Funeral Director
The Co-operative Funeralcare

David W

00:00:03 My name’s David W. I’m a Funeral Director for Co-operative Funeralcare. I love the job. I love the fact that I can be involved at a certain time in their life where people would know they have the confidence to leave that with me, and for me to do the job perfectly for them. And there’s nothing better than at the end of this when somebody shakes your hand and says that was beautiful, that was seamless, that was just exactly what we wanted. Mum would’ve been proud is one that is a sentence that I had about two days ago, and I just love the job for that reason.

00:00:36 My parents were very busy people and because of various family divorces and things like this, I actually grew up with my grandmother and I think that’s been – she’s been so, such an inspirational part of my life. She made me understand the importance of ‘you get out of life what you put into it’. She would never hold me back. She would never try and say what I was doing was wrong, but she would always be there to help me should anything go wrong, and I’ve learnt so much from that.

00:01:03 When she died 10 years ago, it was like the bottom had fallen out of my world and it took me a while to get over the fact that she wasn’t there anymore. But I sat there and thought, ‘well she wouldn’t want me to be sitting there moping and being miserable’. So I went out and said that day that, ‘life is mine and I’ll do with it what I want’.

00:01:25 Outside work, I enjoy films. I’m a big Star Trek fan, a bit of a trekky. I am, I love books and I love book reading. I love do-it-yourself and I’ve got, as I’ve mentioned earlier, four teenage stepchildren, which is also a fantastic learning curve because I’m actually known as Learner Dad rather than Dad, simply because of the fact that they’re learning to have a real dad and I’m learning to have four real children and it’s a brilliant symbiosis of the two and it’s a fabulous hobby.

00:02:02 When I was younger, I wanted to be in the Navy, I wanted to be a paramedic, I was quite uncertain about what I wanted to do, there was no clear direction that I wanted to go. I came out of doing my A levels because I had some issues that I’d had with the school and I came out of full time education. A big mistake I’ve found out since. However you make a choice in life, you have to live with it and you deal with it and you carry on.

00:02:27 I went into being an apprentice alarm engineer, but unfortunately they went bankrupt and they went out of business. So what I did was I didn’t like being on the dole. I was on the dole for about two or three months and I hated it. So I went out to do some Christmas temporary work for a well known stationer in the high street and that put me in contact with the general public, and ever since I started working with the general public, I’ve just loved every minute of it.

00:02:56 The reason why I swapped from working in the retail sector and moved into this was because retail became very much more about numbers. It became more about achieving targets rather than being personal to people, and I perhaps got to the stage in my life where I wanted to try and give something back. I’ve done all this. I’ve made mistakes in my life. I’ve done good things in my life and what it does is it builds you as a person and then at some point in your life you think I need to go back to basics, I need to be able now to get back to doing at what I’m good at and that’s being with people, talking to people and helping people. That’s what I wanted to do.

00:03:37 And I had the opportunity to work for the Co-operative came up as a funeral carer, as a funeral director. What they wanted was somebody with retail experience that wasn’t afraid of promoting himself and the business. It was perfect, that’s exactly what I wanted and it’s the best thing I’ve ever done. I don’t see this as a job. I see this as a vocation. This is something I was meant to do and it might’ve taken me a few years to get here, but I’m here and I’m loving it.