Feedback from Brick Kin, 2025
Thank you sooooooooooooo much. I didn’t know what to expect but it totally blew me away. So moving and so fun at the same time. Brought my son and I’m so glad I did. Thank you. What a beautiful thing it is.
I can’t thank you wonderful, dedicated, hard-working, creative and loving people enough. It’s going to take a long time to process the experience. I’ve been crying a lot since I got home and it’s a paradoxically beautiful emotion to embrace. As I have matured, I find myself discovering ‘my tribe’ more and more. But yesterday was overwhelming, to share this experience in all its aspects with hundreds of kindred spirits, was one of THE most uplifting, joyous, profound, hilarious, absurd and life-affirming moments of my life and suffice to say, the most meaningful, poignant and memorable ways to contemplate and celebrate the life of our loved ones and build a last memorial dedicated to their place in the world.
Thank you to everyone for making yesterday so poignant and beautiful. It was definitely the best Bricklaying Ceremony yet. It was absolutely lovely how everyone cheered for every brick. Total respect to everyone x
Thank you for a beautiful, moving and joyful ceremony. It was a pleasure to meet some of you, if only for a moment, to share the sacred space and feel part of a new community. I feel very lucky. Also it’s super fun walking through town spotting everyone in glimpses of high vis x
Thank you all for the videos, chat and community. The organisers really do a great job, what an experience/spectacle definitely the greatest of the three I’ve attended. Thank you for the videos, I’m having difficulty explaining the experience to others. I attended Ian Smith’s cremation whose brick I carried on Sunday and it was just awful, not representative of the man we had lost. However Sunday was a great send off, there was so much love in the atmosphere from everyone, a deserving send off. Now he’s with his “big Handsome ” as he wished to be and my darling Shonah. My love and best wishes to you all.
Feedback from participants in previous years
I just wanted to thank you all for yesterday. I felt so welcome and involved. I arrived anxious thinking how am I going to get through this. I left thinking how could I live or die without this. Hope you’re all feeling well and rewarded today.
No person is an island when it comes to grief. Grief is about connection, about love, friendships, brotherhood and sisterhood. We all find that we rely on others to hold us up. What grief teaches us most is that we don’t always realise this until the person who held us up is gone.
I wanted to thank you all. The mourners, the celebrators, the machine oilers, the gatherers of lost souls who now have a place in the world, free from the rigid conformity of traditional funeral rites.
I didn’t expect the whole thing to be as moving as it was and obviously the timing with dad’s recent death was tough, and my emotions were raw, but it was one of the most beautiful celebrations of life I’ve ever witnessed.
I look forward to hearing the stories of the other bricks and learning more about the amazing characters that will surround and embrace our loved ones bricks in the years to come.
Like a massive game of ‘pile-on’ with your mates.
It feels like a very powerful structure now and I am looking forward to next year, doing it all again with a lighter step.
Love and gratitude to you all.
I would like to thank you for what we had the chance to experience last weekend. It was beautiful!
I keep thinking about it, about your care for the dead as well as for the living, for communities, minorities… with unusual passion and empathy.
Especially in the contemporary condition when modernity reduces life to individual pleasures, I believe it is important to create and maintain such rituals of collective importance.
It was a glimpse of the world I would love to live in and it made me stop and think about meaningful ways to spend my lifetime.
Thank you for doing it.
Thank you for all the things I have no idea you did. You gave a lot of people – not just me but all of the other Families and Friends of Bricks – a very much needed dose of compassion and ceremony and even fun in the cold, dark, damp of the Toxteth of the Mind. You really have made peoples’ lives collectively better and deserve our thanks.
I will recommend your Merchant Services to anybody I know who is planning on dying.
Thank you so much to yourself and all the team who worked so hard to make yesterday happen it was so special to us all the day and evening went perfect, we laughed on the Toxteth (Buxton walk) with Tommy… he’s never changed.
We cried when we laid our loved ones bricks, bricklayers done an amazing job… we listened to those words so many wrote about their loved ones also.
Then we Danced to our chosen music plus so many other fab sounds from the 80s.. hopefully all being well we all look forward to joining you all again next year hopefully no bricks to lay .. and we can enjoy the moments with others celebrating life.
Once again thank you so much for all your help, support over the last few years since we’ve been in touch.
It was great to meet such a bunch of fantastic and inspirational people, far, far removed from my regular circle.
All our dead were fully present.
Want to say a huge thank you to you personally as well as the whole TDOTD group.
The amount of work, thought, love and pure theatre put in made it a most special experience for us. The details of the event are so myriad.
[My sister] and I also said this morning that it was the best funeral ever and [our mum] has been treated royally and would have been so thrilled to be part of such a special event and huge spectacle long my it grow and I look forward to bringing more bricks to the pyramid. Thanks.
I just wanted to say thank you so much for your part in a truly life affirming and important event in my life. My brother, my mum and myself all have signed up for bricks and I wanted to let you know that I would like to put myself forward as someone that is committed to the project for life until eventually I join my dad in the pyramid. I want to offer to volunteer in any way I can to assist in future events
Many thanks for all that you guys do. A truly unforgettable and magical experience.
