A Brixton funeral planning service is putting the ‘fun’ into ‘funerals’ by celebrating the deceased’s life rather than focusing on mourning.

Personal Touch Funerals provides people with the opportunity to shrug off the black colour scheme and instead fill a loved one’s final farewell with bright flowers, balloons, photography and even filming.

Director of Personal Touch Funerals, Pauline Miller, explained that these celebrations of life have grown in popularity in the UK and aren’t too dissimilar to a traditional send off.

Ms Miller said: “Celebrations of life are not like a humanist memorial – It has all of the things that you would find in a traditional funeral, except that here frivolity is not frowned upon.

“Often people come to us to plan their own funerals because they want to make it a fun one.

“They don’t want the last memory everyone has of them to be in the sombre tone of the funeral.

“They would rather be remembered as the fun person they were and give their friends one more opportunity to enjoy themselves.”

Balloons are increasingly used in ceremonies with messages written on, or in, them and released into the air at the end of the ceremony as a way of symbolically saying goodbye to their loved one.

And it’s not just specialist providers offering this service with more traditional funeral directors also welcoming this new style.

Ernest Larner & Son press officer Stewart Cox explained that the company was more than happy to comply with their clients’ requests.

“It just depends on what the client wants. We do traditional funerals, but if the person who hires us wants it to be a little more festive, we’ll do it,” he said.

Picture courtesy of saffron100_uk, with thanks