
A moving and inspiring account of how one Final Flinger used the site to help her live life to the full, right to the end.
I’ve had a lovely connection with a Flinger over the past few weeks and I thought it worth sharing as a prompt to doing useful things with pockets of free time. If you are depressed by Coronavirus lockdown, feeling shackled by Covid-19 limitations, thinking more about end of life than usual, Dot’s tale might help. […]
Scottish Government is introducing a statutory Code of Practice, an inspection programme and a licensing scheme for funeral businesses as part of a regulatory framework to ensure high standards of service. They’ll be working on implementation over 2019/20. In their consultation and investigation they drew an interesting parallel comparing the funeral parlour business model and […]
This week, my friend Rebecca shares a surprising, delighting moment at a recent family funeral – to come across an Order of Service recipe. “Pat Mills, died at the end of last year and in my family, that officially marks the End of an Era. Pat and Bunty were legends. They were distant cousins of ours – […]
Designing compassion into services for death and dying has been at the heart of Final Fling’s work since our online community launched in 2012.
6 years on, Founder Barbara Chalmers presented a slot on designing compassion into services for death at the Everyday Compassion conference organised by Good Life Good Death Good Grief to bring together death workers from all over Scotland and beyond.
For the last week, I’ve been reflecting on a question Professor Allan Kellehear raised about how long grief lasts. He posed this question during his keynote speech on Creating Compassionate Cities at the Everyday Compassion conference in Glasgow. He answered his own question. “Grief doesn’t last 6 weeks or 6 years. It lasts forever.”
I was thrilled to meet Kathryn Mannix in Glasgow at Aye Write book festival where she was talking in her gentle, wise voice about living with the end in mind. The audience hung on her every word as she shared the years of knowledge and experience she has built up as a palliative care specialist, […]
The big news today is that Barbara Chalmers, Founder of Final Fling now has a Masters – with distinction – in funerals.
“Well, in reality, it’s an MDes – a Masters in Design Innovation, Service Design – and my final project was on funerals, so I consider it a Masters in funerals,” said Barbara. “I just found out on Friday at our degree show that I achieved a Masters – with distinction – in funerals (as I call it) and I couldn’t be more delighted.”
We’ve updated our Fling-O-Bingo end of life planning tool after last week’s Dying Matters Awareness Week event, Byw Nawr (Live Now) in Cardiff.
What has bingo got to do with end of life planning, you may well ask! Well, always looking for accessible ways to open up conversations about life and death decisions, we use bingo cards as a way of playing a game to identify the Top 20 Essential Documents Next of Kin will need.