Writer:
Over the last few years, developing my voice as a writer has become a significant feature of my creative practice. From sci-fi comedy, to autobiographical, to educational, with a strong focus on mortality and ritual life generally.
Modern Loving & Dying;
I was sat down, enjoying my morning coffee when I got a call on Good Friday 2020. I hear a voice on the other end of the line, thick with emotion, simply say my name, “Is it Promethea?” I replied. I hear a sob then I immediately take up the chorus.
Promethea was a black British Shorthair, a elderly feline lady that had had liver cancer for several years so, although her death wasn’t a surprise, it was still a shock nonetheless. In times like these there is often a tension between the pain of loss and the relief that the one we love is no longer suffering. If not channelled in a constructive way, this tension can grow into guilt and can have negative ramifications for years, stunting our healing and ongoing emotional development as human beings. This is one of the reasons why a good funeral is so important.
We were in Lockdown 1 at the time so the funeral ceremony would have to be done remotely, but since I have been an undertaker and funeral arranger for about 5 years I drew on that energy to apply to my dear cat’s farewell ritual. As there would only be three of us attending, we decided on a whatsapp video call the next day. The first thing I see is Orlando (my friend who made the call) reverently carrying a bundle of fabric into view and laying it out on his living room coffee table. I can’t hear him but can see his torso shake as he gingerly unfolds the material to reveal a skinny feline form of oily black fur. She looks so peaceful, just like she is sleeping, which was oddly reassuring; it's clear she isn’t in pain anymore. In this moment I realise that I will never hear her little breathy purrs again, never rub her warm belly or dangle a piece of string over her happy little face as she attacks it. In the last few years her girlish soprano mew had become more of a slightly cantankerous growl, her patchy, matted fur from the difficulties of grooming with arthritis, her little face in an ever present scowl. All these memories flood through me, and endeared her to me in that moment, for the millionth time. I talk about my favourite memories of her, the times (usually just after I’d washed my hair) she would creep along the back of the sofa and furiously sniff my hair and rub herself on my head, how the happiest I’d ever seen her was when she was chasing a moth around the flat, until finally she caught it and I watched her proudly swagger across the room with half a moth hanging out of her mouth.
The next day, I came to take her to the pet crematorium, a wonderful establishment that I have used several times. The people there are clearly all animal lovers and there isn’t a whiff of judgment at the cascades of tears as we say goodbye to our furry little friends. Orlando brings Promethea’s cat basket out onto the step outside his house, the same one that we brought her home from the cat sanctuary in all those years ago. His eyes rimmed with red and fresh tears gathering on his eyelashes.
Here we stand, a flight of stairs between us, no hugs, no hand holding, just almost two decades of unspoken memory shared with silent eye contact. Our faces, a mirror of each other's emotions, without the catharsis of contact. He puts the basket down, there is a slightly uncomfortable pause, “So what, do I just close the door and leave her here?” I shrug, thinking, “Yeah, I guess’ as the tears start to fall again. There are a few moments of awkward silence as he works himself up to say goodbye to her for the last time before her final journey…
It was in this moment that the full force of what my relationship with Orlando has evolved into hit me. We were a couple for 10 years and had a very amicable break up about 10 years ago. I have a complicated family, and he has been for many years the first person I go to for advice and solace. We are family and he is by far the person that I have spent the most time with in my adult life. When people develop this kind of closeness, the barrier of flesh doesn’t armour us from another’s pain, empathy is like a knife when it can’t be tempered through touch. But I could do our little girl this last thing, which he wasn’t able to do. When I returned with the ashes a few days later, we did an exchange, I handed over the tiny box containing little Promethea’s remains and he gave me an even tinier box containing a lock of her fur. Looking into that box, being able to touch it, having that physical connection to a lost, loved creature has helped my grieving more than any multimedia, video link funeral could. Grief is essentially a visceral experience and, I believe, is met best with visceral solutions and participatory practices. We need to feel that we have done right by our lost loved ones and in that, the doing is what is crucial. This is the essence of ritual.
