Ashes To Admin: Tales from the Caseload of a Council Funeral Officer

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Join our community to get personalised book suggestions, extracts straight to your inbox, 10% off RRPs, and to change children’s lives. Or to put it in simple terms; funerals for those with nobody around, willing or able to bury or cremate them. These experiences made it all the more touching to read this book about a local government officer who makes funeral arrangements for people that die without either the money or the loved ones to have it dealt with privately. A downside to longevity that people sometimes don’t consider, and something that is striven for blindly in our life-at-all-costs culture.

Ashes To Admin: Tales from the Caseload of a - WHSmith

I occasionally organise online conversations with authors, and the one with Evie was particularly lovely with a wonderfully engaged audience. This is where King comes into her own, setting out on a mission to find out whatever she can about them, using all the means at her disposal and some inspired methods of her own. In a gentle and funny tone Evie King highlights both the bureaucracy and the humanity that is behind funerals organised under Section 46. Sometimes hard to handle, as an anxious person who usually relies on reading to relax and escape such worries, but made bearable and enjoyable with plenty of humour and memorable pearls of wisdom. The author works in England performing the duties that are performed in the US by county public administrators.

The chapters that follow, poignantly named after some of the individuals whose funerals Evie organised, and whose lives she here respects and honours, are filled with stirring details. Evie goes above and beyond to uncover clues about the people whose case land on her desk, and she has elevated a stuffy admin job into something meaningful and profound. I wanted to read this book after hearing Evie King being interviewed on the radio; I thought she seemed like a lot of fun, and she had a very interesting job. That said, her kindness, generosity and tenacity is evident throughout in the efforts she goes to to ensure those in need of a section 46 funeral get something that is a true reflection of the person they were. Since moving to the seaside and going part-time she has had more time for writing and has completed her first book about her job arranging council funerals under her pen name.

Ashes to admin : tales from the caseload of a council funeral Ashes to admin : tales from the caseload of a council funeral

Another reason why people might be buried under Section 46 is the fact that human relationships and human life is complicated. Whilst King has no way of knowing how other CFOs operate, her approach is to contact all the relevant authorities and necessary departments to set the wheels in motion.Sadly it contains similar words, "causing the body to be cremated" and I suspect the person who did that may have a similar role to yourself. Reading Ashes to Admin encouraged me to fire off a whole host of questions to my Council's Bereavement Services Officer and I was very relieved to find out in response that, as in Evie's case, my local Council provides a celebrant and does their best to provide Section 46 funeral recipients with as many honoured wishes as possible. As someone who works at a Council and studied death culture at university, it was probably inevitable that I would find Ashes to Admin immensely enjoyable. Evie is a local council worker charged with carrying out Section 46 funerals under the Public Health Act. Her stories are sometimes tragic, as with the case of an unidentified woman found on a beach buried without even a name, but often uplifting and occasionally hilarious.