It Tolls For Thee

A guide to celebrating and reclaiming the end of life

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Pub Date 9 Feb 2021 | Archive Date 2 Feb 2021
Watkins | Watkins Publishing

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Description

A funeral celebrant's story about how celebrating death, and creating personalised space for grief, can enrich lives and give meaning to death.

After a close encounter with death, Tom Morton realised he needed a change of pace and perspective. He decided to become the only independent funeral celebrant on the remote Shetland Islands, an unusual new profession that would lead him on an extraordinary journey into the world of the dead.

In a vivid narrative that reveals the fascinating realm of the unspoken - from extraordinary undertakers and death cafés, to pilgrimages and taboos - Tom quickly learns that death and speaking for the dead requires you to think on your feet and often take a magpie approach to faith and philosophy. From Humanism to hymns, Theravada Buddhism to Star Wars theology, he discovers the importance of ritual, humour, and the empowering act of trying to find words for something beyond language itself.

This is an accessible and thought-provoking guide to celebrating mortality. When grief must be an inevitable part of life, Tom shows how we can mourn together in a way that feels appropriate to the life of the one who has passed on, and ultimately cultivate a healthy attitude to our own eventual demise.
A funeral celebrant's story about how celebrating death, and creating personalised space for grief, can enrich lives and give meaning to death.

After a close encounter with death, Tom Morton realised...

Advance Praise

"This is an extraordinary and important book, both vitally topical and essentially timeless. It’s a book about how death fits in with life not as a wraith or spectre, but as a major and pugnacious character in life’s story, one to be embraced and wrestled with as well as kept at arm’s length. It is, on one level, a manual for dealing with the practicalities of death and grief. But more than that, it is a beautifully written personal account of life and death, as lyrical and tough, tender and grave as the Shetland landscape and communities it is rooted in." - Stuart Maconie


''At the beginning, I’m happy to be drawn gently in, by about half way through, I’m starting to realise that, not only is this entertaining, but it’s important, and by the end I know it’s vital... I want it on the nightstand to read for fun AND I want it on the shelf, amply marked with post-its and a big notice saying ‘In the event of my death READ THIS’.- Tim Hayworth

"This is an extraordinary and important book, both vitally topical and essentially timeless. It’s a book about how death fits in with life not as a wraith or spectre, but as a major and pugnacious...


Available Editions

EDITION Other Format
ISBN 9781786784780
PRICE US$16.95 (USD)
PAGES 352

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Featured Reviews

An excellent, very readable book about end of life and celebrations of life and death. Bringing wisdom from Shetland it asks questions and encourages the reader to think about death and how preparations can make it easier for those left behind. Also excellent for those involved in the grief process and celebrating life. It'll become a staple of many bookshelves I hope

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