How funerals have been transformed from sad affairs into joyful celebrations of life

Funerals should be about life and love, more than death (Picture: Ian Forsyth/Getty Images) | Getty Images

New research from Co-Operative Funeralcare found almost 70 per cent 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 this century. 

Funeral rituals change 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 is the content of the ceremony, as I discovered when training to be a humanist celebrant in 2005.

All I knew about funerals then 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 appealed to me, and I soon discovered I wasn’t alone. 

Triumphs and disasters

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

Tony Walter, emeritus professor of death studies at the University of Bath, wrote a book called Funerals And How To Improve Them. 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. 

A tragic death

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.

Tim Maguire is a humanist celebrant with Celebrate People and the honorary humanist chaplain to the University of Edinburgh and Napier University