The Final Fling legacy lives on

When Lockdown kicked in in March 2020, I was staying in Portpatrick, my home patch. I spent a month swimming in the freezing Irish Sea daily and, like many others, woke up to a new way of life. Limited and liberated all at once. I determined to move back ‘home’ to live by the sea after decades away.

I reviewed my life and decided I wanted it to be less virtual and more real. I decided to wind-down Final Fling, my award-winning website for end-of-life planning. I’d spent 10 years developing it. It’s satisfying that so many people have got so much out of it as a support for thinking about and planning for end of life. But I want to be more involved in time-of-need… helping individuals and family at the time of a death.

When someone has just died it’s a very different vibe to planning for end-of-life. Advance planning is a relatively positive place of picking music, sorting paperwork, ticking off your bucket list, reckoning with yourself. ‘Final Fling’ was the perfect name for that. It’s not the right tone for the naked, vulnerable space of sadness, shock, resignation, loss that comes with death. So I set up Only Human as a place to help.

I did more funeral training so that I could combine celebrancy with funeral directing.

And here we are. The future of Only Human awaits.

Read a bit more about Final Fling.

And for now, you can still visit the original website.

(If you get an error message, we’ll be in the future and this blog will have timed out.)