When she worked for British Airways, Tracy Lazonby always made sure the people in her care were happy and comfortable jetting to and from Europe.

Now she’s looking after those making an entirely different type of journey.

Appropriately, Final Journey is the name of her business.

The former flight attendant gave up her job and life at Gatwick to help care for her mum in Carlisle when multiple sclerosis took hold.

And the traumatic and lingering death of Deirdre prompted Tracy into making the dramatic career shift into organising funerals.

Tracy was happy with the funeral and the service she requested for her mum, but was shocked at the cost involved and the lack of real choice offered to bereaved families.

“We got the funeral we wanted, but afterwards I found out that you don’t have to have a coffin, that there are burial shrouds and woollen coffins.

“There is such a massive range of possibilities and I don’t want people to be restricted.”

Death affects people in different ways and Tracy is trying to make a big difference to the business of dying.

For a start, she sees herself more as an event organiser than a funeral director and urges people to ‘shop around’ for their service.

“If you were buying a car, you would go to three garages to get the best deal,” she reasons.

“When you organise a funeral, you are not thinking straight, it is a crisis purchase and you go to one company.

“If you go to three different companies you could save thousands of pounds. And you don’t need a funeral director at all,” she smiles with alarming honesty.

Insurer SunLife’s latest annual Cost of Dying report found that the price of a typical funeral has increased by 5.5 per cent in the past year to £3,897.

Tracy reckons that figure could be closer to £8,000 when you add in solicitors’ fees and the cost of catering, flowers and other items.

“That is frightening and people don’t have that money now,” says the 43-year-old. “Because we don’t talk about it, no one knows how much it costs and no one prepares for it at all.”

Tracy’s fees start at £1,550 for what she describes as a “small, direct cremation”.

“I start small and give the families confidence to take control and do what they want.”

Her chapel of rest is all light wood and cream walls.

A converted area of her home just outside Carlisle, it is more like a spa or a relaxation room than a gloomy room for hushed voices and brave smiles.

In among the leaflets for woollen shrouds and wooded burial spots, there are others for sending ashes up in the whoosh of a firework for a glittering end, or transforming them into crystal jewellery.

She asks for ashes to be placed into one of her large cardboard tubes with colourful pictures of sunsets, woodland scenes or pictures of flowers, rather than the usual grim plastic urns.

As well as the traditional choice of wooden coffins, she offers wicker caskets, or cardboard coffins printed in a range of patterns.

For Tracy, it’s not the death that matters but the life that was lived.

So bodies could be carried to their final resting place in a VW camper van or a motorbike sidecar.

Her coffin print of a VW camper van is now included in a catalogue of designs.

Weddings have evolved over the past decade, with increasing numbers of people choosing not to have a traditional service. Tracy can see the same happening with funerals.

“A lot more people want something simple and personal and small.

“Prince and David Bowie had small cremations that spared the families from ceremony and that is by far the most popular.

“A lot of people want the funeral dealt with simply and to get the ashes back, then a few months down the line, when they feel stronger and in a different mental state, they will have a memorial service.”

One service she organised was for a family to say farewell to their mum with a prosecco and chocolate picnic.

They listened to Rod Stewart because she had danced to him at her 80th birthday. Another family decorated their wicker casket with hats because their mum loved them so much.

One woman died in a hospice, rather than at home where she had planned.

Her daughter wanted her to rest at home before the funeral so family and friends could visit.

Her home was at the end of a long potholed track and Tracy and her husband Mike built a special sled to get the coffin to and from the house.

You don’t even have to have a coffin.

Tracy arranged for one family to have just a shroud and they spent their final hours with their mother’s body sewing messages and pictures onto the shroud.

“I want to do this, I feel I can help people,” says Tracy. “Going through that illness with mum for so long, something inside changed and I wanted to do something to help people.


Tracy Lazonby “I become a temporary best friend to the family for a week or two. I have to help them achieve as much as they possibly can, to get what they want .

“It is a question of going completely out of your way for them.”

She has had photographs and videos taken at funeral services and even Skyped one to a relative in Australia.

Being able to add colour or patterns or messages to a coffin or casket personalises it more.

And her skills have been called on closer to home. She spoke with her father-in-law just a few months before he succumbed to cancer.

“His coffin had images of the Solway Firth, Rydal and the Langdales printed on it. He loved the Lake District and grew up on the Solway. The images were for him,” she explains.

The mum of two young children says there’s still a taboo about planning for death and funerals but we are getting better about booking that final journey.

One woman Tracy spoke to earlier in the year about a funeral has just phoned again to say her health has deteriorated and she wants to have another chat.

“There is more awareness about different types of funerals and services and families should have a talk about it,” she says.

Funeral businesses tend to be family run and pass from generation to generation. Tracy started her business from scratch two years ago and admits it has been hard.

Husband Mike – who initially said her funeral business idea was a “harebrained scheme” - has been a rock.

And word is spreading.

She has managed funerals in Barrow, Newcastle and Scotland.

Online reviews are studded with five stars and superlatives. Last month she was selected from hundreds of nominees to enter the final stages of this year’s Good Funeral Awards.

Final Journey was named runner-it up for ‘most promising new funeral director of the year’.

Fran Hall, chief executive of The Good Funeral Guide, said: “By progressing this far, Final Journey has already demonstrated outstanding professionalism, empathy and a willingness to go the extra mile.”