Drew Baxter - Celebrant.

09/09/2026

WEDNESDAY WISDOM — SO LONG, FAREWELL AND THANK YOU

Yesterday, I conducted my final funeral.

My first was at Mansfield Crematorium on 31 January 2005.

I remember the nerves.
I remember walking into that chapel knowing that a family had entrusted me with something precious: the story of a person they loved. Mr John Anderson Else.

More than twenty-one years later, that responsibility has never felt any less significant.

Every funeral has been different.
Some lives lasted a century.
Others ended before they had properly begun.

There have been chapels filled to overflowing and services attended by only a handful of people.

There has been music that made us smile, stories that made us laugh and silences in which nothing needed to be said.

I have never believed that my job was to make grief disappear.
Nobody can do that.

My task was simpler: to listen, to understand and, for half an hour or so, to try not to make things worse.

I hope that, most of the time, I managed it.

I have met thousands of people at one of the most difficult moments of their lives.

They invited me into their homes, made me a cup of tea and trusted me with memories they sometimes found almost impossible to speak aloud.

They told me about ordinary lives which, when examined closely, proved to be anything but ordinary.

Lives filled with work, family, friendship, mistakes, laughter, kindness and love.

Those stories changed me.

They taught me to notice people.

To listen beyond the words.

To understand that silence is not an emptiness which must always be filled.

And to recognise that there is no single right way to grieve.

I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to the funeral directors, arrangers, bearers, chapel attendants, crematorium staff and countless others who have supported me through the years.

Their work is often unseen, but never unimportant.

A special mention to my mentor, Don Sharpe, who helped me take my first steps into this extraordinary work.

To my fellow celebrants, well some of you, thank you for your friendship, encouragement and support.

I leave the families I can no longer support in your hands. Please look after them.

Listen carefully, speak honestly and never forget whose service it is.

It is not a performance, a platform or an opportunity to make an impression.

It is for them. It was always for them

Most of all, I want to thank the families.

Thank you for opening your doors to me.

Thank you for the photographs, the laughter, the tears and the cups of tea.

Thank you for trusting me to speak when speaking felt impossible.

Thank you for allowing me to tell the stories of the people you loved.

And thank you to Mrs B, who has shared far more of this work than anyone will ever know.

She has listened when a service weighed heavily upon me, understood when I needed quiet and helped me carry the things that could not simply be left behind at the chapel door.

Yesterday, I walked away from that door for the final time.

There is sadness in that.
Of course there is.

But there is also gratitude, and the knowledge that it is time.

I am not retiring from caring about people.

I am simply making room for a quieter life: for writing, music, conversation, the garden, more cups of tea and whatever comes next.

So this is not my epitaph.

It is simply a farewell.

To everyone who has walked beside me during these twenty-one years: thank you.

It has been the greatest privilege.

So long.
Farewell.

Oh god I’m turning into a Von Trapp!

Take care of yourselves and do try to remember this final piece of wisdom that I offer as a professional celebrant:

life is short, so enjoy it!

(This means you can never have too much sherry or Lurpak).

I will be taking a break from these Wednesday posts, I'm still deciding what to do going forward but as Mr Spock once said, there are always possibilities.

08/09/2026

One last time…

02/09/2026

Welcome to Wednesday.

People still don’t believe I’m retiring.

I tell them I’m finishing next week and they give me a knowing look.

“You’ll be back.”

No, I won’t.

“You’ll get bored.”

No, I won't.

I have books I haven’t read, films I haven’t seen, music I haven’t heard, a garden that requires supervision and a dog who believes my principal purpose in life is to sit still while she sleeps beside me. I think I’ll cope.

“You’ll miss it.”

Of course I will.

I’ll miss meeting people and hearing their stories. I’ll miss the privilege of being trusted when families are at their most vulnerable.

In my time I have conducted funerals that had to remain secret and others where some of life’s most intimate secrets were entrusted to me. Those occasions were especially moving.

To be invited into the most private corners of another person’s story was an extraordinary act of trust: trust that I hope I never took lightly.

I've taken services assisted by brass bands, tribute acts, musicians and singers of all ages and even Dame Judi Dench...twice.

And I’ll miss those moments for which no celebrant training could possibly prepare you.

