Category: Blog

“All rituals were invented by somebody. They didn’t just come out of the ether from God.”

Grayson Perry

I’ve long been a fan of Grayson Perry. Not just of his work as a potter which is as subversive as it is beautiful, but also of his clear-eyed attempts to understand and explain the human condition. He’s a gifted communicator, whose easy directness allows him to connect with people from all cultures and walks of life, and in his series for Channel 4 Grayson Perry: Rites of Passage — he travels from the rain-soaked Midlands of England to the rainforests of Sulawesi to investigate the ways in which we mark the big events in our lives. 

“All rituals were invented by somebody,” Perry says. “They didn’t just come out of the ether from God,” and his insight is that while rituals can become empty and meaningless when they lose their connection to the societies they are supposed to serve, they can also evolve.

“Making meaning: that’s what we’re doing” he says, and in his series, Perry gracefully and movingly offers possible solutions to two realities of 21st century life that no ceremony, religious, civil or humanist currently address: prolonged illness and divorce. Just as Perry transcends easy gender stereotypes, I suspect he’d evade any attempt to categorise his beliefs, but the ceremonies that he helped to create in these programmes struck me as being profoundly humanist in nature. 

As a celebrant, I occasionally have the privilege of meeting people before they die so they can tell me about their life, but it hadn’t occurred to me until I saw this programme how much better it would be to celebrate their life while they’re still alive. 

Roch Maher was diagnosed with motor neurone disease and given 18 months to live. That was eight years ago. Now approaching what he recognised as the end of his life, Roch decided to celebrate it with his family and friends while he could still speak and enjoy their company. Grayson made him a canopic urn of the type used by the ancient Egyptians for their funeral remains, into which the guests placed mementoes of Roch’s life: there were many, many bottles of beer, but the first and most moving contribution was the ‘something blue’ garter his wife had worn at their wedding.

Grayson Perry has the gift of making his insights seem unremarkable and obvious, so it now seems extraordinary to me that although almost half of the marriages in the UK currently end in divorce, to date no faith or belief system has tried to create a ritual to mark it. Divorce is often messy, emotional and traumatic, but in episode two, we met Dilly and Mark who were doing their best to part on amicable terms having acknowledged that marriage had run its course.

For their outdoor ceremony in a nearby park, Grayson created a beautiful silk banner, with which he presented them, along with a huge pair of shears to cut it in half. Like the living funeral, the divorce ceremony provoked both laughter and tears from Mark and Dilly’s family and friends, but even without a specially commissioned Grayson Perry artwork to destroy, it is easy to see how a ritual in which a couple could express not just their sorrow and regret but also their hopes for the future could help to heal some deeply damaging wounds.

Rites of Passage is unapologetically provocative television but it doesn’t upset, it inspires. Quite when I’ll ever meet someone brave enough to participate in their own farewell I don’t know. Sooner, perhaps, than I will meet a couple so emotionally mature as to contemplate a divorce ceremony, but one day someone will and I believe that Grayson Perry’s example will help them to invent their own ritual, full of meaning, emotion, and purpose. 

This article first appeared in The Scotsman.

Faye Yerbury is going to die. Not tomorrow, maybe not next week but definitely sometime soon. She has been living with one lung since the age of 12, and after being diagnosed some months ago with ovarian cancer, she knows her time is limited, which is why she’s taken steps to ensure that the end of her life is as painless as possible for everyone around her. 

One of her first decisions was to donate her body to medical science, and as her wish has been granted by the School of Medicine at the University of Edinburgh, a conventional funeral was out of the question. 

Living funerals are not completely unknown in this country but they are very rare. I’ve never done one, and I’ve conducted literally hundreds of funerals since I became a humanist celebrant in 2005. To put that in a wider context, in that time, I’ve met fewer than a dozen people who felt able to tell me about their lives before they died, and Faye is one of them. 

It takes courage to accept our own mortality. The Stoics were among the first people to get the paradox that the way to live a full and rewarding life is to embrace the fact that we are going to die, and the Roman philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius had lots of advice about how to do that. “Think not disdainfully of death, but look on it with favour; for even death is one of the things that Nature wills,” he wrote – or as the scriptwriter for “Gladiator” rephrased it, “Death smiles at us all; all we can do is smile back.” 

Most of us aren’t Stoics, and we find death scary because we don’t see it as part of our lives. 50 years ago, when your granny died, her body would have been laid out in its coffin in the front room where everyone would have come to pay their respects, and while that tradition continues in Ireland and the rest of Europe, here in the UK, death has become so medicalised and professionalised that it’s been removed from life, and because of that, death has become much more alien and frightening than it should be, which makes Faye’s decision to celebrate her life before it ends all the more courageous. 

Because I’d never conducted a living funeral, Faye, her husband Trevor and I made it up as we went along. We agreed it should be a party first and a funeral second, and in the event, it had the best elements of both. Trevor spoke first, introducing their friend and colleague Kevin, who presented Faye with a Lifetime Achievement award from Master Photographers International; I talked about Faye’s life and career, and then four of her best friends paid their own tributes. 

Wrapped in a shawl, Faye sat in the place of honour, beaming all over her face. She is frail now. Always petite, now she is tiny, and able to move only with the aid of a walker. Her voice, always gentle is barely more than a whisper, but her brain is as sharp as ever and she has lost none of her wit or her character.

An award-winning hairdresser when she met Trevor later in life, Faye changed careers and became a photographer, specialising in boudoir and classic nudes. Her models are noir goddesses, framed by classical architecture or poised and posed in a dark wood, where their alabaster bodies gleam like sculpture. 

Listening to her friends talk about who she was, and how she inspired them, it struck me how strange it is that we wait until someone has died before we say how much we love them.

There were around 70 guests on Sunday, some of whom had flown across the world to be with Faye for one last time, and those who didn’t speak brought letters for her to read later. Something else that made her ceremony very different from a conventional funeral was that social media has allowed me to read people’s reactions to it. Trevor’s Facebook page has been inundated with likes and comments from hundreds of people, and while their comments varied, the common theme was that her ceremony was not just fitting but moving, touching and inspiring.

That’s what Faye thought too. As she wrote, “It was a wonderful day, listening to kind words from friends and family. I also loved reading all the social media messages not realising how many people I had encouraged and influenced. It was very humbling. I hope that my decision will set a trend for others to feel that there is an alternative to a traditional funeral so they can celebrate their lives with family and friends before their life finally ends.” 

This story appeared in The Herald on 6th August 2024