Funerals for the Bushfire Victims

Feb 13, 2009

(A shorter version of this was sent to the Age letters.)

Every compassionate payment to the victims of the bushfires is to be commended. The government is to be particularly commended for the $10,000 Compassion and Bereavement Payment to the next of kin of all who have died - to cover funeral and related expenses.

This is the worst and most horrific tragedy many of us have ever been close to. The very thought of friends being burned alive and in pain is almost unimaginable. We are weeping. But just as untrained or half trained therapists can do enormous psychological harm at a time such as this, so can untrained and half trained Funeral celebrants. I have seen the long term harm survivors experience from clumsy funerals, and I fear for those who have already experienced so much pain.

So I am alarmed by an organisation I know nothing about, offering free services by “funeral celebrants”. Is this organisation paying for these freebies?

Now retired from funerals, I spent thirty-five years as a funeral celebrant. Funeral celebrants are the lowest paid and the most exploited people in the funeral industry. If discounting for funerals is to take place ( and I hope it will be) then the discounting should be shared across the board by the Funeral Directors (who make the most money), the florists, the crematoria, the cemeteries, the newspaper advertising departments, the coffin manufacturers, the florists and so on.

The serious and professional funeral celebrant sees her (or his) task as a serious responsibility - even more serious when death is tragic and premature. A tribute to a life, cut short by tragedy, is a very serious task and it must be taken seriously. There are ideals and standards the funeral celebrant must hold onto, there are things she must know, there is careful research she must do, there are skills she must have, there is checking that she must ensure is totally accurate, and there are mistakes she cannot make. There is too much at stake to do otherwise.

All this she does with people, we know or have seen, who are torn apart by grief, sometimes riddled with survival guilt, and who will have conflicting visions and memories of the deceased. The work for the funeral celebrant will be intense. I cannot remember the last time I prepared such a funeral, when I spent less than thirty hours of all-consuming work.

The funeral celebrant is also faced with three other difficult obstacles. There is the tendency of some Australians to trivialise ceremony and ritual. There is the false myth, forcefully clung onto by some Funeral Directors, that civil funeral celebrants, like prosperous clergy, have the full support of congregations, and thirdly, there is deluge of new celebrants ca. 4500 since 2003, most not trained in funerals, many of whom, without any kind of justification, call themselves funeral celebrants.

As we also read in many articles in the Age this is a time where the main challenge is coping with the complex and deep psychological impact of of sudden and tragic death. Trivialising the work of the professional Funeral celebrant and thus the funeral itself, or presuming, on their low pay, that all funeral celebrants can give the most, is creating an expectation that is unbalanced and unjust.

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