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Two Together: Save £100!
Save £100 when you purchase two funeral plans together. Call us for more details.
Two Together: Save £100!
Save £100 when you purchase two funeral plans together. Call us for more details.
There are many questions that we don’t tend to ponder the answer to until the time comes for us to organise a funeral, whether for ourselves through a prepaid funeral plan, or at short notice for a loved one who has very recently died.
One such question concerns the role of a funeral director: what they do, how much they cost and whether they are legally required? In this article, we are going to consider the role of a funeral director, providing some context on what they do, how they can help you and how their role has changed with evolving British funeral tastes. We hope you find it useful.
The role of funeral director is a very versatile one. Their job comprises administrative, organisational and emotional elements. A good funeral director may help you to compile a funeral checklist, offering reassuring advice and demonstrating a good understanding of the paperwork requirements of organising a funeral.
They will also be able to coordinate the logistics of funeral arranging – booking appropriately sized and located venues, as well as the transportation of the person who has died to the venue of their funeral. There are certain elements of aftercare to attend to as well, such as the return of the ashes, whether within a cremation urn or a scatter tube.
But, of course, funerals are not merely about planning and organising; they are deeply emotional affairs. With that in mind, whilst a funeral director is not necessarily someone who will be able to offer you counselling, they should know how to listen, and how to weave the emotional significance of the day into your plans. A good, empathetic funeral director can make it easier for families to deal with grief.
As such, a good funeral arranger has to call upon a variety of skills, demonstrating the ability to understand your emotions and how best to support you, but also be well organised and hard-working. With a traditional funeral which has a hearse and funeral procession, the funeral director will typically lead the procession on foot, directing to the venue of the funeral. Nowadays, with the decline of religion in the UK, more and more British people are looking for a modern and more personalised option. This means that funeral directors need to be better than ever before at catering to the wishes and personalities of those for whom they are organising funerals.
They may also need to be aware of how to support families with the organisation of an end-of-life celebration after the funeral has occurred.
Broadly speaking, the responsibilities of a funeral director can be split into three main areas: the planning and coordinating of funeral services; the handling of legal and administrative tasks; and the provision of emotional support.
One of the main things that a family needs their funeral director to help them with is to plan and coordinate the funeral service. A funeral is a potentially complex affair with a lot of moving parts. The body of the person who has died needs to be collected and cared for before the funeral; transported to the venue; and processed (cremated or buried, for instance).
Aside from that, depending on what kind of ceremony the family wants (attended or unattended), they may need to help them to find a local funeral celebrant, who can design and personalise an order of service. The funeral director may also be able to help with things like choosing the best funeral songs for the person who has died. Naturally, along with all of this venue bookings need to be made in a timely way, and the funeral director always needs to know what is going to happen when so that they can update the family as necessary.
Something that people are often surprised by is the amount of paperwork that proliferates when someone dies. One of the first things you will need to do is register the death. In doing so, you will receive the Death Certificate of the person who has died; the legal document officially registering their death, and documenting their cause of death. This document is very important for what follows afterwards; especially if you are the executor of their will.
A funeral director can act as a source of guidance and information when it comes to cremation forms and other pieces of documentation that need to be done around a funeral. Your funeral director will keep an eye on what needs to be submitted when in order for everything to run smoothly, and can help to make sure that everything is completed correctly.
One of the most important skills of a funeral director, (which, nevertheless, is possibly a little more difficult to measure) is the ability to be emotionally present with the family. This isn’t just a case of working through the admin and legal elements and then checking in with them now and again. It’s about weaving an emotional awareness throughout the process, remembering details so that there’s no need get the family to repeat themselves; recognising the tone that the family is using, which is as likely to be distraught as it is businesslike; and recognising when the family wants to speak about what they might be feeling.
At Aura, our team of funeral arrangers, the Aura Angels, offer industry-leading compassionate care. It’s through their people-centred approach to their work that we have earned our place as the top-rated national ‘Cremation Services’ provider on Trustpilot, with a score of 4.9/5 stars. They are masters of providing the personal touch, tying up all the loose ends whilst making sure that you are looked after.
Some of the responsibilities of a funeral director tend towards the practical. For instance, they will usually need to prepare the body of the person who has died, and manage their transportation from mortuary facilities to the location of the funeral.
In some cultures and religions, in accordance with different beliefs on death and funerals in religion, it is important to have an open-casket ceremony, i.e., where the person who has died is clothed and displayed within their casket, the lid of which is kept ‘open’. In certain Christian cultures, this is an important way of saying goodbye, and something that can help the grieving process.
In this case, the funeral director will need to gently wash and clothe the person who has died, in clothes selected especially for the occasion by the family. Their body will likely need to be embalmed too, in order to slow down the decomposition process, allowing it to be viewed publicly. With that said, despite a widely believed funeral myth on the subject, it is not a legal requirement to have a body embalmed. Indeed, with a direct cremation, embalming doesn’t normally happen.
Transportation is one of the most important elements of a funeral. The person who has died will need to be brought from where they are resting to the venue of their funeral, and transportation may also need to be arranged for some of the guests — especially if they are elderly, cannot drive, and live alone. A funeral director can coordinate all of these transport logistics for you.
If you were to select Aura for your funeral, or the funeral of a loved one who has recently died, we would bring the person who has died from one of our local care centres to the crematorium within a private ambulance.
