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The big funeral Rip-off
Hannah Betts on an industry in need of change
My mother died on 21 June, 2015, the longest day, having been diagnosed with cancer six months earlier on the shortest. Her passing was an agonising, hurtling thing that she resisted with all her fragile might. My father’s death came a year later, his body broken, ready to go, yet dragged there by a horrific accident at home. These were not ‘good deaths’ – they were bloody and bitter and savage.
If age and illness subjected my parents’ bodies to horrors, then so did their Birmingham undertakers, as their funerals were so banal – while also expensive – they compounded my sense that some great indecency had been done them. I will not burden you with the enormity of it all, suffice to say I realised I wouldn’t be able to attend the moment I met these figures, for whom grief could only be expressed via cod Victoriana.
While weddings have become ever-more bespoke and individual – and doing it on a shoestring is now a badge of honour – for years funerals remained staid, one-size-fitsall affairs, usually a touch Dickensian, and cripplingly costly. For the past 14 years, the average cost of organising a funeral has increased by six per cent annually – twice the inflation rate – according to the Competition & Markets Authority, which has accused some companies of taking advantage of vulnerable customers. Crematoria costs have also shot up – the largest private operators have increased their prices by between six per cent and eight per cent a year for the past eight years.
The average cost of a UK funeral stood at £4,417 in 2019, more than double 2004’s £1,920. And that’s without additions such as flowers and catering. In fact, the average total cost of dying (which not only includes
the funeral but extras such as the send-off and professional fees) stood at an all-time high of £9,493 in 2019, according to financial services company Sunlife. Which begs the question, how many of us can actually afford to die?
‘It’s time the industry had a kick up the backside,’ says funeral director Carl Marlow. ‘It really does stink. Because it’s death, people will pay whatever it costs because they think being seen to scrimp and save looks disrespectful. It’s all just a massive rip-off.’
That said, in the three and a half short years since my father’s demise, things have slowly started to change, with mourners becoming more assertive about their needs. Behold the rise of death cafés, eco funerals and bespoke burial and cremation services that actually feel personal – from ceremonies on golf courses and in teepees to unusual hearse alternatives such as fire engines and camper vans. What’s more, many of them can be done on a budget.
Marlow’s firm, Go As You Please Funerals, is testament to this. He established himself as the funeral industry’s rulebreaker-inchief way ahead of the curve – 19 years ago – after being disappointed by the options when planning his mother’s funeral, and feeling that the funeral industry was cashing in on grieving families. Today he runs the North East’s largest independent funeral directors, with nine premises (including branches in Edinburgh, Blyth and Newcastle). As well as personalised extras such as coloured coffins, he offers budget options – his cheapest package is just £1,500, £900 of which goes on cremation fees. ‘Prices are rising all the time and it’s nonsense,’ he says. ‘I mean, how much does it cost to put a box in a taxi? Of course, I’m respectful, but, in the end, I’m just a delivery man. Funeral directors are taking the p—.’
But now others are breaking the mould too, with ever more inventive options. Restaurateur and Great British Menu judge Oliver Peyton started his new funeral company, Exit Here, last year, prompted by the limited options available for his father’s funeral, and offers cool colourful caskets (from £650) and pill-shaped urns (£125). The firm’s cheery colours and wood flooring have seen it mistaken for an art gallery or café. Customers swing by to plan natural burials (using biodegradable coffins) at Sheepdrove Organic Farm’s four-acre Berkshire woodland, say, or white-truffle banquets of the sort Peyton, 58, is plotting for his own send off.
He already has plans to expand Exit Here. ‘People have contacted us from Denmark, Brazil, Sweden and Australia,’ he enthuses. ‘Everyone’s going to die. Let’s make life’s culmination as life-affirming, individual and empathy-rich as possible. I want this to be the John Lewis of funeral planning.’ In other words, the one-stop (middle-class) shop for UK funerals.
