The Road That Led to My Latest Book:
More than five hundred funerals. I sometimes stop and think about that number, not because I have been counting them as some sort of achievement – far from it – but because behind that number are thousands of people – hundreds more husbands or wives, thousands of sons and daughters, siblings, friends and neighbours who have trusted me, often within minutes of meeting me, with some of the most personal stories they will ever tell.
Over the past six years I have sat in front rooms and around kitchen tables, in funeral directors’ offices and, sometimes, at the other end of a screen. I’ve drunk countless cups of tea, many of which have gone cold because we’ve become so engrossed in talking. I’ve watched families arrive for our meeting wondering how on earth they are going to talk about the person they have just lost, only to find that, half an hour later, we are laughing together about something they had completely forgotten until that moment.
Those conversations have taken me into almost every corner of life. I’ve heard about childhood adventures, first dates, long marriages, second marriages…fifth marriages and marriages that probably lasted rather longer than they should have done. I’ve heard about careers and hobbies, triumphs and disappointments, holidays that became family folklore and disasters that became even better stories with the passing of time. I’ve heard about great love, complicated love and relationships where love was undoubtedly present but wasn’t always particularly good at showing itself.
And I’ve learned that the things people remember most are very rarely the things you would find on a CV – or in those old-style traditional eulogies!
They remember Dad standing at the wooden doorway insisting he knew what he was doing, with screwdriver and bolt in hand, when everybody else knew perfectly well that he didn’t. They remember Mum’s handbag, which seemed to contain the solution to every conceivable emergency and always a spare fiver that could be ‘permanently’ loaned. They remember the chair nobody else was allowed to sit in, the terrible jokes, the Sunday routine, the favourite pint, the expression that was repeated so often that the whole family can still hear it being said. Those are the things I have come to appreciate, because somewhere amongst all those apparently insignificant details is the person we are trying to find.
And I suppose that is where The Little White Book of Funeral Celebrancy really began.
When I trained as a celebrant more than six years ago, I was incredibly fortunate to receive fantastic training. It gave me the foundations I needed and, importantly, the confidence to walk into that first family meeting and subsequently stand in front of a chapel full of people and conduct a funeral. I remain enormously grateful for it.
But with the benefit of experience, I’ve come to think of celebrant training rather like learning to drive. A good driving instructor teaches you how to control the car, understand the rules, negotiate the junctions and, eventually, do enough to convince an examiner that you can safely be allowed onto the road on your own.
Then you pass your test.
And that’s when you really start learning to drive.
I’ve been driving for nearly fifty years and I’m still learning. No instructor could possibly have prepared me for every road I would eventually travel, every appalling junction, every unexpected diversion, many a driver doing something utterly inexplicable in front of me or every occasion when I’ve found myself in the middle of mad congestion wondering how on earth I’m going to negotiate my way through it.
Celebrancy has been much the same.
My training got me onto the road. The families I’ve met since have taught me how to travel it.
You learn them when you sit with a family and discover that the person who has died wasn’t universally adored. You learn them when two people remember the same event completely differently. You learn them when somebody tells you something enormously important just as you’re putting your notebook away. You learn them when the funeral you carefully prepared suddenly needs to change because grief, families and life itself don’t always follow the script.
Most of all, you learn that people don’t come in templates, and therefore their funerals shouldn’t either.
I’ve never met two people who lived identical lives. Even two people born in the same town, who went to the same school, did the same job and lived to exactly the same age would leave behind completely different stories because it isn’t the dates that make us who we are. It’s what happened between them.
That, for me, is where funeral celebrancy becomes something much more than simply writing a competent eulogy and delivering it well.
Our job is to find the person behind the facts.
Sometimes that means asking another question when you think the family has finished answering the first one. Sometimes it means allowing a silence to sit for a few seconds rather than rushing to fill it. Sometimes it’s noticing the glance between a husband and daughter when somebody mentions a particular holiday and asking, “There’s a story there, isn’t there?” And suddenly there is.
I’ve become fascinated over the years by the sentence, “Oh, that’s probably not important…” Because it always is. In fact, it can be the most important thing I’m told.
It might be the ridiculous nickname nobody outside the family knew. The sweets permanently kept in the glovebox for the grandchildren. The fact that he polished his shoes every Sunday night whether they needed polishing or not. The way she always waved from the window until the car had disappeared from sight.
On paper, none of those things looks particularly significant. Put one of them into a funeral ceremony, though, and you can sometimes feel the room change. Someone smiles. Somebody else nods. There’s a little ripple of recognition because, for a moment, they aren’t listening to a celebrant describing somebody who has died.
They’re seeing them. And that matters enormously.
A funeral cannot remove grief and nor should we pretend that it can. But I do believe a good funeral can help. It can gather all those fragments of a life together and, for forty minutes or so, allow the people who loved someone to recognise that person again. It can make room for sadness without allowing sadness to become the only thing we remember. It can remind us that before there was a death, there was a life – and usually a wonderfully complicated, imperfect, funny, frustrating, ordinary and extraordinary one.
Over these years, I began accumulating lessons without really realising I was doing it. A question that opened up a wonderful conversation would stay with me. Something that didn’t work quite as well as I’d hoped would make me rethink how I approached the next family. An unusual situation would force me to find another way. Occasionally a family would say something that completely changed the way I thought about part of the ceremony.
Gradually, I started writing those things down and not because I had reached some magical number of funerals and decided I now knew everything there was to know about celebrancy. If anything, the opposite has happened. The more funerals I conduct, the more conscious I become of how much there is still to learn.
And that is really why I have written The Little White Book of Funeral Celebrancy.
It’s the book I think I would have liked beside me when I first set out. Not instead of training – good training is essential – but for the bit that comes afterwards, when you’re out there on your own and discover that real people, real families and real grief don’t always behave quite like the examples on a training course.
I’ve written it for new celebrants who are just setting out and perhaps experiencing that peculiar mixture of excitement and terror that comes when the telephone rings with the first funeral. I’ve written it for experienced celebrants too, because I hope those of us who have been doing this for years never reach the point where we decide we’ve perfected it. There is always another question we could ask, another way of looking at something and another opportunity to make a ceremony more personal.
But as I wrote, I realised the book was becoming something else as well.
It is also for the person who suddenly finds themselves being asked, “Would you like to say a few words at the funeral?” and goes home wondering how on earth you reduce someone you have loved for forty years to five minutes on a piece of paper. It is for families planning a funeral who want it to genuinely reflect the person who has died. And it is for those of us brave enough to think about our own funeral and perhaps make life a little easier for the people who will one day have to arrange it.
Because if somebody had to tell your story tomorrow, what would you want them to know? What would you want them to remember? Which stories would make the people who know you best smile before the storyteller had even reached the punchline? What music would take them instantly back to a particular time and place? What are the peculiar little things you do now that drive everybody mad but which, one day, they might give anything to experience just once more?
Those are the questions at the heart of this book because, increasingly, I think they are at the heart of what I do.
So The Little White Book of Funeral Celebrancy isn’t my attempt to write the rule book of celebrancy. There are already enough rules in life, and funerals have spent quite long enough being constrained by what somebody somewhere decided we were “supposed” to do.
Instead, think of it as me pulling up another chair at that kitchen table. I’ve made the tea. It will probably go cold.
And I’d like to share some of the things all of these families have taught me about telling someone’s story, about making a funeral genuinely personal and about creating ceremonies that don’t simply mark a death but honour the life that came before it.