When my father-in-law, Cliff, died in March 2021 after being recognized with an aggressive and late-caught most cancers, he didn’t depart any funeral plans. Nor was there cash squirrelled away to pay for them, even when he had. He was an ardent atheist, so a church service was out of the query, and pandemic restrictions had been limiting visitor numbers, so my spouse, Hayley, and her siblings determined to decide out of getting a standard funeral. As an alternative, they selected “direct cremation”, a service that minimises formalities – and, crucially, the price. There isn’t a funeral service; the coffin is just introduced into the crematorium earlier than it’s cremated, after which the ashes are returned to the household.
Throughout a web-based session with “loss of life specialists” Farewill, Hayley was quoted £1,062 for a direct cremation, greater than £3,000 cheaper than the present average cost of a basic funeral. The one catch was that nobody would attend the cremation, apart from these paid to hold it out. It appeared a merciless option to some, who couldn’t get their heads round the concept there wouldn’t be a funeral to attend. However Hayley defined why it appeared like the right possibility: they might receive her father’s ashes with out fuss and maintain their very own, intimate ceremony on the banks of the River Wye, the place Cliff had cherished to fish.
Though Cliff died in a hospital in Powys, Wales, he was cremated 140 miles away at a crematorium close to Exeter. His ashes then travelled 220 miles east, with no limousine cortege in sight, to our residence in Southend-on-Sea, Essex. The supply man arrived holding a present bag containing Hayley’s dad in a single hand and a small bunch of flowers within the different.
Farewill’s co-founder Dan Garrett is one thing of a disruptor inside the loss of life business. Demise first impressed him when he was rising up in Golders Inexperienced in north London, the place his household residence backed on to the native crematorium.
“The stroll with my household was all the time to the crematorium,” he says. “It was completely lovely; I reckon it left some form of resonance in my head.” He graduated from the Royal School of Artwork in 2015 on the lookout for a spot within the startup market, and launched Farewill the identical yr. He felt that the funeral business, with its monopolising practices based mostly round native, family-run funeral administrators, was ripe for revolution. Farewill branched out from its preliminary supply of on-line will-writing companies (often carried out by solicitors) after it observed a sample rising amongst its clients.
“We have been talking to twenty,000 individuals a yr,” he says. “And we had a field [on the online form] that stated: ‘What do you wish to do along with your funeral?’” And doubtless 80% of what individuals have been writing was: ‘I simply need no fuss, don’t put on black, nothing conventional, simply one thing that represents me.’” Garrett realised this was “an excellent enterprise alternative”.
Farewill started doing direct cremations in December 2019, a couple of months earlier than Covid hit the UK. The recognition of its companies didn’t peter out with the pandemic, and now 20% of bodies are disposed of by direct cremation. Farewill rivals Pure Cremation recently predicted that fifty% of the UK inhabitants will select direct cremation inside 20 years. Enterprise has been bolstered by a era of tech-savvy shoppers navigating a value of residing disaster and a stagnant financial system. It isn’t unique to the UK: the US is experiencing an identical shift within the funeral business, as detailed by the New York Times.
According to the Cremation Society, as much as 80% of persons are cremated within the UK, which is above the typical globally – though that is nonetheless behind Japan, the place nearly everyone seems to be cremated – but it surely hasn’t all the time been the case. As Jessica Mitford (who, like David Bowie, opted for direct cremation) wrote in The American Manner of Demise, there have been simply three cremations within the UK in 1885 – the primary yr of its legalisation, after a hard-fought interval of campaigning. Right now, the overwhelming majority of the UK would moderately be incinerated, maybe for causes just like these articulated by George Bernard Shaw within the Forties: “Earth burial, a horrible observe, will some day be prohibited by regulation, not solely as a result of it’s hideously unaesthetic, however as a result of the lifeless would crowd the residing off the Earth if it may very well be carried out to its finish of preserving our our bodies for his or her resurrection on an imaginary day of judgment.”
Regardless of its rising recognition, fightback is brewing towards direct cremation, nicknamed “burn and return” by those that oppose it. “Direct cremation interrupts each this sacred understanding of the lifeless physique and the sense that it has deep and highly effective religious worth,” wrote Anne Richards, public coverage adviser to the Church of England, in June. “Whether or not supplied overtly or not, such a no-fuss service undermines the sense {that a} lifeless physique is worthy of respect, care, dignity and love. Why spend cash on one thing nugatory?”
Writing within the Spectator, Ysenda Maxtone Graham, in a chunk that described the method as “a lonely finish for one’s mom or father, or certainly oneself – and really fairly costly for what occurs, which is principally waste disposal”, stated: “You may see how – as with assisted dying – the aged may very well be pressurised into going for this feature by the death-averse, non-religious and hard-up younger.”