Like the man who summed up my entire professional approach with:

“I like your style. You don’t f**k about.”

Or the lady who stood up during a service and calmly announced that she had been the deceased man’s wife in a previous lifetime.

There is no paragraph in the celebrant’s handbook entitled *What to Do When Reincarnation Interrupts the Funeral.*

For the record, I just carried on. Apparently, I don’t f**k about.

I may even miss wearing a suit, although I’m prepared to wait and see on that one.

People often tell me I should write a book. I may never do it, and that’s fine. If the podcast continues, I’m sure some of the stories will find their way into that. Or perhaps they won’t.

The great joy of life isn’t always in recording it for posterity; sometimes it’s simply in enjoying it while it’s happening.

Either way, the story I’ve been writing for all these years does have a happy ending.

I ride off into the sunset in search of adventure; or more realistically, a comfortable chair and a nice pair of new slippers.

But missing something doesn’t mean you made the wrong decision. Sometimes it simply means it mattered.

The truth is that my body has been submitting its notice for quite a while.

It has ignored all requests to reconsider and is now working strictly to rule. My legs have left the negotiating table, my back has referred the matter to arbitration and my energy levels are represented by a small flickering bulb in a cupboard.

So I’m retiring.

Not disappearing.
Not giving up.
Not just sitting in a chair waiting for someone to bring me a blanket; although if there’s tea and a chocolate digestive involved, I’m not ruling it out.

There are still things I want to say, places I want to go, music I want to share and life I want to notice.

I’m not retiring from life.

I’m simply giving it more room in the diary.

And yes, I really mean it.

Have a lovely day.

26/08/2026

Wednesday Wisdom

For nineteen years I was a police officer.

For more than twenty years afterwards, I stood alongside bereaved families as a funeral celebrant.

Those two lives taught me different things about tragedy.

The police officer in me knows that actions have consequences; sometimes terrible consequences, carried not only by those who take the risk, but by entirely innocent people who happen to cross their path.

The celebrant in me knows that grief is rarely simple.

In recent weeks, twelve people have died in two collisions involving vehicles travelling the wrong way along major roads.

In Ireland, five teenage boys were killed. In the other car, three women and a seven-year-old boy were seriously injured.

On Teesside, five people travelling the wrong way along the A66 died when their car struck a marked police vehicle.

PCs Matthew Blades and Tom Clough, travelling in the correct direction, were also killed.

When I heard the news I changed my profile picture to the thin blue line because, even after all these years, part of me will always belong to the police family. Two officers went to work protecting their community and did not return home.

I feel sadness.

But I also feel anger: and I suspect many ordinary people feel the same.

But anger does not mean that we lack compassion.

However, compassion does not require us to pretend that these were harmless mistakes affecting only those who made them.

Other people were placed in mortal danger. Other families will live forever with the consequences.

I have also found myself thinking about the families of those young people who died.

As I said, my years as a celebrant taught me that grief is rarely simple.

But grief does not automatically make someone wise, gracious or blameless.

Bereavement can expose the best in people; it can also expose attitudes and loyalties that are much harder to regard with sympathy.

In fact, it can generate more anger in a community of decent people who are grieving for more than the lives lost. There is a grief I think many of us feel, as we mourn the lack of decency.

Yes, I know, we should be cautious about appointing ourselves judges of entire families. They did not all make the decisions taken in those cars, and some will be carrying questions and burdens most of us can barely imagine.

Perhaps others are more complicit than we can know.

So, compassion, if we have it, need not be indiscriminate.

We are not required to excuse, romanticise or remain silent about behaviour that endangered innocent lives.

Nor must we manufacture sympathy for anyone who responds with intimidation, glorification or contempt for those who suffered. I think the public response to the ‘balloon release’ spoke volumes on that matter.

Sometimes there are no comforting explanations.
Sometimes people knowingly do appalling things.

Understanding their background may help us prevent another tragedy, but it does not cleanse their choices and grief does not confer innocence upon everyone left behind.

In Nottingham, we are moving towards a position where authorised officers will be able to ask someone to remove a face covering, usually a balaclava, when there is reasonable belief that it is being used to conceal their identity while committing crime, causing intimidation or engaging in antisocial behaviour.

About time, I hear many of you saying. I agree.

