Dear Judy,
I saw yesterday’s advice to a man whose girlfriend was burying her dog. You were very unsympathetic, and I was surprised. I have — had — a beautiful Siamese who died over the weekend. She was 12 years old, a little early for her to go. She was breathing loudly – panting really — and [...]
Dear Judy,
You’re going to think I’m nuts, but I’m not. My girlfriend is. We’ve been going together for a year now, almost living together (sometimes…). Her dog just died. I think it was part-Lab. But I don’t really care. It was old. It slobbered and I once got bitten by something I could swear was from [...]
Dear Judy,
Please don’t use my real name or anything similar to my name. I live in a medium-sized town in the South and everyone here gossips. My problem is the man I’ve been quietly seeing for 2 years died suddenly (thrombosis). It was a big shock, not just to me, but to everyone here.
His funeral is [...]
Dear Judy,
Our father is going fast — congestive heart failure, as well as an assortment of other issues, and he doesn’t have long. My sister is already planning the funeral (she’s like that: plans everything).
She has, if you can believe this, picked out at our local funeral home a casket that costs $11,100. It’s supposed [...]
Dear Readers, this week’s blog is written by Josh Slocum, the brilliant head of the Funeral Consumers Alliance (www.funerals.org). I could resist asking him to tell all of us just how difficult some in the funeral industry make our lives — and our deaths. Here’s Josh:
Caring for our dead isn’t something most of us do. But [...]
About the only good news in this economy comes, amazingly, from the funeral industry.
No, the funeral people who last year raked in about $15 billion selling coffins, services, burial plots, urns, embalming and cremations, are not exactly thrilled these days. But you, the consumer, are in a better place.
By which I mean you are probably thinking [...]
Dear Judy,
I’ve been following your column ever since my husband died 6 weeks ago and a friend recommended it, but you never seem to deal with the real taboo subject. I mean money.
You act like the only problem associated with death or dying were emotional, medical, or psychological. Well they aren’t! When my husband died I [...]
Dear Judy,
An acquaintance who has breast cancer, now in remission, is doing what I’ve noticed you always tell your readers to do: planning everything about her final days and months long in advance. In this instance, she’s also planning her funeral, which is the one planned event I haven’t really seen you recommend.
Anyway, she obviously thinks we’re far [...]
Dear Judy,
I know this may sound trivial to you and maybe a lot of your readers. But to me it’s serious. I’ve been to several funerals over the years where the regular minister was out of town. In one case, the substitute minister ended the eulogy with some sentimental bit of poetry that was real drivel [...]
A reader writes me, “Do you feel the stress of going through a funeral of a loved one is less if that funeral is less traditional and fits the personality of the deceased?”
Well next to shotgun weddings — in fact right up there with all kinds of weddings — there’s generally nothing more damaging to the psyche or as costly than [...]
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Posted on January 24th, 2009