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!
Latansani 