You Gotta Have Faith.

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 cremations end eventually in the crematorium, and all burials end in a grave, whether it is in a field, a natural burial ground, or a town cemetery, but the route we take there can be long and circuitous, and in taking these wandering paths, the journey is the destination, walking the path becomes the ceremony.

None of this makes the job any easier, it elongates a process which most funeral directors try to keep a simple and uncluttered as possible, often more for their convenience than for the emotional benefit for the family.

A part of me understands this, even yearns for it, when I am part way through helping a family construct a particularly ambitious ceremony. Why don’t I just lead these people in shock down the path of least resistance, narrow the choices they have down to the three songs that might play, the font of the order of service, the opulence of the coffin they can choose? Why do I agree to these logistical nightmares, with their tiny margins for error and the colossal emotional consequences that would result if they go wrong?

But as the late, great, much lamented George Michael said, sometimes, you gotta have faith. And so a couple of weekends ago, I found myself agreeing to a ceremony which seemed madly ambitious, with so many things that could go wrong, mainly around the different stages involved, and the possibility of anyone of them being scuppered by unpredictable uncontrollable events like excessive holiday traffic, the weather, and sheer physical exhaustion.

The funeral was for an artist, and ultimately was to be a cremation, but it was where the family wanted to hold most of the service that was the big headache, on top of some of England’s highest cliffs, where Exmoor plunged into the Bristol Channel.

The artists family decorated her cardboard coffin with some beautiful cloth with some of her original silk screen prints on, but even a cardboard coffin is a weight with a body in it.

As I’m sure you all know by now we don’t employ bearers, so the job of carrying her from sea level to the top of the cliffs was up to the mourners.

Everyone is surprised by the weight of a coffin and a body, but not everyone has to carry them a mile and a half up a cliff, but a challenge like this is like getting a tattoo; as soon as you have started there is no turning back.

And so it was that this deeply practical thing, this bearing of the body of a woman who had died to her favourite place on earth to properly mourn her became a hard and loving pilgrimage.

As we started to climb, stopping to rest and change bearers, it started to feel like Werner Herzog’s film Fitzcorraldo, in which a paddle steamer is dragged up through a jungle and over a mountain, or the funeral for a Tibetan Lama in a high Himalayan monastery.

We were climbing the Southwest Coast Path, so would meet hikers every so often. Their faces were a mixture of awe, respect and disbelief.

By the time we reached the high plateau, with Wales and Lundy clearly visible on the horizon, and falcons screaming over our heads, we had become a temporary community, bonded by the visceral physicality of our efforts.

Everyone who carried her had all gone through moments when the reality of what they were carrying on their aching shoulders broke through, when the emotional pain had met the physical pain, and somehow found some solace in the balance.

We sat around her on the cliff top for over an hour while we shared reminiscences, and eating
sandwiches.

For the final poem, we all stood beside her and gazed out to see, doing it for her, one last time. Our descent was considerably easy, as was the journey to the crematorium where we had what anyone else would consider to be a perfectly fulfilling and appropriate ceremony.

But they hadn’t carried her up a mountain, shoulder to shoulder, tears of sweat and tears of
emotion running down their faces.

Find out more about The Green Funeral Company