Of course I’ve planned my own funeral! We all must learn to talk about death
How an organiser of glittering events turned her talents to humanist farewells that celebrate life
SUSAN Mathieson has her funeral all planned out. There will be a cremation, music, and little flowers in pots on top of the coffin for people to take away and plant. Most of all, she is determined it will not be a mournful occasion.
‘I would love people to walk away with a smile on their faces and just think good memories,’ she says. ‘I don’t want my funeral to be a sad day.’
Mathieson is in the business of making the hardest day of people’s lives that little bit easier. As a humanist funeral celebrant, her job is to guide grieving relatives through the process of reflecting on the life of their loved one, and to create the sort of funeral they would truly have wanted.
These days, she’s much in demand. While humanist weddings in Scotland are now more popular than those conducted by the Church of Scotland, funerals are catching up as the appetite for traditional ceremonies wanes. So much so, it is estimated that between a third and half of all funerals now carried out in Scotland are humanist in nature.
A rising number of celebrities have opted for humanist funerals in recent years, including Ronnie Barker, Bob Monkhouse, Keith Floyd and comedian Linda Smith, a former president of the British Humanist Association. Yet even with their increasing popularity, there is some confusion as to what, exactly, a humanist funeral involves.
‘I think the difference is that the entire service is about the person,’ says Mathieson. ‘It is wonderful if people want to have a religious funeral and I’m not against anyone doing that at all, but within a religious funeral the timing is still around 30 minutes and in that time you have three hymns, a prayer and a reading, so the actual time involved in talking about the person and their life is shorter.
‘A humanist funeral would almost remind you more of a memorial service rather than a funeral itself. It’s very much speaking about the person, and giving other people the chance to come up and speak about them as well.’
A statuesque blonde businesswoman, 57-year-old Mathieson may seem an unlikely candidate for a humanist celebrant. Based in Edinburgh, she runs her own highly successful events firm, Event Consultants Scotland, which organises awards ceremonies and black tie events across the country.
She has what has been described as the ‘biggest little black book of contacts known to man or woman’, and counts Kirsty Wark as a friend.
BUT with a husband who has been a humanist celebrant for 12 years – the couple were themselves married in a humanist wedding ceremony in 2014 – she has long had an interest in the movement. Attending her first humanist funeral in 2011 was a revelation.
‘It was for a girl who was 26 and I was going into it thinking it was going to be absolutely awful, and in fact it wasn’t. I walked out thinking “Wow. What an amazing life she had in those 26 years.” Without dismissing how tragic it was, given she died so young, the funeral was all about her. Unfortunately, I’ve been to other funerals where I’ve walked away thinking that it wasn’t about the person who died at all.’
Inspired, and watching her husband Tim conducting funerals on a regular basis, she decided to give it a go herself. She re-jigged her working life, told her amazed family (she has two grown-up daughters), and started training.
She said: ‘I went in completely accepting that I may fail. But the more I got into it, the more I discovered it was something I could do.’
Following her training, the first funeral Mathieson officiated was for Jessie, a 94year-old lady who had spent the final 16 years of her life in a residential care home. In all that time, not one family member had visited her.
‘Being such a family person myself, I found that almost unbelievable. Yet when I got to the care home, not knowing if I would find anyone who could tell me anything about her, I found that all of the carers in the home had written stories down about her.
‘They told funny stories about what a character she was, and I got a real sense of who this person had been.’
Mathieson went home and started compiling the story of Jessie’s life, putting together the pieces of her personality from the tales shared by her carers.
‘When the funeral service took place, at the opposite end of town from the care home, eight members of staff, some on their day off, travelled to be there,’ she says.
‘She actually did have a family, and it was those people who had cared for her. And because of them, I was able to create a lovely service. Seeing the people in the front laughing and crying as I told stories about her was so rewarding.’
Since then, Mathieson has conducted more than 20 funerals, all different, some harder than others.