Although I believe in protecting civil liberties, I believe we all have the right to go about our daily life without the anxiety, intimidation and fear these masked youths are bringing to our streets, on their illegal scooters and dangerously driven motor bikes and cars.

Some will say that we must understand why young people are drawn into such behaviour. Again, I agree.

We should ask what lies behind the masks, the stolen cars, the dangerous driving and the apparent disregard for other lives.

But understanding is not excusing.

We can care about the circumstances that lead someone onto the wrong road while still holding them responsible for what they do to everyone travelling the right way.

Compassion matters.

But it is not limitless, compulsory or blind.

We can mourn the waste of life without pretending that every life was lived harmlessly.

We can recognise grief without admiring the grieving.

And we can reserve our deepest compassion for those who were endangered or killed simply because somebody else decided that their lives did not matter.

Innocent people have the right to go about their lives without being intimidated, endangered or killed by the choices of others.

Compassion is not silence.

And it is certainly not the surrender of our moral judgement.

19/08/2026

Welcome to Wednesday Wisdom — Feeding the Beast

I received a message recently from someone who had been deeply affected by a story in the news.

He wondered whether I might write something about it.

I won’t name the person at the centre of that story. I don’t know enough about what happened, but the official post mortem and the unofficial one, are in full swing and I have little—if anything—to add to the arguments already taking place.

But the message left me thinking about the way we consume news.

There was a time when newspapers appeared once or twice a day and television news occupied a few scheduled minutes. Now the news never stops. It rolls endlessly across television screens, websites and phones.

But a twenty-four-hour news machine must constantly be fed.

And some people use that fact as a weapon to attack others. Make someone else the story - not me.
That’s because they know that a story cannot simply be reported.

It must be updated, revisited, analysed and discussed. Every available detail must be uncovered. Every silence must invite speculation.

Every human life at the centre of it must become an unfolding drama with heroes, villains and spectators choosing sides.

It would be easy to point the finger solely at journalists and editors. But the uncomfortable truth is that the rest of us feed the beast too.

We click. We share. We speculate. We demand another development, even when nothing meaningful has changed. We consume the distress of people we have never met and call it keeping informed.

Good journalism matters.
People in positions of influence should be questioned, wrongdoing should be investigated and institutions should be held accountable.

That is why journalism has traditionally been guided by an important test:
Is publication in the public interest?

But somewhere along the way, perhaps we began confusing the public interest with what interests the public.

They are not the same thing.

The fact that we want to know does not automatically mean that we need to know. Nor does it mean that every private detail should become public property or that scrutiny must continue until a person has been reduced to little more than the accusations attached to their name.

Behind every headline is a human being.

Around that human being are families, friends and others who live with consequences long after the rest of us have clicked on the next story.

We can demand better from the media. We should.

But perhaps we must also demand something better from ourselves.

Before we click, share or join the latest public prosecution, we might apply our own public-interest test:
Do I genuinely need to know this?
Or do I merely want to?

12/08/2026

Good morning and welcome to Wednesday.

For more than twenty-one years I’ve stood at the front of funeral services.

Occasionally, after the event, a beautiful card would arrive in the post or via the funeral director.

Sometimes there’d be a heartfelt letter.

Every now and then someone would write a kind comment on Facebook.

Those things were always appreciated.
Deeply appreciated.

But the truth is, most of the time… nothing arrived at all.

For years I wondered whether that meant I’d somehow fallen short.

Had I said the wrong thing?
Missed something important?
Could I have done better?

Then, gradually, I realised I’d been asking the wrong question.

Not everyone expresses gratitude with words.

Some people simply go home and hold their family a little closer.

Some quietly visit a grave a week later.

Some begin to laugh again.

Some find the strength to get through tomorrow.

They don’t write to tell you, they just carry on living.

Perhaps that’s all the thanks anyone could hope for.

As I prepare to retire and spend more time writing, recording podcasts and sharing my thoughts online, I find myself carrying that lesson with me.

Of course I’ll smile if someone leaves a lovely review or writes a kind message. I’d be lying if I said otherwise.

But I don’t want to spend my time measuring what I do by likes, comments or reviews.

I’d much rather believe that somewhere, someone has made another cup of tea before the episode ended.

