Today’s episode celebrates our one year anniversary! We cannot believe we have been creating content for a whole 12 months already! This episode will look back on some of the most pertinent and popular topics that we’ve covered. We’ve been fortunate to meet some outstanding guests, from celebrities, to families we’ve had the privilege to look after, and some G Seller colleagues.
This anniversary episode features: Malin Andersson, John Adams, Reverend Canon David Jennings, Tara DeMarco, Ruth Blakemore, Katherine & Simon Tansey as well as G Seller’s Tracy Orton, Joe Clarke-Ferridge, Amy & Joseph Barsby.
We’ve found that most people have questions about funerals and what really happens but never find out those answers until their loved one sadly passes away. Our podcast is designed to answer some of those questions and tackle the taboo that surrounds the funeral profession.
So please do submit your questions to liftingthelid@gseller.co.uk and we will do our absolute best to answer them in future episodes.
Today’s episode celebrates our one year anniversary! We cannot believe we have been creating content for a whole 12 months already! This episode will look back on some of the most pertinent and popular topics that we’ve covered. We’ve been fortunate to meet some outstanding guests, from celebrities, to families we’ve had the privilege to look after, and some G Seller colleagues.
This anniversary episode features: Malin Andersson, John Adams, Reverend Canon David Jennings, Tara DeMarco, Ruth Blakemore, Katherine & Simon Tansey as well as G Seller’s Tracy Orton, Joe Clarke-Ferridge, Amy & Joseph Barsby.
We’ve found that most people have questions about funerals and what really happens but never find out those answers until their loved one sadly passes away. Our podcast is designed to answer some of those questions and tackle the taboo that surrounds the funeral profession.
So please do submit your questions to liftingthelid@gseller.co.uk and we will do our absolute best to answer them in future episodes.
Hi, I'm Andy. Today's episode celebrates our one year anniversary. I genuinely can't believe it's been a whole year since we began. We'll be looking back at some of the most pertinent and popular topics that we've covered. We've been fortunate to meet some outstanding guests, from celebrities to families we've had the privilege to look after. And, of course, not forgetting my very own colleagues. We found that most people have questions about funerals and what really happens, but never find out those answers until our loved one sadly passes away. Our podcast, it's designed to answer those questions and tackle the taboo that surrounds the funeral profession. You can still submit questions. Please, please send them to liftingthelid@gseller.co.uk and we will do our absolute best to answer them for you. But for now, we hope you enjoy the clips we've chosen to celebrate our one year anniversary. Let's look back at an episode answering one of our listener questions. So, what is your self care from being in high emotional roles? How do we shut off or wind down? I never, ever thought about that until Alison joined the team. So, Alison's, one of our obviously bereavement counsellors, works alongside you. And I never considered self care, what I do, what that coping mechanism was, until she started questioning me and probing me on what I do, why I do things, how I do things. And my self care is I leave work and I call my mum every night. So every night I call, I divulge my day, the good, the bad, the ugly and everything in between. And I hadn't realised how much I was offloading and then I'd close the door walking home, and then I'm mum and wife and I hadn't realised how much self care that helped me to wind down and lose parts of my day, to then carry on. But that is the thing, because for Alison and myself as counsellors, we have to have it's called clinical supervision, and that's like our offloading of all the stuff that we hear and all the trauma we hear about, and we have to have that, but most of the professions don't. And so there's that side of it that we, you know and she would have said that to you. I mean, I was very aware of that, that you hear a lot, you deal with a lot of emotional people in your roles and you don't get the support in the same sense that we get and we have to have. Yeah, this is going to make me sound really basic and really bad. I never phone my mum, which I'm really sorry, Mum, I know, but I don't know, I just sort of get on with things, so I suppose I like to go for a run. I find that as a good coping mechanism because it sort of resets my brain for the day, but generally I'll go home and interact with my daughter and wife and just enjoy their company. And I've always been very good at sort of boxing off what happens at work and keeping that very separate. We've had some great questions over the last year and it really puts us in the spotlight, so please do keep sending them in. Next, my colleague Amy is interviewing the wonderful Malin Andersson. This episode gives a real insight into multiple losses and how to handle emotional trauma. So at what point did you feel like, hang on a minute, I don't have a dad, I don't have these memories? Did you ever get delayed grief from that, from not knowing