celebrants

Proxy grievers

8 November 2011
Charles
1 Comment
Categories: Attitudes to death, bereavement, celebrants, funerals in other cultures

Presently serving the bereaved of Essex and Suffolk we have a new concept in funeral service, the professional mourner. They’re called Rent a Mourner, we wish them every possible success, and you can find them here.

Did we say new? There’s nothing new in Funeralworld. Every innovation is an act of necromancy. In our scholarly and vigilant way we have covered this business of rentasob before, here and here.

And because our curiosity, like yours, is global, you may be interested to know what the market looks like in China.

One can make a decent amount of money being a proxy mourner … Wailers actually belong to an ancient profession that now keeps a low profile thanks to its singular characteristics. InChongqingandChengdu, wailers and their special bands have, over the course of more than a decade, developed into a professional, competitive market … wailers are predominantly laid-off workers.

Wailing is an ancient funeral custom. Texts show that dirges began to be used in ceremonies during the time of Emperor Wu of Han and became commonplace during the Northern and Southern Dynasties. Customs varied across ethnicities and regions. During the Cultural Revolution, wailing was viewed a pernicious feudal poison and went silent. In the reform era, it was revived in a number of areas.

Hu Xinglian’s hair is tied into pigtails pointing up in opposite directions. Her stage name means “Dragonfly” … and the two pigtails, which resemble dragonfly wings, are her trademark. She is fifty-two years old, and she is a professional wailer.

Before the ceremony begins, she asks the family of the deceased about the situation. She must do this every time. She says that wailers usually put on some makeup and wear white mourning clothes. Some of them are more elaborate, with white stage costumes and “jeweled” headdresses.

Hu calls the family of the deceased into the mourning hall and begins to read the eulogy. There is a formula to the eulogy that is adapted to the particular circumstances of the deceased. Most of these say how hard-working and beloved the deceased was, and how much they loved their children. The eulogy requires a sorrowful tone and a rhythmic cadence. As Hu reads, she sometimes howls “dad” or “mom.” And then the bereaved begin to cry as they kneel before the coffin.

After the eulogy comes the wailing, a song sung in a crying voice to the accompaniment of mournful music. Hu says that the purpose of this part is mainly to create a melancholy atmosphere which will allow the family to release their sadness through tears.

Hu says that more time is devoted to wailing in the countryside. In video recordings, Hu can be seen howling, weeping with her eyes covered, and at times crawling on the ground in front of the coffin in an display of sorrow. At some funerals, she crawls for several meters as she weeps. This never fails to move the mourners. As she wails, the family of the deceased sob, and some of them weep uncontrollably.

After the wailing is done, the second part of the funeral performance begins. Hu says that a funeral performance is usually sad in the beginning and happy at the end. Once sorrow has been released through tears, then the bereaved can temporarily forget their sorrow through skits and songs.

She says that the performance is draining to both mind and body. When she wails, she says, “My hands and feed twitch, my heart aches, and my eyes go dim.” Wailing has more lasting effects, too: Hu says that her hands have gone numb from time to time over the past year.

Like many wailers, Hu also performs at weddings. She says that because of the transitions between such high-intensity work, wailers are liable to make mistakes. For example, if the line “Would the new couple please enter the mourning hall” is let slip at a wedding, that mistake would mean the forfeiture of the fee, and a beating as well. [Source]

Back to Rent a Mourner, we can’t help thinking that, in preference to bringing another separate specialism to the grief market, it might make more sense for secular celebrants to offer a joined up service here.

Views?

What Makes Funeral Celebrants Do It?

12 October 2011
Charles
10 Comments
Categories: celebrants

From a practising funeral celebrant, more opinionated stuff that possibly needs a health warning: it’s only what I think.

