Tag: grief

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Finding Meaning in Loss: Lessons from a Funeral Celebrant

In a world obsessed with credentials, nobody ever asks me where I trained to write or speak. They just want to know if I can help them say goodbye.

My name is Julie. I used to be so proud of the letters after my name – I worked hard for them and I used to be employed because of them…

For most of my life, I was in education. Targets, exam results, league tables – those were supposed to be my measures of success. Achievement defined in numbers, not in kindness. Progress meant moving up a grade, not moving through love or change or loss and grief.

Now, part of my role is as a funeral celebrant. And I’ve learned that the most important lessons don’t come from classrooms – they come through love or change or loss and grief; from the solitary moments, when expressing thoughts and crafting words are all that’s left.

Nobody interviews me as such these days and no-one ever asks me where I trained to speak, or what qualifications I hold. They don’t care whether I can quote philosophy or recite poetry from memory. They just want to know if I can help them tell the story of someone they loved. If I can stand beside them, steady and sure, when the world feels like it’s come undone.

It’s a strange kind of privilege – to meet and care for people on what is often the hardest day of their lives. To listen as they stumble through memories, laughter, regret, pride. To shape those fragments into something that feels true.

Not perfect. Just true.

I’ve watched families arrive in silence and leave with a small smile because, somehow, in forty minutes or so of words and music, we have found an honest way to honour a whole life.

I’ve seen strangers turn to one another and say, “That was so them.” And for a heartbeat, grief softens. Nobody puts that in a data table. There’s no graph for comfort. No metric for meaning. But if there were, I think it would look like this: a daughter’s nod as her father’s favourite song plays. A friend’s tears turning into laughter at a well-told story. A look – the kind that says, Yes. You got it right.

We live in a world obsessed with credentials, certificates, and success stories. But when loss arrives – and it always does – it’s not prestige that holds us together. It’s presence. It’s gentleness. It’s the willingness to sit in the silence and not look away.

I sometimes think back to my teaching days. How so many of my colleagues told young people that failure was the opposite of achievement. How we rarely spoke of how much we learn through losing – a game, a chance, a person. But loss is a teacher too. Maybe the most profound one of all.

So here’s what I’ve come to believe:

It doesn’t matter if you have letters that follow your name. It matters that, when someone’s world falls apart, you have the courage to show up. To listen. To speak words that bring light into the darkness, even for a moment.

And if a young person ever tells you they want to do something “small” – to care, to comfort, to help others through difficult times – tell them that it’s not small at all. It is everything!

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Daily inspiration

Hanna Green

Hanna Green’s life was one that began and ended in perfect symmetry. Sixteen years in completion… and although it was a life brief in years, it was vast in love; immense in learning, in meaning, and in light.

How do you begin to honour such a rare, radiant soul on this, the seventeenth anniversary of her birth and the first of her death?

Perhaps, like many things too big for words, we can look to nature. Mother Earth speaks not with explanations but with metaphors. With her constant reminders. With her cycles and rhythms. Among Hanna’s great loves were watching night skies filled with stars, growing sunflowers, and loving delicate, endangered turtles. So, I’ll turn to them for their help…

One of the most powerful illustrations of both beginnings and endings is a supernova; that’s the word that describes the final, most brilliant act of a dying star. Stars are born when hydrogen atoms fuse in the cold of space, lighting up the darkness for billions of years. But when that process ends, when the star can no longer hold itself together, it explodes in a radiant burst of energy. In death, it outshines entire galaxies. And as it does so, it sends its building blocks of other beings and entities across the universe. These become planets. Oceans. Trees. People. They become you and me. So when a life ends – even when it’s far, far too soon for us to contemplate with any understanding – it does not vanish. The light continues. The elements remain, reshaped. Their love lives on in new forms, just like the stardust we’re made of.

There’s so much beyond our current comprehension about someone being born and dying on the same date. And yet, when you think about it, this cycle is everywhere…in the perfect symmetries of Gaia. The sun returns to the same place in the sky, tracing a perfect circle…a full revolution. Although this symmetry can feel both piercing and profound, there’s a completeness to it, even in the midst of tragedy.

