In 2021 I created FACFO – The Federation of African & Caribbean Funeral Operatives. This resource is primarily designed to help those who offer the culturally sensitive services of death care, funeral and grief related support and guidance the ability to be easily found by those who require their services, primarily from the African and Diaspora communities in the UK.
I started this organisation with big plans that I still intend to implement, but I can’t do it alone. There are so many people within our communities who just spring into action when a loved one, or community member lays their body aside, they are needed by their community, but they don’t often realise just how valuable and vital they are.
We have so few Funeral Directors and cultural Death Care service providers who assist families through this all important transition. Often, due to our learned behaviours, inherited traumas and life experiences, we feel we can deal with our grief alone and that it is not to be spoken of or shared for fear of appearing weak. This is an unhealthy narrative that can shorten our own life experience if we continue to suppress our natural emotions.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, many lives were lost and our eyes were opened to the realities of death and funeral. Since the pandemic our elders have been leaving on a daily basis and we are finding ourselves facing the harsh truths surrounding the levels of care we receive. Most often we are at the mercy of people who do not look like us, nor do they understand our needs and sensitivities. We thus experience a compromised quality of treatment and levels of service that impact negatively upon our grief.
Unfortunately we are not present in the industries that we turn to when our loved ones die. The funeral industry is unregulated, dominated by franchises or families that have passed the business down through the generations. It requires no qualifications and in the past there has been no governance over the amount of money a funeral can cost. The funeral of the African/Caribbean/’Black’ Britain would typically cost more.
I trained to become a Death Doula and a Funeral Celebrant. I noticed that I and people who looked like me were not addressed in the training. The resources focused on the generic white death and the nuances of the African/Caribbean diaspora citizen were brushed aside. I set about working with them so that they could include us in their training programs or educate their learners of our needs. However I quickly found that my imput was not respected or genuinely wanted. One day I was tapped by my guides who informed me that this was my work and that I couldn’t expect those outside my community to do it for me.
I created FACFO because I was not welcome within the funeral industry, my face did not fit. I wondered how many people had experienced the same kind of harsh refusal when genuinely presenting their services to funeral directors. When I sought out the funeral directors of African heritage I was aghast to find only one in the North of England and few more scattered further south. I found out that through Covid-19 no ‘Black’ funeral celebrants were offered work unless it came directly from the families that knew of them and that bereavement services were woefully lacking in their care or awareness of the African/Caribbean perspectives around death.
I found that we too were woefully lacking, it was as though we had fallen asleep on death. I realised that when it came to having conversations about dying, death or grief, we were silent, to our detriment. We had no idea what the role of the funeral industry was; and that our knowledge of death, cultural death practices and spiritual beliefs had fallen by the way side, Although we have been dying for longer than any other race of people on earth today, we had allowed ourselves to be taken over by Christian narratives and a faith in the honour of people from other cultures.
Where are our End of Life guides? African Traditional practitioners, Root workers, and Herbalists? Where are our florists? Stone Masons, Caterers and DJ’s. Where are our photographers, singers and story tellers? What are our traditions, cultural needs and mandetory requirements? How do we not know the basics of dying, death and grief? What happens to the body when we die and where might we go once we have laid our body aside? How does someone who is not in direct contact with a church or community group access the support they need…
The FACFO directory is free. If you know any person offering authentic cultural services, please implore them to register their business.
We need you.