Come Die With Me…No Place for Complacence – Episode 3

On a radiant day in the summer of 2007, I was awarded the dazzling gift of connection and spiritual enlightenment with my fellow interfaith ministers. I was ordained as a spiritual minister, and it filled my being.

The fact that I had no affinity with most of these ministers is irrelevant. Connection with one’s fellow humans on a wide scale is not easy, it’s quite an art and a science. Today as I confront my own death I’m still learning and I’m just beginning to embrace so much about life, and death too. Time has been short.

Death also made its unexpected appearance 11 days after my own ordination, when my sister who was dying in the palliative care ward of the Marsden, finally gave up the ghost on August 16^th. Her demise taught me so much. It taught about the importance and beauty of the life/death balance; the harmony of death, the peace, the wisdom, the calm. In her little room at the top of the Marsden Cancer Hospital, as she faded gently and poetically, she turned to me and said ‘You’re going to do beautiful funerals.’ Her words were a mystical blessing. I had to honour this belief, and it became my own. This blessing taught me that one cannot live life without death, the two belong inextricably together.

And so in the following years I dedicated myself to creating funeral readings of every possible kind — the quiet, the jokey, the loving, the unexpected, the caring and above all the authentic, whether they were written for footballers or matriarchs.

www.funeralreadings.org