Exploring the Benefits of Natural Burials: Back to Basics

In becoming the world’s first “punk undertaker” and establishing the Green Funeral Company in the UK, Ru Callender and his partner Claire challenged the stilted, traditional, structured world of the funeral industry; fusing what he had learned from his own deeply personal experiences with death, with the surprising and profound answers and raw emotion he discovered in rave culture and ritual magic. In the passage below, he highlights his decision to turn the funeral industry on its head and explore natural burials.

The following is an excerpt from What Remains? Life, Death, Ritual and the Human Art of Undertaking by Ru Callender. It has been adapted for the web.

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The Flaws of the Funeral Industry

How do you become an undertaker in the UK? You just do it.

That might all be about to change as the lumbering corporate beasts of the funeral industry near the end of their 130-year attempt to ‘regulate’ the profession for their own hidden reasons, but in 1998, if you had a particular mix of fervour, pure naivety and guts, and no clue that what you were about to try and pull off was almost impossible (and had done nothing much but rave and run around wheat fields), then you just did it.

The man I saw on the television for a stoned five minutes, who changed my life so completely, was Nicholas Albery, a remarkably similar public-school-system escapee as me, but older. I’ve never actually met him in the flesh, though we have talked on the phone, but he is one of the most important people in my life. He is one of my ancestors.

Nicholas was a fully fledged part of the hippie underground, a practical theorist, a dreamer who could turn those dreams into reality. He had been one of the main architects of a remarkable social experiment when he and others, including the radical poet Heathcote Williams, squatted a block of flats in Notting Hill and turned it at first into a self-regulating commune then, influenced by the ideas of R.D. Laing, the maverick anti-psychiatrist, took it a little further, and created a refuge for the emotionally vulnerable – the drug refugees from the 60s that were starting to grow in number. They called this place Frestonia, and it became famous when they tried to secede from the UK and declare themselves a nation state. A lot of this was situationist theatre, but the actual experiment was a beacon in compassionate and tolerant community and existed for many years, providing a safe place for many vulnerable and not so vulnerable people.

Nicholas was a utopian dreamer with the energy and drive of a pamphleteer, a form of disseminating underground ideas that had been popular since the sixteenth century. He produced ideas, all of which were based around empowering and helping ordinary people to jump the train tracks of destiny and live lives filled with meaning, and he largely distributed these ideas via self-published books, densely packed with information, echoing the hippy tomes of the time such as the Whole Earth Catalog (an American catalogue and counter-culture magazine). Nicholas turned his attention towards the closed-off world of funerals after a dissonant experience between the natural birth of his son and the awful, medicalised death of his father.

Other people had been down this path before. In the US, Jessica Mitford had written a coruscating attack on the funeral world called The American Way of Death, later the basis for Evelyn Waugh’s comic novel The Loved One. Jessica exposed much about the predictably fake nature of death in America, the ludicrous upselling of funeral bling to extremely vulnerable people, the hollow platitudes of the preachers, the straightforward emotionally dishonest and unnecessary process of embalming – a post-mortem continuation of the idea of American exceptionalism that begun in the Civil War as a way of returning bodies to families from across the country and grew into a bizarre art form that could leave a person looking better dead than they were alive, the ultimate cosmetic triumph over the messy truth of death and decay.

And with her disgust at the corporate nature of death, the slick unctuous production line of products and pomp, came a rejection of ceremony and mourning. Jessica can probably be said to be person zero of the ‘just bung me in a black bag and put me out with the rubbish’ brigade. Nicholas was coming at it from a different angle.

Natural Burials: Reclaiming the Experience

He saw the consumer excesses, the unnecessary violence and psychological hypocrisy of embalming, the ridiculousness of the aesthetics of the British funeral, still in thrall to the class system and deferring endlessly towards the church. But his experiences in the counterculture were very much of the do-it-yourself mode so, instead of merely criticising the industry, which he certainly did, he uncovered ways for a bereaved family to reclaim the experience, to bypass the so-called professionals and deal with the practicalities themselves, all of which he laid out in clear detail in a series of volumes of a book called The Natural Death Handbook.

Within ten years, I would be a trustee of the charity and in charge of editing and rewriting the fifth volume of the handbook.

