Not All Funeral Directors Are The Same
Your relationship with the funeral director is important. Their role is to help you to arrange the funeral of your choice. Since most people will only engage with a funeral director perhaps once or twice in their lifetime, the act of purchasing a funeral is an unfamiliar and often, daunting, experience.
Funeral directors are there to support you. They support your choices. So, the more you understand about how a particular company works, the easier it will be to decide whether they are the right one for you. We strongly encourage people to ask funeral directors questions, and lots of them. You can ask family or friends for help with this and take the time you need. There’s no rush. Ultimately, getting the right funeral directors alongside you for guidance, support and the carrying out of your wishes, matters.
At first, many people feel like Michele:
I knew what I did not want, but did not really have any idea about how to get what we did want.
Whether you’re looking for a funeral director right now, or thinking ahead to the future, we hope that the following pointers will help you to find the right people to support your needs and choices.
1. Decide, as far as you can, the style of funeral you want. Think about what it is you want the funeral director to do and the desired level of involvement of family and friends. You can gain some initial ideas by taking a look through a funeral director’s website, or via their social media pages before contacting them.
2. Know that you can help to wash and dress the body of a person who’s died, bear their coffin, design and conduct the funeral ceremony and other things if you wish. Quality of service is just as important as price and far more difficult to judge in advance of using the services, but a discussion or visit without obligation can help you decide.
3. Recommendations from other people can be helpful, but find out what sort of funeral it was that they arranged. A good funeral director for a traditional funeral in a church may not be the right one if the family want to actively participate in the arrangements. For example, you may want an alternative venue or to use a woodland burial site, or even bring the body home for a vigil the night before the funeral ceremony. Gauge how helpful, flexible and open to your ideas the funeral directors are.
4. Ask about pricing, their fees, the cost of coffins, cars, an estimate of the total cost of the type of funeral you require, and ask for the quote in writing. Their attitude to your cost survey will provide you with information, for example whether they are prepared to quote for exactly what you want rather than give you a price for a package.
5. Visiting: if you and others are likely to want to visit the person who’s died, find out if the funeral director has a pleasant and spacious chapel of rest in which you could spend some time, and make sure their visiting hours are sufficiently flexible.
6. Remember that you can always change funeral directors, at any point. This is completely normal and not something to be afraid of doing. If you have appointed a funeral director who doesn’t feel quite right, you can absolutely change to one of your choosing. This is more common than you might think and there is no need to feel uneasy about this. Such a decision is within your rights, details of which are published in the National Association of Funeral Directors’ code of conduct. You’re in charge!
7. Who are the funeral directors? Increasingly funeral directors are owned by big corporations, but still trade largely under the old family name. They tend to be less flexible in what they can provide and more expensive. Ask a funeral director whether they are an independent firm or part of a group (the biggest groups are Co-operative Funeralcare and Dignity).
Questions to ask: The team behind the Good Funeral Guide CIC have created a useful list of questions to ask a funeral director, before you consider engaging their support: https://www.goodfuneralguide.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Questions-to-ask-a-funeral-director.pdf
You can also find more advice from our book, “We Need To Talk About The Funeral” and our “Arranging A Funeral” page