him and from living trying to get to know him through your siblings and through mum? Did you ever feel a sense of loss or is it because it's always been the norm, there's never been that feeling? I think going through school when I was younger, I used to find it weird that everyone else had a dad and I didn't, and I didn't really understand that. So lower school, middle school and upper school. And I think me not having a father also gave me a really, it carved a bad path of unhealthy toxic relationships and attracting men that were abusive because I think I wanted love and I didn't understand what it was from a father giving me a hug, that kind of thing. And like, seeing mum and dad together, that relationship, and like, okay, this is exactly that. I'm sure you'll agree. An incredibly powerful episode. Amy at the office, she talked about that interview for a long time afterwards. Thank you, Malin, for your honesty. In this next clip, I interview John Adams, the former president of the NAFD. It's clear from this episode that John's drive and passion for the funeral profession is driven by the loss of his very own mother at a young age. It's because all these areas I go to are having the same issues. And again, what I want us to do as we move forward now, our new CEO as well, which he's as passionate as I am, is about how we really connect up all these areas together. And that's how you become even stronger as well. Absolutely. Totally agree. You seem incredibly passionate, John. Have you suffered a loss yourself? Is there something that drives this? So, yeah, with the bereavement awareness within schools, which, again, we'll come on to, a lot of that has come from the loss of my own mother. Her name was Maria, and still is, when I was twelve years of age. And I think that experience that I went through, it has shaped me. It has shaped me. And I think it's an example that any dark moment in someone's life, it's how you flip it over and you turn it into light. And that's what I use my mum for. She's my fuel and fire in everything I do, how I serve families, how I want to be at home, and with the NAFD and again with education within schools, it's how we empower society and community and give education. And I really believe the outcome can be so positive. It's great to see so much passion within the profession that drive to dispel the taboos and help people through a difficult time. Hopefully, in the future we can work together again. With the next clip, I interview the Reverend Canon David Jennings. I was hugely surprised to hear of an Anglican minister spending a night in prison. Let's hear more. And then after ordination, I did a Master of Philosophy degree in marketing at Loughborough University at the business school. Yeah, but you still maintain you learnt the most in the prison? The prison I learned a lot. I actually got locked in a cell for well, it wasn't for very long, but I did ask the governor whether he actually thought I was an inmate. And he said, do you really want an answer to that? It was difficult to get into because the Church of England hadn't actually done this before for ordinance in training to go and stay visit a prison. And so they had to invent a title and they invented the title catechist. We were to be a catechist into the prison. And the first day we went, there were three of us at the gate in Canterbury Prison. A guy called Fred said, I have to phone the governor to let you in. And he phoned the governor and he said, I've got three anarchists here that want to come into the prison. Having worked with Canon Jennings, this episode is far too short. He has such a huge array of different experiences and stories which keep us all entertained. Do you know what? I'm pretty certain there's enough there for a spin off podcast. Turning loss into a positive and developing a phenomenal business. We interview Ruth Blakemore of Life Ledger. What is Life Ledger? Just for the people listening. I know, but yeah, what is it? I think it serves a problem in the community, which is that when somebody passes away, the bereaved left behind very quickly have to face the administrative burden. And this was something you had experienced, no doubt. It was absolutely, of trying to inform organisations of the death. So when my mum passed away, I partly wanted to do something which was a legacy to her. And I'd run and been involved with lots of big businesses, tech, all sorts of banking, media. So I looked around the world and tried to find gaps in the market that would help the elderly or the bereaved. I spoke with Ruth after the interview. Again, there's so many different stories, Ruth. She spent some time working with some big names within the music industry and I've got to admit, with some of the name drops, I did have a touch of the green eyed monster. My colleague Joe, he had the privilege of looking after the family of Isla Tansey. He also had the privilege of interviewing them. This is a very difficult episode and a difficult clip, but a real insight into the full journey of struggling with the loss of a child. They were like, we've got the tumour, we've got it all out, we think it's going to be all right. But then about a couple of days later, they got some results back, didn't they? And they had to call us