I’m not really sure why we do it – I’m sure we have many very different conscious reasons and less self-aware motivations. As Freud, Jung, Adler and Frankl all said, or if they didn’t, they should have: our motives are opaque unto ourselves. If you think you’ve understood your own motives in something as complex as this, then your motives have probably just skipped a step or two further back into the mists. Anyway, here’s a few pointers through the murk:

  • We do it because for some strange reason we can do it, this odd thing. It’s difficult, demanding, fascinating, and – dare we say it – addictive.
  • No, we don’t do it just for the money. We’re not that stupid.    
  • It needs doing, if people are to have more freedom and choice about an important event. That’s the ideological motivation. Not everyone’s spiritual needs (or atheistical requirements) can be well served by ordained ministers of religion.
  • It’s intensely interesting, the patterns of all these lives and their endings. Many “ordinary” lives are not in the least ordinary. It is a privilege to help mark their ending.
  • The job flatters or completes our egos; it feels good to be wanted, at a time of crisis in people’s lives. People are mostly very appreciative; the bond between us and a family is brief but it can suddenly feel very warm, very strong. If we’re doing the job well, we have to share a little of their grief, and feel some love for them. So it’s a bit deeper than flattery, but the mists are swirling, so I’ll move on…
  • No, hang on, let’s look into that: maybe we get a charge out of being close to some strangers for a short and intense period, and then we can – have to – move on; we’re compassion tarts, sentiment junkies, it makes our own lives more intense. And that sense of heightened meaning, contact with an absolute, is very addictive.
  • It helps us to explore our own mortality and to come to terms can you buy cialis online in canada better with the prospect of our own deaths. So we’re trying to work through fears of our own about death, by a kind of familiarisation therapy.
  • Following on from that: we are close to death at funerals, but afterwards we are still here; after a successful funeral, we feel a sense of achievement, even a small victory. We’ve helped some people find meaning when death has taken away someone who meant a lot to them. Not a victory over death itself, of course, but over the desolation and emptiness it creates.
  • We like the attention – it’s a small-scale public event, and they sure as hell pay attention to you, even if many of them won’t remember a word.
  • We are chronic melancholics and we like hanging around graves and crematoria, wearing black and looking profound – sort of doing a Hamlet: “Alas, poor Yorick! I never knew him Horatio, but he sounds to me like a fellow of infinite jest, why, his family were telling me just the other day they well remember the time he…”
  • We’re disgusted by what we see as the emotionally stifling conventions of the funeral business and our culture’s mortality aversion. We want to open it right out, because we can see a way it can be done better, a way that can enrich people’s lives, honour their deaths, and be use to their grieving.
  • Oh, and (let’s be fair to ourselves): It’s good to feel you’ve helped some people, and done a good job for them for a fee that is not extortionate. If, of course, you have done a good job…

It’s interesting how many celebrants I know moved into the role after some profound and distressing experience – a near-death illness, the death of someone or some people close to them. I very much respect that. Which raises the question: can you be a successful celebrant if you haven’t been bereaved? Don’t know – guess so, but I do think our own losses can make a bridge for our empathy and compassion.

I’m not religious but there’s something about funerals…

28 September 2011
Charles
5 Comments
Categories: alternative funerals, celebrants, ceremony, funeral customs, Religious funerals

Posted by Belinda Forbes

From the moment I had booked myself onto a course to become a secular funeral celebrant, it started happening.  Like when you get married, get pregnant or get a puppy.  Suddenly everywhere you turn, it’s about weddings, what the expectant mum shouldn’t eat or drink, and how you should never play tug of war with a puppy.  Oops!  Too late.

So, three years ago, having resigned from my job as a teacher, I was looking forward to my course on writing and conducting non-religious funerals when I read an article in the Sunday Times.  To sum it up, the non-religious journalist Minette Marrin extols the virtues of tradition and religion for funeral ceremonies.

http://www.minettemarrin.com/minettemarrin/2008/08/im-not-religiou.html

I was so annoyed, I wrote to her: 

Your article, “I’m not religious, but there’s something about funerals” makes the point that non-religious funerals do not quite hit the mark and are not a proper end.    Most funerals I have attended were Christian ceremonies, and in almost every case the deceased was not a practising Christian.  The passages from the Bible have been anything but comforting for the majority of non-religious people in the congregation.  At my grandfather’s funeral, a dreadful passage from Revelations was read out.  At my grandmother’s funeral, the vicar referred to her as ‘Kay’ throughout – her name was Kathleen!  …We cannot all have a handsome Victorian Gothic church and Harold Pinter reading a poem.  But we can choose a fitting farewell whether religious or not.

