THINGS are about to get strange for me right now, as my book will have, by the time this column is published, be well and truly launched and out there, warts, boasts, confessions, angry denunciations and descriptions of grief and courage, everything that form the basis of “What Remains? Life, death and the human art of undertaking.” Much of the tone of what I have written, even some of the actual stories will be familiar to the readers of this column, but what won’t be is the story of what actually led me to becoming a radical undertaker, certainly not in the angry detail with which I have documented it. Reactions to the book so far have talked about its brave raw honesty, but at this point of human history, when you are given a chance to say something out loud to the public, it seems a terrible betrayal not to be as truthful as one can, however that truth may rattle some establishment cages. I hope. And I must take this opportunity to publicly thank all the families, many of whom live amongst us, who have been generous enough to allow me to tell the stories of their losses, just as they were generous enough to allow myself and Claire into their moments of terrible intimate suffering. They have inspired me for the last 23 years, and everything about the way we grew and shaped our practice has been taught to us by the families we have helped. They have shaped me, probably in ways they can’t imagine. So begins a round of appearances at bookshops around the country, small book festivals, lots of podcasts, because as you can imagine, death is a topic well covered through the medium of podcasts. I have even done my first festival appearance followed by a session signing books, truly a surreal dream come true for someone who always wanted to be a writer. But I remain an undertaker who writes, not a writer who undertakes, and I will be continuing to serve my community as best I can in the way I do, by balancing these two things perfectly, with the help of my colleague Claire Burton. One vocation feeds the other of course, without my undertaking, without my childhood trauma, I would not have had such a strange life which stumbled me into my vocation and given me such a rewarding job. My door is open to you all. So look out for local appearances around the West Country if you would like to come and hear me read or be interviewed then I am due to speak at Dartington at some point, but of course what I would really like you to do is buy a copy, either direct from my most excellent publishers Chelsea Green, or your local bookshop including the fabulous Dartington bookshop on the High Street, genuinely one of the best bookshops I have been into in years. Of course it is available from bigger chains, including Waterstones and the dreaded Mr Bezos online Department store, (you just can’t escape his retail gravitational pull) and my desire for you to buy my book is not based on a hunger for riches; nobody gets a decent income from writing books except J K Rowling and Dan Brown, but I really want you to hear what I have to say. And as you probably know by now, I do have a fair bit to say. “What Remains? Life, death and the human art of undertaking.” Is available from www.chelseagreen. com and all good bookshops and probably a couple of crap ones too. l Visit www.thegreenfuneralcompany. co.uk or email enquiry@ thegreenfuneralcompany.co.uk or call 07759 890 639.

