Step inside the not-for-profit funeral home that's doing death differently.
Kevin Bushell went to his own wake. He wasn't going to miss that party. He had already gone to his funeral on the back of his own ute. "There was no way my husband was getting in the back of a hearse," his wife Nikki says. "That is not who Kevin was. By hook or by crook we were going to get him there in his ute."
Escorted by a convoy of the motorbikes he loved, his dog in the ute, they all ended up at the Shellharbour Surf Life Saving Club, where he had grown up eating his favourite cob loaf. "The funeral was very much Kevin," Nikki says. "He wanted people to be casually dressed, he wanted people just to be able to relax. He wanted to be at the wake, and he wanted people to sign his casket with a personal message."
Suddenly gone three months after the diagnosis of an aggressive form of cancer, Kevin, 59, became part of a quiet revolution, a way of doing death differently. Instead of being whisked away by an undertaker, Nikki was able to keep him at home for another couple of days. She made cups of tea and she talked to him.
"This is his home. I didn't want him to just leave. I put his dad's doona over him to keep him warm. It was comforting just being able to go in there and touch him and talk to him. It wasn't scary, it didn't feel creepy. It was beautiful because he's my husband. It was our family under one roof one last time. It helped us to be able to say goodbye without having to make an appointment to go and see him. It just felt so right."
This revolution in the funeral industry is coming from an old fire station in Port Kembla, NSW, which has been converted into the Tender Funerals mortuary and funeral home.
Down the road from the port, great plumes of smoke from the steelworks billow into the sky. Port Kembla is an industrial town with a lot of disadvantaged and working-class people. With a typical funeral costing between $4,000 and $16,000, for many, the death of a family member can mean going into debt. At Tender, a not-for-profit, community-led service, funerals usually cost between $2,500 and $4,500 — a fraction of the price.
It's not just about making funerals more affordable. Tender is part of a movement gathering pace across the country to change the way we do death. It is about taking death back into our own hands, as families traditionally did, and not just handing it over to a $1.6 billion funeral industry.
Living in a 'culture of death deniers'
Jenny Briscoe-Hough has been general manager of the Port Kembla Community Project for over 20 years and has been working on providing alternative, affordable funerals for the past 14. Funerals, she says, "can be not good or they can be absolutely transformational. And why not go for the absolutely transformational".
But most people don't know they can do that. It doesn't have to be a cold and rushed formal service, followed by desultory sandwiches. "They could be the celebrant for their own family member's funeral," says Tender Funerals Illawarra general manager Amy Sagar.
At Tender Funerals, "a funeral might not look like a funeral".
"It might look like a beer with friends or a dinner around a table. That could be a funeral," Amy says. "They could have a funeral in their backyard or in their living room if they wanted to. They could decorate their own coffin and shroud the deceased."
In fact, you can do pretty much whatever you want for a funeral, Amy says. Except have a Viking funeral. "So many people would like a Viking funeral," Jenny says, laughing.
Under NSW law, you can keep your deceased person at home for five days to care for them, dress them for the funeral and say goodbye in your own way. Tender Funerals will provide a cool plate to put under them, which is a refrigerated tray that sits at -15 degrees Celsius.
"What comes forward when someone dies is love," Jenny says. And to have them taken away and never see them again, except in a box, can compound the grief.
"We are afraid of seeing dead people because it's the unknown," Jenny says. "What happens though, when we see our people, is that all of that melts away: 'Oh, it's just Mum.'"
We live in a culture that views death as if it is contagious and should be avoided at all costs. It is the last taboo. "We are a culture of death deniers," Amy says.
"If you've been caring for someone that you love for a long time as they die, and then for them to just be removed and gone, that's such a stark end to that process."
So many people expect the person who has died to come walking through the door for months and months because they never saw the body.
"I do know that there is something that happens when you put your hands on the body of a person who you love that's died," Jenny says. "Your body gets a message from that body to say, 'Oh, that person's gone.' It's a physical knowing in your body that is helpful in the grieving process."