Death Positivity;
My favourite subject is death. I think about my own death every day. Will it be sudden or lingering? How old will I be? I imagine my body in various stages of decomposition. I wonder what, if anything, comes after? Strange as it might seem, all this has not made me a misery, quite the opposite. Fundamentally, rather than making us more morbid, thinking about death and processing the idea of our own, and everyone we love, mortality is a benefit to human mental health. Conversely, the idiosyncratic manifestation of death denial in the west is profoundly damaging to our culture and our happiness. I also love death positivity because I get to be a do-gooder that strives to create a genuine, positive cultural shift for the betterment of the community, whilst still being my weird, gothy self.
The term death positivity can seem a little strange when we first hear it. My favourite response to being told I worked in death positivity was, ‘what, like a serial killer?’ The term was coined as a reference to ‘sex positivity’ and in that way it is taking a taboo subject and demistifying it by attacking it with open, honest and bold conversations and changes in behaviour. Perhaps ‘death acceptance’ might be a slightly easier to digest definition.
I fell into death positivity advocacy through my friend Tora who runs a progressive funeral directors called The Modern Funeral. I’d already spent years listening to her talk about her work and been blown away by the energy she brought it and her company’s ethos. She started the business because she had been to seven funerals before she went to a wedding. Most of these funerals were, as many are in this country, not fit for purpose and as an events organiser, she felt that she could probably do a much better job. One of the main problems with the conventional funeral model is that there was, until quite recently, very limited options. There was the religious option on one hand, where the celebrant would be a member of the clergy. The main alternative to this had mostly been the completely secular Humanist funeral. An issue with this is that, for most people the appropriate option is a combination of the two, so that not only the wishes of the deceased, but also of those left behind are served. For example, younger people often aren’t religious and those close to them organising the funeral don’t feel the need for a religious ceremony. However, that person's grandparents might not be comfortable unless there is some nod to faith, a prayer at least. They're not wrong for wanting this and it is the job of a good celebrant to make sure everyone feels a sense of catharsis and a functional goodbye, where they feel that they have ‘done right’ by the person left behind. She began her career in this field by trying to fill this gap.
I remember one funeral in particular that really stayed with me was a young friend of our’s who died of cancer at 26 years old. The fact that she was able to take care of all the arrangements through her own grief and as the celebrant had to speak publicly about the life of her friend, having organised the funeral with her in the last weeks of her life, blew me away. The resilience mixed with sensitivity needed to do this kind of work still impresses me. Working with her, we saw ourselves almost as secular priestesses, it is a vocation more than just a job. We see it as our responsibility for a short time, to metaphorically hold the hand of the bereaved through the process of saying goodbye, so that they can do what needs to be done in as healthy and meaningful a way as possible. The obvious results of this are incredibly satisfying, from the first meeting when two young women show up at someone's house to help them make the necessary arrangements in a kind and matter of fact way, you see the tension in people’s shoulders relax, because we give the confidence that it’s all going to be ok. We are often told that we are not what people expected of undertakers, which we see as a compliment. Our humanity shines through because we really do care, because that is what people need.
How It All Started
We were at a mutual friend's birthday party when she asked to get involved for the first time. She asked if I wanted to pallbear at her first burial the next day. An opportunity that I jumped at! A few days later she asked me to help out again and I saw and touched my first dead body, something I’d been curious about for some time. An odd experience, I braced myself for disgust, fear, sadness, but the reality of caring for the dead is an indescribable mixture of the pragmatic and the spiritual. The closest word I can think of to describe it is grace. It is a visceral feeling of witnessing something monumental having happened. Death. The big one. This is particularly palpable when a person has recently died. Touching a stiff, cold limb, but the torso is still warm. Death isn’t something that happens in an instant and there is a presence of some kind that lingers for the next few hours after the brain function ends and the heart stops beating. I have found myself unconsciously holding a dead person’s hand, stroking their hair, talking to them, it feels so fundamentally human to bestow what the rational mind says is not really a person any more, with personhood. It says something about who and what we are, not just as a society, but the kind of animal we are. The gift of the human imagination that means we can recognise the humanity of the person who used to be alive but now is not.