into the horrible side room in Birmingham Children's Hospital. And I knew it wasn't good because there was a student nurse on placement. She was a lovely nurse, but she cried all morning. She couldn't even look at us. She was just, like, ignoring us and I thought, oh, this isn't going to be good. And they took us into the room and they told us, didn't they, that Isla had what do they call it? They called it a glioblastoma multiform initially, which is the tumour that they removed. They confirmed it crushed her spinal cord and she'd never walk again and she'd be paraplegic. But the initial tests showed that it was malignant and then they had to wait for further tests to find out the grading of the tumour, which seemed to happen quite quickly. So, I mean, we would we kept saying, like, we've got to keep optimistic, you've got to find hope in something. But every time we had news, it was turning the corner and being faced with even more bad news, wasn't it? And it just became just this kind of spiral down, really, with the kind of options and what might happen with that. And then we found out it was stage four. Then we found out that it had a mutation of DIPG, which usually grows in the brain. Yeah, it doesn't normally grow in the spine. No. So it had this kind of genetic mutation and they said they'd treat her with radiotherapy in order to try and kill off any residual cells, but there was a possibility that it was going to kind of cross the brain blood barrier and then start to develop in the brain, which was what happened, really. Thank you, Joe, for leading this episode. I know Isla has had a lasting impact on him and, of course, our local community. The full episode explains more about the charity set up in Isla's name, Islastones. We're proud to continue supporting the charity and the work it does for other families facing a childhood cancer diagnosis. One of our early episodes, we speak to social media blogger Lauren, The Honest Mum, who opens up about the loss of her baby boy. She remembers in that moment that the doctor came to me. I can still visualise it now. The doctor come over to me and she just said, there's nothing more that we can do and I'm really sorry. And I said thank you, because I knew that they'd done everything that they could. They felt that emotion like we felt it and they really cared and they had looked at every single avenue they could look at and nothing was working and he was just too poorly and he was on the cusp of even being viable to be alive at 24 weeks and 4 days. He was just on and he was 838 grams. He was tiny, really tiny. So I mean that piece that you just mentioned there around they did their absolute best. I mean from a funeral director's perspective we kind of feel your pain too. We sort of take a bit of onus and want to do our absolute best. Nowhere near the pain that you feel. Of course it's really difficult for us to go through it. We have lots of support mechanism coping mechanisms to assist us. You have your own in house bereavement? We absolutely do, yeah. So they're more for families. We're in various different bodies that we can communicate with if we as individuals are struggling. Thank you so much to Lauren for sharing her heartbreaking loss with such honesty and of course for challenging me with questions. I just hope my answers were as insightful. Take a listen to the next clip to get a real insight into the day to day life of our own managing Director Joseph Barsby. You know, you, you lined your first coffin at age twelve. I mean what does that feel like? So from myself, from my perspective, I haven't been around funeral for my whole life. You clearly have been, so what does that feel like as a twelve year old? So I always came into the business with Mum and Dad when I was in the school holidays. I was always asking them when we could go home and I was sat in the office and I knew all the team and I was on their computers and asking lots of annoying questions to them and they'll keeping me entertained. Exactly. So it was kind of a natural progression that in my school holidays when Mum and Dad wanted me to earn some pocket money that I helped out in the back of house and cleaned the cars, swept up and then I asked and... What did it feel like? It felt like a natural progression, like it's something that I wanted to do. I didn't have any involvement with looking after a deceased till a lot later on but I was still in and around the environment of caring for people, although I wasn't doing it myself until I was a lot older. I found that Joseph brings the same passion as John Adams at the office. It's great to have leadership with someone so forward thinking but it's clear that drive comes from wanting to provide the absolute best service we possibly can for the families we have the privilege to look after. Have you ever wondered why it's so important to plan ahead? The next clip with my colleague Amy explains why. So I think there's quite a unique point with G Seller here, that if the funeral plan grows above, we actually refund, don't we? Yeah, we do. And we still keep flexibility within the plan. So if people are taking out a plan and today, in today's moment, they require three limousines, because we've got a big family, we were planning ahead for all the grandchildren