Dancing with death
With people living longer than ever before, the way we deal with death and hold funerals is changing. Catherine Groenestein reports.
Wild Horses and Thunderstruck rang out when Sharee Brown farewelled her mother on a sunny afternoon in a rose-filled garden surrounded by family and friends.
Robyn Brown was a loving wife to Bruce, mother to five children, Kyle, Sharee, Cameron, Joe, and Sabrina, and a teacher at Ha¯ wera’s Christian School.
Her death from bone cancer at 54, two days after Christmas, had been expected but still felt sudden, Sharee said.
‘‘We got to have Christmas with her, she was Father Christmas and gave the presents out to everybody.’’
Her funeral was held at home just two days after she died.
Robyn was an organised person and had put plenty of thought into her funeral, Sharee said.
‘‘Mum and Dad had discussed it quite a bit. She’d had everything written down in a notebook. She had all her songs. She’s quite into rock and she had Wild Horses, and Aerosmith’s I don’t want to miss a thing and ACDC Thunderstruck.’’
Instead of calling it a funeral, they had a garden party.
‘‘The whole thing was in the garden. We had a tent set up where she was. She was in an open casket at the house for that time. The casket was made by one of her good friends and it looked amazing. It was all eco-friendly, she didn’t want anything that wasn’t going to break down, the same with what she was wearing.’’
Funeral director Kelly Judkins organised her mother’s care and another family friend, Greg Parata, ran the ceremony.
‘‘It was quite a family and friends affair. Everyone stayed around afterwards and we had drinks and a barbecue, it turned into a night thing as well. Mum always said she wanted to be a part of the party so we didn’t close her casket until later that evening,’’ she says.
‘‘It was an awesome day, exactly the way she wanted it, there was nothing I would have changed really. We all still talk about what a good day it was.’’
The trend of having funerals that are less about religious ritual and more about celebrating the person’s life has grown since celebrants began taking funerals about 25 years ago.
Before then, it was more likely to be a priest or a minister.
While the relaxing of conventions around what a proper funeral looks like is a good thing for many families, some people are left unprepared when they have to arrange a funeral themselves, says Gary Taylor, president of the Funeral Directors’ Association of New Zealand.
A hundred years ago, most 10-yearolds would have been to, or been around, approximately 50 funerals.
Nowadays, people of 50 and 60 may only have been involved with one or two funerals, so funeral directors were often having to explain the value of having a funeral, as well as helping them plan one.
‘‘We’re in a society that doesn’t understand funerals very well. Because of that, they tend to think what’s the point, why do we need a funeral?’’
But grief is not something people can opt into or out of, and it can be reasonably destructive, he says.
‘‘If they don’t deal with that grief when it appears, it will trip them up later on.’’
Throughout mankind’s history, there has always been some sort of ritual or ceremony around the death of a person and their burial or cremation, and this is because having a meaningful farewell helps people transition from internal grief into mourning and the public expression of grief.
Funeral directors, often with the help of a celebrant, still run about 80 per cent of funerals in New Zealand, but legally, anyone can do it.
You can build your own coffin or be buried in a shroud or woven mat.
It’s not even necessary to have a body embalmed, and if people are opting for a natural burial (as seven have done in the New Plymouth District since 2011), embalming is forbidden.
But Taylor recommends it because it ensures the family can have up to a week to say goodbye without having to deal with the normal deterioration that occurs after death.
‘‘The days between the death and the funeral are possibly the most precious times we will ever have with that individual because they are coming to an end.
‘‘Spending that time is hugely important. You’ve only got to talk to some families who had Dad home and spent some time having a few beers with him, they will cope much better than people whose Dad died in hospital, they didn’t see him and had a direct cremation and the next thing they’re getting some ashes back. That is never going to help them on that path to healing around that death, because they’ve not had that experience and walked the walk.’’
A funeral can cost thousands of dollars or be relatively cheap, depending on the family’s choices, whether the person is buried or cremated, and where in the country they are.
Cost is a factor for families, and this is something where pre-planning and preparation is very helpful, Taylor says.
The FDANZ runs an annual campaign called ‘take the time to talk’ (this year is from April 9-13) encouraging people to talk about what they’d like in their funeral with family members.
Conversations around her mother’s funeral have led to some precious memories for Ella Borrows of Ha¯ wera.
Over several recent trips to see her 93-year-old mother, Emma Amosa, in Nelson, they have put together a plan for when the time comes.
‘‘It started off being a bit sad, she didn’t like it being about her own death, but it became a bit of fun, we have looked through hundreds of photos and talked about memories. She also identified a lot of photos of people I didn’t know, ‘‘ Borrows says.
They have decided where a service will be held, who will talk, and what music will be played.
‘‘I already know who the organist is and she knows the hymns that Mum has chosen. We’ve chosen the photos for the pamphlet too. She had quite clear ideas about what she didn’t want, and with some she’s said ‘put that one in, that will surprise them.’ She wants to remember the good times – it will be like her final message, the funeral service will absolutely have Mum’s input.’’
Everything was written down in a folder.
‘‘It’s not scary and it’s led to some lovely conversations with Mum. We didn’t have anything like this for Dad, we hadn’t thought about it,’’ she says.
Taranaki celebrant Mary Bourke has been leading funerals for nearly 20 years.
She became a registered celebrant after her brother asked her to officiate at his wedding while she was South Taranaki District Mayor, and began leading funerals some time later.
‘‘By and large the funerals I do are for people and families that I know quite well and that’s part of this emerging trend really, where people understand they can do it their way. Often people appreciate having someone who knows the person who has passed away because they are looking for something a bit personalised and responding to their situation.’’
Funerals are interesting because they are often not discussed a lot, she says.
‘‘Funerals are just like weddings really, in that families can do whatever they would like to do, whatever would bring them most comfort and whatever their departed family member would appreciate the most.’’
The rise of celebrants taking funerals in place of ordained priests or ministers has coincided with the trend towards a more secular society, says history professor Peter Lineham, regional director of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Massey University, Albany.
It’s not necessarily that those who die who are less religious but their children or those that organise the funerals are less religious and have really wanted to make it more a celebration of the person’s life than a context of religious comfort, he says.
The notion of what is appropriate at funerals has also really shifted.
‘‘The idea that death should involve some kind of respect for the dead person in a kind of formality has really quite significantly changed, especially for people from the rougher ends of New Zealand society,’’ he says.
‘‘I recently heard an astonishing account of a funeral where because the man was a huntin’ ridin’ fishin’ type of person, the coffin was delivered on his old ute with a boar’s head on front.
‘‘I think that kind of increasing informality and roughness, if that’s who the person is, has become characteristic.’’
However, despite the more relaxed tone of many funerals, society is less relaxed and accepting about death itself, he says.
In the 19th century the average age of death was so much lower, and death at any age more common.
‘‘A young person dying wasn’t all that rare.
‘‘Now with the average age of death above 80, and with the prevalence of death much, much reduced, then every individual case seems likes a grotesque tragedy, it’s almost as though in our contemporary society we are pretending that people don’t need to die,’’ he says.
‘‘The two certain things are we are going to suffer pain and we all die, but they’re postponed for so long in our society that we seem to have very few tools to handle them in a mature way when they happen, as inevitably they will happen.’’
‘‘We’re in a society that doesn’t understand funerals very well. Because of that, they tend to think what’s the point, why do we need a funeral?’’
Gary Taylor - president of the Funeral Directors’ Association of New Zealand