Or lingered a little longer in the garden.

Or wandered without quite so much hurry.

Or rediscovered a little wonder in an ordinary day.

I’ll probably never know if those things happened.
There won’t be a notification to tell me.
But perhaps that’s rather the point.

The most meaningful things we ever do often leave no visible trace at all.

So I’ve decided that, from now on, I’m not aiming for comments.

I’m hoping, instead, for contentment.

Not just my own…
…but yours too.

Conversation, not content.
Contentment, not comment.

Have a lovely day.

05/08/2026

Wednesday Wisdom – Holding the Threads

The Bayeux Tapestry has returned to Britain for the first time in almost a thousand years. It goes on show to the public on 10th September.

Seventy metres of stitched history, carrying the faces of kings, soldiers, sailors and ordinary people from a world long gone.

It has survived centuries of movement, conflict and human carelessness.

The cloth has aged. Some of its threads have weakened. Parts of its story may even have been lost. And yet it remains; carefully protected, because generation after generation has understood that those threads matter.

It made me think about another tapestry.

One that could never be hung in a museum because it exists only within us.

The artistic tapestry of our lives.

It begins forming when we are young, although we don’t realise it at the time.

An actor appears on the television in the corner of the room. A singer’s voice comes through the radio. A familiar piece of music tells us that a favourite programme is about to begin.

They entertain us for half an hour or accompany us through a summer, and then life carries on.

But somehow, without our noticing, a thread has been added.

Years later, we hear that one of those familiar figures has died.
We didn’t know them. They didn’t know us. And yet the news brings a small, unmistakable sadness.

Perhaps we are not mourning them alone.

Perhaps we are mourning the room in which we first saw them. The house in which we once lived. The people who sat beside us.

Perhaps we are remembering an earlier version of ourselves who believed that all of it—and all of them—would be there forever.

It isn’t always the great stars who leave the strongest threads.

Sometimes it is the character actor whose name we never learned but whose face we knew immediately. The dependable police inspector. The formidable aunt. The kindly doctor. The suspicious neighbour.

They populated the imaginary world of our childhood. They became part of its furniture.

A voice can return us to a journey taken long ago. A song can restore an entire summer. A few notes of theme music can rebuild a living room and, just for a moment, bring back someone who once sat beside us.

That is the extraordinary thing about art.

It does not merely help us remember what we watched or heard.
It helps us remember who we were.

Lately, I have sometimes felt that the artistic tapestry of my youth is beginning to unravel. Familiar faces are disappearing. Familiar voices are falling silent. One by one, the people who coloured the landscape of my younger years are leaving it.

But perhaps I have been looking at it the wrong way?

The Bayeux Tapestry has survived because, generation after generation, someone understood that it had become their turn to care for it.

Perhaps that is what happens to us as we grow older.

The tapestry does not disappear.

It passes into our care.

The faces, voices and music are still there, stitched to rooms and people and moments we once thought ordinary.

We become the ones who hold the threads.
The ones who remember.
And, when we can, the ones who pass the stories on.

I guess that's what I've tried to do for 21 years...

Addendum

One final thought.

The Bayeux Tapestry tells the story of kings and battles, victories and losses, of lives crossing for a brief moment before the thread moves on.

For so many years, I’ve had the privilege of being woven, for a little while, into the tapestry of thousands of lives.

It has been an honour beyond anything I ever expected, and one I shall always carry with gratitude.

But every tapestry has a point where one thread ends and another continues.

So, on the last day of August, I shall quietly retire from the field.

Not, thankfully, with an arrow in my eye… just with a heart full of memories and an overwhelming sense of gratitude.

And yes… this time, it’s for good.

Thank you for letting me be part of your story.

04/08/2026

My cruise reflections. Not my usual take but the fjords were a place that awakened poetry not my usual humour. Forgive me but perhaps you still might enjoy?

Bonus Chapter –Small Pond on a Large PondWe often imagine that travel is about seeing bigger places and grander sights. But perhaps that’s not quite right.Join me aboard a ship in the Norwegian fjords as I discover that even among towering mountai...

31/07/2026

We’re having difficulty with the Bereavement Cafe page but I can confirm we will be open as usual on Monday morning. Hope to see you there. If you need more details please do get in touch