[My partner] and I found the proceedings both poignant and fun. A totally fitting send off for [my father-in-law]. The chap who compared (sorry did not catch his name) and Claire set a mood and atmosphere that felt so welcoming and supportive.
The Krossing was amazing. Everything fell both personal and shared. Thank you very much.
It was amazing and very healing, hope to visit again. Thanks to you and the team for making it happen.
We are now back in our little Welsh utopia and reflecting on the previous week, wow! It was absolutely freaking amazing! I would like to thank you all for all the work that went into this, hopefully, everyone can feel assured that there are enough of us to take this forward in the future.
It was so humbling to see my brother’s brick make it to the pyramid when it was only a year ago we had the conversation about getting him a brick, I had hoped he would be there with us in person this year at least. I am still quite blown away by the whole experience, I spent most of the day going for a little walk by myself to deal with the emotions but was also overwhelmed by the closeness of the KLFRs when we all came together to make the depository happen, what a team. […]
A great BIG MASSIVE THANK YOU to you all, thanks especially to you for the hug when the first set of tears of the day fell from my face and all my love and praise to Daisy, Jim and Bill for the awesome event they created.
All our love, see you again next year.
I just wanted to get in touch to extend a massive thank you, to you and to everyone involved with the Day of the Dead. From the first moment of getting in touch to register [my friend’s] brick, right through to the day itself, everyone was so kind and lovely and basically just very human.
The spontaneous singing happy birthday from the crowd during the brick laying was an amazing, beautiful moment that I don’t think I’ll ever forget. It all felt very perfect for [my friend] and I am so incredibly glad that we did it, and that [he] is able to be part of the Pyramid. And that, if we want to, we can all join him when the time comes!
I think it’s a really special thing that you are doing. So much of general ‘death admin’ can feel awkward and overly sanitised, and like you have to say certain words and phrases that would never normally, in a million years, come out of your mouth. Every time I think about the Pyramid though, I just think about how human it all seemed, and how beautiful and cathartic that was.
Just a quick message to say thanks for a great event.
It was reverent and reflective as well as a jolly great adventure. [My husband] would always come back from the 23rd Nov with many a tale and he made some great pals.
I just wanted to thank you for everything. You have both been amazing offering so much help and support which I really appreciate. I’m so pleased that I did it. It was very tough. [My husband] would have loved it all. Thanks again.
I’ll admit I found it very overwhelming. [My husband’s] death is so recent and raw and I have had so much to deal with. I am so glad I did it.
Thank you for the help and support over the weekend. What a wonderful way to celebrate our loved ones. I’ll be processing this for tiiiiiime
Thank you so much for your help, support and patience throughout. What an incredible experience.
I just wanted to say an extra thank you for being so thoughtful and kind, providing a duty of care for everyone, especially those who are still processing very raw emotions having lost their loved ones so recently. It’s very much appreciated and such an important (and needed) aspect of the event.
After last year’s event and laying my brother’s brick in the pyramid I found it quite emotional. I experienced a lot that day. I’m so proud I had the strength to do this for him. I loved him a lot. He was my best friend.
The Ferry Krossing was such an incredible moment. I was trying to explain to someone last night just how poetic and moving the ferry tannoy turned out to be. It was one of the most powerful parts of the day.
I really appreciated bringing my two kids (the young) to the day. I hadn’t mentioned this to anyone before today but as a family we lost a child who was very close to us during covid. She was 14 and took her own life. It broke us as a family. Although it was a brick for my mum that went into the Pyramid, we were all very much thinking of the child we lost on the day and during the death café.
Our family had the most amazing day and night. I am so amazed and impressed by everything that happened and how it happened. The thought that went into everything was so next level and full of love.
I think it’s the most amazing thing I’ve ever been part of.
Wonderful day from start to finish. Everyone was so giving and loving.
Yesterday was such an amazing, brilliant, moving, poetic and ridiculous experience with so many cosmic connections to my brother. Thank you so much to everyone who helped organise and took part. I hope you all found it as beautiful as we did.
I’m still overwhelmed by just how perfect and wonderful yesterday was. It was exactly what I needed. It really was so moving and rewarding to meet so many of you, to share our cherished memories and our grief.
This experience has completely changed my idea of how to honour someone after their death. Since the ceremony, we have been distributing 23g of my brother’s ashes on important dates and at meaningful events and it is a wonderful and perfect way of keeping my brother close.
Still processing the last few days, overwhelmed by the love, joy, emotion and camaraderie, and the honour of being a puller of The People’s Pyramid. Thanks to Tommy for the welcome, to The Tillerman and the KLFRS for the re-enactments, to Gimpo for the rum, to Richard and Mikey for the music, to Bill and Jimmy for the spark, Daisy for the flame, and to the youth for accepting the baton. And to all those that danced, played, cried and cheered alongside me. Until next time.