And in that painful symmetry, nature speaks again. A sunflower, for example, turns its face toward the sun each day, tracking its light across the sky. Sunflowers symbolise adoration, loyalty, and the persistence of hope, even in the darkest of times. They remind us that grief is not an end to love, but another form of it. Even when our hearts are broken open, they too still turn instinctively toward the light. I see all of Hanna’s family doing that now. Perhaps that’s why sunflowers are so comforting in grief. Their golden faces look like miniature suns, radiant and resolute, even as summer fades. They bloom, they bow, they return again.

And then, there are the turtles. So small. So slow. So easily overlooked. And yet, they are ancient symbols of endurance, protection, and quiet resilience. Turtles carry their homes on their backs…a reminder that we all carry what is most precious with us. Something vulnerable, yes, but also strong enough to weather life’s storms. They emerge from their shells in their own time, in their own way. They know how to retreat, how to rest, how to begin again.

In grief, we often feel exposed and raw, as if we’ve lost our shell. But the turtle reminds us that healing does not need to be fast or loud.
It can be slow. It can be gentle. It can be deliberate. It can happen beneath the surface, as we learn again to move forward with care, with memory, with meaning. Hanna saw the magic in turtles. She loved them not just for their vulnerability, but for their quiet strength and maybe she saw something of herself in them. Delicate and determined; beautiful and rare.

So how do we remember someone who left this earth on the same day they arrived in it?

We remember them the way nature remembers – not just with fixed monuments – but with living, breathing symbols:
We plant sunflowers. Watch them grow tall and proud, even in rough soil. We gaze at the stars and whisper their name to the vastness. We honour their day not just in mourning, but in movement …through a walk along the sands, a swim in the sea, a dance beneath the moon. We light a candle, not just to grieve their absence but to acknowledge their continued presence in the way they changed us.

But, most importantly, we live. We become the stardust that shapes new worlds. We carry their memory not as a heavy burden, but as a spark that lights our own becoming.

The story of a life that begins and ends on the same date is not just a circle…
It’s a spiral.
Grief, love, memory…all of these things move us forward, never back, even as we return again and again to a particular day.

In time, this date might hurt a little less. It might even become a day of connection, of planting, of lighting, of remembering. It might become a day of sunflowers. A day of stargazing. A day for turtle-watching, or simply for sitting so still with anything that is precious to us.

Let the sunflowers bloom.
Let the stars remind you.
Let the light – Hanna’s and yours – keep flickering. Because what she loved most still surrounds us:
The stars: vast, bright, eternal.
The sunflowers: strong, loyal, reaching.
And the turtles: slow, gentle, enduring.

She is in all of them.
And in us.
And she will never fade.

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Daily inspiration

Embracing Grief: The Sacred Process of Healing

I often get asked how I manage to lead funeral services; people are keen to know how I cope with being surrounded by such grief.

There’s a simple answer to this – I am continually learning how to carry both love and loss together. And whilst the grief at most services is not my own, personal grief to bear, it is such a privilege to help carry this momentarily while others learn too.

I saw this post on social media today, attributed to Jim Carey…I thought it appropriate to share…

“Grief is not just an emotion – it’s an unraveling, a space where something once lived but is now gone. It carves through you, leaving a hollow ache where love once resided.

In the beginning, it feels unbearable, like a wound that will never close. But over time, the raw edges begin to mend. The pain softens, but the imprint remains – a quiet reminder of what once was. The truth is, you never truly “move on.” You move with it. The love you had does not disappear; it transforms. It lingers in the echoes of laughter, in the warmth of old memories, in the silent moments where you still reach for what is no longer there. And that’s okay.

Grief is not a burden to be hidden. It is not a weakness to be ashamed of. It is the deepest proof that love existed, that something beautiful once touched your life. So let yourself feel it. Let yourself mourn. Let yourself remember.

There is no timeline, no “right” way to grieve. Some days will be heavy, and some will feel lighter. Some moments will bring unexpected waves of sadness, while others will fill you with gratitude for the love you were lucky enough to experience.

Honour your grief, for it is sacred. It is a testament to the depth of your heart.

And in time, through the pain, you will find healing – not because you have forgotten, but because you have learned how to carry both love and loss together.”