to have edited, continues to sell extremely well. The publishers, Sinclair-Stevenson, are issuing it as a hardback in November '96, for the Christmas market. In the United States, an American publisher, Steerforth Press, are publishing it in October '96, under the title of A Poem A Day, with extra American poems added by my co-editor, the poet Karen McCosker. Do please consider giving this book as a Christmas present. And do please buy the paperback version of Poem for the Day direct from the Natural Death Centre (£11-49 including p&p) as the Centre gains far more this way than through royalties on bookshop sales.
Please also attend the second Poetry Marathon in London on Sunday October 13th '96 and recite a poem either for the Natural Death Centre or for the charity of your choice. Your friends and relatives sponsor you to learn any poem by heart and to recite it on stage. Last year's event, with 160 or so adults and 45 children in attendance, was judged a success - "all the people I persuaded to come went away inspired," writes Diana Senior; and Victoria Zinovieff adds: "I felt proud and happy and amazed to find myself up on stage rehiciting a poem to an audience. It was such a good atmosphere."
For ts year, it is hoped that a poem will be engraved on the pavement outside the Amadeus Centre in Little Venice where the event is taking place; and that poems will be hung from trees.
Schools everywhere are being invited to hold their own mini-Poetry Marathons on a date of their choosing. One school last year raised over £2,000 for charity with a week of 'Poetry Happenings'.
- The Natural Death Centre, 6 Blackstock Mews, Blackstock Road, London N4
2BT (tel 020 7359 8391; fax 020 7354 3831; e-mail: rhino@dial.pipex.com).
This is also the address for the Association of Nature Reserve Burial grounds.
- A Poem A Day in the States is available for $15, plus $3 p&p, by credit
card from Steerforth Press on 800 639 7140 (PO Box 70, South Royalton, VT 05068).
- The Befriending Network is at Claremont, 24-27 White Lion Street, Islington,
London N1 9PD, UK (tel 020 7689 2443; e-mail: info@befriending.net;
web: www.befriending.net).
- The Poetry Challenge, 6 Blackstock Mews, Blackstock Road, London N4 2BT
(phone 0871 288 2098 to book a place and to be sent a sponsorship form; see
www.poetrychallenge.org.uk)
This webpage forms part of the Global Ideas Bank (www.globalideasbank.org).
Book
Orders: To order the Creative Endings book in which this piece
appears or any of the other books that make up the Global Ideas Bank.
";
echo $mb_link;
echo "
";
if ( session_is_registered('navigation')) {
echo " Return to Message Board's last display of selected messages";
}
?>