A good way to go: the funeral business joins the 21st century
Saying a final goodbye to a loved one can now be a life-affirming experience. Boudicca Fox-Leonard meets the people bringing death out of the shadows
When Fran Hall buried her husband in November last year, she arrived at the funeral on the back of a motorcycle hearse. It’s what he had requested. Steve Meade, a former police sergeant who worked training police drivers and cyclists, died of Covid, but had been terminally ill with cancer, meaning that he and his wife had talked about what he might like to happen after he had gone. It was still a shock to lose him so soon, but organising his funeral was a way for Hall to celebrate the person he was. “I’ve never heard so much swearing in a service,” she says. “But that was Steve!”
Covid meant only a fraction of the mourners who would have been there could attend, so Hall had the funeral recorded and shared. He had also chosen to have a natural burial in a woodland, with mourners present helping to back-fill the grave. A basket of messages was buried with him. “Despite Covid I think we still managed to achieve what I needed that funeral to
do, which was to honour his memory and place him where he is now, emotionally and physically,” says Hall, 61.
She visits the woodland most weekends, taking her grandchildren and the dogs. She says it’s easier to explain death to the children in a wood where the cycle of life is all around them. As the director of not-for-profit advisory service the Good Funeral Guide, she has noticed that Covid has not just imposed rules and restrictions on how we say goodbye, it has forced us to think again about the rituals we assume we have to follow. An easing of traditions means that even Prince Philip felt free to choose a modified Land Rover of his own design to carry his coffin through the grounds of Windsor Castle.
The pandemic has made us all recognise our own mortality, but even before it, the conversation around death and dying had started to move out of the shadows.
When comedian Cariad Lloyd started her podcast Griefcast in 2016, people frequently screwed up their faces and told her that they didn’t really want to think about it. Now she has made 136 episodes, won multiple awards, and has no shortage of high-profile guests wanting to talk to her about their own bereavements.
“We have a joke on the show that it’s a club you don’t want to join – but you’re in the club,” Lloyd tells me. “I’ve noticed a lot more members and a lot more people tweeting.”
She thinks the mental health revolution laid the foundations for bereavement going mainstream. Not only has publishing embraced the concept of good grief, with books on the subject by the likes of psychotherapist Julia Samuel and the Reverend Richard Coles, but young people are also holding frank discussions on social media platforms including Instagram and Tik Tok, under names such as @GoodnessGraciousGrief and @LifeDeathWhatever.
THE FEMALE TOUCH
When Hall became a funeral director more than 20 years ago she was the only woman conducting funerals in Buckinghamshire, despite this being, historically, women’s work.
“It was women who used to lay out bodies and worked with the dead,” says Hall. “Then everything changed and dead people became invisible because deaths happen in hospitals, and there was this nice undertaker that would take care of everything for you. Families became passively, rather than actively, involved.”
Blonde and youthful, Louise Winter and Anna Lyons don’t fit the image of typical death industry employees. Which is precisely the point. Winter, a funeral director, and Lyons, an end-oflife doula, bonded on Twitter over their similarities. They started Life, Death, Whatever, an initiative to redesign the dialogue around death and dying, and have just published a book on the subject, We All Know How This Ends.
They feel a lot of our current culture isn’t fit for purpose when it comes to talking about death. And when it comes to funerals, their approach is less about the hardware than the software. They want people to stop concentrating on Victorian tradition and start employing some emotional intelligence. “It’s about coming together, as family, friends and community, to acknowledge who that person was to us and what their loss is going to mean to us moving forwards,” says Winter over Zoom.
She initially became a funeral celebrant after finding herself fascinated by how such an important occasion was so rarely talked about. Now 34, she runs the award-winning London funeral directors Poetic Endings. “Often by the time the person came to me when I was a celebrant it was just too late: the 20-minute slot at the crem had already been booked. The funeral directors were more interested in the shiny cars and the top hats. What we really needed to do was not possible because it didn’t fit into the funeral directors’ ideas.
“Out of complete despair I decided to become one myself, to start addressing the issues I was experiencing.”
Similarly, Poppy Mardall, a former deputy director at auction house Sotheby’s, started Poppy’s Funerals nine years ago after her father was diagnosed with cancer. Rather than offering gold, silver and bronze packages, “where what differentiates them is how many limousines there are or whether there are two floral tributes or three”, her intention was to approach funerals from the angle of “What do the bereaved need?”
“Obviously the stuff we connect people with – the vehicles and the coffins – are beautiful, nice things,” says Mardall. “But we see our skill much more in our service and guiding people through this experience.”
‘You can decorate a lower-priced coffin. It’s about what you put into a ceremony’
FRAN HALL, DIRECTOR, GOOD FUNERAL GUIDE
‘Many funeral directors serve the same thing. But no two people are the same’
OLIVER PEYTON, FOUNDER, EXIT HERE
‘We see our skill as much more about guiding people through this experience’ POPPY MARDALL, FOUNDER, POPPY’S FUNERALS
‘One lady realised her funeral had nothing to do with her. She let go completely’
LOUISE WINTER, FOUNDER, POETIC ENDINGS
As Peyton says: “There isn’t only one type of restaurant, is there? By and large all funeral directors serve the same thing. But no two people are the same. And no two funerals are either.”
The clean lines and art-inspired aesthetic of his funeral parlour might look achingly hip, but he insists it isn’t style over content. “That’s just because I didn’t want it to be ugly,” he laughs. “What we do is really beautiful. We take care of people. We’re good at what we do and I’m proud of it.”
