I have been standing over the bodies of the dead to tell the story of their lives for twenty years now. It is an incredible honour, and fraught with risk. More often than not, I never met these people, yet I take it upon myself to try and offer words of comfort and explanation as […]
Part of our twenty year mission to deconstruct the bland funeral packages that the industry has forced us all into, is to literally deconstruct the funeral itself, to take the ceremonies out of the established venues that we have all thought of as being essential to their smooth running, and letting them fly free. All […]
As undertakers for nearly eighteen years, and sextons for four, (someone who manages a burial ground) we are familiar with soil. It stains our lowering straps and our hands. The red clay of Torquay, the deep rich loam of the far West of Cornwall, the shilletty, unyielding earth of our own ground at Sharpham Meadow, […]
Unintentionally, but I do. Along with their names and their stories and keepsakes from their funerals. It is part of the payment and the toll of the job, a gift and a burden. I look at the faces of friends and fellow townsmen and women, and the faces of their mothers and fathers, their husbands […]
“Can I call you back when I’ve stopped crying?” So starts another working week. Of course, I am one of the few people who are okay talking to crying people on the phone, but I get what she meant. It wasn’t my feelings she was sparing, she needed to tend to her own. Her brother […]
The epidemic that we have been living through these past two years seems to be slowing down, although professional opinion from epidemiologists from the beginning always was that this was going to take at least three years to fully play out. Down here in Devon we were spared the worst of it in the first […]