The Anarchist Undertaker Who Does Death Differently

If you’re lucky, you won’t experience the business of funerals for a long while—and when you do, you’ll be too fugued up on psychic shock to wonder whether your fringe Satanist uncle Brett really would’ve wanted all this church business for his big send off. 

It needn’t be that way. Scottish-born Ru Callender was sitting stoned on his sofa aged 29 when he saw an advert on TV about ‘green’ funerals. In a moment of clarity within his weed-borne stupor, he decided there and then to start his own funeral business, despite knowing absolutely nothing about the industry.

Callender felt the call so keenly because he lost his own dad at the age of seven, and wasn’t present at his funeral. The unresolved grief of his father’s passing—and the lack of closure afforded to him in its aftermath—ran long into adulthood. When his mother died when he was in his twenties, his non-central role in her funeral only metastasized old wounds.

Twenty-five years later, Callender is so good at undertaking he’s won awards for it, and his DIY ethos is helping to upend an industry dominated by multinationals. He’s also just released a poignant memoir called What Remains? Life, Death and the Human Art of Undertaking.

I spoke to Callender to get a handle on his mission and what he’s learned about death.

VICE: Hi Ru. What’s so bad about the mainstream funeral industry today?
Ru Callender: It’s become such a multinational business, with huge players going up against small, independent, family funeral directors. A lot of the independents are just being gunned out by sheer financial pressure. Then there is the worrying trend of pushing people towards direct cremation, which has got masses of money behind it, with rolling ads on TV. It’s everywhere, and an existential threat, I think, to those of us who still prioritize the ceremony. 

I’ve always worked in a two-person team, for 20 years with my ex-wife, and now with another person. With the larger organizations, the more people you have, the more disjointed it gets, and the more the family suffer. The massive corporations have what’s called a “body hub,” which is a kind of Amazon warehouse for corpses, serving a ring of branches around it.

You’re looking after people as parcels, really. It’s dehumanizing.

That sounds far from utopian. What are the three big things you’ve learned about death?
It can be gentler than we fear. Yet a lot of deaths are difficult.

Dying is a thing we do, not something that happens to us. Some people die either in distress—or what appears outwardly to be stress. The labored breathing that sounds so ragged and awful to those at the bedside is often much less distressing for the person dying. Don’t mistake your own pain and upset for what you’re witnessing.

Another thing is that it’s almost impossible to realize how gobsmacked you will be when someone you love dies. Even if it’s expected, even if there is a long trajectory of illness and everyone has been attending the dying person throughout, the actual moment when life turns to death is uniquely mind-blowing. The head knows the truth, but the heart is often in denial.

It can happen to anyone, at any time. This is so obvious, and we survive by damping this knowledge down, but death does not honor our ages. What [American poet and undertaker] Thomas Lynch described as “The everyday lapses of caution that do us in” can hit anyone.

Do you get people coming up to you all the time, saying they want you to bury them?
People often say they want me to do their funeral, and I have to tell them there’s no guarantee they’ll predecease me. I’ve developed a superstition. If someone asks me to do their funeral, and they are hale and hearty and of a comparable age, it shaves ten minutes off my life.

Do you ever worry about people seeing you as kind of ‘disrupting death,’ in the same way people these days always seem to call themselves ‘disruptors’ when they bring a new approach into an established industry?
If only there was a chance that I or anyone else could disrupt death. But as for disrupting the death industry, I’ve been doing my stubborn best to do that for 25 years. It needs it, it needs the corporate mindset changed. I aspire to anarchism, the great disruptor, and in my dreams, all funerals would be conducted by a tight two-person team from start to finish.

What would be your perfect funeral—as in, your own funeral?
I had strong feelings about how I saw my own funeral for many years, but recently I’ve started to follow my own advice and leave it up to my family to decide.

But if they think they could handle it, then this is what I would like: Ideally, it would be midsummer. The solstice would be perfect. I’d like to be carried up a hill in the evening, and placed on top of a huge pyre, built above a hole. At dusk it would be lit, and everyone would rave around it all night, feeding wood on so it burns fiercely. By dawn, the fire would have collapsed into the hole, which now becomes a grave.

Simple, but rather grandiose.

Do you have any ‘dream’ customers?
El-hajj Malik el-Shabbaz, previously known as Malcolm X. Malcolm X is the historical figure I admire the most, for his unswerving commitment to the truth, even if it means a 180-degree pivot. When Malcolm X visited Mecca, he had a profound realization that the divisions between the races were a social construct based on the country you live in. His public renouncement of his previous views about black and white people—and their need to live separately—led to his assassination, and he knew it would. Total integrity.

What about people you hate?
There are many public figures that I would like to see the back of, but to be honest, I wouldn’t want to do their funerals, because in that intimate setting with their families, I would undoubtedly feel sympathy towards them, and we can’t have that.

I thought you wrote really well in the book about it being beneficial to have some kind of muscle memory of grief, even for young kids.
I did a funeral on Monday for a young man, 35, who died of a brain tumor—leaving a wife who is six-months pregnant, a three-year-old, and a six-year-old. We did the service in a church hall. When children are so young, it’s difficult for them to lodge their memories. So we took lots of pictures and included them as much as possible. The three-year-old had a little bubble gun that he was going around, doing everybody with, and the six-year-old, the daughter, had a flower crown and walked in front of us, scattering rose petals. When we buried him in the ground, they sat with their legs hanging over the grave for about half an hour, throwing petals in and looking, you know, really kind of getting it. Then they helped their mum fill the grave in. 

Bloody hell.
I know that the seeds of that aren’t going to bloom for 10, 15, 20 years, but the fact there’s going to be a big pictorial record, they will remember it. They actually will remember it. And I think that’s vital when dealing with kids. As you know, I was excluded from my mum’s funeral when I was 25. There was a ring of bearers carrying my mum and doing the lowering, so I couldn’t actually get near the grave until it was all done. So it’s just about not excluding people from their bereavement, and replacing the slickness you get with uniformed people who know exactly what they’re doing, with a haphazardness that makes it much more real.

@niche_t_

Ru Callender’s book What Remains? Life, Death and the Human Art of Undertaking is out now via Chelsea Green.