She replied:

…Each to her own, I guess, as far as funerals go.  I think it’s very hard at the last moment, in the middle of grief, to make decisions, and if no one has taken them before, then convention is good to fall back on. I think the words of the prayer book are very beautiful, and give me a sense of connection with the past and other funerals, but I entirely take your point.

With best wishes

Minette Marrin

Although I was impressed that she had taken the trouble to reply, I was still annoyed.  However, three years later, I look back at my pre-celebrant self and smile.  I am annoyed no longer.  If an atheist wants a traditional Anglican service in his village church, why not?  If a Roman Catholic wants to be cremated and asks me, an atheist celebrant, to conduct the service, why not?

And thank you Minette for replying!  In many years to come, may you have the send-off you have asked for.

The bitter spice that sweetens the dish

23 September 2011
Charles
4 Comments
Categories: Attitudes to death, bereavement, celebrants, ceremony

Posted by Jonathan

A celebrant said today:

“Even when funerals are designed to be a celebration of life, I nearly always begin by acknowledging people’s grief and sadness.”

Jose (see his thought provoking blog post of 19th September), ever enquiring and studiously leaving no stone unturned, wants to know about incorporating grieving and celebration of life in the same goodbye ceremony.  His tenaciousness is stimulating for us celebrants, who must every day question our way forward.

His query:  “Which are the elements that you use afterwards to move the mourners and their emotions to a more positive feeling?” is not an easy one to answer.  I never thought of it in terms of involving ‘elements’, and I never thought of grief as being any less positive than celebration of life.

Grief has to do with sadness, not unhappiness.  There’s a big difference between the two. Unhappiness is isolating and unattractive and faces towards depression.  We’ve all been there.  It’s not grieving, it’s self pity.  Sadness, particularly about death, is beautiful even when it’s unbearable.  It’s feeling sorry not for yourself but for your loss – loss is not separate from you, but it is not you; it encompasses you, and it’s helpful to share it with others. We’ve all been there, too.  It is a noble feeling, and one I certainly wouldn’t want to be deprived of after even a tragic loss.

Following the last funeral I conducted, when I was trying to ‘let it go’, I found I couldn’t do so until I’d understood what it had taught me.  I was feeling uncharacteristically sad that it had ended, but I didn’t want to stop feeling sad because I knew if I did I’d miss something very important.  So I sat at the pavement table outside a café, watched the human beings go by with all their inner concerns showing or not showing, had a fag and a double espresso, and I thought deeply and wrote down what these last ten days of ‘funereality’ had given me.  Why was I reluctant to release it, this recent experience that my sadness was holding so close to me? 

It was only then, after I’d understood just what I was losing, that I was prepared to say goodbye to it and feel glad I’d had it while I did.  That’s what a good funeral does, too.  You could say it bequeaths you with a greater energy, a wisdom, as this did for me.  It crystallized into a poem, which I kept to remind me why I do this (and incidentally why, unlike some bereavement workers tell me they feel, I actually find myself energized rather than burnt near the furnace of recent death).  It also approaches the matter of our relationship with, and our role in, others’ grief, so I can happily share it with you here:

‘The funeral nourishes me
by embrace in the humanity of strangers.

I relieve them of their bewilderment
and reveal them to themselves in the majesty of their pain,
with words, with voice, with actions.

I touch their hurting hearts
to know they are not in isolation;
that their own grief is universal;
that healing lets love in and does not banish it;
that anguish is their invited guest;
that tomorrow will still come.

