How the world’s first ‘punk undertaker’ is redefining funerals as we know them

Rupert Callender is not your usual funeral director. You won’t find him trying to upsell mahogany coffins from a catalogue while juggling appointments with the bereaved. And much of the rigmarole surrounding the rituals of modern death frankly appals him.

“Quite often, all these add-ons come at the expense of the content,” he says. “But for me it is all about content, and a good funeral can be really minimal.”

In the simplest terms, this can mean two or three people standing around a grave with “not a lot going on apart from honest conversation”. Yet, Rupert, 54, also believes that at their most opulent, funerals can be something way beyond the stilted formality of a traditional Victorian service.

To this end, he has carried coffins across windswept beaches, sat in pubs with caskets on beer-stained tables and helped children fire flaming arrows into their father’s funeral pyre. No wonder he’s been called the world’s first “punk undertaker”.

Now, the owner of The Green Funeral Company has written a lyrical and inspiring book about how we are as a culture getting the business of death all wrong.

Rupert insists that much of what is on offer from commercial funeral parlours with their hefty mark-ups on fancy vehicles and chipboard coffins finished with fake handles – the reason why pallbearers carry them on their shoulders – is little more than what he calls “cosmetic aesthetics”.

“There is a lot of bad theatre in the business of death, and people go along with it because they think funerals are supposed to be like this,” says Callender.

“Imagine a farmer who spent his working life outdoors dressed in a kind of celestial choirboy chic that he wouldn’t have been seen dead in when he was alive… The corporate idea of something alternative is a Disney-theme for a child.”

In the larger chains, it’s unlikely that the body will actually be kept at the funeral directors before the funeral. “Instead, there are centralised ‘body hubs’ in big conurbations where the bodies are actually stored,” he reveals.

For Rupert, this Amazon-style storage makes it impossible for spontaneous short visits to sit with a loved one’s body which he sees as a powerful missed opportunity in the grieving process.

“Spending time with the dead is a form of vigil that enables acceptance, and I’m a great believer in it,” he adds. “There is something deeply sacred about the indescribable difference between death and a state of unconsciousness. It speaks to the truth of our lives and our mortality.”

He conducted a funeral recently of a young father who had died of cancer at the age of 32. His widow was pregnant with their second child.

“They had made the decision to have children, despite the inevitability of his condition which he had had for 12 years. It took her a long time for us to get in touch with us – a week after his death – and when we first met she was young and deeply apprehensive about seeing him.

“When she did, she was consumed with bone-wracking sobs; absolutely heartbroken.”

She came back five times before his funeral.

“Every time she was worried that rather than healing, the pain would get more distressing, but gradually there was a change in her manner. Not acceptance, but a diving down into the horror and gradually being able to drink tea, and even find humour in the everyday.”

“It is an absolutely magical process, but you have got to have real patience if you are offering this and, ideally, this is where we all need to be by the brink of a funeral.

He sighs. “Of course, the corporates are not set up for this, and generally the larger the business, the less the personal connection.”

Instead, the hard sell of funerary wares made popular in Victorian times is often the focus with funeral arrangers under pressure to up-sell the range of coffins.

This happened to a friend of Rupert’s who has asked for a quote for a cardboard coffin.

“For the mainstream companies, these eco-friendly disposable coffins don’t offer enough of a mark-up. The response from the arranger was, ‘I think your mum’s worth a bit more than that’. My friend changed funeral directors.”

It was Rupert’s experience of losing his mother in his twenties that inspired his interest in becoming an undertaker, as did losing his father as a young boy.

“With my mum, I couldn’t get near the grave when the thing was going into the ground due to the bunch of capable blokes in front of me,” he says.

“I realised there had to be a better way of doing things.”

He, like a number of the smaller independents, including the award-winning Judith Dandy of Dandelion Farewells in West Sussex, decided to change the paradigm.

“We are an incredibly tight, two-person team,” he says of his small company. “We do everything from receiving and preparing the body to taking the ceremony.”

Rupert says the best place to look for an ethical funeral director is The Good Funeral Guide – “it’s written by the chap who used to do the Good Schools’ Guide and is a great list of recommendations.”

Once practical storage details are taken care of, his main focus is to help people reflect on the person who has died. “I did meet one lady, at a funeral conference, who had taken her mother on holiday and driven her around the Lake District in a campervan in a form of extended vigil,” he tells me.

Campervans are apparently very popular as DIY hearses. One young man who had died in a motorbike accident was taken to a pub by campervan on the way to his funeral.

“People can be as distinctive in death as they are in life,” asserts Rupert.

Last year, a widower asked Rupert to conduct the ceremony for his widow, who was in her sixties, at her favourite National Trust spot in North Devon. “This involved not a car park with a café, but carrying her cardboard coffin one-and-a-half-miles up a soggy coastal path with Exmoor dropping into the sea below.

“There we were on a magnificent edge, zig-zagging up the path with the coffin, and meeting hikers all kitted out with sticks and kagoules coming the other way and cheerfully waving at us.

“We carried her down again, of course, at the end of a beautiful ceremony and held another ceremony at the crematorium. Her husband refused to hide his loss.”

But families determined to coffin-carry can create all sorts of headaches for funeral directors.

“It sounds a simple thing, but it’s both a huge blessing and a terrible anxiety,” chuckles Rupert.

“People are in a state of shock; it’s difficult to retain information, you worry they will drop the thing, but the crucial thing is that the handles must work.”

The key thing is to carry the coffin low, positioning the strongest people at its foot.

“We stop often, we don’t rush. And it’s an incredibly potent thing to do – nobody ever regrets it.”

Rupert recently conducted a funeral for an eminent doctor who was a member of a medical ethics committee. “Her colleagues were all these incredibly glamorous, female registrars in their sixties, wearing designer clothing. We held the service in a little church and buried her in the graveyard. The sight of all these elegant women carrying her coffin was beautiful and moving, and it was the smoothest coffin-carrying experience I had ever seen.”

What Remains? by Rupert Callender (Chelsea Green, £12.99) is out now. Visit expressbookshop.com or call Express Bookshop on 020 3176 3832. Free UK P&P on orders over £25