We are all going to reach the same conclusion to our lives in the end. It is I’m afraid, a ‘when’ not ‘if’ the ‘worst happens’.

We can embrace this and wonder what comes next, putting the worst behind us and stepping bravely into the next world, or we can look at our lives and realise the truth, that time is limited. And whatever we might think (or deliberately not think), every minute that passes, is a minute closer to the end of our own physical life.

Each day that ends, is one less day we have left to live and tomorrow may be the last one.

So, we tend to pretend that this isn’t really true for us.  That ‘it’ll come to pass’ one day perhaps but that day is way off in the future – something that happens to old people, or the poor souls we seen on the news each evening.

As funeral directors, we deal with the practicalities of death every day as well as the emotional turmoil that death leaves behind. We try and comfort the bereaved whilst trying to afford the deceased some degree of dignity now that their body has ceased to live.

We can sometimes become a little too objective and as can be seen from the many stories in the press over recent years, sometimes the business aspects can take over from the personal.

I even heard one FD once joking that his ‘stock levels’ were running a little low and he might have to turn the fridge off if some new business didn’t come in soon!

A funeral director is on the ‘front line’ and as such can easily become hardened to the process of caring for the deceased.

Nothing can bring home the fragility of life more than supporting a family through the bereavement of a child or young adult.  And so often, their death may have been avoidable, a tragic accident or even been at their own hand.

Every now and then, you find yourself being brought up short, faced with fragility and the transience of your own existence;  as you gently wash and dress a 34 year-old man and lay him in his willow casket ready to be visited by three generations of his grieving family; parents, siblings and children;lay a teenager to rest, who for whatever reason, simply couldn’t see any future for herself worth living for; carefully take a plaster-cast of a foot of a new-born child to be cast in bronze for the devastated young parents to hold as their only keepsake.

You can’t help but wonder how their lives had been for them.  If they had known that when they got out of bed and brushed their teeth, put their socks on and boiled the kettle that today might be their last day.

We all live our lives as best we can and we expect to be treated with a certain degree of dignity and respect.  And, for the most part, we treat others with same measure of respect.  Just because someone’s physical life has ended, for whatever reason, doesn’t mean that we can’t treat them with that same respect and afford them the same level of dignity that we would have afforded them in life.

Although there are times, like when moving a deceased person from the 2^nd story of an old Victorian cottage, down 2 flight of stairs, with tight corners, trying your best to avoid the years of accumulated ‘treasures’ lining every window sill and available shelf whilst the grieving family wait at the lounge door to say goodbye – all the time quietly wishing that at 18 stone, they could have had the forethought to pass away downstairs preferably next to the french windows leading onto a nice patio or pathway – that compromises to dignity will have to be made.

However, once the physical challenges are met, we can still afford them the same courtesy and thought that every living person deserves.

When my Dad died a short while ago, I brought him back to my funeral home. I washed and dressed him with the care and love that he probably once washed and dressed me as a child.  Talking to him and caring for him as I laid him out in his coffin, even though I knew I would be the only person to see him.  Everything else faded away and it was just me and him, there together in that last shared task.

It was then I truly realised how each and every body I saw, every day, every week – every single one was someone’s child, friend, partner, sibling, or parent perhaps and that every single one deserved the same level of love, dignity and respect as I gave my own Dad.

Very few of us these days can (or would wish to) be involved in the ‘post life’ care of a loved one.  Only a few generations ago, it was unheard of for the family to allow a stranger to come and take their loved one away as soon as they’d died.

In the past, it was the family’s work to wash and care for the deceased. To lay them out, close their eyes, dress them in their Sunday best, place a pillow under their head and a roll for cloth or flannel under their jaw.

In todays world, this is subcontracted to the undertaker, or funeral director as we’re more often called these days.  As such, we owe it to the deceased, and to the family to offer the same level of care and dignity in death as we would in life.

After all, it’s not ‘if’ but ‘when’ that we will be lying there ourselves one day in the near or distant future.

Jonathan Mees

Oak Funerals

Regular Author