Good grief! How traditional mourning is giving way to something a little less grave

Martha Gill

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Mourners are taking more control of funerals, opting for eco-friendly coffin options and carrying out their own rituals. Getty

(Getty)

Death has always been good business.

Demand is certain. Traditionally, funeral directors have been able to set their price. Haggling over the costs is often seen as taboo. Meanwhile, grief-stricken friends and relatives, often with no experience of organising funerals, make trusting customers.

But now funeral directors’ dominion is being challenged on several fronts. The most dramatic of these is the rise in direct cremations - a cheaper form of body disposal with no ceremony or attendees. Companies pick up the body, incinerate it and return the ashes later - families typically have no precise idea about when the cremation is happening. Just 3% of funerals were direct cremations in 2019; by 2023 this had soared to 20%.

In part this is merely the latest iteration of a long trend: elaborate mourning customs have gradually given way to simpler ceremonies. Cremation has been on the rise for the past 150 years, not least because churchyards started to run out of space. The recent switch to unattended cremations was helped along by the pandemic, but has also been ushered in through advertising. Pure Cremation, founded in 2015 and by far the largest of these companies, has spent vast sums on glossy daytime TV ads, headlining its low prices and encouraging customers to “avoid the costs of a fancy funeral”. This has garnered criticism, particularly among funeral directors, to whom it is a growing threat.