Death and Council Taxes – The World of Environmental Health Funerals

Christina Martin, Technical Business Support Officer, Environmental Health Service for Rother and Wealden Councils, gives an enlightening insight into her important role in providing funeral services and explains why it’s ‘the most satisfying job’ she’s ever had.

Before I started working at the Council, I’d never had cause to think about what happens when people die without family or money. Few of us do, as I have learned every day since. That surprised silence when I tell people what I do, followed by the lightbulb moment of, ‘but of course, there must be loads of situations where that happens’. There really are, and once you see it, you really cannot unsee it.

That bland line within Section 46 of the Public Health Act 1984 that says the Council will step in ‘where a funeral is not being arranged’ contains the full gamut of human experience, tragedy and plain happenstance. The reasons why a funeral is not being arranged veer from estrangement, through outliving, to solitude, or being outcast, to being unclaimed, or even unclaimable by bent of being unidentified, to rotten luck – like dementia steamrolling over the memory of your marriage, and with it your spouse’s ability to arrange your funeral – and of course, plain old lack of funds. A category that councils can now count themselves part of too, at ironically a time of the greatest demand on record for their help in this area.

So why is this potentially maudlin task set against a fraught backdrop also the most satisfying job I’ve ever had?

Well, as I said to Ian Andrews from CIEH when we met to talk, this work has a resolution, an end point. So much Environmental Health work doesn’t. That neighbour is back making noise again, that hoarder has returned to their old ways, the elderly lady next door is feeding the birds again. The dead though, perfect polite customers all, and the task of arranging their disposition has a defined set of points that must be hit, and a final outcome that cannot be avoided. Admin followed by a funeral, then case closed. With the additional existential satisfaction of knowing that someone has been laid to rest, their life acknowledged, and those left behind have had their moment of much needed ritual; funerals being mainly for the living.

There are complicated situations to be navigated to be sure, traumatic sometimes, with hard to find and missing information to be sought in house searches that can occasionally challenge the strongest of stomachs, and of course there’s the emotional work of locating and supporting the bereaved as best we can. Detective, administrator, cleaner, grief counsellor, and, not forgetting, negotiator with all of the various departments and organisations that freeze up and place roadblocks due to the unusual liminal space these deaths can inhabit. “No next of kin” feels impossible to banks. Sharp elbows are the chief skill required in this line of work, and a side of Jedi mind trickery. Tell them what you need and how they are going to provide it to you, because nobody understands our work so they won’t be volunteering any solutions; this is my main piece of advice when delivering training for this role.

This job steeped in death and bureaucracy is however primarily about life, and this is where I place my focus. I work at a council that provides a funeral service. Not a legal requirement, the public health legislation we work under is concerned only with the ‘disposal’ of remains. But every religion, country, and civilization have developed a ritual. I was in a Neolithic burial chamber on a holiday to Wales with wall carvings that danced in torchlight. They may have been the most advanced Stone Age folk, but they were still primitive and yet still just knew that when someone dies we mark it. Money or happenstance should not deny anyone that right.

In my attempts to populate the eulogies for our services, and also for the purposes of completing the rudimentary death certificate information, part of my job is to seek out life stories, or glimpses of them.

When I asked a carer for the marital status of their recently deceased charge, “married for a week, but nobody was allowed to speak of it” came the intriguing answer. It was a simple death certificate question, but stories are shot through our lives like a stick of rock; life just flows from every case action.

Where there is no family to provide this story, I seek out their chosen family. A man who had turned his entire house into a model railway layout had a full house funeral of train enthusiasts he attended clubs with, and the chip shop he frequented weekly closed so that staff could attend. Whenever people pull a pity face and say ‘oh how tragic’ about my people, I ask if they ever had a chip shop close for them. Never judge. We are all one of two bereavements or misfortunes from this situation. Not to be depressing, quite the opposite. If you see it as something that can happen to anyone, it stops being this moral failure and takes the sting out of our 3am fears of dying alone.

Though something I have learned in this job is that nobody is truly alone. An unidentified woman who washed up on the beach in my district had over 100 mourners. The lack of knowledge about her may have prevented a detailed eulogy but it was replaced by something bigger. The community taking her under its wing and seeing her off. We leaned into fellow feeling and the universal human experience that day. She could be anyone, so she is everyone.

Though a personalised service is of course what I aim for. When I worked the case of a very withdrawn man, everyone I connected with could not help me; he never spoke they said. I searched online for his name and town, he had lived there his whole life, so may have left a footprint. And so it was, quite a muddy one. He was a member of a gardening club where he won awards every year for his flowers. They put me in touch with his first and only girlfriend, the one person he had opened up to. His silence was due to growing up in a deaf and non-verbal household; it had become his preference. His good nature shone through the silence though, and he was well liked. His garden club friends attended our service and were open mouthed as his eulogy revealed him to have been a brickie, a tug of war tugger, a guitarist, and a biker. They had kept his allotment watered throughout the heatwave he had died in, eventually picking and bunching his own flowers into a coffin spray.

It felt like a job well done and as his girlfriend ended her phone call to me with ‘just thank you, from a friend’ I knew I was in an important and privileged position that can make a difference.

This continues every day. I was told only last week that my advice and support had given someone their first night’s sleep since their partner died. Through this work we can impact the deceased, the bereaved and the community in a meaningful way; restoring order and dignity. I feel very lucky to be charged with this responsibility and we should all be grateful to councils for carrying out this important duty.