And then I leave.’

OK, I was only losing an experience, not a real live person, but the principle is the same; you have to be aware of what and whom you have lost, and the desirable pain to which love commits you, to move you on from just the raw feeling of pure loss before you can celebrate what you did have and what you still will have.  The pain of loss doesn’t go away with celebration of life.  It just becomes less overwhelming and more manageable when you’ve identified your loss, and understood that you still have something real and priceless, yours to keep.  And it brings to your attention that we are all human, and that this is the deal.

If a bad funeral damages you by making you unhappy, that detracts nothing from the healing value of a good one, even a good sad one.  And I think there’s something to do with loyalty where grief is concerned.  We can’t in good conscience abandon our dead by just getting intoxicated at a hooray party, any more than we could by indulging in the misery of a self pitying orgy, or going through the motions of an irrelevant tradition. 

Our dead leave us through no fault of their own.  We have to include their absence in our funeral for them, painful as it is, and I believe we owe them our mourning as much as our appreciation.

 

Words, words, words

21 September 2011
Charles
19 Comments
Categories: celebrants, ceremony, funeral customs

First posted by Charles on 9 Feb 2010

I’m putting this back up as a contribution to recent debates started by Jose and Richard.

Following my post about the ineptitude and ineffectiveness of words, I stumbled on this piece in the Sydney Morning Herald. It’s actually about citizenship ceremonies, but you’d never guess it from the way I’ve plucked the extracts:

Traditionally, ritual, including rites of passage, is embedded in our religious culture. And it is true that religion seems to have a competitive advantage when it comes to this stuff. Religions have been practising their liturgy for a long time. The godly are very good at all of the non-verbal aspects of ritual from bells and smells to crazy cozies to speaking in tongues. Great ceremony is about an absence of speeches and many faiths get this.

Moreover, the godly have the advantage that they feel that they are consecrating their rites in the presence of their transcendent God. That ineluctably gives an ineffable power to the ceremony. The godless will obviously struggle to match that attribute of faith. And we need to get better at the non-verbal stuff. We atheists can talk the leg off a chair but we can’t sing or chant or dance the leg off an amputee.

Now a real rite of passage doesn’t just rejoice in change. It is the change. A ceremony which merely celebrates but doesn’t cause the change is not strictly a rite of passage. Graduation ceremonies from university are rites of passage because you don’t get the damned piece of paper without enduring the ceremony. On this definition, school graduations strictly aren’t rites of passage because the exam marks after the ceremony are the life-changing event, not the school graduation or valedictory service. So funerals aren’t strictly rites of passage because unless you’re a time traveller, your funeral won’t end your life, just celebrate it.

We, of the secular world, often fail to employ those non-verbal rituals that make a ceremony. You can easily cock up even the most moving event by speeches. During my days of municipal service, these ceremonies meandered between inspirational and pedestrian. The pedestrian bits were inevitably the speeches. The best bits were non-verbal – the Mayoral handshake, the familial hugging, the singing of the national anthem, the presentation of the symbolic wattle and the giving of certificate. All of these had no words merely music or actions.

Religions don’t have a monopoly on rites of passage but they do them better than us. The secular world needs to learn more about celebrating without speeches. We need to have rituals we perform together and not passively watch. I think we are still a century or so away from really learning these skills.

At the heart of great ceremony is performance that is not normal. Normal is pedestrian. Words are dull. We need transforming ceremony and that requires anything but speeches.

Read the whole article here.

Oh bits from obits

16 September 2011
Charles
6 Comments
Categories: celebrants, ceremony
Posted by Jeanne Rathbone 

Noel Coward said funerals were the cocktail party of his set. James Joyce called them funforals and GB Shaw said  ‘ Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh’. 

I am a Humanist celebrant and have conducted hundreds of non-religious funerals. As our ceremonies are very personal I have heard some wonderful lifestories and anecdotes and had the privilege of conducting the funeral for my compatriot –  the wonderful Dave Allen. 

