Reconnecting with the human experience of death.

“We’ve been caring for our own people since pre-human history. It’s not a new invention, it’s in our bones.”

– Jennifer Briscoe-Hough

In this conversation, Tender Funerals founder Jennifer Briscoe-Hough shares what death can teach us about life, what she has learned about people’s innate capacity to know what they need, and what happens when we stop outsourcing death and reconnect with the human experience of it.

Anna:

Well, I know that we could get very carried away with all sorts of things here. So just to get us started, I would love to hear about Tender Funerals and the model that you’ve built there, why you built it and what you think it shows is possible around different ways of thinking about end of life and community and care.

Jennifer:

I think at heart, I’m probably a mixture between a community development worker and a cultural activator. What I believe in is people’s innate ability to create, to know what they need, to know what they want. 

I learned a lot before Tender started from the communities I was working within. When we first were here in Port Kembla, we did a festival. When we started to talk to the local community, they said “we could have jumping castles and we could have fairy floss”. You know, community development will say you need to go to the community and ask them what they want. But sometimes what people want is limited by what they can imagine or what they’ve already seen.

So we did the first festival, based on a 13th century Persian poem called The Conference of the Birds, and people loved it. The next year, when we asked the local First Nations community what they wanted to do, they said, “we want to do a festival about the first death.” They absolutely knew what they wanted to do now because they’d seen what was possible. They did this incredible festival about the birth of the butterfly, which is the story of the first death. And what that taught me was that culture is limited by our imaginations and also by what we think our capacity is. 

The other part of culture is based on a citizenship model. We’re citizens in a community, and we have the responsibility of citizenship, which is care of country, care of each other, care of community. It’s not transactional, it’s relational. 

And so I started Tender because I got cranky about funerals. We paid for my mother’s funeral because we could afford it. But what I was astonished about was that we did everything for my mother’s funeral, washed and dressed her, did the flowers, I did the eulogies. We had one hearse, we already owned the burial plot, and we still paid thirteen thousand dollars for a funeral. And that was 20 years ago.

So I was like, well, that’s okay, we could pay for that. But in the community I worked in, the disadvantaged community, I was like, how do they pay for that? So in the beginning, Tender was about making funerals affordable. 

We learned along the way and we had to change. I thought we didn’t want a benevolent fund because I wanted everyone to have an affordable funeral. I was totally wrong – people love donating to it. They’ve said, we’re going to pay for some unknown person that we don’t know, who may need assistance, we’re going to contribute. So that’s a citizenship model.

The whole thing of Tender is that people can come in, we tell people all the possibilities that they can have, and then people choose. They can participate as much as or as little as they want in the process, and they can change their minds as they go. 

And we sort of debunk whatever’s going on in the mortuary. And when people come and we ask if they want to participate, they might go, oh yeah I dunno, I could be a bit afraid. I used to say we’re five minutes away from not being afraid. And I think that’s the other thing. Like we can be afraid of things, but we’re always going to be afraid of things. So it’s like if you can get over being afraid of this thing, you can just get on to the next thing you’re gonna be afraid of. It’s what makes life interesting. It’s not staying stuck in the same fear or the same limitation. 

And what I know is that people are brilliant and they do know what they want. They might want a church funeral with a hearse and a beautiful oak coffin and a big spray of flowers and choirs. But the fact that they want it, and they choose it, means it’s theirs. The opportunity in end of life and death is the opportunity of life. 

Anna:

I think as I’m listening to you, it feels like we live in a culture at the moment that sanctions and enables the fear of death and says, actually, no, you shouldn’t have to deal with that, and we’ll just handle it for you and keep it out of sight so you don’t have to confront it. It feels like what you do is help actually step towards it and break down that separation and outsourcing that’s kind of happened around the end of life and death and what happens after.

Jennifer:

Yeah, I think it hasn’t been hard because we have a natural instinct. We’ve been caring for our own people since pre-human history. It’s not a new invention, it’s in our bones. 

The thing about this process is that each element builds the muscle for the next element, which is also true of the stages of life, right? If you’re denied access to doing the work, you can go into the next stage of life unequipped because you haven’t built the muscle from the last stage. 

So that’s the same with the funeral. A lot happens between when someone dies and when you put them in the ground or burn them. So if you are able to have access to your person and care for them and be with their body, it’s a good thing because the body is a house and it serves us well. It’s given us joy, it’s given us pain, all of that stuff. It is our humanity, it’s what makes us human in a way.

