As a Funeral Celebrant Trainer I have just just spent the last 3 days with 6 wonderful new students all embarking on new careers as Independent Celebrants, we even had our first international student who flew all the way in from South Africa for the course. I often believe that people are brought together for a reason and certainly this group bonded in the most unique way, we shared tears, laughter, knowledge and friendship, and by way of a strange coincidence almost all of them had aviation connections, we had a former air steward, pilot, RAF members and ATC Wing commander. However all had very different backgrounds, yet all at the same time they were being led down the same path to start on this new, demanding and yet very rewarding profession.
It is all too easy when you have been doing this job for a few years to forget what a very unique service that celebrants are offering, we conduct these services everyday, we network with other celebrants and we sometimes fall into the mindset that everybody conducting funerals offers a similar service ~ not the case! I was reminded of this when I split my students into pairs and asked them to role play the celebrant and bereaved relative to practice their interviewing and fact find skills. Each in their turn as the bereaved gave factual information about a loved one they had fairly recently lost, be it a close friend, a brother or parent. What touched me more than anything was the outpouring of love from the person they were paired with to then go away and write and create a beautiful service for the other.....this had become more than a training course exercise but a very real and genuine act of love and friendship.
The following day when Eulogy's were presented, everyone had gone that little extra mile to include their own words of love and comfort, tears from other students flowed freely in the safe enviroment that together we had created in the previous 2 days. Words were spoken "that was SO much better than the original service that Mum/Dad actually had ~ if only I had known such a thing as a celebrant existed then" In that moment, people were being healed and having the closure that the "real" funeral had not given them.
I am feeling blessed today that these wonderful people came into my life last week, I did not feel we had a teacher/student relationship, as I learnt as much from them as they did from me, but I am grateful in the knowledge that in the forthcoming months and years many more families will be able to say goodbye to their loved ones in a personal, moving and uplifting way, because of the growth of our celebrant movement.
