Stories told at Chelsea: “I’d like my funeral to be….”
Gill Hodgson has been reading through the funeral wishes that visitors to RHS Chelsea Flower Show added to our yellow labels and the results were far from sad and sombre.
We printed 1,000 bright yellow tags to use at Chelsea and invited visitors to complete the sentence ‘I’d like my funeral to be …’
Alan Titchmarsh completes a label while Gill Hodgson and Georgie Newbery look on. Photo: Angela Stubbs
We encouraged visitors to complete tags with their funeral wishes at Chelsea and to tie them to the perimeter rope around our display. By the end of the show they formed a dense line of personal wishes.
Some used the tags to write lovely messages to people they’d loved and who had died; some took them home to remind partners of their wishes, planning that the tags be stored with their wills; some were indecipherable or in a language beyond Google Translate’s capabilities – but the rest, I transcribed one weekend in June when it was too hot to work outside.
Gill hard at work with the archive!
It wasn’t long before a pattern emerged and the same words came up again and again and again.
“We want a celebration.”
“We want family and friends, we want a party.”
Floriferous
I was delighted that flowers were mentioned everywhere, but I didn’t find it surprising. The messages were written in the Great Pavillion at Chelsea Flower Show in front of a towering display of Roses, Foxgloves, Orange Blossom and Peonies: it would have been difficult for anyone not to have had flowers in mind.
Our RHS Chelsea Flower Show display captured the public imagination in The Grand Pavilion.
Celebratory words
Champagne features quite a lot and Pink is the most-requested colour.
The words Joy and Fun are scattered everwhere.
Most replies in response to ‘I’d like my funeral to be’ begin with the words ‘Full of’ or ‘Filled with’, which made me grin. It seems no-one wants just a little bit of anything – their funeral needs to be absolutely bursting with it.
It was like reading descriptions of really epic parties, especially the ones wanting lots of top quality craic – which Microsoft Word dictation transcribed as Crack, leaving me nonplussed the first time it happened.
Pink was the most-mentioned colour for funeral flowers on our tags. Photo: Tuckshop Flowers
A funeral wishes resource for the future
I mustn’t give more away because, first of all, we need to share the complete list, all sixteen sheets of A4, with our main sponsor, The Institute of Cemetery and Crematoria Management. They’re genuinely interested in learning more about people’s wishes: wishes written spontaneously while hale and hearty and not dredged up whilst grieving in a Funeral Director’s parlour.
When the ICCM have analysed them, perhaps we’ll upload the whole lot to our website. Perhaps there are other bodies out there for whom this unique insight would be useful? The tags themselves are important too, they’ll make a wonderful art installation and we’re looking for the best way in which to use them.
Our favourites
For now though, I’m just going to enjoy the images conjured up in my head as I read those hundreds of messages, especially the person who wants his funeral ‘with pies on top of a hill’ leaving all of us debating whether it was really a blazing Viking pyre that was desired or if his friends really were going to remember him while tucking into pastry, steak and kidney overlooking a fabulous view.
A footnote from Carole: My favourite of all the labels was the one which read “Dolly Parton heavy, with NO s**t flowers” 😂
