Testemonials 2
James Meighan
‘Thank you very much for conducting the service today and all your efforts put into the preparations. From our first meeting I had every confidence that it would be the service we wanted and that’s what we got. The whole occasion ran superbly.’
Greta Keen
‘I just want to say Thank You again, for bringing my beloved Mim back to us all, albeit briefly, today. You have a real ability to connect with the family, and I do not know much about you, but one of the best decisions you ever made was to become a celebrant.
As a family we were not quite sure what to expect so we were more than pleasantly surprised when Glen showed up at our family meeting and very gently and sympathetically coaxed us into talking about my mum.
At moments like this, when the loss is very recent and emotions tend to be a bit raw, sensitivity is of the highest importance and yet there is still a job to be done – which is to make sure that the ceremony is properly planned and the celebrant has a clear idea both of who the person was in the fullest sense, and of the family’s wishes for the event.
In all of this Glen was magnificent. He brought with him the right balance of sensitivity, experience and knowledge and most importantly, a genuine interest and curiosity in our family. He steered us through some difficult moments. He didn’t balk at digging deep, but at the same time, he put us at our ease and managed to get our stories flooding out in more or less the right order.
By the end of the meeting, when Glen was sure he had enough information, we already felt the benefit of having had a genuinely special experience. Not only that Glen had talked through the ceremony in great detail and let us know what to expect, and what options we had and had even helped us plan our role in the ceremony itself.
After leaving the meeting Glen wrote up what he intended to say and let us see it and have input into it to correct and hone it. He also helped us define our own contributions to proceedings and created space to make sure that we could participate to full effect.
The result was that on the day of the funeral, people arrived and Glen led us through the ceremony. Different members of the family played music, sang songs, did readings or just shared memories. The whole thing felt like a real celebration of my mum’s life and when it was over everyone (and I mean everyone) attending said what a great way it had been to celebrate my mum’s life but that also, that the way it was done reflected the person she was and the kind of things she valued. It was as if she had actually been there. Which in a sense she had.
All this was in no small measure down to Glen. I cannot thank him enough or commend him highly enough. In a calm understated way he managed to create an event which enabled us as a family to move on to the next stage of our lives, while at the same time taking with us what was valuable and we needed to keep.
No small feat. It was pretty much the perfect funeral.
Thank you Glen.
Jamie Ford
Hi Glen I just wanted to say how much of a great job you have done. You have made this whole process run so smoothly and helped guide me throughout all of this. I felt incredible pressure to make sure my mother’s funeral and burial went exactly how she wanted it to, and you were a major part of the proceedings. You adapted on the fly with my brother’s speech and the way you spoke and conveyed my mom’s words she had said to you was fantastic and everyone said how good you were. So from me and my family, thank you from the bottom of our hearts.