Book of the Week: What Remains?

Ru Callender on the fight against the corporatisation of funerals

This is the story of how my partner Claire and I became the first, and possibly the last, of the punk undertakers by applying the lessons of punk and acid house, and its do-it-yourself ethos, to shake up the stilted funeral industry at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

It is how this most unlikely of vocations propelled me off my sofa as I sat smoking a joint at the tail end of a Monday afternoon, at the tail end of my twenties, and into a life that has opened many unexpected doors of opportunity.

It is the only thing that I have ever done for money, bar a brief period spent being an eel fisherman on an estuary in Cornwall, which was as brutally hard work as it was financially unviable but appeared devastatingly romantic when viewed from the banks of the river.

I have had no training or qualifications other than my own extensive and early experience of bereavement, a graduation from the University of Death as it were. I crashed in, slipping in through the gaps around the definition of who was or could be an undertaker, flat broke and a little bit mad, driving a tatty old Volvo with no tax or insurance, and using a wide pine board as a stretcher.

The first dead body I touched was of the first man I buried as I dressed and shaved his face with the help of his weeping family, during the first funeral that I ever did.

I have never worked for a funeral director (notice my linguistic differentiation between an undertaker and a funeral director), only with my partner, Claire. Consequently, we have done and continue to do every aspect of arranging a funeral: looking after the dead (easy but physically exhausting), looking after the living (the real work), cleaning the car, the mortuary, arranging the flowers in the viewing room, doing the paperwork, booking the crematorium, putting the notice in the paper and promoting ourselves, right through to being the person who writes the eulogy and holds the ceremony, traditionally the role of a priest.

The only thing we drew the line at was tidying up after the post-funeral party, a lesson learned early when we realised we were the only people sober enough to take down the decorations and wash up.

I have carried and lowered an uncountable number of coffins and shovelled tons of earth onto them. Many times I have been the last person on this earth to see someone’s face.

I have held stillborn babies in the palm of my hand.

I have looked into the eyes of dying men who know that the next time we meet they will be dead.

I have watched as children have fired flaming arrows at a pyre upon which sits their father’s remains. I have seen bodies that are no longer recognisable as human, and bodies that looked so peaceful I have been filled with envy.

All without the permission or regulation of any authority, religious or governmental, other than the families who have engaged my services and trusted me with their dead.

There are some, many in the traditional funeral world, who consider me and my partner as dangerous mavericks, everything that is wrong with the industry, a strong case for the regulation of the market. The industry can be brutal in its need to see off competitors and critics.

There are others who have respect for our transparency and rawness, and credit us with being real agents of change, given us accolades. We have been called “The greatest undertakers of all time, by a country mile” by an independent funeral guide and I have also received anonymous, negative phone calls for my publicly expressed opinions.

I try not to let either of these extremes break me or go to my head, but my position is that the real problem is that how we deal with death has become an industry.

Although it will often feel like it, this book is not an attack on the funeral industry per se. We are all culpable for the slow, lazy drift away from meaning. The tolerance of outdated ways of thinking due to a resistance to effect change. But it is an attack on the hijacking of our mortality by corporate bodies that pay only lip service to the sorrowed and only engage with the void in order to conjure it up to channel our fear and grief into unnecessary retail purchases.

It is an attack on the belief systems that have failed to accommodate and adapt to our brave new worlds and instead serve up increasingly tepid forms of spiritual comfort.

There are exceptional undertakers and ministers everywhere, but they live in the shadows of faceless multinationals that continue to operate in a deliberately disingenuous way, who dominate the advertising slots of daytime television with emotionally bullying prepayment tactics, guilt-tripping frightened pensioners solely in order to futureproof their businesses.

It is an attack on the complacent entitlement of the industry that refuses to yield to the times because it is still patriarchal in its mindset.

It is an attack on the idea that an expensive flower arrangement and a veneered oak-effect coffin are more important than the content of the funeral itself.

Nothing comes from nothing, and personally I feel part of the long tradition of what can be described as Radical Dissent. My immediate peers are the acid house and punk movements, and my immediate elders are the hippies of the counterculture.

Behind them stand the political and religious nonconformists and irritants. The pacifists of the two world wars, the organic pioneers, the experimental communities of the 1920s and 1930s, the social outlaws of the centuries before, who go back at least to that beaten, robed figure standing in front of the fifth procurator of Judea, Pontius Pilate, a representative of the most powerful state on earth at that time, quietly stating the enormous and uncontainable idea that all authority is a form of violence.

I stand for less regulation and more personal responsibility.

I stand for more risk and less caution.

I stand for the electrifying moment of unfettered human to human contact.

I stand for honesty, appropriateness and participation in one of the most real experiences we can go through, our inescapable encounter with death. Our own, and, more significantly, the death of those we love.

The arena I chose in which to live these ideals, or rather was chosen for me by life events, is the reimagining of how we serve the living by dealing with the dead. By ridding ourselves of the well-meaning but outdated traditions that still are the default setting for so many of us, and that are often imposed upon us by the paternalistic mainstream and by our own culpability, through shock, ignorance and deep pain.

I should also make it very clear that I am not alright with death, not alright with it at all. Since death made its dramatic entrance into my life at the age of seven, I have thought of my own death every day. It still scares the shit out of me.

It is what wakes me, Larkin like, at four in the morning, drenched in sweat. It is what whispers in my Caesar-like ears at the moment of my small triumphs. The slave who is really the master, tugging at the links that chain us together.

Working with death for over twenty years has not made me a better person. I do not savour each moment of joy knowing that soon, all too soon, it will all be gone and done. I am not more forgiving of the taxing dullness of life and the feet of clay of those who trudge beside me. I am not part of the death positive movement, although I have the greatest respect for those who are. The only thing worse than death that I can conceive of is immortality.

This is an extract from Ru’s new book, What Remains? Life, Death and the Human Art of Undertaking. You can buy a copy here and enter the code IDLER30 to get 30% off until 20 November.

Ru will be joining us on A Drink with the Idler at 6pm on Thursday 29 September. Book your tickets here. Free for subscribers.

Our September/October issue is available in bookshops as well as Waitrose, WHSmiths, Booth’s and Easons.