Funeral celebrants are trained laypeople available to work with a deceased person's family to plan and conduct a funeral service that celebrates the person's life. They are used most often when the deceased was not religious or had no relationship with a local minister or house of faith.
Celebrants are more widely used in Australia and New Zealand, where church attendance rates are low and cremation rates high, but they are becoming more common in North America. This is the story of how one celebrant provides a caring service to a Calgary funeral home and its families.

Bonnie Roddis operated veterinary clinics for 30 years and regularly takes animals to visit schools and nursing homes, but it is her role as a funeral celebrant that this resident of Calgary, Alberta, Canada, considers her life's calling.

Since attending celebrant training two years ago, Roddis has led approximately 200 services through Foster's Garden Chapel of Calgary. She considers a personalized service that enables even family members to learn more about the deceased to be "The last gift we can give. I just help the family find the right wrapping paper."

Several of the earliest services Roddis conducted were for indigents who had no money for funerals.

"I feel very strongly that everyone should have appropriate words said over them," Roddis said. While she received no money for these services, she described "the greatest payment I've ever received" as eight photographs of scenery around Banff in the Canadian Rockies taken by a man who died a pauper.

Learning about the person
Roddis' work begins when a funeral home contacts her to let her know it is serving a family that may be interested in her services.

She calls a family member, expresses condolence for their loss and arranges a time to meet at their home or at the funeral home. She then outlines what her role would be and what would be involved in preparing for the service.

If the family decides to engage her as celebrant, Roddis begins with a list of questions designed to obtain the family history and biographical facts about the deceased.

She then moves to a more open-ended approach and may say something like, "Give me five words that describe your dad," or "What was your mom like on holidays?"
During the interview, Roddis draws out information about pets, athletic pursuits, hobbies and anything else a family member thinks is important.

A young child once asked Roddis if she was going to speak about her grandmother and Roddis immediately asked the child if she had something she wanted to share.

"She could take her teeth out," the child replied. Roddis carefully crafted a way to use the story and drew smiles from family members in the process.

In another instance, Roddis worked with the family of a 37-yearold woman who had died of cancer. During the family meeting, Roddis learned the woman was an alcoholic who had joined Alcoholics Anonymous and stopped drinking three years earlier.

At her service, "we focused on what a fabulous thing she did when she joined AA and helped others at the same time," Roddis said.

"I speak for the immediate family about what they want people to know about their loved one," she said. "They want someone to talk about their love for the person. They want it put right."

Writing a good eulogy takes time
To get it right, Roddis spends two to six hours in the family meeting and then three to six hours putting the service together. As she writes a eulogy, she imagines one person in the service who never met the deceased. By the end of the service she wants that person to feel as though he or she did know the deceased.

For the family, Roddis wants "to give them a mental picture that's not as sad as the one they saw in the casket or at the hospital. You have to give them something good."

Roddis also works with the family to decide where the service should be held. She has officiated at services in funeral homes, private homes, yards, parks and a historic building.

"Not everyone's cathedral is made of brick or wood. It may be on a river bank or on a mountainside," she said.

Roddis, who is 56 and has multiple health problems, believes being a celebrant may be her last vocation. She also doesn't believe she could have done it at a younger age. "There is a wisdom that comes to a woman in her 50s," she said.

She is sometimes asked why she has chosen to be involved in such a "sad" line of work.

"I don't hear about sadness," she said. "I hear about courage, selflessness, love and many other human traits. I'm not making a fortune, but I'm making a difference."

A lot of characters have been killed off in seasons 1-4, and no doubt more will die in seasons 5 and 6. As always when I watch a TV show or a movie, I notice cemetery/funeral scenes. Of course there aren't any funeral homes or official cemeteries on the island, at least none that we've seen. But there have been plenty of scenes showing people dealing with the aftermath of death.

STOP if you haven't watched all four seasons: MANY SPOILERS AHEAD! I'm going by memory here, so this may not be a complete list--feel free to add to it:

* After they've been on the beach a couple of days and wild boars have entered the fusilage foraging for food, Jack decides the decomposing bodies must be burned. Sayid, who is Iraqi and later confirmed as being Muslim, objects to imposing cremation on people who might not have wished to be cremated. (The writers assume viewers will know why he objects--or will look it up.) Dr. Jack says they can't bury all those people deep enough to keep the boars from digging up the bodies, so cremation it is. Claire gathers their belongings and uses the information she gleans to lead a service, where the remaining passengers do their best to say something to eulogize each of the deceased.

* Boone is buried with a service, at which Sayid speaks. Boone's stepsister, Shannon, has a hard time dealing with her grief. When they take refuge in the caves, she insists on dragging Boone's luggage with her and breaks down crying. Sayid understands and helps her with the luggage rather than telling her to leave it behind. Later Sun tries to comfort Shannon, telling her that Boone died bravely.

* When Shannon is killed, Sayid digs the grave himself, placing her by her brother. Another service is held; Sayid again speaks.

* Paralyzed by spider venom into a state mimicking death, Nikki & Paulo are buried alive. The less said about the infamous Nikki & Paulo story arc, the better!

* Libby and Ana Lucia are buried, with a service, after being murdered. Hurley, who was sweet on Libby, is later seen by her grave, talking to her.

* Jack was on Oceanic 815 because his mother asked him to go to Australia to bring his father's body back to the US. There's a scene where an Aussie at the ticket counter is telling him he doesn't have the necessary paperwork from a funeral home to have the casket put on the plane, and he manages to talk her into accepting him and the casket. Hmmm, that seems unlikely in these post-9/11 days! Wonder what went through that ticket agent's mind when the plane was lost?!

* One of the red herrings the writers throw in to keep Jeremy Bentham's identity a mystery until the last possible minute is the funeral home where his body is being held. The fact that the funeral director is black and the funeral home seems to be in a black section of the city are obviously designed to feed the fan theory that Bentham is Michael.

* After the Oceanic 6 return home, the service for Jack's father is finally held, though the casketed body he talked onto the plane is of course not on hand. Jack eulogies his father, with whom he had a difficult relationship, in a touching way, and says he loved him.

* Hurley visits Sun in Korea to see her baby. They then go to the cemetery together and visit Jin's grave, where Sun talks to Jin and "shows" him his daughter.

* We see Sayid with others carrying a coffin as part of a funeral procession in the Middle East. It turns out Nadia has been killed and he has returned to Tikrit to bury her.

* There's a lot of debate about whether Ben/The Others are in fact "the good guys," as Ben claims. The fact that Ben killed his father and then left his body in the van, not even bothering to bury him (his body falls apart when the survivors find the van and try to get it running), makes him seem pretty bad to me.

Will there be any time for scenes showing reverent treatment of the dead and/or dealing with grief in Seasons 5 & 6? The previews make the action in Season 5 look more frantic than ever, and we learned at the end of Season 4 that "everyone" died because Jack and the others left the island. During Season 4, there was no service for much-loved Claire, who appears to have died while everyone was on the move somewhere. Ditto Charlie, at the end of Season 3. (Of course there were no bodies in those cases.) Stay tuned ...