Why I won’t risk falling over while conducting funerals or marriages

It’s coming up for six years since I first began conducting funerals, mostly here in the Shetland Islands. Somewhere between 80 and 90, I think, the last in Unst, Shetland’s northernmost island, at the start of the year. These were mostly secular funerals, but faith played its part too, sometimes with hymns, prayers, elements of Christian – Protestant and Roman Catholic – tradition but with other spiritual paths represented too. My aim was to provide what the grieving family felt was appropriate for their loved one. What they would have wanted.

Last year I received confirmation from the Registrar General for Scotland that through the humanist group Celebrate People, I was able to conduct legal marriages. There’s no need for official sanction to officiate at a funeral. Anyone can do it. Any storyteller.

Because that’s what you do at a funeral, or what I tried to do: tell someone’s story. Honour their life. Celebrate and mourn. At a wedding, you also tell the couple’s story, and publicly mark the legal unifying of their lives. 

I’ll still be telling stories I hope, but not at funerals or weddings. A recent health episode, the latest in a line of irritatingly debilitating events, means that temporarily I can’t drive anything but an electric bicycle or risk standing in front of an audience or congregation. Without falling over. And that would put a bit of a dampener on a wedding. Or add unwanted elements of farce and extra tragedy to a funeral.

My numerous medical advisors insist that all should be well but the whole experience has provided the opportunity to reassess and reconfigure a few things. I’ve canceled a number of commitments and have decided to stop providing funeral and marriage services.

I’ll still be writing, playing records on 60 North Radio, and producing annoying songs and poetry for a select and discriminating audience. Making and taking pictures. Cleaning and cooking and fixing fences. Buying and selling books.

I would say that the past five and a bit years of helping families through the process of saying goodbye to their loved ones has been deeply fulfilling personally, though demanding and stressful at times. I’ll always be grateful to our local funeral directors, Goudies Ltd, for their help and support, and particularly to Anne Goudie and Alan Dow. Also to Tim Maguire and Gerry McGarvey and to the incredible Celebrate People duo of Gerrie and Susan Douglas-Scott, as well as the rest of the crew at CP.

Thank you also to all the families who trusted me to conduct the services for their departed. It’s been an absolute privilege. Apologies to the couples whose weddings I was due to conduct this year and next. There are other celebrants now working locally and Celebrate People has a team of wonderful folk willing to travel if necessary. Or consider asking the local registrar to do it. 

Just one thing. Death is an inevitability and something we’re often nervous or superstitious about even discussing. But it’s the one certainty in life. The past five years – even the past two weeks – have highlighted for me the importance of telling your loved ones what should happen when you die. Who should conduct the funeral? Whether you want it to be a religious or secular funeral or something in between. Even (some) church ministers can be surprisingly accommodating to the last wishes of rampant atheists. Where you want to be buried. What kind of coffin. The music you’d like and definitely don’t want. Also: don’t make unreasonable demands of those you’ve left behind and love you. They’re grieving. Getting Stevie Wonder or Daniel O’Donnel to sing will be difficult. And expensive.

As for weddings…my current marriage was solemnized some 36 years ago in the registry office behind Rutherglen Town Hall. No handfasting, ‘ring-warming’ (look it up) common quaich, pagan stone embracing, prayers (at least not aloud) or Viking sword exchanges. Still going, though.

It Tolls For Thee: A guide to celebrating and reclaiming the end of life.