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 how dance and movement might help us express our grief at Glasto, I'm reflecting on the pros and cons of exit planning and I'm finding out what Bruce Springsteen has to say about turning your ghosts into ancestors.
I post updates fortnightly so please do subscribe and share widely.
Glastonbury and raving with your grief
Glastonbury kicks off today and with it thousands of people will be heading to Worthy Farm to sing and dance and rave and feel. I'm wondering how many going will be using their experience for catharsis, to support the expression of feelings like grief and loss.
I'm wondering this for a number of reasons:
I recently went to a dance party: one of those sober, daytime opportunities to move your body to music without the connotations of nightclubs and dressing up and caring what people think. One woman on the dance floor was bubbling over with grief - her person had just died. She danced and cried. We didn't talk or ask questions - we just danced by her side. At first I felt protective - is she okay? What can I do? Then I realised: this is exactly the place to be, moving, crying, with no expectation to talk or explain. There was no 'oh my goodness, what happened?' that can be the burden grieving people have to face as they go about their day. Just being alongside her as she danced her grief through.
A while back I became aware of Annie Frost Nicholson's amazing work with Grief Rave, during which people come together to play songs that connect them to their people who have died and 'shake out' their feelings. It's described as an 'afternoon of catharsis'. In Annie's words, 'there’s been a real shift from talking therapy to movement and release and kind of shaking it out... Those non-verbal... modes of experiencing and releasing grief.'
Interestingly, Emily Eavis has talked about her work at Glastonbury as a celebration of her mum, who died in 1999. 'Through the rocky days, to what it became later on, she was like the mother of the festival. When she died in 1999, I wanted to come home from London and support my dad – to try to fill a tiny bit of the hole she left behind.'
So for anyone heading to Glastonbury over the next few days, have fun, be safe and I hope you get the chance to dance through all your feelings.
Exit plans vs keeping the end in mind
Since I founded Poppy’s in 2012, many wise people have told me to think about, even to be guided by, my ‘exit plan’. I have resisted it with intensity and for a number of reasons:
💰 I understood exit plans to be for people motivated mostly by the sale of their business and the money it would make. No judgement at all for those who want to be in the Bahamas with a pina colada in five years time, but that ain’t me.
⏳ I wanted to focus on the present: developing and growing an outstanding service, reimagining what’s ‘normal’ when someone dies by demonstrating thoughtful, gentle, personal care for the living and the dead.
📖 There wasn’t an obvious blueprint to follow. We didn’t want to become like everyone else. We wanted to care beautifully for lots of people and to do it well. We needed to explore and evolve rather than track someone else.
Recently, though, I have started to feel a bit of a shift, emphasised greatly by a poke from the tremendously wise Sam Cooper-Gray who suggested my belief in the power of planning for one’s own personal ending might be somewhat undermined by my own reluctance to plan for my own professional transitions. And alongside that, a re-shaping of what exit planning might entail. This is where I’ve got to:
🔚 Rather than an exit plan, how about living with the end in mind (thank you palliative care doctor Kathryn Mannix for this deeply helpful reimagining of endings). I can be in the present and be mindful of what’s likely to happen in the future.
🛤️ You don’t have to pick one path. You can have a bunch of versions of what endings you’d be happy with. I am really, really clear in my head about what I don’t want – in fact viscerally aware – which means there are probably only about 3 or 4 paths that Poppy’s could take. It helps to be clear about that and to know what we’re open to.
🥀 Saying what you want out loud does entail a degree of loss. I wonder if founders like me can be reticent about imagining endings because in doing so we must be grounded by reality. If you are wired as an ‘anything is possible’ kind of person, it can be a bit depressing to realise, ‘yes, but probably this will happen’. There is a time for that creative founder energy and there is a time to get realistic about what’s likely.
All of this has excellent and fascinating parallels with death and one’s own ending. It may be actively unhelpful to create a concrete, inflexible stone tablet with exactly what, how and when, but some clear guiding principles underpinned by values can be very helpful for yourself, and for the people around you.
Thank you Sam Cooper-Gray for helping me think this all through 🙏
Ghosts and ancestors with Bruce Springsteen
A while ago, cycling home listening to a podcast, I heard something that stopped me in my tracks. It was Bruce Springsteen talking to Barack Obama for the Renegades: Born in the USA podcast. Bruce is talking about his relationship with his dad, who had been long term angry, drunk, sad and very difficult to grow up alongside. Bruce describes his on-stage persona – the working class New Jersey guy in workmen’s clothes – as a way of relating to his dad. He says,
‘The trick is, you have to turn your ghosts into ancestors. Ghosts haunt you. Ancestors walk alongside you and provide you with comfort and a vision of life that’s going to be your own. My father walks alongside me as my ancestor now. It took a long time for that to happen.’
This impacts me deeply. Whatever our beliefs, the people in our lives who have died remain within us – as good or bad memories, as DNA, in a photograph or a voice note, as a sentimental object in a drawer. Whether we acknowledge them or not, the dead are here in the present, alongside us. Their lives happened and impacted ours. They can not be erased.
I often meet people who, for different reasons, are struggling to bring their dead people with them. Often the common theme is a feeling that others don’t want to remember or talk about the dead person: their name isn’t mentioned and photos have been put away. Or maybe the relationship was hard, or ended badly, and memories are painful and complicated.
One thing I’ve noticed though. It’s never too late to relate to the dead, and you don’t need anyone’s permission to do so. There is no time limit on this. If someone died decades ago and talking about them has been taboo, it is not too late. If you weren’t allowed to attend a funeral, because of Covid, or because your parent died 40 years ago when funerals weren’t deemed ‘appropriate’ for children, it is not too late to hold a ritual to say goodbye.
I like Bruce’s point because it reminds us we do have some agency. We can choose to relate to the dead and to shape the role they play in our lives. We can try to have ancestors who walk with us rather than ghosts.
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.