Playing Dead with Pensioners –The DIY Funeral Game

Over a decade ago, I was invited to Leeds to give a talk on silver society trends and futures, as part of the city's age-friendly smart city initiative. Leeds City Council had invited a group of local pensioners to co-create what it actually means for a city to be 'age-friendly', and – although it seemed a little on the nose – we managed to get death added to the agenda.

I have Abhay Adhikari to thank for that. He's the kind of visionary facilitator who spots exactly where a room needs to go before anyone else in it does. I wouldn't have dared suggest bringing death into that workshop myself, but Abhay knew it belonged there.

So I brought along the DIY funeral game, it’s basically a long canvas that maps the whole journey from the moment you die to your last resting place, with every decision along the way laid out: what you legally have to do, alongside a lot of things you could do but don't have to. Between each ‘stop’ along the journey are cute little hearses moving you along.

This whimsy is pretty fundamental to how the game works: we don't start by asking people to make decisions for their own funeral. (Too much, too soon). Instead, we ask them to design the funeral and memorial for a fictional character.

Here's how it works. Teams choose together which fictional character has died. It's important that everyone on the team knows the character well enough to have a real opinion about their funeral arrangements (no living celebrities, we tried that once and it felt very distasteful). Then, working along the canvas left to right, the team makes decision after decision: would their loved ones open a window the moment they passed? Would they be buried or cremated? What decorations, what tributes, right up to where they'd finally come to rest.

The conversations that come out of this are genuinely fascinating to watch. There's a bit of accidental learning through play –  the odd 'gosh, I never knew you could do that'. But mostly, the discussions get properly lively.

Watching from the sidelines in Leeds, I saw one group breeze through the funeral music for Darth Vader, a little too obvious a choice to spark any real debate. At the table next to them, a different group went head to head over the kind of ceremony Mary Poppins would actually want. That one took considerably longer. People properly argued.

And this is precisely the point. This is what happens when someone in a family actually dies, except the people at the table are grieving siblings, unable to agree on their mother's final arrangements and desperate not to let her down. Nobody can agree on what she would have wanted, because nobody ever asked, and nobody ever said.

In our workshop debrief one thing was unanimous –  we need to talk about it before it's too late. Make sure there's clarity, while there's still time to give it. This sparked the conversations back home after the workshop. Our participants were determined to let their loved ones know their funeral wishes.

It also left me with another question: Who is a funeral actually for? Is it merely a fitting tribute to the person who died, or is it really there for the people left behind?