So, what's it like being a Funeral Celebrant?

The funeral world has shifted a great deal in the eighteen years I’ve been part of it. Large organisations now run much of the industry, and everything moves according to systems, workflows, and algorithms. It’s efficient, certainly, but sometimes it feels as though the human part has been tidied away behind the software.

My role, though, hasn’t changed. I still watch how families move through grief, how they hold themselves, how they try to make sense of a day that doesn’t make sense. I still listen, observe, and try to understand the shape of their loss. But the way I meet them has changed. Back in the day, it was all hands‑on: visiting families in their homes, sitting at kitchen tables, hearing stories told with laughter, irritation, tenderness, or all three at once. “Loved one” is a generous phrase; affection comes in many forms.

Those visits were where the real work happened - talking, remembering, untangling the small details that make a person who they were. My hope was always the same: to support the family, to understand their world for a moment, and to bring them some comfort on the day when everything feels too sharp.

Now the industry is more automated, more streamlined, more “managed.” But the human part remains exactly where it always was: in the quiet rooms, in the pauses, in the way people tell stories when they think no one is judging them.

Here, I’ll share some of those experiences. Not all sad - far from it. There is a surprising amount of laughter behind the scenes, the kind that arrives gently and never at anyone’s expense. The work is serious, but the people are human, and humanity rarely stays solemn for long.