I have selected a few snippets to share with you and hope that this will encourage you to do likewise. Here are a few of my ‘oh bits from obits’

My dad was working for the Maharajah in Gwalia. When war broke out, Mum and I joined the army! She went to Delhi first. 

 Mum wore a perfume called ‘Smart Party’

 On his first visit to his local  pub he was aware that people were awkward and to break the ice he took his leg off, put it on the bar and said, ‘fill it up’…   after that there was no problem.

 Grace, Rose and Peggy (sisters)  worked at the admiralty during the war, and ironically Grace and Peggy knew that Harry’s ship HMS Cornwall had been destroyed but could say nothing until Rose had been informed.

 Frank worked in the newspaper industry until after the drama of the Wapping Protests. We have never been allowed to have any of the Murdoch’s publications in the home.

 He loved his motorcycles, leather jackets and milky coffee.

 Civil service hours were an unbelievable 10 to 3 in those days with half days on Wednesdays when she and her girlfriends would often go to the cinema.

 He found some popularity and recognition through his skills in building homemade fireworks.

 He was hospitalised inNaplesand then moved to various convalescent homes (now mostly 5 * hotels) along the Amalfi coast.

 Hilda moved to the Stamp Office, following in the footsteps of her great, great uncle, Sir Rowland Hill, who set up the first Penny Post Service.

 I even recall him ironing his football laces.

 Mark kept a snake whose home was in a tank upstairs on the landing.

 I remembered going to visit her in hospital believing aunt Grace was trying to buy a baby.

 He completed the London to Brighton walk in 1969 in 11hrs 53 mins.

 Jim never married, though he had several what he called “lucky escapes!”.

 On his first driving lesson when told to feel the pedals he knelt down and touched them!

 

Now show us yours!

 

 I hope that celebrants who read this blog will rise to the challenge. Jeanne has a very good blog. Find it here. Her latest post on Baroness Warnock’s defence of faith and the C of E is well worth a read.

 

What do atheists profess?

12 September 2011
Charles
35 Comments
Categories: Attitudes to death, celebrants, ceremony, funeral customs, funeral trends, Religious funerals, Secular approaches to death

Posted by Richard Rawlinson, religious correspondent

Vale makes interesting points in the thread beneath my Beyond the Abyss post, which discusses the gap between secularist individuality and religious communal ritual:

We (I) believe that community and the communal celebration of key events is important – yet secularism, at least as it finds expression in the west today – tends to be individualistic. Not surprising, perhaps when the only common bond is a lack of belief.
My own feeling, though, is that we are in a transitional phase and will over time evolve new and meaningful rituals to reflect the reality of people’s sense of personal meaning and purpose.

At first these will ape the religious ceremonies we are familiar with – because they are the ones we know. But they will diverge and in time consolidate new norms, patterns and meanings.

Actually, look at any civil ceremonies, the start has already been made’.

I’m trying to be open but find it hard to imagine meaningful death rituals devoid of any spiritual belief in an afterlife. I agree that non-religious funerals help bring comfort and closure, but wouldn’t a truly atheist ritual do this while professing the faith that God and souls don’t exist? Would it not be crucial to celebrate the fact that the deceased, however fondly remembered, is now nothing, incapable of pleasure or pain?

Some political and intellectual atheists can cope with such a nihilistic philosophy, but we seem some way from popular demand for rituals reflecting such secular realities.

Some stats…

Each year, around 500,000 people in the UK die, according the annual mortality statistics published by the Office for National Statistics. Over 30,000 funerals a year are currently non-religious, according to the National Association of Funeral Directors. This is around 6 per cent of deaths, or over one in 20 households affected by death.

This figure is increasing as families turn to celebration-of-life ceremonies rather than services conducted by a priest, either in church or crematorium. There’s certainly a growing willingness to admit non-belief, encouraged by secular educationalists, politicians and media pundits.

