The long farewell

I’ve just been chatting to one of my closest celebrant friends and colleagues, Gillian Robertson. Inevitably (as celebrants always do!) we got to discussing work and she told me of a service she had recently performed for a dear friend in the beautiful Fonab cemetery.

The service was actually an interment of ashes. Gillian had conducted the funeral and now she was performing this last act of ceremony. I know it will have been a very fitting and beautiful moment.

It got us thinking about ashes and what people choose to do with these last remains of their loved ones. There are creative ways to incorporate ash into memorial jewellery or all sorts of other objects that can bring great comfort (I wrote about Lynn Smith’s bears over a year ago). Sometimes people prefer to scatter the ashes in some special place. Or they inter the ashes, perhaps in an existing family lair – when my father’s cousin Betty died down south in Farnborough, I performed a service in the local crematorium but then, following her wishes, I carried the ashes back to Scotland, where we interred them in Camelon Cemetery. Reuniting her, the last of the Urquharts, with her parents and siblings.

Gillian and I wondered how many urns stand on shelves, maybe for years. Of course, this might be deliberate. People sometimes choose to wait, say, until a spouse dies so that the ashes can be mingled and scattered together.

But are there urns that sit there almost forgotten and simply because people don’t quite know what to do with them? That would be sad because these last ceremonies can be very special and meaningful. More private and less stressful than a funeral.

Celebrants are always taught that their work is so important and that they must strive for the highest standards of professionalism because the funeral is the last word. The final curtain. And you have to get it right. Well, I certainly think that celebrants should work to those high standards. And it would be odd for me to say that the funeral doesn’t matter….. but maybe it just doesn’t have to be that last word. Sometimes, for all sorts of reasons, a funeral isn’t the perfect send-off that people would have wanted. Think of COVID times. Or those funerals where emotion is so raw, grief so intense, after the sudden death of a young person. Or some terrible family rift opens. Or someone important can’t be there. When you consider the months of planning that go into weddings and then the short time you have to plan a funeral, it’s little wonder things don’t always work.

But I always think there are other opportunities. A celebration of life on an important anniversary. The dedication of a tree or a bench “in memory”. A family meal in a special place.

Or the loving burial of ashes in a beautiful Highland cemetery.

We agreed, Gillian and I, that it was a bit like music. There are pieces that end in quite a predictable fashion. There are songs that end suddenly. And, like the last Mahler song of the earth, there are pieces that just seem to gently linger and slowly fade.

Michael Hannah, Dundee, May 2026