I started listening to podcasts with funeral director Caleb Wilde (one of my favourite names ever) in the last couple of years and then started reading his blog Confessions of a Funeral Director https://www.calebwilde.com/. I’ve had a fascination with the funeral business for a long time and there are many books about it. Probably the most famous is Jessica Mitford’s The American Way of Death which created a real stir by revealing much of the business side of the business. My favourite is probably Tom Jokinen’s Curtains: Adventures of an Undertaker in Training. Jokinen worked for the CBC in Winnipeg and took a leave to train in a very well known Winnipeg funeral home. I especially loved it because I knew the places he was describing and some of the clergy he talks about are friends.

Clergy spend a lot of time thinking about funerals. They are a big part of what we do. And it may surprise people to know this but generally they are part of the work that clergy are really glad to do. I don’t know how many times a colleague has said, I’d rather do a funeral than a wedding any day. I was at a clergy retreat in May and at one meal there were half a dozen clergy and one layperson. She was shocked when someone said this and then there was a chorus of agreement. Note, no one said they didn’t like doing weddings, they just preferred funerals.

It is a really difficult part of ministry. But it is also holy time, holy space. I often find it really difficult to explain what it is like to be with someone when they die, or to be with a family as we plan the funeral. But as I read Wilde’s book Confessions of a Funeral Director: How the Business of Death Saved My Life I kept thinking “yes,” that’s it. Wilde is part of a family funeral home in a town where his family has known and buried everyone for generations. His book is a really honest expression of his own struggles of faith and the journey he made towards what he calls a death positive narrative.

There is much I like about Wilde’s theology like his focus on God’s solidarity with us in our suffering. He talks about coming to terms with our mortality as an essential feature of our humanity in ways I think are really important. I wondered if he has read Richard Beck’s book The Slavery of Death in which Beck teases out the implications of the Eastern Orthodox reading of the fall in which death leads to sin rather than the western reading in which sin leads to death.

Mostly though what I loved about this book was the way in which he would describe the holy moments when in the midst of sorrow there was community. In one account of a scene where there was wailing and tears and he was conscious of being on the clock he relates how he stilled himself and allowed himself to be present to the sorrow: “With renewed eyes, I saw a rare moment when heaven was born. I saw a community honestly express the horribleness of death. In a rare moment, I saw how death and dying creates community by allowing us to touch one another’s humanity.”

The last chapter of the book is a list of ten things Wilde believes about the spirituality of death. One of them resonated deeply with me: “Death cannot be tamed. Death can either break us open or it can break us apart. Those who are broken open find more room for compassion, understanding, forgiveness, and the Other. Let death break you open.” When my dad died one of my best friends said to me, “our hearts are broken but they are also broken open.” Those are words to live and die by.