Of the four in 10 Brits who claim membership of the Church of England, it’s clear many are secularists, who increasingly see hypocrisy in using their church simply for baptisms, weddings, funerals and the Christmas carol service.

The NAFD has confirmed that most of those choosing non-religious funerals were ‘hatch, match, dispatch’ Protestants. Lapsed Catholics remain more likely to uphold the ceremonial traditions of their forefathers, hedging their bets, so to speak. This is borne out by weekly Mass attendance figures among the genuinely faithful – for the first time in the UK, CofE and Catholic attendance is neck and neck, each attracting between 800,000 and 1m a week, even though the starting pool of Catholics is smaller than those claiming to be culturally CofE.

But just as there are people of half-baked religious faith, so there are ‘atheist-lites’ for whom the fond belief in some sort of afterlife prevents them from totally parting ways with religion-inspired ceremonial.

Funeral direction

The muddled masses are only likely to reach clarity on one side or the other by authoritative guidance. In a nutshell, they need to be evangelised by fundamentalists, not in the nutty Creationist or Islamofacist sense but in the sense of inspirational leaders persuading others of their creed, be it religious or godless.

This is where the problem lies for anyone trying to devise new rituals devoid of quasi-religious elements. In the case of civil funeral celebrants, it doesn’t matter if they settle for a client-driven compromise. Who really cares if high priest of atheism Richard Dawkins disapproves of them perpetuating religious rituals? After all, he’s a biologist, not a philosopher or social worker, and, even then, considered a sloppy intellect by most of his academic peers.

In the case of priests, their vows in the Sacrament of Holy Orders mean they must serve God and the faithful of His Church by obeying and teaching God’s laws, handed down by the Holy Bible and Apostolic Tradition – the Mass with its divine liturgy and rituals as the focal point.

It’s at this point that Catholics must briefly digress – yes, there are priests who attempt sacrilegious ministry, and, of course, a minority who have committed vile crimes in the eyes of secular law, as well as mortal sins against God. But the point I’m making is that the way forward for the Church is not the same as for secular ritualists: a priest who dons layman’s attire for a civil funeral should be defrocked; a civil celebrant’s a la carte service, complete with religious appetiser, offers choice.

As Gloriamundi makes clear in his/her recent blog, ‘What You Need to be a Celebrant’, such choice forms a compassionate collaboration between celebrant and the bereaved. By the same token, the Church is being compassionate and indeed true by being relatively inflexible, as touched on in my post, ‘Individuality in the Requiem Mass?’.

True atheists and theists are dogmatic, not pragmatic. They are not relativists as they believe in orthodoxies: that we are just physical beings, or that our mortal bodies are vessels for eternal souls, saved by the grace of God.

Some religions do indeed seem to be committing slow suicide, but there are also fresh buds, a growing hunger for reverence among many younger Christians. In a parallel world, generations are growing up not even as cultural Christians, meaning they’re less likely to behave as their grandparents would have done when confronted by death.

But this seems more social consequence than conscious movement: has the average person really embraced the belief that a world without religion would be a better place, even if they do prefer living in the moment and banishing thoughts of life after death?

Apathy has wounded religion but a creed that denies belief cannot equal it, certainly not communally. True atheist diehards (die-easies?) will never replace religion as you have to fill a void with something, not nothing.

‘Teach them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and, lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world. Amen’. (Matthew 28:20)

On the map?

9 September 2011
Charles
3 Comments
Categories: celebrants, funeral, Plan your own funeral

Posted by Vale

Are you on the map?

On the 1st August a new information service for consumers was launched. It’s called ’Funeralmap’ and it aims to make it easier for someone to find out about funeral related businesses in a locality. You enter a postcode or the name of a town, select the type of business you are interested in and, bingo! the map shows you who’s listed and where they are located. Have a look for yourself here.

