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We have served at funerals in Devon for seven years and both of our two Devon born riders serve full time.
It
was an honour to support my mother in how she wanted to deal with the end of
her life. My father’s funeral had been conventional and impersonal. Judy
felt strongly she wanted to be in charge of organising her own and set about
it with characteristic enthusiasm. Always passionate about ecology, she wanted
an environmentally-friendly and natural event; she wasn’t religious but had
a very spiritual connection to nature. With helpful information from the
Natural Death Centre in hand, we drove around her beloved
A biodegradable cardboard coffin was bought from a local green undertaker
called Good Grief! They hand-painted it for her with favourite symbolic
images: butterflies, clouds, swallows and poppies. There being nowhere else in
her bungalow to store this flatpack coffin, she propped it up against her
bedroom wall. Over the years visitors became accustomed to it; one neighbour
referred to the lid as her surfboard.
The one remaining need was for transportation; she couldn’t bear gloomy
hearses. She thought of asking a local farmer friend with a flat back truck to
help. When we spotted a magazine item about the revving rev, Paul Sinclair,
she was delighted. She’d ridden on an uncle’s motorbike as a girl and had
a hankering for them ever since.
She wrote to Paul about her plans, saying that ‘sailing across Dartmoor in a motor-cycle and sidecar would be the icing on the cake.’ I was sworn to secrecy about her choice of the ‘ultimate dispatch rider’ as she wanted to surprise the neighbours, taking great pleasure in imagining their faces when he came chugging into the village with her onboard.
Judy felt that she’d had a wonderful life and after long term chronic
illness was lucky to reach her eighties. She believed we all have a right to a
good death. In an Advance Directive she chose not to have her life prolonged
by hospitalisation – in fact, threatening to have ‘do not resuscitate’
tattooed on her forehead - and was able to die at home as she hoped. While
staggering around grief-stricken I tried to assemble the coffin and found a
post-it note stuck on the back on which she had written ‘Surf’s up!”
Judy had told Paul ‘I don’t know how the day will turn out but we are
having a lot of fun in the planning and I hope it will be reasonably
cheerful.’ Indeed it was. Her final ride over the moors was wonderful to
accompany, and drew many a puzzled look. Friends and family then gathered to
celebrate informally and share music, anecdotes, memories and poems as
eclectic as she was: Kahlil Gibran’s poem on death and Abba’s Dancing
Queen. We rounded off the day at the local pub.
Nothing can take away the pain of the loss of my fabulous mother, but it
inspires me that she felt that death is not to be feared but seen as a natural
part of the life cycle. This down-to-earth attitude helped family and friends
to come to terms with her dying and perhaps our own mortality too. She had
brought me into the world with love; being able to carry out her wishes as she
had entrusted me to do felt like the completion of a circle.
Frankie
Hewett
Judy first contacted us after reading up on UK alternative funerals. UK alternative funerals are gaining in popularity. This was in 2003 and today our motorcycle hearses are the UK Industry Standard.
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Warning: Some 'environmentally friendly' coffins sold online may set off crematorium alarms and some are prone to bursting with weight. Please check the FFMA website to ensure your supplier is a member. All FFMA approved coffins are emissions tested.