Diary of a funeral director
The Story
Dan box
4 • 1.5K Ratings
🗓️ 19 May 2020
⏱️ 31 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
When Lee Solomon set up his funeral home, he had one mission: to give families the sendoff they really wanted. But now that's no longer possible. For a month Lee has been keeping an audio diary for us, chronicling the experience of running a funeral home during the Covid-19 outbreak and the hardships that come with it.
Guest:
Lee Solomon runs 'Lilies Funeral Directors' in Sutton Coldfield.
Host: Manveen Rana.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Yesterday another 160 people died of COVID-19, bringing the official death toll in the UK close to 35,000. |
| 0:10.0 | There are few people in this country who are intimately acquainted with death as Lee Solomon. |
| 0:16.0 | Lee runs a funeral home with his best friend Nathan. |
| 0:20.0 | It's called Lilies and it's in Southern Colfield. |
| 0:23.0 | For the last few weeks, as the peak of COVID deaths came and went, |
| 0:27.0 | we asked Lee to record his reflections for us. |
| 0:30.0 | So today's episode is the diary of a funeral director in a pandemic. |
| 0:35.8 | You're listening to stories of our times from the Times and the Sunday Times. |
| 0:40.9 | I'm Manveen Rana, but you won't be hearing from me in this episode. I'm handing over to Lee. |
| 0:47.0 | It's currently eight minutes passed to Friday the 17th of April. It's been a bit of a busy day running about but we are getting on top of it. |
| 1:02.0 | Do apologize for the phone in the background. They are just going off |
| 1:05.6 | non-stop today and so I'm gonna have to go to get that. |
| 1:10.4 | My name's Lee Sullivan. I'm the owner and director of Lillies Funal Directors. |
| 1:16.0 | I'm only the mighty old age of 30 and Lilies has been going for just over four years now so it started when I was 26 in 2016. |
| 1:27.0 | I didn't have a clue what I wanted to do. I wanted to be a fighter pilot at one point, wanted to be a solicitor, didn't know. I went to university, studied physics for a year and I didn't agree with that. And Nathan, who we set Lillies up with, he's my best friend and we've been friends since |
| 1:46.1 | since birth really were a few months apart and we were born on the same street |
| 1:50.5 | we grew up at going to the same playgroup. Our moms were best friends. So when |
| 1:55.1 | we was about 21 we both said if we ever get the opportunity, let's go for it. Let's open |
| 1:59.8 | up our own funeral home and give the service to families which we really want to give. I didn't |
| 2:05.3 | 100% know I'd be able to deal with it. Before opening lilies I've never seen a |
| 2:11.3 | deceased before, not even any of my own family. I just knew deep down that this was a service that I wanted to provide and my mentality is if a job needs to be done, I forget about my own feelings, |
| 2:25.7 | emotions, I just need to do it. |
... |
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