Claire and Rupert Callender, of The Green Funeral Company in Devon, are in the business of doing ‘stripped back’ alternative funerals, as detailed in their Ted Talk on the subject (‘Death, Grief, Ritual and Radical Funerals’). They don’t wear formal suits, they drive a Ford Galaxy rather than a hearse and make services as personal as possible. In one, a boy finished reading the final pages of a story he had been reading to his mother before her death, at her graveside. ‘We do not have a standard funeral,’ explains Rupert. ‘We do not use euphemisms. We do not consider faux-victoriana to be an assurance of respect and dignity.’
These days even Britain’s largest providers, Co-op Funeralcare and Dignity, offer a range of burials and cremations featuring unusual venues, personalised picture coffins, live-streaming facilities and guidance regarding less conventional wakes. ‘Increasingly, we want niche funerals – that are
‘People will pay whatever it costs because they think being seen to scrimp looks disrespectful’
shareable – with personal quirks reflecting who we are,’ says Richard Cope, senior trends consultant at Mintel. ‘Changes are happening because of a new informality, lack of money among the young, and pressure for green alternatives. And yes, there’s also a kind of Instagram effect. People are no longer playing by the rules.’
Richard Radnor Williams, a teacher from Birmingham, was 48 when his wife, social worker Vicki Sharp, died after a long illness. He opted for the nearest undertakers – the Co-op – and spent about £3,500 on Vicki’s funeral, and £1,000 on a wake. ‘She and I had spent an afternoon planning what she wanted: a specific crematorium and loads of people all wearing the brightest of colourful clothes. And – wow! – this so worked. She died young and was so loved that hundreds came: all shapes and sizes, different ethnicities, religions and cultures. We looked amazing.
‘My two sons and I carried her down the crematorium aisle in the cheapest, most basic coffin, the 18-year-old inconsolable; awful, but it was very important – we had looked after her. She and I had written a hilarious account of her life and I got a friend to read it. Another friend sang a song. Then we all bopped out, laughing and joking. Several hours later, we all met at my local and partied hard until the early hours still wearing our mad, colourful clothes. I love talking about that day.’
In England, there are currently more than half a million deaths a year. Thanks to our ageing population, this is projected to increase by 13 per cent by 2032. Space is at a premium everywhere. In China, the government has issued guidelines for burials that encourage cremation, scattering ashes at sea, and bodies being buried standing up.
‘In Japan, with its ageing population, there’s a huge market for lavish funeral spending, with customers shopping for death robes and trying out coffins,’ adds Cope. ‘Mexico’s Day of the Dead has become a massive cultural export in terms of making death seem a more positive part of the human cycle.’ And in Sweden, eight per cent of funerals involve no official ceremony, according to the Swedish Funeral Directors’ Association. ‘People just turn up, see someone get buried and do their own thing.’
Meanwhile in the UK, the pressure is on for funerals to be eco-friendly. ‘Half of British bodies undergo some form of embalming so they can be viewed by relatives,’ continues Cope. ‘Traditional embalmings demand nine litres of the poisonous carcinogen formaldehyde for each body.’ In the US, they’re said to get through 20 million litres annually.
In the UK, cremations are becoming more popular – they account for an estimated 78 per cent of all funerals in the British Isles – but this can also be environmentally unfriendly in terms of carbon emissions. Hence the growing movement for ‘flameless cremations’, also known as green cremations or liquid cremations, which involve a process called alkaline hydrolysis where hot water and potassium hydroxide or sodium hydroxide are used to break down the body tissues, leaving only the bones which are then turned into a fine white ‘ash’.
Elsewhere, companies such as Bios Urn and The Living Urn sell pots from which people can grow trees from the cremated remains of loved ones, from $129. In the US, three miles off the Florida coast, Neptune Memorial Reef is essentially a man-made underwater memorial park where ashes can be buried or scattered. Loved ones can also buy underwater plaques – and can dive to
visit the site. A woman I once interviewed had transformed her husband into a fetching pair of diamond earrings so she could carry him about with her. (This is via a months-long process during which at least 500g of human ashes can be turned into a gemstone and worn as jewellery.)
