I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the idea of a strong back, soft front. It’s not my phrase, I first heard it through Tara Brach, who credits the Buddhist teacher Joan Halifax with the teaching, but it’s one of those ideas that has stayed with me because I keep finding it in different parts of my life.
In jiu jitsu, it makes immediate sense. You need strength and structure, but too much tension works against you, you have to stay responsive, know when to hold your ground and when to move, when to resist and when to let go.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about it in death care too, and in grieving, and really, in being a dad, a husband and a friend.
The strong back
Running a funeral business requires a strong back in ways I probably didn’t fully appreciate when we started Idyllic. It’s immersive work, death doesn’t keep business hours and neither does grief, so being genuinely available to the families we care for means the work naturally finds its way into the rest of life.
There are the things people see — the funeral itself, the flowers, the music, the coffin, the photographs and the words that are spoken — and then there is everything underneath it. The first phone call, bringing someone into our care, the paperwork and meetings, conversations with churches, cemeteries and crematoriums, finding the right piece of music, putting together photographs and tributes, tracking down something a family really wants, changing plans when circumstances change, coordinating all the people involved, and solving the inevitable things that don’t quite go to plan.
Most of that is invisible, as it should be. What matters is that when the day arrives, a family can be present for the farewell rather than worrying about everything happening around it.
Doing this personally means being on call, sometimes caring for several families at once, and carrying a lot of small details in your head because each one matters to somebody. It asks a lot of you, but that’s also part of the privilege of the work. A family has trusted you with someone they love, and with creating something that feels right for them, and I want to give that the time and attention it deserves.
That requires a strong back, but I’m increasingly convinced that the other half matters just as much.
Staying soft
The last few months have given me plenty of reasons to think about this. I’ve sat with families grieving people who had lived for close to a century, and with others facing the shock of a life that ended far too soon. I’ve watched families draw deeply on faith and cultural traditions, and I’ve watched others create a farewell entirely their own.
There have been churches filled with prayer and ritual, gravesides and crematorium chapels, rooms filled with stories, music and laughter. Very different lives, very different families and very different ways of saying goodbye, but one thing that strikes me again and again is the way grief and joy can exist in the same room.
Someone can be devastated and laughing at a story thirty seconds later, a funeral can be deeply sad and somehow uplifting at the same time, and there can be an enormous sense of loss alongside an equally enormous sense of gratitude that this person existed at all.
I think staying open to all of that is the soft front. Not trying to make grief neater than it is, not assuming what a funeral should feel like, and not doing this work for so long that any of it starts to feel routine.
Because no matter how many funerals I do, for the family in front of me, this one is theirs.
Grief doesn’t keep time either
One thing this work has reinforced for me is that grief doesn’t behave particularly well around time. A long life doesn’t make the loss small. When someone has had their mum for 97 or 100 years, there can be a tendency from the outside to think of it as a good innings, and of course reaching that age is extraordinary, but she is still their mum.
A lifetime together can mean a lifetime of memories, habits, phone calls, birthdays, Sunday lunches and simply knowing that person is there. The number of years on the page doesn’t tell you how their absence will feel.
I’ve also realised that the same applies at the other end of grief.
My grandfather died more than 20 years ago. I loved him enormously, and I suppose for a long time I thought of that grief as something that belonged to a much earlier version of me, but this work has a way of finding things.
Sometimes I’ll be listening to a family talk about the person they’ve lost, some small detail about who they were, the role they played or simply the way they made people feel, and suddenly I’m thinking about my grandfather. It has surprised me how close that grief can still be, not raw in the way it once was, not something I carry heavily every day, just still there.
We often talk about grief as though time is supposed to move us steadily further away from it, but sometimes a memory can collapse 20 years in an instant.
Becoming a dad has changed it again. There are things I understand now about being loved, protected and shaped by the people who came before us that I couldn’t have understood when I lost him, and sometimes I find myself thinking about what I carry from him into the way I show up for my own family now.
Maybe grief doesn’t have a timeline because love doesn’t really have one either.
What the work gives back
For everything this work asks of us, it gives an extraordinary amount back, and that is something I probably talk about less.
You get invited into people’s lives at an incredibly intimate moment, you hear stories that explain who somebody really was, you learn about marriages and friendships, childhoods, careers, adventures, mistakes and inside jokes. You see families show up for one another, and you see the care people take over the smallest details because those details suddenly matter enormously.
You watch a room change when someone tells exactly the story everyone needed to hear, you see tears turn into laughter and sometimes straight back into tears again. You see people reconnect, you learn things about lives completely different from your own, and every now and then, at the end of a service, someone hugs you and says, “That was them.”
There aren’t many better things someone can say to me.
Before doing this work, I wondered whether being around death all the time might make you hardened to it. So far, I think it has done the opposite.
It makes me pay more attention to being alive, to being a dad, a husband and a friend, to the people who shaped me and the people I’m lucky enough to have around me now, and to the ordinary days that are very easy to take for granted while you’re living them.
And despite the sadness that is inevitably part of it, funeral work can be incredibly uplifting. I get to see people at their most vulnerable, but I also get to see them at their most loving. I see humour in places you might not expect it, families pulling together, old stories being brought back to life, and people finding ways to celebrate someone even while they are grieving them.
I think that’s what keeps the front soft.
Perhaps that’s also why this idea has stayed with me. As a dad, I want to be dependable without becoming rigid, as a husband, strong enough to carry things and soft enough to admit when I need help carrying them, as a friend, to be there without always needing to fix something. In jiu jitsu, to have strength without relying only on force, and as a funeral director, to be steady enough that a family can lean on me without becoming so accustomed to death that I stop being moved by it.
A strong enough back to carry what needs carrying, and a soft enough front to let it change me.