However checked out one other manner, direct cremation has demystified an business that has lengthy been accused of overcharging grieving households. The “price of dying” within the UK, together with skilled charges for administering the property, a easy funeral service, and all elective extras just like the social gathering or wake, has this yr hit a document excessive of £9,797, in response to Sun Life’s annual study, whereas 6% of funerals are actually crowdfunded.
In February 2025, Farewill was offered to Dignity, one of many largest funeral firms within the UK, which operates 45 crematoria. Within the workplace of Dignity’s Bentley crematorium, simply outdoors Brentwood, Essex, supervisor Ian Finest says he nonetheless calls direct cremations “unattended cremations” out of behavior. It’s a hangover from the times when the one cremations with out household or mates have been “pauper’s funerals”, paid for by the council if there have been no family members to cowl the price (because of the price of residing disaster, the variety of such funerals, now often known as public well being funerals, has risen by 47% in England in the last seven years). Earlier than the pandemic, Finest says, unattended cremations solely occurred at Bentley each three or 4 months. Now, they rely for roughly a 3rd of all cremations that happen there.
“It’s undoubtedly modified the business massively, and I feel we’re studying as we go,” says Finest. “It’s uncharted territory for us.” The largest change, he says, “is simply the truth that individuals aren’t right here. I’m so used to being right here, looking of the window, seeing the automotive park full up, and listening to individuals – to then suppose, oh, there’s nobody outdoors, however I’m nonetheless attending a funeral.”
However in lots of different methods, you’ll be laborious pressed to inform the distinction between a direct cremation and a service attended by mourners. “I all the time emphasise the truth that we do it precisely the identical right here, no matter whether or not it’s attended or unattended,” says Finest. “You’ll nonetheless all the time come by way of the entrance [of the chapel], we’ll all the time have music on, we’ll all the time bow, we’ll all the time have the curtains, there’ll all the time be that component of respect.” Imagining it jogs my memory of one other echo of the pandemic – catching highlights of Liverpool’s successful Premier League marketing campaign when there have been no crowds; all that ceremony, however with nobody to share it with.
I first arrived at Bentley shortly after a direct cremation and members of the family have been standing outdoors chatting, having stated their last goodbyes. I ask Ian if he minds individuals attending direct cremations on this method, when they’re marketed as “unattended” (and that is mirrored within the value). Fairly the opposite, he says: when he observed them congregating, he turned the audio system on outdoors and performed music as they watched the funeral administrators take within the coffin. “Theoretically, an unattended funeral ought to simply be the funeral director bringing the cherished one within the coffin: there’s no household,” he says, however he’s open to households watching, and typically invitations individuals in to take a seat on the again, to assist them grieve for his or her cherished one. “I’m not going to show individuals away. It doesn’t price me something.”
Some funeral administrators recommend that the best way direct cremations are offered is just too pushy. Pure Cremation is without doubt one of the nation’s largest direct cremation suppliers, with an unlimited crematorium in Andover, Hampshire, and a multimillion-pound TV advertising spend, with commercials proven primarily throughout daytime hours to catch the retired demographic most definitely to purchase funeral plans. Their adverts are throughout social media, too. I noticed one advert promising a free afternoon tea, as much as the worth of £50, when shopping for a direct cremation by way of the corporate (“Supply ends 31 August”).
The rise of direct cremation, in addition to the backlash, goes some strategy to addressing a elementary query about loss of life: what, or who, are funerals for?
“Funerals have all the time been for the residing,” says Martin Stibbards, whose household funeral administrators in Essex supply the whole lot from a full horse-drawn funeral cortege that harks again to their Victorian roots to their very own direct cremation service. “You don’t know you’re at your funeral, however your family members do.” Stibbards says that the genius of the brand new direct cremation firms is that they’ve flipped the choice from the household to the residing, directing their promoting in direction of these making their very own funeral plans. “Grief is tough. You would possibly suppose it’s all excellent once you’re sitting in your lounge and also you’re not dying and pondering: ‘Yeah, I’ll simply enroll, that is going to be nice for my household.’ However when the fact occurs and also you’re whisked off someplace with out anyone understanding the place you might be … grief might be very complicated.”
It feels insufficient, in some way – however not due to the cremation course of itself. Reasonably any try and mark the tip of a life feels unsatisfactory. And nothing – direct cremation, a princely burial after a multi-vehicle cortege, or lighting up the sky with fireworks like Hunter S Thompson – can change that.