Seven years!

Today, 1 March 2026 (and St David’s Day), marks my seven-year anniversary of becoming a funeral celebrant! It’s been a most fascinating and rewarding period of my life. I’ve done a lot of different things in work down the years (never really knew what I wanted to be when I grew up….) but this has definitely been the best experience.

It has also been a time of change in the Scottish funeral. We’ve seen a huge rise in the number of celebrant-led services. A greater emphasis on the person’s life being the centre of the funeral. More imaginative approaches to ceremony. A rise in direct cremations.

Of course it was also a time of the pandemic, which affected funerals so profoundly. There were times when only six people were allowed into the crematorium – and they had to sit apart. I recall the surreal experience of driving from Dundee to Perth along a completely deserted dual carriageway to conduct a service with just two people in the chapel. I thank SICA (the Scottish Independent Celebrants’ Association) for their support during that time. (I didn’t know then that I would go on to become Chair of SICA!)

In the course of seven years you do meet a lot of families and conduct such varied services. Sometimes a eulogy practically writes itself when someone has led a full life – career, family, hobbies, travel. But there are also occasions when there seems on the surface so little to write about: “what did he do for work?”, “oh he never had a job”…. “and hobbies, pastimes?” … “no he wasn’t the hobby type”…. “lots of friends?”, “no, not really, bit of a loner”.

Of course a picture begins to emerge between those few lines. But those are both the hardest services to write and strangely perhaps, among the most rewarding from a professional and personal perspective. I’ve been dipping into the work of the poet WH Auden lately and there’s a lovely short poem called Who’s Who that captures something of that for me. The ordinary life of someone “who, say astonished critics, lived at home”.

But of all the funerals I’ve conducted over these years, the most meaningful for me was for my own friend Bryan Bale, a proud Welshman who with his usual immaculate timing, died on St David’s Day 2020. Sadly, that was just at the very start of the pandemic and we were unable to have a memorial service in person at the time as he’d requested. And as the pandemic wore on, it became clear that it might never happen so his partner and I decided to hold a zoom service on the anniversary of his death. I led that evening’s celebration of his life. As I had promised him I would. I doubt if all those assembled in that online space would have got all the (very bad!) jokes that I made. But Bryan would.

So a couple of anniversaries to reflect on today as I prepare myself to go out this afternoon and meet a family and prepare a service for the loved one they have just lost.

Michael Hannah, Dundee, St David’s Day 2026