Simon Booker left his mother’s funeral feeling he had done the best job he could. “I had my producer’s head on,” he says – he used to work in radio and TV – “as well as my grieving son head on. I was very control-freaky about it.” In particular, he was pleased with the humanist celebrant and “tucked the idea away for this phase of life – my third act”.
That was in 2010. Booker is 67 now, and last summer he enrolled on a training course for celebrants, run by Humanists UK. There he was, for two weekends, learning and performing dummy funeral ceremonies for his peers.
At his first funeral proper, last winter, he was nervous – “mainly about the logistics, whether the tech would work. And was I going to press the right buttons? There is no dress rehearsal. Your eye’s on the clock, because there is another ceremony coming in straight after you. The cardinal sin is to overrun. The crematorium can levy a fine.”
The service builds to a “committal”, when the bereaved say their final goodbyes to their loved one before they are buried or cremated. As he says: “You don’t want to be accelerating at that really impactful, meaningful moment.”
Pacing should not be a problem for Booker. In his previous career, he was a writer for TV dramas that were watched by millions – The Inspector Linley Mysteries, The Mrs Bradley Mysteries, Holby City. Now, he says: “I’m still writing and everything’s very dramatic, but the audience is smaller, 60 or 80.” Funerals are, like TV dramas, ephemeral, Booker says – but they have a much more lasting impact.
“You’re helping a family going through a really difficult time to get probably the worst day of their life to go as well as it can,” he says. At the end, he hopes, they will have “a sense of closure, of being able to start the process of moving on”.
Still, it must seem very different from his previous career. Booker left school at 18. His mother had a “very glamorous” job as a publicist for Hollywood films; for a while Booker harboured “a silly idea” of being an actor.
“One of my mum’s friends was the head of drama at BBC TV. He came round one night and showed me a volume of Spotlight, the casting directory for actors, and told me to go through it and tell him how many names and faces I recognised. I quickly got his point,” he says. “My mother put him up to that.”
He got a job as a producer for Capital Radio, working with Michael Aspel and Kenny Everett. He also read the traffic reports. On his 21st birthday, he opened cards from listeners, including one from his father, who had left his mother when Booker was still in nappies.
“There was an address in Weston-super-Mare and the card said: ‘If you ever feel like getting in touch …’ But I didn’t follow it up. I think I felt it would have been disloyal to my mum, who had raised me without any help from him.”
Booker, who also writes novels, is a lifelong atheist, but a recent humanist. “The whole ethos is that we only have one short, precious life, and we should try to live it with kindness and compassion for others.
“When you get to my age, you inevitably start thinking about your own demise more than when you’re younger. So I suppose that kind of attitude helps as you start to address that prospect.”
Humanist funerals are “not the kind of thing anyone does for the money”, Brooker says, although he has heard of one celebrant who does three a day. He has had “a cluster” in London, where he is based, since Christmas.
Doesn’t it get depressing to prepare funerals all the time? “I don’t find it depressing – I find it uplifting,” he says. “My own attitude to death is quite sanguine and philosophical. I’m not squeamish about it. The thought of ‘not being’ doesn’t spook me.”
The thought of retirement, on the other hand, is anathema to him. “I want to do useful things. Useful and worthwhile, satisfying and interesting.”
Tell us: has your life taken a new direction after the age of 60?
English (US)