Short Death Stories: Becoming a Celebrant

What job would you do if you could do anything else?

A softer, more melancholic space—because by looking at death, I believe we experience life more vividly. Elegy and obituary, beautiful words both, language for the abyss.

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At a funeral last year for a baby, the Celebrant gave us something beautiful. A story and shape to the shapeless and terrible. Grief in its dark-feathered form, for a moment, took flight and those of us in the room with the broken mother and father were gifted some language and advice to offer support.

To know better how to love.

My quiet obsession with the stories of our lives and how we hold those in death has grown. I read the obituaries and store away glimpses of lives lived like I’m a magpie. Holding them, like I’m holding this story I heard this week from

Sarah Fay Writers at Work

. Hemingway was in two plane crashes, on two consecutive days. In the second, Hemingway and his fourth wife plunged into the crocodile infested Nile. His death was widely reported.

So, Hemingway read his obituary notices, those that slipped to print as described in The New Yorker in the February 6th, 1954 edition.

The Mirror and Tribune closed up around 3 AM thus missing a 3:24 AM bulletin from the AP announcing H's double escape.

He lingered in his own obituaries, discovering himself and not-himself in short paragraphs written by others. So many pieces of this story ignite something quiet and essential inside.

Sarah also told me about a book of poems called Obit, by Victoria Chang, which I’ll share a poem from below—and I’ve ordered at my lovely local bookstore. The book is described as this:

These poems reinvent the form of newspaper obituary to both name what has died (“civility,” “language,” “the future,” “Mother’s blue dress”) and the cultural impact of death on the living. Whereas elegy attempts to immortalize the dead, an obituary expresses loss, and the love for the dead becomes a conduit for self-expression.

A softer, more melancholic space—because by looking at death, I believe we experience life more vividly. Elegy and obituary, beautiful words both, language for the abyss.

And so, with all this talk of stories and death, I found myself circling back to a desire to become a Funeral Celebrant here in Canada. As a ghost, as a mother, as a storyteller, this pulls me. To help families find words seems something I might be able to do.

I’ve learned to trust those quiet instincts, that pull of the gut as

Elin Petronella

so gorgeously conveys it in her endlessly lovely Substack.

And you? Is there another job you’d love to do? Can you?

xoxo

Alice

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If you’re new here, my name is Alice Kuipers and I’m a writer, mother and dog-owner transplanted twenty years ago to the Canadian prairies from England. I’ve published fourteen books in 36 countries and my writing has been described as: “For storytellers and story lovers,” by Kirkus Reviews; ‘Gorgeous, heart-ripping, important,” by VOYA; and “Intense and wonderful” by Bif Naked.

Join me for Little Life Lists and possibly more Death Stories…

Xoxo

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Here’s the poem, from The Poetry Foundation.

OBIT

BY VICTORIA CHANG

My Mother’s Teeth—died twice, once in 1965, all pulled out from gum disease. Once again on August 3, 2015. The fake teeth sit in a box in the garage. When she died, I touched them, smelled them, thought I heard a whimper. I shoved the teeth into my mouth. But having two sets of teeth only made me hungrier. When my mother died, I saw myself in the mirror, her words in a ring around my mouth, like powder from a donut. Her last words were in English. She asked for a Sprite. I wonder whether her last thought was in Chinese. I wonder what her last thought was. I used to think that a dead person’s words die with them. Now I know that they scatter, looking for meaning to attach to like a scent. My mother used to collect orange blossoms in a small shallow bowl. I pass the tree each spring. I always knew that grief was something I could smell. But I didn’t know that it’s not actually a noun but a verb. That it moves.