Funeral directors, in recent years, have needed to adapt the services they offer in order to fall into step with the changing funeral needs of people in Britain. Lately, they have had to focus much more on incorporating personalisation into the funerals they are organising, as well as on embracing technology.
With the rise of social media and the decline of traditional attitudes in the UK, the urge to personalise everything about our lives seems to be stronger than ever. This tendency has spread into the way we arrange our funerals. We want the music, the words, and the visuals to align as closely as possible with who we, or our loved one, were in life.
Funeral directors need to be more adept than ever at recommending the most popular funeral hymns; helping families to incorporate words from stories about death; and offering advice on how to theme a funeral ceremony in the most personal terms possible. They may even provide advice on organising a memorial service or celebration of life afterwards, or even on different cremation ashes ideas.
Throughout Covid, due to various government restrictions on gatherings, many of us were unable to physically attend the funerals of those we had lost. Technological solutions provided a workaround for this reality, with many people using communication software to send their love and support from afar.
Funeral directors have needed to become a lot more technology savvy in recent years, not just to allow for people to attend funerals digitally (if, for instance, they live very far away from the family and cannot make it back home in time), but also to incorporate multimedia content into funeral ceremonies. More of us want to add video or a presentation and music into elements of our funerals, such as the eulogy. Knowing what is possible for each venue, and how to implement such ideas is more key than ever.
A funeral director will need to work across a variety of different locations depending on the kind of funeral that is being organised and on what stage proceedings are at. They will also need to be flexible in their working hours and schedule, and to handle both emotional and physical demands.
A funeral director will spend their working day in a variety of different places depending on what stage proceedings happen to be at. At the first point of contact, they might be found in their office, where they can get a sense of the initial needs of the person looking to organise a funeral. From there, they can also pull together a lot of the logistical matters, coordinating the different parts of the event, enquiring about venue availability and so on. They may speak with the family face-to-face or over the phone as they prefer.
One of the first things you will need to do when you are arranging a funeral is to weigh up cremation vs burial. This will, among other things, determine whether the funeral director will join proceedings at a funeral parlour or cemetery, or at a crematorium. With that said, there is a wider variety than ever of different funeral locations, through the development of alternative funerals.
Funeral directors have different operating hours, so it’s best to check beforehand if you have specific needs. Aura’s operating hours, for example, are Monday-Friday 9:00-5:30 with limited hours on weekends. We are available 24/7 for someone needing to be brought into our care urgently, however.
Funerals can happen any day of the week, depending on availability, including on weekends for usually an increase in cost. Services run from morning to evening, with more popular times such as mid-day and early evening sometimes being a little more expensive.
A good funeral director should have the ability to cope with the emotional and physical demands of working in close proximity to those who have died and their grieving families. They are often a good source of death education, having a good, useful blend of process-related and emotional knowledge. This should not only help them to offer a more knowledgeable and confident service to the families in their care, but should also allow them to understand their own mental health needs on the job.
Some physical labour may also be required, such as moving caskets around and organising the funeral space. Funeral directors will need to be capable of carrying out this work.
A funeral director can offer a wide array of different types of expertise and experience in their day-to-day working life. An essential skill in their repertoire is communication. Without good, solid communication and presentation skills, a funeral director will not effectively be able to liaise with and coordinate third-parties who are responsible for, e.g., organising the transportation of the person who has died or their family. It goes without saying that, attached to that, is the need to be highly organised.
Communication isn’t just about organising third-parties, though. It is also about the ability to offer impeccable service. When you are choosing a funeral director for your own needs, and you are comparing funeral plans, one of the most important metrics is the customer satisfaction attached to the director’s services. A funeral director will earn recognition from those whom it serves by knowing when to listen, knowing when to offer support, and when to direct us to other sources of support. This is why checking reputable review websites like Trustpilot is so valuable; Aura has an excellent 4.9/5 stars, making it clear why our customers choose us over other providers.
Funeral directors also need to be versatile and able to continually learn throughout their careers. They will also know how to handle difficult situations, whether they arise through complex or specific cultural needs, or through stringent time pressures. Not only will they have to adapt to the continually changing funeral landscape in the UK, as tastes change and more alternative funeral options become popular. But they will also need to continually learn how to integrate technology into their work, whether to organise a funeral, or to actually implement one on the day.
We hope that you have found this article about the role of a funeral director interesting and useful. We could be planning our own funeral and wondering if we really need one. Or we may currently be faced with the sudden or impending loss of a loved one, and we just want to know what they do. In either case, a good funeral director can be an essential element of end-of-life planning or funeral arranging.
Aura is a family-run provider of direct cremation services, offered both to those in need now for a recent bereavement, or for those planning ahead for their own future. We are end-of-life pre-planning experts with a compassionate touch. Our founder, Paul Jameson, set us up in 2019 following his own diagnosis with motor neurone disease, and his subsequent struggles with legacy planning and facing mortality. Now he runs the company alongside his son, David (our CEO), and their family friend, Ben (our COO).
Every day, with the expertise of our kind and caring Aura Angels, we strive to offer a level of care that never drops below that which Paul would expect for himself and his own family.
If you think Aura might be able to help you with your own funeral plans, why not download our funeral plan brochure today?
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