It now seems so strange to me that most people haven’t had contact with human beings after life has fled. A friend of mine died not long after I started working as an undertaker and the fact that every single person involved in organising his funeral loved him was a beautiful thing. We were able to have a chapel of rest as part of the funeral ceremony. Attendees that wanted to could view the body to have a personal goodbye with him and several of them who had never seen a dead body and were quite nervous made a point of saying how wonderful it was to have this last, personal goodbye. The effect of seeing a body is twofold. To be confronted with the obviousness of death, when you look at a body, what is lacking is so clear. Life, the thing that animates us and what that is becomes clearer than in any other instance. Also, that moment of connection goes far beyond looking at a closed coffin, or photograph, it helps solidify the goodbye that is the function of the funeral.
It’s Personal
My mother and I have had several conversations about what our plans for her funeral will be. If I am able (ie, as long as her death isn’t sudden) I hope to have her at home as she dies, and afterwards have a vigil before a speedy funeral. A body can easily be kept at home for a week as long as it is kept cool, this can be done as easily as rotating bags of frozen peas over the body. The thought of my mother in her own bed, surrounded by scented candles and wrapped in blankets and a snuggly dressing gown, rather than in a cold, dark fridge is of immense comfort to me. I want to be able to dress her and do her make up as she likes it and kiss her goodbye before she goes to be cremated. I would not need any more of a funeral than that. She has other wishes though, in accordance with her religious beliefs and knows that I will respect them. I am so grateful that we have spoken about this. In fact, if there is one thing I would want someone to take from reading this, it is to make sure that you speak to those closest to you about what you would like your funeral arrangements to be, because when a person has just died and those left behind to organise things are fraught with grief is the worst possible time to think about funeral logistics. I have seen this so many times in my professional life, this lack of clarity causes familial tension and can sometimes even result in falling outs. It often results in weeks-long delays for the funeral date as people are in denial and can’t yet bring themselves to make practical decisions that need arranging, oblivious to the reality that their loved one is slowly melting in a fridge somewhere, or being pumped full of toxic chemicals in the invasive process of embalming. Often, elderly people who feel the impending presence of their own demise are eager to have these conversations, so that they can have their own closure, but their loved ones resist, from the understandable pain of their culturally imposed death denial. For these reasons, it is so important to normalise these conversations.
“Celebration of Brighton” Ceremony at Hollingbury Golf Course Iron Age Fort:
We are standing on the earth of Brighton and that makes us Brightonians; on a structure built 1000’s of years ago by the inhabitants of this place; by us because they were Brightonians too, though they had another name for it. We are connected to the people who built this place by our position here, in space, even though we are separated by the unfathomable span of time. Please take a moment to think back from today to when you first came to Brighton, what choices brought you here? How has the city changed since then, how have you changed? We can even imagine further back, to imagine all the people who have stood on this spot since the structure here was built. Mods and Rockers, decadent Regency ladies and gentlemen, back to the medieval and Saxon fishing villages, through the Romans, finally to the Celts who built this castle.
What Brighton is and what it means is as different as the number of people who have called this place home through the ages. We’ve just listened to what it means to [client redacted]. To me, Brighton is the only place I have ever been where I feel normal, my only true home. For each of you it will be something unique to you. And yet the place is the same, we are watching the same Sun set into the west, we look out over these hills to the same sea, up at the same sky. And this binds us to each other. With this connection in mind, we now have a small choice to make to move on to the next point of this evening’s journey. The route you take is your own, choose which path you want to walk (point to paths) and please follow us.
Section from a goodbye ritual, in which a pregnant couple were moving to another country:
“As with N,S,E,W, there is past, present, future and potential of things not known. As the sun sinks below the horizon, sometimes the people that we love are parted from us, yet they remain alive and present in our memories. And although we often yearn for what we perceive as lost, the reality is that the only constant in this world is that things change and it is how we interact with these changes that affect how they affect us. Always remember, it's not what we lose, but what we have and have had that give life meaning. Nothing lasts forever, yet nothing ever truly ends. M***** and G**** have made the choice to leave our little town to begin a new phase, to create a new life with the new life they have created...and so, like the coming of dawn, a new cycle begins. Today is a simple punctuation, a ritual through which we undertake a formal journey with them and each other, a small copy of the journey that is each individual’s life. And so, let's move on...”