Jenny's bill shock inspires change in funeral industry
Jenny grew up in suburban Sydney with a mother who ran a home hairdressing salon. "It was like Steel Magnolias. People were having perms, there was a lot of laughing," Jenny remembers. Her mother would go to the "old people's home" and do the "old people's hair" and the kids would come along.
When her children protested, her mother would say, "You're going and you're going to give them a hug. We are possibly the only people who are physically touching these people, so we're going to do it".
"She was this person who understood people," Jenny says.
When her mother died in 2008, Jenny found out how funerals worked, how removed and rushed they could be. "You're in a different state for a couple of days when someone dies. I found myself being led through this process without being given any clear information. We had to pick a coffin and there's no prices on the coffin."
When they went to dress their mother, they had to drive to Western Sydney where she was in a mass mortuary. The funeral company had their advertising on the bottom of the memorial card. "It was like somebody had slapped me."
They owned the burial plot, "we did the flowers, we just drove in our own cars, we did everything. And we got a bill for something like $10,000." Jenny knew of people who had taken years to pay off that debt. "Funerals can be a big financial strain and place people under an enormous amount of pressure at an incredibly vulnerable time in their lives."
Suddenly it became very clear to her, "a possibility of something being different. So I went to our community committee and I said, 'What about a not-for-profit funeral service?' and everyone said, 'Let's do that. I want us to bury me.'"
The problem was that she had absolutely no clue how to start a funeral service. Then she heard about Zenith Virago. "Zenith was one of the first people to look at doing death differently in Australia," Jenny says. "That people did participate in the process, that people were empowered in the process."
"I've spent 25 years in the Northern Rivers working with people who are dying, with their bodies when they're dead and with their families," Zenith says. Before there was a funeral industry, she says, "there were always families taking care of their own, washing, cleaning them, dressing them on their own kitchen tables, putting them in a coffin".
Now, she says, the funeral industry is about making profits, upselling. "The funeral industry is a corporate business and they are owning links in the chain, which people don't understand, like the coffin manufacturer, the funeral director and the crematorium."
For seven years, Jenny applied for grants, had knock-backs, and could not get the money for her not-for-profit funeral service. Death was not turning out to be an attractive investment.
That was until her childhood friend and artist Lynette Wallworth decided to make a film to help people understand their vision, Tender.
This included documenting the death of Nigel Slater, the former caretaker at the community centre. "He knew everyone, everyone knew him," Lynette says.
Nigel Slater allowed cameras to film his final days with lung cancer. "The most profound gift of that film is Nigel's gift to it," Lynette says. "Maybe the last thing he could do to help this incredible community was to let them show his death. And let them do this first funeral, which was Nigel's funeral."
And with the film came the money they needed from crowdfunding, donations and help from Social Enterprise Finance Australia and the Vincent Fairfax Foundation.
Inside the 'sacred space'
One of the people who saw the film was Amy Sagar, who had discovered her vocation at the age of 16 and had been working in the funeral industry for eight years. "I don't see funeral work as a job, I see it as my life's work really," she says. "[But] I was very much feeling like I was stunted in my position, not able to offer the things that I felt like a family should be offered."
She reached out and Jenny immediately knew she wanted her to run Tender. For the first 12 months it was just the two of them. "I didn't know what I was doing and she knew absolutely what she was doing," Jenny says.
Today, volunteers "are at the heart of what we do".
Samuel Clowes's grandmother, Jean, had been involved with Scouts her entire life. She was adamant that she wanted her funeral service in a Scout hall. "We contacted a few places," he says, "and Tender was the one that was able to enable a completely different funeral service."
When he found out Tender allowed volunteers to come in, "I signed straight up," he laughs.
Once he went into the mortuary, he discovered a passion for it. Today he is studying forensic medicine while still volunteering and doing paid work at Tender.
Tender Funerals will wash and dress your loved one, allowing you to participate and see them that one last time. For Amy, it is an honour to look after someone after they have died.
"We treat our mortuary as a sacred space, so we treat the act of caring for someone's body as a sacred act," she says.
