I am Andrea Penly
I am a celebrant, currently focusing on funerals and memorials. To me, a funeral or a memorial is a person’s one chance to say a ‘good’ farewell to their loved one. I believe that ‘good grief’ is possible, and it can be helped by organising the right send-off. It is important for us all to think we have done the right thing, and had the funeral that our loved one would have liked. But it’s also important for us – the people left behind, the people who will mourn their loss. I have, like so many people experienced funerals that have gone wrong. I have also experienced beautiful ceremonies too that really celebrated the loved one’s life and were a real homage to who they were and how they lived. It is this that motivated me to become a celebrant. I want to give people that beautiful ceremony and help them to have a positive experience.
In my life, I spent many years teaching psychology to teenagers and adults who wanted to return after time out of education. I found that my enthusiasm for my subject and my empathy for people, especially those feeling out of their depth made me very successful in my role. After 25 years, I decided it was time for a change, and having experienced loss for myself, after a time spent processing my loss and finding the ability to grow my life around my grief, I chose to become a celebrant.
As a non-religious person, I decided to train with Humanists UK, and I am happy to carry out any non-religious ceremony. I believe that having a ceremony grounded in nature and honouring the person can be very fulfilling to bereaved people and can help them to accept their loss.
My training as a teacher and personal tutor alongside my own life experiences, enable me to gently talk to grieving people in their own time, allowing me to get a real sense of who the loved one was. I am able to garner information such as life histories, personality characteristics along with family memories and these I can put into a sensitively worded ceremony. Quite a few people from various congregations have asked after the funeral has taken place, how I knew the deceased person, and apart from a couple of occasions, I had never met them.
When I’m not working as a celebrant, I like to read non-fiction books and keep up to date with psychological research, and I sometimes act as a tutor to A-level students. I love my four cats who are very spoilt and extremely needy and when I can tear myself away, my husband and I love to tour mainland Europe on our motorbikes.
Please get in touch if you would like to talk more about arranging a funeral or memorial.