Our job really was to build a community around that person, to help that community come out and support that person. We can help, you know, if people don’t have anybody, sure. But most people have got somebody and it’s no good us being the support because the funeral director’s choofing off after the funeral.

If you give people enough space, enough information so that they can access what they need, it’s remarkable what they do and what they want.

Anna:

What do you think happens in the mainstream model of end of life and funerals that interrupts that knowing at the moment?

Jennifer:

I think money has a lot to do with it. How it happened was that the funeral industry used to be a logistics industry and it used to just all be about how we’re gonna transport a body, because the families traditionally did all the human stuff.

And it became more commercialised and more industrialised, and at the end of the two world wars, people were tired of death and they didn’t want to deal with it. People didn’t necessarily have a front parlour anymore and there was depression. Things changed and it’s taken us a while to get back to what we’re missing. 

It’s like a gift. This being connected to death is so much about realising that life is limited and that sort of wakes you up. So you don’t want to miss the opportunity of being woken up to the fact that life is precious and so you better do what you want to do with it rather than pretend as if you’re gonna live forever.

Anna:
‘The opportunity of death is the opportunity of life’ really struck me because I think being close to death shows you how to live. And I think all these sorts of things come from actually being around people at the end of their life and seeing, at the end of the day, what made a difference, what mattered. It’s all there to be shown. 

Jennifer:
We as citizens really have a lot of power in how we create the world we want to be in. If we stop thinking it some other way, we start to imagine.

And I think also with ageing, we’re always ageing, we’re ageing from the day we’re born. But as we get in need of more assistance in life, as we get older and not as able, the opportunity to be cared for and the opportunity to care is the same opportunity. Why would you miss it?

Anna:

I’m curious when you say the opportunity to care that is there at that stage of life, what are you thinking of?

Jennifer: 

I’m thinking that everybody needs to feel useful. People want to feel useful. It’s a two-way street. The opportunity for people who are not as able maybe, it doesn’t mean they don’t have something extraordinary to offer. Most people have had wild and rich and glorious lives. And this stage of life is the same internally. Externally, that should be matched. And that can be matched by engaging with people with curiosity. How do we know what people’s lives have been or are unless we talk to them, unless we go in. 

Anna:

I’m thinking about something which you said to me in one of our earliest conversations, which relates to this, how we’re making space for care and how adults are caring for their kids and we’re sort of designing around that, around the jobs of the different life stages. And I’d love to hear you talk about that.

Jennifer: 

I mean for me, rather than talking about ageing, we probably should be talking about the stages of life, and the job of each stage. In traditional societies and in the rites of passage world, you would say that each age has a job attached. The job of the child really is to maintain their innocence, awe and wonder. The job of the adolescent is to learn what their gift is, their natural gift. People say the job of the adult is to give that gift to the world and to look after the children and old people. The job of the elders is to look after the culture. To be talking to the children, talking to the adults. They should be able to be very close to childhood again, in freedom, not in that they’re incapable. But the capacity to just not have a worry, not be responsible. To be honoured as an old one. To be listened to, to be cared for. 

If you haven’t had the value of the other stages, like where you’re relieved of the pressure, elderhood should be like you get the broad view. You can sit back, but you have also spent your adulthood giving your gift to the world. So you know what you’ve been doing. It hasn’t been work because you found that out in adolescence. And you were honoured for it.

Rory Valentine said at his father’s memorial that his father never asked him or his sister what they wanted to do. He asked them how they wanted to live. I mean, there it is. It’s just very simple. How do you want to live? It’s not about who you want to be. It’s a good question at every age.

Which is probably a good question to end on for somebody who’s listened to all this and just going, my gosh, yeah, there’s so much in this and it’s so big. What would your advice be of one thing to actually kind of take from this conversation and do?

Jennifer: 

I think those questions are really important. How do you want to live this next stage of your life? How do you want to die? How do you want to live your dying? How do you want to live? 

And if those stages of life make sense, and you’ve got adolescents, try and give them a rite of passage. If you’ve got children, try and protect their innocence. If you are lucky enough to be around elders, ask them, tell me what you know. 

So I think it’s just about you engaging in your community. People come to Tender and they go, we don’t have a community. I’m like, yeah, you do. Your community are the people that you have dinner with on a Saturday night, the people you talk to at school gate, the supermarket girl or boy. Everybody who you interact with can be in your community.

I would say with death, when someone’s died and people say, “I don’t know what to say,” just say, “I don’t know what to say.” Then ask: how are you? And listen to how they are. Because how they are is something we’re all going to be, or we all have been.

Start with the people closest to you and keep going out.