The Green Funeral Company, Devon and Cornwall
A good Funeral is for the living but about the dead - and honours both. It stands at the core of what it means to be human.
“ With your kindness, respect, professionalism and comforting advice, I was able to organise a dignified yet intimate goodbye for my dad with a strength he would have been proud of.”
The Green Funeral Company was founded in 2000 to offer an ecological alternative to traditional funerals. Since then we have helped hundreds of people through the traumatic days following a death and together we have created appropriate, emotionally rewarding funerals.
We started The Green Funeral Company in 2000, and for the first 9 years we ran it from our home in Cornwall. We have now moved our home to Totnes, and our business to Dartington Hall Estate.
I would like to say I am not as coquettish as I look in this 'photo, it's just hard to get comfy on that sofa. Claire
Whilst none of us come from traditional funeral backgrounds, we were moved to become funeral directors through our beliefs and experience of bereavement and its aftermath.
Rupert spent much of his childhood in the hospice where his mother worked, and the caring humanistic philosophy of the hospice movement is central to our work.
In the eleven years we have been doing this work, we have become more confident about our approach and its results. We proudly call ourselves undertakers so there is no ambiguity about what we do. When we first meet you, we are unlikely to be wearing suits. We do not have a fleet of hearses and limousines. We do not employ bearers. We do not have a standard funeral, we do not use euphemisms. We do not consider faux-Victoriana and a mournful expression to be an assurance of respect and dignity. That is not to say we are unable to produce a traditional funeral spectacular; we have buried Generals and Lords, but we approach each funeral as unique. What is at the core of our work is honesty, acceptance, and participation, even if that is just helping us to carry the coffin. In doing so, all of us become less of an audience and more of a congregation.
We are experienced in the complicated dynamics that result from tragic young deaths, the way modern families are, the need for all to be heard and the deep, deep wounds that these deaths can produce. It is in the crucible of such events that our beliefs and working practice have been forged.