and so on and so forth. But actually, at time of need, circumstances have changed. Family are living away, some people may not be able to come, so on and so forth. Those limousines can be taken off the bill, so that money is refunded back to the family or the money is offset against something else. We would like a little bit more catering, we would like more flowers, orders of service. That money can be reallocated within the plan at the time of need, so it's still fit for purpose for that loved one and for the family saying goodbye. Absolutely. I think that episode has made us all think about our own funeral wishes and planning ahead. Myself and Amy, when we look back, we were amazed at the number of times we both say, absolutely. I think someone should tally it up. We interviewed Tara DeMarco. Let's find out what it's like and how to train to become a funeral celebrant. So not granddad, I'm talking a family that you're not familiar with. How did you feel doing that? I felt honoured. Yeah. Privileged, nerve racking. And I felt the weight of responsibility. It was terrifying, quite frankly, Andy, it was terrifying. But I think, rightly, so you should be terrified, walking into that first service because you want to do a fantastic job. But I was actually very fortunate. Kev from G Seller. When I was beginning this type of work, I met with Kev, had a chat to him, talked about my training and my experience and very much he took me under his wing at that point and helped me and supported me and gave me my first family to work with. As I say, great privilege to do so. Yes, but a wholly terrifying experience. But what a wonderful family. Such a gentle group of people who loved that person that they had lost dearly. Thank you, Tara, for sharing your story with us. It's clear to see the sense of achievement Tara has when delivering that service. But my word, the pressures involved in doing so. I mean, after all, there's only one opportunity to get it right. We filmed several episodes with my colleague and bereavement counsellor, Tracy. Let's hear from her now about What Is Grief. The acceptance bit. I do take a bit of an issue with that because I don't feel that we accept the loss of somebody we love dearly. I think it's more that we learn to live with it. Okay, so you talk through a bit, a kind of a linear piece there, which we don't feel is quite accurate as such. I mean, I've studied models and oscillating theories where we bounce around all over the place. Different people, though, I imagine we don't all grieve in the same way. No, you mentioned the oscillation and that is more what the realistic way that it is. And some people will it's bouncing from getting on and living life to actually feeling like you're debilitated and can't cope with anything. And we bounce between the two and some people will be more in one area and some will be more in the other. And then you can look at somebody else and think, well, they're not feeling like I'm feeling, but they've lost somebody that they love, so why am I feeling like this? So actually, we're all very individual in the way that we grieve. Yeah, absolutely. Do people ever ask you, I mean what does grief feel like? Yeah. And I think that's people want to know that they're not going crazy almost. I never say there's anything normal. There's no normal way to grieve. But actually there's usual ways that people can grieve, so it's not uncommon ways that it happens. So sometimes that's when the one to one therapy is quite useful because that can help people to like we can reality check the fact that you're not going crazy and that these are very usual responses and people knowing that it can really help them to feel that they're a little bit more in control of what's going on. Grief is such a huge topic. Thank you, Tracy, for doing a great job in giving me a small insight into it. I know there's so much more to hear as grief is so complicated. One of our more popular episodes was embalming. Here's my colleague Rhonda to tell us more. Basically, I was paid 25 quid a week and it gave me an opportunity to get into a profession that I wanted to get into. Okay, so quite a strange choice in profession, to be honest. What were people's reaction to that initially? Shock. Horror. An unsuitable job for a woman. Okay, so this was back in the 80s, wasn't it? 1984. Yeah. Different times. So we're here to talk about embalming. So can you give me a brief history? What is embalming? Where's it come from? Well, embalming, embalming has been carried out for thousands of years. I mean, everybody knows about how the Egyptians used to carry out their processes. 20th century modern embalming now is obviously totally different to how things were done thousands of years ago. Okay. But yeah, it's something that we all feel is a necessity. I found Rhonda's episode incredibly interesting. Not just about the embalming, but the difficulties she's faced in trying to get into that role. We hope you've enjoyed a brief look back over the last year. I have to say, I'm a little bit disappointed I haven't been presented with a cake. But here's a hint. Maybe next next year. Remember, we want to hear from you. Please ask questions, submit them to liftingthelid@gseller.co.uk and we'll see you for our next episode.