AT one, a funeral for a stillborn baby, she opened the ceremony by telling those gathered that she had brought her mother’s handkerchief along with her.
‘I said “today, I think we can all cry”, which was just an acknowledgement of the emotion of the situation.’ She is still in touch with the family.
At another, a grieving son told her he would be too upset to speak at his father’s funeral, only to phone her at home and ask if he could sing instead.
‘He was so emotional during the ceremony, but when he stood up he sang absolutely perfectly, because that was the way he could express himself.’
The informality of a humanist funeral is often what attracts people. There will be chosen secular music – anything goes from hard rock to Frank Sinatra – poems and reminiscences from friends and family, photo montages, and sometimes, some rather frank admissions.
‘In one service I made reference to a person’s bad points, which were around addiction, and there was actually a bit of laughter from all the people who’d cared for this person that
yes, I was talking about how he could be a bit of a devil.’
It is all a long way from the dearly beloved, buttoned up Presbyterian funerals that most Scots grew up with. Mathieson remembers that even at her own mother’s funeral, the minister didn’t make any reference to who she was, who she’d been married to or who her children were. She feels that as a nation, we are not good at talking about death.
‘I have a friend who has tragically lost both children and he still has people three years later who will cross the street to avoid him.
‘Yet years ago when I was in New Zealand I stayed with a family whose brother had been killed in an accident and people did the opposite – they walked across the road to speak about it.
‘I learnt from a young age how important it is to go out of your way to speak to someone who is grieving. Don’t avoid them or be scared about writing to somebody whose husband has died – they just want to hear from your heart what you think. But we don’t talk openly about death. I would love to think that the younger generation will be far better about talking about it than we were.’
Things are starting to change. One organisation, Good Life, Good Death, Good Grief, organised by the Scottish Partnership for Palliative Care, campaigns to raise awareness around ways of dealing with death and bereavement and even runs an annual Death Awareness Week with conferences, exhibitions and workshops.
One of the most unusual encounters Mathieson has had was writing a funeral for a man while he was still alive. The man was in a hospice when he contacted her, and having never been married and with no children, wanted a say in his own funeral ceremony.
‘It was a real privilege to spend time with somebody beforehand and write it and get approval from them,’ she says.
‘He was an academic but not many people knew that he’d also been a great hockey player when he was younger, that he loved Scottish country dancing, and that he also loved heavy rock music.’
WHEN it came to the funeral she explained that he had written his own service and read out a letter he had written. She adds: ‘When a song by the band Madness started playing, people were looking around as if to say “who chose this music?”
‘It was wonderful to tell everyone, once it had finished, that it had been him. The place erupted in laughter, as it was something that they didn’t know about him.’
While Mathieson doesn’t advocate that we should all speak to a celebrant before our deaths (although her husband has encountered a few who, having reached a certain age, have chosen to), she does think we should have more conversations with loved ones.
‘I do think more of us should be talking to our families about death. We should be making it something that’s discussed around the table,’ she says.
‘I’m not asking people to talk about it all the time, but when I do meet a family and somebody’s talked about it and said what they want, it is so much easier for the family. When somebody hasn’t said anything, there’s a big responsibility to try and get it right.’
Hence the reason she has spoken to her own family.
‘My family and my husband know approximately what I’d like,’ she says. ‘They know that I’m going to be cremated, that my ashes are going to be scattered, that my favourite place is Elie in Fife. They know I don’t want a headstone. I want my daughters at my funeral not to be sad. I want them to remember the great times.’
Dealing with grieving families on a regular basis, however, she knows that might not be easy.
‘I know how hard that is. I know it’s a terrible time for people. But I remember that first humanist funeral I went to for the 26-yearold, where we heard a story about how as a little girl she was about to swim a breadth of the swimming pool and Mum was at one side of the swimming pool and Dad was at the other and before they knew it she’d run to the top of the pool and swum a whole length.
‘That has stayed with me. I still have that happy little memory of her. That’s what I hope people can always take away from a humanist funeral.’