Hello and welcome to Life Lessons from Death, a newsletter for people and organisations curious to know what death can teach us about living and working well.
In our professional and personal lives, change is a constant and endings are a part of life. We can fight this – and lots of us try to - or we can learn to ride it. If we can ride it, we will find that every ending holds the seeds of something new, the chance to learn and grow.
As Founder of London funeral directors Poppy's I’ve had more than a decade of insights from death, and it has transformed me. Now I want to invite you behind the scenes so you can learn too.
This week, I'm exploring the privilege of burying friends, acknowledging the grief of miscarriage and pregnancy loss, and the slow, steady steps being taken by the Law Commission to legalise human composting in England and Wales.
I post updates fortnightly so please do subscribe and share widely.
Burying friends
A strange, double-edged privilege of working with death is that sometimes, the people you are burying are people you love very much, neighbours, friends and family, people you have grown up with, people you depend on.
Privilege might sound like a strange word, but it's true. It is a gift to be able to do something, to be helpful, when the worst happens. And it's something I always had my eyes open to right from the beginning. I remember when I set up Poppy's and I wasn't sure how it would go, I had a distinct sense of, 'even if this work simply gives me the skills to be of service to my friends and family, to my community, those would be skills worth having.'
It has taken me time though to learn some tough lessons about caring for people I love, which I think have parallels for anyone who is grieving. Here goes:
Remember to 'be' as well as 'do'. Yes it feels good to be of service. But taking charge and serving others has sometimes meant I have bypassed my own grief. That is a mistake.
Grief comes when it comes. It is my style to jump into 'doing' first (I can't help it - wired like this from a young age). So I can be blindsided by feelings months later. I do what I can to 'be' in the moment but I have also come to expect this, to make time and space for it.
Don't take charge when it is one of 'your' people. It took me ages to let the Poppy's team help me when one of my people died. I felt I should step forward and take charge. But it meant I was working through the experience rather than having it. I didn't get to be alongside everyone else - I set myself apart from them, making sure everyone else was alright. I've learned not to do this and instead will let my astounding colleagues in the Poppy's team hold space for me alongside everyone else.
I am curious to know, how have you balanced 'being' and 'doing' when you are grieving? If you work with death and dying, how have your experiences gone when people close to you have died? It would be helpful to hear.
Grieving baby loss isn't 'sick leave'
Something really important happened this week. The Employment Rights Bill is changing so that parents can legally take time off work if they experience miscarriage and pregnancy loss.
This sounds obvious doesn't it? But until now, this right was limited to parents grieving when the loss occurred only after 24 weeks of pregnancy. If you experienced baby loss before 24 weeks, which is when most miscarriages and baby loss occurs, your legal right was to take sick leave.
But as miscarriage awareness campaigner Myleene Klass put it in this article in the BBC, ‘you’re not ill, you’ve lost a child, there’s a death in the family.’ Whether this sentiment reflects everyone's feelings around baby loss or not, it's certainly true to say that the experience is not limited to physical recovery.
I have learnt a lot about this from the parents and families we have supported at Poppy's, none of whom recognised an arbitrary 24 week pregnancy distinction. The truth is we have supported people who needed and wanted a funeral for their baby when the pregnancy lasted 10 weeks and 16 weeks and 20 weeks too. These babies have had names and futures imagined for them.
If you want to learn more, Poppy's has some helpful and supportive blogs on breaking the taboo around miscarriage and baby loss in which Carla Miller shares her experiences of fertility treatment, miscarriage and grief, and planning funerals for a baby or child.
The slow, but steady, legalising of human composting
I have long been a fan of Katrina Spade's work to give people the choice to be turned, beautifully, into soil when they die at Recompose. Back in 2021 Poppy's CEO Clare Montagu and I visited their greenhouse in Seattle to see the work firsthand. It was breath-taking to open a vessel labelled 'Alan' (not his real name), who had been placed in there 40 days before, and to see rich, dark soil now heaped inside.
The complication here in the UK has been that, whilst this choice and other new methods such as alkaline hydrolysis are not illegal, they aren't legal either. The regulations aren't in place to practice them. If you did so, you would be tangentially breaking other laws. So to get these new choices here, some work needs to be done.
So hooray for the Law Commission who have been doing great, painstaking work to create a framework that would allow new practices like human composting to be practiced safely and legally in England and Wales. This is a summary of where they're at:
🎉 This is big news. We haven't had a meaningful new choice for our bodies enshrined in law since cremation was legalised in 1902. Quick shout out though to the amazing Ken West who pioneered natural burial in the 1990s at Carlisle Cemetery, for which new laws were not needed.
✍️ The Law Commission will produce draft legislation next Spring 2026 and propose an act of parliament, not for each new future method but for a generic framework which would encompass both human composting and alkaline hydrolysis but future new methods too. Choice is good.
⚖️ About 63% of the Law Commission's recommendations are implemented by government. So there's a very good chance these choices will become an option for people, but it's not guaranteed.
If you can, take time to respond to the Law Commission's consultation (closes on 4 September). The more engagement they get, the better their draft legilsation will be, and the more chance we'll all have to be turned into soil when we die 🌱
Okay friends, until next time.
About the Author
I founded Poppy's in 2012 to make outstanding care the norm when someone dies. Running a young company through the 2010s, I experienced pretty much constant organisational chop and change. Along the way I had three kids, now aged 10, 8 and 6. In 2021 I went through a leadership succession, recruited a CEO and changed my role to Founder & Chair. Change, endings and fresh starts are my buddies and friends.
Poppy's is a funeral directors, based in London, with a fresh approach to funerals. Instead of following rigid traditions, we listen to what you want and need. Instead of hiding behind closed doors, we’re open about how we care for the living and the dead. At Poppy's, we’re by your side every step of the way.