Funerals; Looking for permission

In November I started to write a diary of sorts but it's taken until now to decide to publish it. I have written another entry already, and will add it to this site in a couple of day's time. I wonder whether anyone but my Mum will read it..................

Today is 3^rd November, a Monday, and 35 years since the death of my Dad. My employment for the last year finished on Friday so today I'm unemployed. Or am I in that clicheed place “Between jobs” although the jobs I hope for are self – employed, directing people through ceremonial rites of passage; baby naming, marriage or funeral.

I have decided to use the luxury of this unstructured time to read about and reflect upon what I can bring to those who seek my help in the final gift they can give their departed, a fitting funeral. A funeral director told me “We would find this job very hard without our faith”. So what right have I to approach it merely as a profession. If – when – I'm given the privilege to conduct a funeral ceremony for a bereaved family which does not have a religion to lean on, I want to have more substance than purely a “way with words”. It's for this reason that I intend not only to read about the subject of death and dying, but to record my thoughts as I go to try and make sense of it all for myself and therefore be in a better position to relate to those who ask me to travel a small part of their journey with them.

This morning I started to read the collection of essays “Writing on Death”, collected by Ru Callender. The first, by Emma George, is written a year after the death of her mother. She had already collaborated with the author on a book about funerals but found herself completely adrift on the death of her own mother. She writes a passage that was said to her by Thomas Lynch, the American undertaker and poet;

We deal with death, the idea of the thing by dealing with our dead, the thing itself. So whatever we do to accompany our dead to whatever the next thing is, the further shore, or the heaven, the Valhalla, or the void, it's our obligation, the living, to take them there, at least to the edge of it, whether the edge is a fire or a tomb. We should go there with them and say, “Now you go there, I go back to life”, that's a deeply human thing.

This is a good starting point on why I want to do this; to help people give their dead permission to leave them, and themselves permission to move on.