It's not my grief

There are two other celebrants in the room, as guests settle into their seats, music playing gently in the background. One sits in the front row, just an arm’s reach away. He is tall and handsome and suited, a visitor from Auckland, the city I have abandoned. The second is at the back of the room twiddling with the technology, my script at his side. He is also suited, a silver fox whose voice you’ll hear on the radio, honeyed and inviting. Today he is the funeral director, alongside a woman I’ve got to know well these last few months, as we bow reverently to the casket at the front of the chapel, eight, nine, ten times together. One is open; one is homemade, a lilac so pale and cool; one is adorned with a sword; one is smooth and curved. I am thankful there are none that are tiny, a task I’m unsure I could carry through.

I am in the middle of the eulogy when he walks in, catching my eye. He is also suited, this special man that knows my family, has held my parents as they lay silently in his care. It is not something to forget. My first funeral was in this very space, commemorating Dad’s life, my sister alongside, the place full of friends and students and teachers and us. That was 2017, five years ago. Then redundancy, the chance to pivot, and when she suggested the work of a celebrant, I nodded, not thinking it through, just knowing in my heart it was right. 

Tamaki Makaurau, and my first paid gig: the family so open to my ideas that I see my investment in celebrant training is clearly paying dividends. “How long have you been doing this?” a guest asks, and I am flattered by the inference. My friends ask not “how long?” but “how can you?” and I reply, “It's not my grief.”

And yet sometimes it is. My friend Jan, the largest ceremony I have done, three hundred people or more, coming to grieve for this woman I have idolised for two decades. I am cloaked in aroha as this precious mahi I have chosen simultaneously fills my heart, and breaks my heart. I bite my tongue to stop the tears, but cry shamelessly when I am back home, only the cat to comfort me.

Today, the sun is shining. It is National Celebrant’s Day, and I will venture back to the graveyard I discovered nestled amongst the villas and homesteads on Napier’s hill. Huge oaks, and raging vines, and clematis and irises dance across the moss-worn concrete, the granite, the rusted finials. The saddest epitaph, for a soldier just one year older than my youngest son, reads: “He did his duty.”




A pair of piwakawaka flit through the trees, their insistent chirping and chasing not a portend of death, but a reminder that life goes on.

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