Loving someone in death care is not something people talk about very often.
When they think about funeral work, they tend to think about the person doing it – the funeral director, the celebrant, the person standing in the room guiding families through the hardest days of their lives.
What they don’t often think about is the people standing quietly beside them.
The partners, the families. The ones who absorb the early mornings, the late nights, the interrupted dinners, the emotional hangovers, the unpredictable calls, and the invisible weight this work can carry.
My wife often says this work chose me. I think she’s right.
Before It All Began
When I first told her I wanted to leave a twenty year career in finance and move into death care, she never doubted it – not outwardly, and remarkably, not inwardly either.
She trusted it before I fully did. She trusted the timing, trusted that life was moving us where we needed to go, even when the path wasn’t obvious.
And in many ways, life did provide.
A redundancy payout gave us breathing room. Wise investments gave us options. But more than that, her faith gave me courage.
What It Actually Asks
That doesn’t mean it’s always been easy.
One of the hardest parts of loving someone in death care, for both of us, is the unpredictability.
Many days begin before sunrise. Some stretch well past sunset. Some bring immense beauty and connection. Others bring stories so heartbreaking they sit with you long after you’ve come home.
And then there’s the emotional toll – the part few people see.
When you spend your days holding space for grief, you carry some of it home. That’s inevitable. The challenge becomes learning where your professional boundaries end and your personal ones begin.
We’re still learning that.
How to say yes without saying yes to everything. How to care deeply without carrying everything. How to make room for recovery.
And for my wife, that has meant something many partners in caring professions will understand – holding space for me too.
For the highs, the heaviness, the uncertainty and the moments where fear about the future creeps in and needs somewhere safe to land.
It’s no small thing.
The Unexpected Gifts
But there have been gifts – unexpected ones.
The greatest of them is the families.
The stories people trust us with. The lives we get to witness. The extraordinary love that exists alongside profound grief. Every family leaves something with us – a memory, a perspective, a reminder that love really does transcend everything.
That’s one of the unexpected gifts of loving someone in death care – it changes how you live.
We talk about death more openly now. Our own wishes, our own plans, the things we still need to put in writing. There’s something unexpectedly liberating about that.
When you spend enough time around death, life sharpens. You realise how much time we waste assuming there’ll always be more of it. You realise how often we stand in our own way.
You realise life is for living.
What This Work Has Taught Us
We haven’t updated our own wills yet – and yes, I’m aware of how that sounds coming from a funeral director.
But even the awareness of it feels like something. The families I sit with remind me constantly that loss has a way of clarifying everything. We try to let it do that for us too.
No One Does This Alone
There is one family, one little girl, who changed us both forever – she was two years old.
Walking alongside her family was the greatest honour of my life – one I hope never needs to be repeated. Her service touched every person involved, and reminded all of us why this work matters so deeply.
It also reminded me of something else.
No one does this work alone. Not really.
Behind every funeral director, every celebrant, every person in death care, there is often someone quietly loving them through it. Helping them carry what cannot always be put down.
That is what loving someone in death care really looks like.
My wife has been that person for me.
And while this work may have chosen me, it has asked something of her too.
I don’t think we talk enough about that.
Maybe we should.