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BY the time this is printed, the third Toxteth Day of the Dead will have passed, the 23rd of November, when we lay the bricks of those who have been MuMufied this year.
I can now safely reveal that this, the third Toxteth Day of the Dead was not held as the others were, in Toxteth Liverpool as you might expect, but at Snake Pass in the Pennines, one of the highest points in the country, and also almost the geographical centre of the country.
Confusing perhaps, but not when you are in an artistic partnership with Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty, those two renegade artists who caused so much outrage when they retired from the music business at the height of their success as the band the KLF, and marked that retirement by deleting their musical back catalogue and burning one million pounds.
That was all a long time ago, and something both of them would rather not talk about, not least because the destruction of that money in the past sometimes returns to haunts their present, but also because they ceaselessly move forward with their art.
Which is why, 23 years after the burning, they approached myself and my then wife and undertaking partner Claire to see whether we would form a hybrid of an art project, a company, and a monument for national mourning.
The idea is simple, if mad. We are building a pyramid of bricks, 23ft high, and each brick contains a portion of somebody’s cremated bones. The pyramid will require over 34,000 bricks to complete, and will not be done in our lifetimes. The pyramid hopefully will be settled in Toxteth, but at the moment, with around 40 bricks laid, it is still somewhat mobile, hence our brick laying ceremony taking place at Snake Pass.
The Toxteth Day of the Dead has become a state of mind, rather than a geographical place.
Bill and Jimmy have long been obsessed with pyramids, but this is no frivolous endeavour; the first brick laid was Jimmy’s brother, a Totnes man. This is for real.
It is an attempt to start a ritual ball rolling that has no specific religious traditions associated with it, but can instead gather meaning as it grows upwards, each brick a life, each life a treasure to the world.
And it has started to grow some ritual skin. It has been both playful, creative, silly, and incredibly moving and solemn. The family of each person who is “MuMufied”, the name we have given the process of becoming a boney brick attends, and for some of them, it is more powerful that the original funeral itself. People crave meaning, and most funerals have so little meaning that they leave you feeling empty and cheated, so revisiting their grief as part of a slowly growing semi anonymous monument complete with an ever evolving carnival of the dead is a chance to heal some long festering wounds.
We created a similar but also very different ceremony when we ran Sharpham Meadow Natural Burial Ground for the Sharpham Trust, around the fire pit which we dug and which has become the ritual heart of the ground.
We invited the families of everyone buried there on All Souls Day, the 2nd of November, and lit an enormous fire, and read out the names of all who lay there, and invited the families to throw a pine cone in and talk about their dead. It was incredibly moving and powerful, and was written about by two separate but brilliant authors in their books, Tom Cox’s “21 Century Yokel”, and Peter Ross’s “A Tomb with a View.” I thoroughly recommend both of them.
It has become impractical now, first with Covid restrictions, and also due to the sheer number of people buried there, but we keep looking for other ways to keep inventing new ways of keeping the stories of our dead alive in our mouths and our hearts, to keep our love for them burning strong.
Meanwhile, we are in, as Jimmy Cauty puts it, “A band that doesn’t make records, but build pyramids out of dead people.” and that suits me just fine.
* Visit www.thegreenfuneralcompany.co.uk or email enquiry@thegreenfuneralcompany.co.uk or call 07759 890 639.

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AND so after 21 years as my business partner, and 17 years as my wife, Claire has left The Green Funeral Company for new pastures. I wish her well in whatever she chooses, though there is a possibility it will still be as a funeral industry upsetter, but in a different area. We created the company together back in the last century, from an idea that arrived to me fully formed after years of early bereavement and inappropriate funerals, and Claire created the solid business base around this idea, without which we wouldn’t have lasted anymore than a couple of years. At the time there was nothing like it, and to be frank although it sounds boastful, despite a second wave of alternative funeral directors inspired by our work, there still isn’t. Unlike me at that time, Claire had little if no experience of personal bereavement, but she totally got that the social currents that had formed both our personalities, the youth counter cultures of hippies, punks and ravers could be applied to funerals to shake them up, to create a more involved and appropriate experience for anyone going through the strange hallucinatory time out of time that is early grief. She also brought the same curiosity I had for people’s lives that is the essential driver for this work, and a gut instinct about the hidden working of a family dynamic that was to prove so extraordinary in figuring out what a family really need, rather than what they think they want. In many ways we didn’t make it easier for ourselves. This model, of trying to really connect with each family in a meaningful way is emotionally draining. The rewards are huge, for the family and for us, -some of my best friends have come from funerals- but immersing yourself in the sadness that goes with each death is gruelling, and both of us have come very close to burn out at times, but getting that close to the fire of other’s loss is the only way I can create a realistic portrait of the person who has died. It is one of our hallmarks, this conjuring up of the essence of the newly dead like a spirit hologram, showing them as they were known to their family in all glory and faults. When it works, it borders on the shamanic, raising up a recognisable personality that is honestly flawed and deeply sympathetic at the same time. A gift to be fully seen again, one last time. It is physically gruelling as well. Feel my hands and they feel like the hands of an office worker, but work a day with me and see that a good part of the work is deeply physical. I do the lifting and moving of every body, dress each one, put them in their coffin. It’s not just my heart that hurts, it’s my back too. We do funerals across Devon and Cornwall, not just Totnes, and always have done, and the families who use us are not just empowered middle class hippies who are no stranger to ritual. Our most satisfying funerals have been with working class families who had no idea what they were going to create out of the mangled wreckage of their grief when they first contacted us. Liberation from tradition and the creative freedom that follows is for everyone. We all die, but we do not have to be part of a machine which guides us blindly down paths which are increasingly irrelevant to us. Etiquette and tradition can be the enemies of resolution. Grief settles easier when you have laid it down yourself with your own hands and heart. I am joined by Claire Burton, a former Occupational Therapist and former business owner of Hestia Care, an award winning company from Totnes which aimed to bring the same fresh approach to the work of looking after the vulnerable elderly at home that we brought to the closed world of funerals. Her natural empathy and cheery insightful, unflappable nature means she is the perfect new work colleague, and though she has just been with me since April, she has already gone through some initiatory events which reveal the seriousness of what we do, the sorrow and the risks as well as the rewards. And so we remain, based in Dartington but covering Devon and Cornwall, offering what we have always offered; ourselves, and the invitation for you to join us in this universal but incredibly personal experience: dealing with the dead for the sake of the living.

