In today’s Sun Life Cost of Dying Report, which covers the 2023 calendar year, the report notes that funeral costs have only returned to pre-pandemic levels in the last twelve months, with the average cost of funeral arrangements increasing by 4.7% over 2022. It’s worth noting that this is significantly lower than the predicted 7.5% annual CPI rate of inflation for last year, demonstrating that funeral directors continue to keep bereaved consumers at the forefront of their minds, pegging price increases as low as possible, despite dealing with significantly higher increases in the costs they bear as businesses to provide the funeral arrangements, as well as rising energy bills and increasing staff costs too.
The report also claims that direct cremations represent one in 5 (20%) of all funerals in the UK. This is significantly higher than the consistent 11-12% reported by our 4,100 funeral home members, and data gathered by The Cremation Society from crematoria. It illustrates the misunderstandings we often see about what a direct cremation actually is. A direct cremation is a completely unattended funeral, where there is no funeral service and no involvement by mourners – the body is collected from the mortuary, cremated without witnesses and the ashes are returned to the family if requested. Many of those funerals being labelled as direct cremations are actually simple funeral services: either a small number of mourners attending a service at a crematorium, or a service held elsewhere, but with no one then travelling to the crematorium to witness the committal (the cremation).
What the report does accurately highlight, though, is the majority of us are still not planning ahead. The experience of two thirds of those who had arranged a funeral was that knowing a loved one’s wishes could have made arrangements less stressful, yet the report says that only one in four of us have had that conversation.
A funeral is as much for the living as for the dead – it is the coming together of a community, however big or small, to honour and remember someone who has died support those who are grieving as they say goodbye. Over the past decade or more, funerals – like weddings before them – have become more personalised, now often including the wishes of the person who has died and their loved ones to enable the funeral service to reflect and celebrate the live they have lived as well as say goodbye. Finding a balance between having your own wishes carried out and enabling those who will miss you to say goodbye, in the way they would want to, is important, and we’ve seen from the pandemic restrictions how distressing it is when that choice is taken away.
Sometimes it is these more personal aspects of a funeral arrangement that provide a chance for important conversations to take place between loved ones as to what they would like to happen at the end of life. Although never easy, they are incredibly important conversations, making sure that funerals not only reflect what the person who has died wants – but also what those who will miss them would like to happen, to help them say goodbye and begin to deal with their loss.