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As a celebrant, I start my weddings and funerals with the same words: “Everyone, we are about to get started, so can you please make sure your phones are off or on silent.”
I introduce myself, express my great privilege in sharing this moment with the people gathered and always make sure I have tissues on hand. Wedding dresses don’t have pockets and you’d be surprised how many people come to a funeral not expecting to cry.
From there the scripts change. At a wedding, I tell the love story of the couple – which is sort of like the prequel to the book they are now writing together. At funerals, I facilitate the family and friends as they tell the story of their person’s life through speeches, music, and slideshows.
In some ways, the narratives of funerals and weddings have similar purposes; both are rituals combining music, story and movement. A wedding represents the close of one chapter and the beginning of a new, hopefully joyous, exciting one for the couple and their community. The couple’s roles publicly shift, from betrothed to wedded, and their roles in their family and community subtly shift too.
Similarly, a funeral closes one chapter and starts another. The person who has died becomes a combination of past and present tense, and the people gathered begin to connect with the person differently through space and time. The people’s relationship with the person does not end but the manner of that relationship changes.
As rituals, weddings and funerals both incorporate physical movement; stand for the bride (or the casket), approach the casket (or the married couple), throw confetti (or leave flowers). People, through ritual, embed a new way of connecting with each other through their bodies.
Both weddings and funerals are sacred, special occasions and I am grateful to bear witness to both these moments in people’s lives. But I think I prefer funerals because the veil is thinner. People enter a space of holding something fragile in their hands, an oasis to feel comfortable with life’s ending. It’s unimaginable, dying. It is beyond the realm of knowing – until you are there. Buddhists practise meditative visualisations to get ready, to die consciously, as consciously as possible anyway, to enter the bardo realm with a goal in mind.
I was interviewing a local Wodi Wodi elder for the book I am writing about spirituality. I explained that I had begun conducting funerals after my sister died in 2015. I felt that my family and I had given my sister a meaningful send-off and I wanted to help other people do the same for their beloveds.
It turned out that on the day before our meeting, the elder had visited one of the funeral homes I work for. She had pre-arranged her own funeral. She showed me the box she kept in her living room, labelled “Departures”. The box contained her instructions and song selections. I applauded her for being so organised.
The elder asked me, “Do you think that conducting funerals is part of your healing?”
No one had ever asked me that before.
“If it stops being healing,” she said and clasped her hands together, “please, stop doing them.”
At my sister’s funeral, I had experienced an authentic return and wanted to offer that to other people, stewarding their engagement with the mystery of life and death. If one day I have nothing left to give, then I will not be able to offer the gift I had given to myself when my sister had died.
I have now decided I will no longer officiate weddings and will just focus on funerals. I love the joy and the vulnerability of a couple‘; stating publicly what they love about each other and what they promise. But, as the elder I interviewed had suggested, perhaps my work is still about my own healing. I had thought I was doing funerals as a service to others but maybe it is also a service to myself, allowing myself to remember – every time – the sacred fragility, the passing nature, the end date in sight.
Maybe funerals help me live a little better.
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Jackie Bailey is the author of The Eulogy, the winner of the 2023 NSW Premier’s literary multicultural award. When not writing, she works as a funeral celebrant and pastoral care practitioner, helping families navigate death and dying
