In years to come, how will 2021 be remembered?  So much has happened around the world from climate change inspired natural disasters to the siege of the Capitol in America to the roll out of vaccines, so unevenly around the world.  We’re more aware of the gap between rich and poor on a global scale than ever we were, but that gap keeps on widening nonetheless.  We’re more aware of the need to cut our carbon emissions, but the quantity of CO² and methane being released continues to grow.  Twelve months ago, we were hoping 2021 would see the back of COVID, but today we’re still in its grip.  Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year was written fifty years after the pestilence of 1665 which killed 100,000 people in London alone, but vanished as suddenly as it had arrived.  How many more years will we be dealing with our own mass contagion, and how far in the future will it be before we can make an honest appraisal of what happened?

For us at Integrity Funeral Care, it has been a year when our services have been called upon more than in any twelve months since we began almost six years ago.  We have witnessed things we never imagined we would see.  For example, funerals conducted by invitation only with strict limits on numbers but with sometimes an astonishing quantity of people watching online – 17,000 is our current record.

Before COVID, when either of us told people what we do for a living there was often an uncomfortable silence and shuffling of feet, almost embarrassment on occasion.  Today, so many people have been touched by unexpected death that it’s as if that taboo has been disarmed.  Instead, they ask, “Do you do embalming?” or “Where do you keep bodily remains?”  It’s hard to determine an accurate average but most people will go to a funeral in normal times once every two years.  Perhaps because, for all of us, that number has risen sharply, discomfort has been replaced by curiosity in this plague year.

Death is perhaps more at the forefront of all our minds.  While figures for 2020 aren’t yet available, we understand that sales of funeral plans will have doubled from the previous twelve months, and those numbers will almost certainly have been significantly exceeded in 2021 (if you are considering taking one out, please read our advice on the subject here before you put pen to paper).  New regulations are due to be announced early in 2022 which will hopefully clamp down on some of the more unscrupulous practices, because a lot of plans on sale are far from fit for purpose.  Certainly, when it comes to funerals held in accordance with the traditions of the African-Caribbean community we generally serve, we’ve never seen a plan which would come close to footing the whole bill.  However, on the personal rather than the financial side, we’ve been so concerned about people’s lack of preparation that we have produced a handy guide for the instructions we think you should consider leaving for your own loved ones and you can download it here free of charge.  Nobody wants to consider their own mortality, but we can all take a great deal of stress away from our families if we only let them know our wishes in advance.

Probably the best thing to come out of the past twelve months for us, has been the number of truly lovely families and individuals we’ve met through our work, and hopefully helped through some of the toughest experiences of their lives.  People can be so gracious, so philosophical and so warm in the worst of times.  We’ve witnessed kindness in despair, love in tragedy, generosity of spirit in deep sadness.  Most moving of all perhaps, we’ve met so many people who want things to be better, who want a more caring society than the one we had when COVID first spread its shadow.  400 years ago, Defoe expressed a similar sentiment.  “Another plague year would reconcile all these differences, a close conversing with death, or the diseases that threaten death, would scum off the gall from our tempers, remove the animosities among us, and bring us to see with differing eyes, than those which we look'd on Things with before.”