PLAY WITH THE TRADITIONS
Until recently most funerals were a binary choice between traditional at one end and hippie crystal burials at the other. Mardall hates that idea. “It doesn’t respect anyone,” she says.
She finds that families are more likely to choose the bits of tradition they want and then add some personal touches: a black hearse, but a willow coffin with a floral arrangement made up of vegetables from the person’s allotment.
Just as an atheist can enjoy Christmas carols, there are parts of Christian tradition that might feel appropriate despite the deceased not having been particularly religious. “People are complex mixtures,” says Mardall.
Ceremonies held in venues such as countryside barns, photo slide shows during the service, filming of the event, and even fizz and hot chocolate for mourners at the graveside – people are feeling bolder about stepping away from Victorian funeral rites towards something more celebratory.
Mardall had a client recently who had chosen to have a carriage drawn by white horses wearing unicorn horns, with ribbons in their hair. “We obviously loved that. Those moments of what these people are expressing about themselves, they’re wonderful.”
And the bereaved should not fear asking to be more involved if they would like to be. “Most funeral directors send pallbearers, but if you ask to carry the coffin they are definitely not going to stop you,” says Mardall.
“You don’t have to carry the coffin at shoulder height. And a huge number of people are up for carrying the coffin when they know you don’t have to march in time. It’s not a show; it’s an opportunity for participation, which you do not need to take.”
MONEY TALKS
Conversation is key for seeing through the opaque business of organising a funeral, but there is no greater taboo than talking about money. This is something that unscrupulous funeral directors have taken advantage of in the past. In 2020 the Competition and Markets Authority investigated the funeral industry after reports of high-pressure tactics being applied to the bereaved.
It doesn’t help there is an idea that the more money you spend, the more respectful you are being, says Lyons: the notion that “your loved one warrants being in a mahogany silk-lined coffin”.
A younger generation, used to online reviews and seeing costs up front on websites, are helping to make the conversation more frank, often leading meetings with funeral directors on behalf of older family members.
The average for cremation fees is around £700-£800. Burial is generally more expensive. Most London cemeteries will be £3,000-£6,000 for a burial plot. London natural burial fees start from about £2,000. Outside of London, £500-£600 may be possible for the burial plot, but this is very much on the cheap side, says Mardall.
It is important to remember the funeral director’s costs and other disbursements, which make the national average for a basic funeral £4,184 (£3,885 for a funeral involving a cremation and £5,033 for one involving a burial). The London average is £5,235.
Hall has suggestions for keeping costs down, including asking yourself how many cars you really need: “Why do people get driven in limousines?”
She also points out that a lowerpriced coffin allows you to be creative: you can decorate it with paint, flowers, and stick things on it. “It’s about what you put into the ceremony, I think.”
Mardall even helped someone be buried in their back garden in London. “That’s legal, and they didn’t have to pay for a grave. There are so many ways to help keep things affordable.”
TO PLAN OR NOT TO PLAN?
It is the kind of conversation that seems fun when you are 13 and becomes progressively less so as death gets more tangible, but Peyton believes coming to an acceptance of your own mortality can be liberating. He also points out that not leaving behind your funeral wishes is “rude” because grieving relatives are then left to figure out what you wanted.
Winter, though, cautions against planning the ceremony down to the last detail. Instead, she says it should be about helping the people who are left behind to figure out how to live their lives without that person. “And if we overly plan the funeral to every detail, down to what canapes are being served, it robs the people who are still alive of doing something that honours the person who died,” she says.
For her, the best kind of funeral plans are loose frameworks that give an idea of what you would like to happen, but still leave plenty of room for the people who are going to be at the funeral to do what they need to do. “The best situation I had was an older lady who started planning her funeral and the more she thought about it, the more she realised it had nothing to do with her,” says Winter. “In the end her funeral plan simply said: ‘In the event of my death I give you permission to do what you want or need to do.’ It took a lot of emotional work for her to get to the point where she let go of it completely.”
THE FUNERAL DOESN’T HAVE TO BE THE BIG DAY
When my own father died five years ago my mother had some pretty bold ideas – or so I thought at the time – about what we should do. There was no celebrant or religious figure (a close friend introduced each speaker), and, to my horror, the funeral was filmed. I have yet to watch the video, but now the idea doesn’t seem quite so strange.
Mum also arranged for Dad to be brought to the family home the night before the funeral, where close family drank champagne, and a tipsy aunt even leant, arms folded, on the coffin nattering away. My father would have seen the funny side.
It turned out to be a more enjoyable, freeing, occasion for me than the funeral and wake the next day, where, as the daughter of the deceased, I felt like I was on stage for three hours.
Mardall agrees. She often arranges for family to have time with their loved one before the funeral. “The pomp on the day is important, but it is not always the most important bit for people navigating their grieving,” she says. “That performative role can make you feel slightly sick: meeting other people’s needs while you don’t get to think about your own.”
The smaller funerals held because of Covid restrictions have temporarily removed some of that pressure. Peyton has found many of them to be more moving as a result. “When families say goodbye and they do it just themselves without 500 people, or without clergy, humanists or celebrants, I always find that the most touching,” he says. “You create your own goodbye. You’re not bound by conventions; not bound by someone outside curating it for you. It’s just you and your family doing whatever you want.”
In spite of a difficult first year in the business, he has no regrets. “This is the best thing I’ve ever done. The job satisfaction is off the radar. It’s just changed me completely as a person.”