"And so when we wash someone, it's not really because they're dirty, it's more because it's the last act of caring for someone's body.
"It's really important to maintain their humanity because that is the person who was a parent or a sibling or a child to the people in their life and they can't advocate for themselves.
"So that's where I step in, to be able to provide that level of care for them."
Putting the 'showman' to rest, his way
Drahomir Žák, 64, came to Australia from the Czech Republic as a political refugee. "He was a really amazing illustrator and he did a lot of different illustrations for children's books," says his ex-partner and friend Marissa Gunning, with whom he had a daughter, Amahla, now 17.
"He lived a very complex artist's life. He liked things that were a bit odd and rebellious," she says. He was well known in the community for his public artworks.
When he became ill with prostate cancer that metastasised to his bones, he asked Marissa to be with him when he died. "He was definitely afraid. And that's why we spent four days and three nights holding him and holding his hand and talking to him," Marissa remembers.
"Then he just turned his head and opened his eyes and looked straight at me. I was right up on the bed with him. He just looked at me and I said, 'It's OK, you can go,' and then he just turned his head and I saw the light leave his eyes.
"It was really amazing to experience that, and I feel very grateful to him that he shared that with me as his friend."
Jenny and Amy washed and dressed Drahomir with care, "smudging" him — burning sage in an ancient ritual of smoke cleansing.
"When I asked Marissa if she had a type of music that she'd like us to play while we looked after him, she said that he really loved Nick Cave and that music would be perfect to play."
Drahomir always wore a long black coat, big boots and a beret. They dressed him in his skinny jeans, his Doc Martens. Marissa found his T-shirt with a skull and "life and death" written on it.
"We knew he was a bit of a showman," Jenny says. "He would have wanted to look good and look like himself. And he looked great. When you dress someone back into their clothing, especially if it's been a long hospital stay, it's like they transform back into themselves because they get a little bit of themself back."
Due to COVID-19, Drahomir's funeral had some restrictions, so to enable more people to be involved Marissa decided to have people paint and decorate his coffin, "to kind of put our feelings towards him onto something he could take with him. We were able to paint on it and draw on it and write on it and graffiti, and then stick all the community's artwork on with glue."
Says Jenny: "If the farewell matches the person, then we feel happy about the fact that we've been able to honour the person and have meaning in that."
Drahomir had to stop working when he became ill and ended up on an invalid's pension. The Tender Funeral costs, Marissa says, "are really so reasonable, it was achievable for us." Those who can afford it are charged an extra $250, which is put in a benevolent fund for those who can't. Marissa used the benevolent fund, otherwise she would have had to draw on her home loan.
Amy believes that the value of a funeral shouldn't be judged on its cost, but on "what that experience was". "We work to provide funerals for every person in our community, regardless of their financial status," she says.
The movement grows
Tender has presided over more than 1,000 funerals now and interest is growing. There are now six other Tender Funerals at different stages of development around Australia; in far north Queensland, Tasmania, Perth, ACT and two more in NSW.
"They're giving the community the gift that they don't know they need until the minute they need it and the minute they need it, they absolutely know they need it," Jenny says.
Jenny says about 59 per cent of people who come through Tender do participate in the care of their person. "We are becoming less afraid. There is a change happening, we're moving much more towards participation, care, authenticity and meaning for people."
It's a groundswell of change, Amy believes, "that is happening in Port Kembla, a little seed that was planted that can really change the norms around the rest of Australia."
Jenny believes that not being around death means we lose an understanding of life.
"Honestly, it wakes you up and it sort of catapults you to the centre of life. It opens everything up in you to life. You suddenly realise that all life is limited and it's precious. What am I going to do with my life? I don't know why we would want to miss that, I don't know why we would deny ourselves that experience."
Watch Australian Story's 'A Community Undertaking' on ABC iview and YouTube.
Credits
Feature writer: Susan Chenery
Producer/ videographer: Olivia Rousset
Digital Producer: Megan Mackander
Photography: Harriet Tatham, Keoghs Vision Photography, supplied: Marissa Gunning
