I was pleased to read the Co-Op’s annual report which shows that 70% of us now want ‘a celebration of life’ when it’s time to leave the stage, but what struck me was any explanation of how that came to be.

I think the missing word is ‘humanist’.

So I wrote this article for ‘The Scotsman’ but you can read the full text below.

New research from Co-Operative Funeralcare says that almost 70% of us want our funeral to be a celebration of life, rather than a time for reflection*. It’s not news to me, but it does show how attitudes to death have changed during the course of this century. 

Funeral rituals change very slowly, which is why in their top hats, frock coats and striped trousers, funeral directors still look like members of Queen Victoria’s household. What has changed though is the content of the funeral ceremony, as I discovered when I trained to be a humanist celebrant in 2005.

At the time, all I knew about funerals was that I didn’t like them. The few I’d attended had been doleful affairs, so I agreed with university lecturer Tony Walter, who in a paper called ‘Ritualising Death in a Consumer Society’ summed up the worst of them as, “20-minute jobs in the ‘crem’, where the duty clergyman is lucky to get the name right”.

My experience of funerals was that you arrived sad and left miserable, but the humanist attitude was different. Joyful not miserable, uplifting rather than depressing, humanist funerals were happy, not sad. Humanists didn’t mourn death, they celebrated life. That paradox appealed to me, and I soon discovered that I was not alone. 

Unlike marriage where records are kept, there are no statistics for funerals, but anecdotally, humanistic ceremonies now account for more than half the funerals in the UK. People choose them less because ‘they’re not religious’, more because they are focussed on the life lived, with all its joys and sorrows, triumphs and disasters. 

Tony Walter went on to become Emeritus Professor of Death Studies at the University of Bath, and he wrote a book called “Funerals And How To Improve Them” that still sits on my shelves. In it, he said, “a good funeral should be intensely and creatively personal; it should involve as many of the mourners as possible, cherish the individual who died and weave together the survivors in bonds of love.” 

I agree. In a funeral, we’re not talking about death; we’re talking about life and more importantly, we’re talking about the thing we most value, love. Just as there is no one way to express our love, there’s no one way to leave our life, and I hope Professor Walter would be as pleased as I am to see how funerals are continuing to change. Not only are families increasingly participating themselves, but inviting friends and colleagues to do so as well. 

Not all funerals can be celebrations of life though, and it would be wrong to insist that they should be. I once had to conduct a funeral for a young woman who had fallen to her death in the Alps, the morning after she had accepted her boyfriend’s proposal of marriage. Hers was an excruciatingly tragic death, but as the mourners filed past me afterwards, an elderly gentleman seized me by the shoulders and said, “thank you, thank you – that was so uplifting!” What he helped me realise was that the only way to come to terms with such an appalling situation is to talk about how we feel, openly and honestly, and that is why what celebrants do is such a challenge – and such a privilege.