Three in one week

You probably won't want to bother with this post unless you are actually interested in the funeral business itself - ethics, work-load, family/undertaker/celebrant interface etc,

Next week I've got three funerals, two on one day.
Wasn't I the one pontificating about not doing too many funerals, not long ago?
Indeed I was.
So?

In a fairly sparsely-populated part of the UK, secular celebrants, let alone BHA celebrants, are pretty thinly spread. My usual first point of referral can't help, for various reasons to do with other areas of her life. Another celebrant I'm not too happy about referring to, because - well, never mind because why, let's just say it's not personal animosity, it's down to approach, dogmatism, that sort of thing, and that's not just my view.

Much as I value many of my BHA colleagues, I may make, for future reference, private investigations and see if there are other celebrants, maybe of the "mix and match" sort rather scorned by some BHA-ers, who would do what I might call a good job. Arrogant? Or just using the sort of discrimination and judgement I want undertakers to make about us celebrants?

Anyway, here's how this overload happened: one family member phoned me direct i.e. not through an undertaker, and when she contacted an undertaker and he suggested a nearer colleague, the lady said she'd talked it through with me and wanted me to do it. That looks a bit self-satisfied, but the fact is that once someone in this situation has talked to you on the phone, they tend to want the same point of contact, if it's been at all helpful. (If it wasn't helpful, then I'm clearly in the wrong job.) People, it seems to me, want a bit of stability amongst the emotional turmoil of recent bereavement. It could just as easily have been my colleague she phoned. I could have said "Can't do it, talk to....." I wouldn't have been happy with that. So that was the first one in the diary.

The second one is a sad story of someone who died too young. The undertaker has not worked with a non-religious celebrant before. This isn't really a good context in which to prevaricate, promise to get back to them soon with an alternative, etc. Yes or no. I said yes.

The third is much more selfish. The undertaker is making contact again after a long interval, and he is the one who apparently decided not to use me because I worked for The Competition as well. I don't know who he's been using for non-religious ceremonies, let's hope it was someone who was better than me. Anyway, I want to build that bridge again. And in any case my colleague can't do it.

It's impossible for me to be objective about motivation here. Maybe there's vanity in amongst it all, maybe there's neediness. But if we celebrants think we are doing anything of a good job, if we think the work is reasonably important and worthwhile, then we want to do the job. There are, as Rupert Callender wrote recently of his much bigger and more demanding role, easier ways of earning money, so you can forget about that as a motivation for over-loading my week.

It seems to me we should think carefully before saying "no, can't do it," if the reasons are "because it'll dominate my thinking for the next ten days, it's very tiring, the computer gives me a headache" and other whines. Similarly, we should also think hard before saying yes. I tried to do so. But it's difficult to say "no" if you're uneasy about the alternatives, and it is obviously a bad idea just to say "no" and do nothing to help fill the gap.

All this is a long-winded way of having a little worry, and explaining why I probably won't be bending your ear (can you bend someone's eye? Probably not) for the next few days.