Funeralmap is designed for customers, but it doesn’t want to sell you anything directly. Instead it provides a location based directory with some additional information and helpful links. As a new source of customer information GFG is happy to applaud the initiative, but there are two tests to apply. Firstly, is it likely to be useful? Information is already widely available to someone with an Internet connection. Does Funeralmap add value? Will people using it be in a better position to make informed choices? Secondly, if you are a business associated with funerals, is it worth getting yourself listed?

Usefulness first. The site itself is professional and well presented. The map interface is clear and simple and, because it mirrors the sort of google maps search we all use, quite familiar. I found a few glitches in moving around the map, but, I guess, these are teething troubles (or my muddles).

A much bigger issue for me, though, was the poverty of the information available. It’s not just that the listings are so basic – the site is young yet and, if businesses pay for premium listings, more information will arrive. No, it’s more that there is so little opportunity for customer interaction. Funeralmap will not let you, as a customer, post local information, reviews, price or service comparisons or make personal comments. It’s a real weakness. It feels surprisingly old fashioned. It strongly suggests that – because the site is geared to present paid for advertisements – Funeralmap has been built as a businesses platform rather than consumer space. The result is that, as things stand, you can search on Funeralmap, but it’s not your forum and, while it will give you the information that businesses choose to present, it’s not necessarily going to help you make fully informed choices.

So, if you are a business, is it worth getting yourself listed? Well some businesses are there already. Basic information about funeral directors, burial grounds – including natural burial grounds – and crematoria are included for free. Other businesses have to pay for inclusion (and all businesses would need to pay for premium listings). The starting price is £75 a year for a standard listing*.

As a celebrant myself this is a real decision. Most of my business comes via funeral directors at the moment, but, maybe, if I advertised, it would let potential clients know that people like me exist and might prompt them to contact me directly. The evidence from celebrants with who have websites already is that people seem to like them, and, increasingly, expect them, but that they don’t yet drive much business.

People do like to know more about you and,  if you haven’t a website yet, a Funeralmap listing that allows for a photograph and some text may help a little. While thinking through my own options I checked out Seth Grodin’s blog. He’s an Internet marketing writer and I found an interesting piece there  called called Memo to the very small

Grodin suggests that for very little money, you can easily create a blog based website. The intelligent use of photographs, published comments from clients and customers and basic information about yourself can all help you make a strong local impact. Better than Funeralmap? Well, it’s early days yet – but I think it’s where I’ll start.

What will you do?

*original post corrected 18.00 9th September 2011

What You Need to be a Celebrant (the unofficial version)

7 September 2011
Charles
17 Comments
Categories: celebrants, ceremony, crematoria, funeral directors

Posted by Gloriamundi

Health warning: this will be opinionated – it’s only my view 

1. Ask yourself why you want to do it, and listen to the answers. The motivations of celebrants are varied, and not necessarily clear to themselves at first. It’s a role that reveals yourself to yourself. That can be quite a tough process. You’ll want to feel happy with some robust, clear non-financial reasons for doing it.

2. Another income stream is essential; it is all but impossible to earn a sensible living. The demand for your services will be unreliable and unpredictable. There may be a very few people who can take enough ceremonies each week to earn a very modest living, but they must be super-efficient, emotionally and spiritually tough, and have a fade-proof capacity for empathy.

 3. There are probably some people who should never try to be teachers or airline pilots or…celebrants. You need a basic toolkit:

*   empathy and patience to deal with the bewildering variety of responses you’ll come across amongst bereaved people (they can even be startlingly rude sometimes!) 

*   a reasonably wide knowledge of the ways of the world – you meet all sorts of people, and you’ll want to pick up very quickly on cultural signals, work references, social contexts 

*   an understanding of, preferably a gift for, ceremony and ritual

*   the ability to write and speak in a way that creates enhanced meaning, and draws people towards you rather than keeping them at a stiff distance.

