Every life has been lived. When someone dies there is a  funeral to say farewell.  A funeral provides a structure at a difficult time. They were created as a way to bring dignity to the final goodbye, a way to honour the life of the person and a connection to the comfort that religion brings at such times.

But funerals have changed little over the years. In fact in the last 100 years it is hard to spot any significant changes to the traditional funeral.

Now things are changing. People are used to having choice and increasingly people are thinking about the way they say goodbye. Other ceremonies have changed hugely in recent decades and I believe it is time for the funeral to change too. The structure of a funeral is now too restricting. It doesn’t allow people to share their memories and thoughts in a way that enables people to feel they have really said goodbye. People are saying to me that they need to feel more personally involved in the ceremony and wish to have more choices on offer to make it more of a personal goodbye.

Death is inevitable. Change is inevitable, but it takes alot of effort to change people’s habits.

This blog has been started as a forum for people to say how they think the funeral, the process of grieving, and the celebration of a life lived can be done differently and be done better.