• Visit www.thegreenfuneralcompany.co.uk or email enquiry@thegreenfuneralcompany.co.uk or call 07759 890 639.

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EVEN if we do not know someone who has died, as a result of the Covid pandemic or anything else, we are all grieving. Grief is always about more than just death. We grieve missed opportunities, ended relationships, things said, things not said, our fertility, our youth, the passing of time, friendships lost in the swirl of life.

And now we are all grieving for the most unimaginably simple yet profound and far reaching losses we have ever experienced together. Good things we took for granted all of our lives.

The absence of big family Sunday lunches, an inconsequential cheery chat over a pint, the everyday bustle of our High Streets, the swirl of a crowd of people in a foreign city, the hush that falls on a cinema as the lights go down, the roar of a crowd of thousands at a football match, the feeling of dancing all night with friends and strangers under a summer moon.

All of this has gone, for now. There have been many stories arising from our national and international experience of this pandemic. Lockdown is of course causing a huge crisis in mental health, but it is also causing people to reflect and mourn for all sorts of things.

One thing I have heard of over and over again, is people weeping for their long dead. Parents and siblings who have been buried for decades.

It is like the collective permafrost of our emotions is thawing, and there revealed are the bodies of our ancestors, perfectly preserved, as if they had died yesterday. Lives we thought had been absorbed into the mantle of history, love we thought had been dispersed into the subsoil of our past are freshly exposed, vivid with detail and familiarity.

This has been deeply saddening for some, and strangely comforting for others.

Our ancestors, including ourselves, are always closer than we think, and grief is never completely wept dry. Human hearts remember deep and long, and have a loyalty that far outlasts conscious memory.

Thanks to science, and the amazing work put in by our astonishing health workers, NHS as well as private carers rather than any moves made by the bumbling of our government, this virus will be gradually wrestled under control, and the life that we grieve for so keenly right now, will slowly return.

After the terrible global ravaging of the Spanish Flu epidemic in 1918-19 had passed and the danger was over, joy rushed into fill that empty space.

It paved the way for The Roaring Twenties which saw an explosion of culture music and dancing and public exaltations of shared pleasure.

We will dance and hug each other again.

In the meantime, lower your head to see what is being revealed. Uncover your perfectly preserved grief, exhume your ancestors, far and near who suffered as we all do through the gift of being alive. Weep for them.

Mourn your own unmourned deaths, dress your own long unattended wounds, quietly aching just under your everyday clothes, pushed aside by hurry, and other’s needs.

We will sing together again.

Visit www. thegreenfuneralcompany. co.uk or email enquiry@thegreenfuneralcompany.co.uk or call 07759 890 639.

The post We are all grieving now appeared first on Reconnect Magazine.