And yet, despite the many leaps forward, there remains one death taboo that still desperately requires a rebrand: talking about it.
A couple of weeks after my father died, I lay awake willing him to take my hand. Years on, I still summon him on railway platforms. Some bearded old man will walk towards me and I will think, ‘What if we were given another 24 hours?’ But no one wants to hear this. Just as no one wanted to hear that he had died, coming as it did just a year after my mother’s departure. Instead, there was incredulity that I could be putting people through this again. Following my mother’s funeral, I lost a month’s work because no one could bear to talk to me.
In a society that has rid itself of all other taboos, death remains the great unutterable, as if by giving it space we might bring it down upon us. As Hospice UK’S chief executive, Tracey Bleakley, observes, ‘Death really is the last taboo. Contemporary British society is an inverse of the Victorian age. We are prepared to be more open in talking about sex than we are about death and dying.’
Britain now boasts 180 death doulas (or death ‘midwives’ who provide practical and emotional support), which may help change things. Aly Dickinson, secretary of Living Well, Dying Well, the UK’S doula association, maintains, ‘An important part of our work is community engagement, such as running death cafés, where people gather to drink tea, eat cake and discuss death. The aim is normalising dying; supporting people to think differently about it.’
Semra Haksever, 42, worked with a death doula after she had a miscarriage: ‘I was in an utter state of shock, totally devastated. She was of great help. She performed a ritual, we spoke about the grieving process, and talked about funeral arrangements. It’s so comforting to have someone there.’
One location in which one might expect death to be openly discussed is in hospices: my mother spent her final two weeks in a hospice and every morning staff attempted to persuade patients to discuss their imminent demises. ‘Voice your worst fears,’ came the invitation. Then, once they had, ‘Does the idea of heaven help?’ Often, the answer was no, leaving the dying staring into the abyss.
‘Staff provide opportunities for discussion about death, but will also understand that some people may not wish to discuss their end of life,’ says Bleakley. ’Sometimes it may be important to repeat conversations. Although many hospices may have a Christian heritage, their support is for people of all faiths and none.’
I wonder about the none. By night, as I occupied a chair next to my mother’s bed, the woman next door would scream and curse at me. ‘It’s all right,’ I’d say, taking her hand. ‘I get nightmares too. It’s the drugs.’ ‘It’s not the drugs,’ she’d reply. ‘It’s the stuff they make us talk about.’ I will never forget her hunted expression, eyes pitted in black. Despite the hospice’s and my own best (worst) efforts, my mother refused to discuss her impending end.
Oncology nurse Janie Brown, author of forthcoming book Radical Acts of Love: How We Find Hope at the End of Life, says, ‘We have difficulty talking about death because most of us are afraid of our emotions, especially grief and fear. We live in a culture that assumes we can figure out and solve life’s problems using our minds, but death is a matter of the body and heart.’
But she adds, ‘Being open in our conversations about dying will inevitably bring us closer to those we love, with a real possibility for peace.’
It may be some time before the American term ‘death positive’ – a play on the phrase ‘body positive’ – or taking death from being taboo to talked about, less dreaded even, catches on this side of the Atlantic. However, forecaster Lucie Greene, founder of brand strategists Light Years, believes that a paradigm shift has already begun. ‘There’s almost a disruptive shift occurring where death, like ageing, is being repositioned. Ageing – grey hair, menopause – is being reframed as experience, wisdom and life journeys. Likewise, death is being viewed differently,’ she says. Take Wecroak, an app that reminds you that you’re going to die, in order to encourage you to live life to the full.
I get this, of course, and am at one with it – up to a point. The end of life can only be improved by curtailing obfuscation and hysteria. And, yet, the point of death, surely, is that it is not like any other experience, taboo or otherwise. Death is life’s sole non-negotiable, the one thing humankind cannot talk its way out of. Rethinking it can’t remake it. Death’s worst aspect will never be redeemable with good taste and trendy coffins… That said, not being fleeced for a ghastly one would certainly make the process more palatable.
‘There’s a shift occurring where death, like ageing, is being repositioned’