December 2024’s ‘guest blog’ written by David Lambert – a Stroud resident, former Extinction Rebel, and part-time assistant here at Family Tree Funeral Company.
I recently read a flyer from Pure Cremation,™ the UK’s leading provider of ‘direct cremation’, that is, disposal of the dead at a crematorium without any family attendance. Direct cremation is currently growing in popularity. The reasons are complex; not least, its relative cheapness in a time when many people are struggling financially, but also a growing dissatisfaction with conventional funerals.
Pure Cremation™ is, I am told,
‘the fuss-free way to say goodbye …a wonderfully liberating option… A funeral without the service … a modern alternative to a traditional cremation funeral. The cremation takes place completely separately from the personal farewell, allowing families to create their own special remembrance in their own time. It’s perfect for people who don’t like funerals…’
Loss is not enjoyable: grief is painful and it is true that the modern funeral can be a dispiriting experience. Most of us have been to a funeral and come away with our feelings of grief and loss somehow unanswered. Some funerals are like that. But ‘not liking funerals’, period, hints at more than that; it suggests avoidance; a wish to close our eyes to mortality completely.
It is notable that in the twentieth century, British, or more specifically English, culture around death, ceremony and commemoration, has evolved quite rapidly in the direction of such avoidance. In the early 1900s dead bodies were kept at home until they were buried; there was no profession of funeral directors, just undertakers who would build a coffin and make arrangements for transport and burial either in a churchyard or a cemetery, cremation still being a very rare occurrence. A body would be washed and dressed by a local person, usually a woman, either with or without the help of family members.
By the end of the century, every aspect of caring for the dead and the bereaved had been handed over to funeral directors and a multi-million-pound industry established, separating us all from the reality of death. The result is a smooth operation that ‘spares’ the bereaved anything difficult or challenging, but which also leaves them spare, redundant, disengaged. People are not wrong to feel dissatisfied with ‘traditional cremation funerals’: many have been hollowed out of meaning.
Again, the causes of those changes are complicated. They include: secularisation and the disappearance of religion from everyday life; the development of technologies such as embalming and cremation, both of which require professional input; capitalism itself and the irresistible tides of commodification and marketisation; modern healthcare which results in ever fewer people dying at home among family; above all maybe to the promises of modernity – fulfilment through consumption, control of our environment, the elevation of personal choice, the ‘triumph’ of the individual and the atomisation of community.
Whatever the causes, we seem to have arrived at a society largely unfamiliar with the corporeality of death, in the sense of seeing or touching or handling a dead body; a society which, encouraged by relentless distraction, is evasive about death; a society in which, even subliminally, we are encouraged to think somehow we can live for ever.
Not thinking about death is – I’d suggest – profoundly unhealthy. In April 2024, the Ryse (Radical Youth Spaces for Education) worked with its Elders to put on a workshop, entitled ‘Leap into Death,’ on the subject of death and dying. It was a well-attended event. One person later wrote:
‘I was really struck by the power of listening to each other / of the intergenerational sharing and the willingness to face into difficult subjects. It has stayed with me – listening to young people sharing their experiences of others dying and it is helping me normalise death as part of life. Thanks for all you all do in bringing these dialogues together.’
The event revealed a hunger in people of all ages to share experiences. Some of those experiences had been doubly painful – the absence of a meaningful farewell compounding the pain of loss. And on the contrary, others were of how a good funeral had begun the process of healing that loss. Some people spoke of their bewilderment, others of how ritual or ceremony, religious or humanist, helped them.
I found the impact of some 30 or so people sharing in a circle very moving and I think it was not just witnessing such a range of intensely personal offerings. It was also people’s faith that bringing a private grief to the community could be restorative. At the end there was a sense in which talking together was contributing not just to our own but to our community’s emotional resilience and wellbeing.
People seemed to agree that our culture no longer encouraged people to consider how life is enriched by awareness of death. Other cultures all over the world and throughout time have known this. The workshop heard a little about death rituals from elsewhere in the world – rituals designed to help people overcome fear or revulsion; rituals in which communities come together over several days to share love and come to terms with loss; or others where the community is responsible for every aspect of caring for the dead, tasks which in our culture we have almost entirely ceded to professionals. Grief is viewed not as somehow unclean, or weak or a failure, but as healing, as powerful and as potentially transformative.
Grief is the flipside of love, and it needs expression just as much. To love is to open ourselves to loss and vulnerability. It is true in our relationships with each other and it is also true in our relationship with the natural world. Just as much as we love the beauty and wonder of the natural world, so we open ourselves to grief at its thinning out and extinction.
Modernity’s aversion to death leaves us emotionally poorer and more fearful.
Seeking ways to reclaim death as something profoundly meaningful, instead of a mere termination to be hidden away, is an act of defiance. Taking responsibility instead of handing it over can feel challenging and too much at a time when people are feeling overwhelmed. But good funeral directors will want to help in making a meaningful ceremony. In bringing together people to share their loss and their love, a good funeral can be a deeply rewarding and empowering experience.
The irony is that much of the shtick for direct cremation is that it allows people to have a ‘special remembrance’. We all crave that: the cruelty is that it bases itself on whisking away the very body of the person we love. That may work for some people but not for all; and the risk is that it further detaches us from the immensity of death.
Resources
Some sources for learning about funerals
https://www.orderofthegooddeath.com/resources/fear-of-death/
http://www.naturaldeath.org.uk/index.php?page=book-shop The Natural Death Handbook
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94o6TH4yDpQ Rupert Callender, What Remains: life, death and the human art of undertaking
https://compassionindying.org.uk/ on Advance Decision (aka Living Will)
https://www.resus.org.uk/respect/respect-patients-and-carers: Recommended Summary Plan for Emergency Care and Treatment
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8-pNudVJ-s Caitlin Doughty From Here to Eternity
https://www.youtube.com/@AskAMortician Caitlin Doughty, ‘Ask a Mortician’ channel
Some testimonies about grief and meaning
https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/parting-taryn-zentrich-0B-_kNcLdeI/ Taryn Zentrich, ‘Passing’ podcasts death and young people
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/mar/24/actor-greg-wise-on-the-death-of-his-sister-and-how-grief-shapes-you-as-a-person Greg Wise on the death of his sister
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/mar/20/ive-spent-a-lifetime-dreading-the-loss-of-a-parent-and-now-its-finally-happened Adrian Chiles on the death of his father
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001y1xl R4 programme on travellers’ cemetery and funerals in St Mary’s Cray, Kent.