Some but not all of these things can be improved with training – provided they are there to begin with. (Fair enough, I couldn’t fly an Airbus if I trained for ten years…)

 4. Here’s the big stuff: for the bereaved people you work with, you need to be able feel and show some love. Not the sentimental version, the real, unselfish, compassionate thing. You’re not there just to take efficient notes about someone’s life, stick some philosophical niceties fore and aft, and play a CD or two. You need to be able to enter a circle of grief and share a little of it without being knocked over yourself. You’re on a journey with these people. They’ve not been on it before, nor have you, and you can’t know your final destination when you start the journey.

 5. Obvious enough: you have to put your own preferences and beliefs at a working distance, while you help people explore what they need. This sometimes means letting go whilst family members do something you may think you could do better yourself. A funeral isn’t an artifact, it’s an event; your control over it won’t be total.

 6. You need to stay calm if unexpected things happen (mostly they don’t.) In fact, reducing tension without being superficial is something important you always need to do, so people can feel what they feel, not what they might think they are expected to feel.

 7. If you’re good, you’ll find a sense of balance, constantly shifting as you read people’s responses and tune your voice, your gaze, your stance; you need what people usually call presence, and yet it’s not about you. The ceremony needs to belong to them; it’s not a showcase for your erudition and eloquence. You’re sharing the floor with them, even if yours is the only voice heard.

 8. OK, so:

*  being a celebrant is badly paid (at many funerals, the flowers cost more than the celebrant’s fee) and the training is expensive

*  some crems are dreary, some undertakers can be difficult

*  it can be nerve wracking (at the first one or two, nerves are predictable, but things can go wrong however well-experienced you are)

*  it is sometimes deeply upsetting; a tragedy that has resulted in a phone call to you from a funeral director you’ve met twice and don’t much like, asking you to visit a family you have never met – who are in pieces

*  even with traditional British levels of self-control, raw grief is a difficult thing to share a room with. The only guide is your compassion, the only help is your skill.

 9. If you are being honest with yourself, (if you’re not, you’ll never be a convincing celebrant) if you still want to do it, welcome – it’s a deeply fulfilling job that may overturn your preconceptions about your own mortality. If you wonder why you feel elated as you leave the crematorium. It’s because you’ve been privileged enough to help people with a unique event at a major crisis in their lives. 

Shooting the messenger

2 September 2011
Charles
5 Comments
Categories: Attitudes to death, bereavement, celebrants

Posted by Nicola Dela-Croix

When I meet grieving families in my role as a celebrant, I always try hard not to judge them if their behaviour is less than polite. For example, the initial phone call where you gently introduce yourself, but are made to feel as welcome as a pre-recorded “Do not hang up… you have won a holiday in Bermuda..” Or when you are left standing in the hallway because no-one wants to offer you a seat. As someone said to me recently, “suffering can ennoble or uglify”. This is very true. So I, like many other celebrants, try to face these situations with a compassionate heart. Although sometimes you know that, grief or no grief, these people are just downright rude.

There is, of course, no getting away from the fact that our reasons for visiting are not happy ones. They would rather we weren’t there asking if they’d like to say a few words beside the coffin of their dead wife/brother/dad/daughter etc. And it’s made all the more difficult if their previous experiences of funerals have been memorable for all the wrong reasons, “her name was Sheila but they kept calling her Shirley”…

These negative ‘vibes’ are not the norm, thank goodness. But they are out there. And that sense of being unwelcome can come at you from all angles. The most interesting responses are often from people who enquire what you do for a living. A recent encounter went something like this:

And what do you do?

I write and conduct funeral services

(Horrified face) Could you bury a child?!

I’m not sure if that was a question or an outcry. It was as if I was actually responsible for the death, rather than being the person who would come to the assistance of the child’s parents (or any family for that matter) and help them with all the care, kindness and sensitivity I could muster.

I know this is all down to fear of loss, fear of death, fear of the unknown, bad experiences… I’m not really asking why this happens. It’s just part of doing what we all do. And for every person who reacts with horror, there is someone who finds it admirable. Like everything to do with dying/death/funerals/bereavement there is no ‘right’ way. We’re dealing with individuals who are as unique as they are varied.

Still, a cup of tea would be nice…