He was not alone in researching ways to reclaim the experience of death. John Bradfield, of Green Burial fame, had researched whether it was necessary to be buried in a churchyard or cemetery, and discovered it wasn’t. This ripped open the world of funerals, and particularly burials. As long as a few common-sense laws around water contamination were adhered to, anybody could be buried on private land.

Nicholas also unpicked the legalities around using a funeral director, with the same countercultural zeal that the hippies had dismantled so many previously seemingly intractable social constructs, arriving at the conclusion that the family were, in fact, the funeral directors, and that given enough information, they could legally and practically do it all themselves.

In the UK, you are still, just, not required to use a funeral director by law. It still is entirely possible to do the whole thing yourself, including making the coffin and looking after the body at home and even burying them on your own land. The industry itself was aware of this on a subconscious level, and so had made a number of moves to prove themselves indispensable, mainly by overstating the complexities of a post-mortem body and by inferring that people were not actually up to doing all of this themselves.

They were largely right. Few people have the guts to do it all themselves, but some do, and the first three editions of The Natural Death Handbook provided all of the practical ways to do this, but most still wanted the help of someone who was used to what could happen.

My Damascene moment was quite profound. I saw my future laid out before me in a flash. I would become an undertaker, a new type – one who didn’t exclude the family or lead them down predictable paths of tradition that ended up with the dusty vicar of a religion the family didn’t really believe in.

Going Green: A Different Type of Undertaker

I am a social anarchist, I believe as Patti Smith says, that people really do have the power, and anarchy doesn’t mean no rules, it means no rulers. Having somebody who has been licensed by the state directly control what happens between you and your dead is a ruler in my book. A low-level one in terms of the might of the state, but possibly more meaningfully impactful than nearly any other form of authority you might encounter.

So, it was clear that there was a niche for someone to set up as an antiundertaker, or perhaps more accurately, an old-style undertaker, the name they called themselves before they morphed into the more paternalist capital F funeral capital D director.

I would be the gatekeeper who opened the gates, a Wizard of Oz stepping out proudly from behind the curtain; I would accompany, not steer them, and together we would do the practicalities of what needs to happen, the ritual and practical transfer of a body from the world of the living to a place of transformation, the grave or the fire and, in doing so, I would slowly mourn for and rebury my own dead – all of my family’s funerals that I had been excluded from, that had turned me and not my dead into a ghost, long lingering at these unattended events.

I rang Nicholas the next day to order a copy of the latest volume of The Natural Death Handbook and began telling everyone of my grand plans.

The news was treated with an amused dismissal by nearly everyone. It seemed so unlikely that I, who had done so little in the way of paid work, should make a success of this bold plan, a plan that involved not only gatecrashing a centuries-old industry that went hand in glove with the religious status quo, but meant creating a new niche within it, a niche that would appeal enough to people that they would agree to use my services, despite my lack of experience.

Getting Started With Natural Burials: Creating A New Niche

This amused dismissal was well deserved. I didn’t fully understand then that the funeral world was such a bastion of conservatism, complete with dominating multinationals who called the shots and beset with hundreds of small competing independent funeral directors, all of whom were scrabbling to survive under the belly of these industry beasts.

If I had, I don’t think I would have had the courage to just go for it. I didn’t realise it was an almost impossible business to set up in, that it took years to earn a reputation and that reputation could be lost in a second. I didn’t fully realise what a working-class family-inherited trade it was or how bitchy and competitive it could be. I knew none of this. I just knew that the current model had let me down time and time again and that the funerals I had attended and the funerals I had missed were stuck in a post-war framework that was failing a lot of people.

I babbled about this to anyone who would listen, much as I had babbled about crop circles a few years earlier. I read every book that came my way about grief and funerals, rituals of letting go, about death, death, death.

Everything I read was pushing me forward, making me more certain that this was indeed my vocation. That I could be an agent of change because I was the result of what happened when funerals were done badly.

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Listen Up! Audiobook Sample: What does not kill us does some serious damage on the way through.

When he became an undertaker, Ru Callender undertook to deal with the dead for the sake of the living. What Remains? is the brilliant, unforgettable story of the life and work of the world’s first punk, DIY undertaker—but it is also a book about ordinary, everyday humanity and our capacity to face death with courage and compassion. To say goodbye to the people we love in our own way.

This video is an excerpt from chapter one of the audiobook of What Remains?, read by Ru.

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From the Eyes of An Undertaker: Grieving & Healing

Magic Within Every Garden: Sharing the Love