Bill Edgar had finally tracked them down – the father and brother of an elderly woman who had died by suicide.
A dad-of-two who lives on the coast of Queensland, Australia, Bill had been asked by the woman to be her real-life ‘suicide note’.
However, when he went to speak to the pair, they simply told him: ‘Oh, she should have done it years ago.’
‘No one attended her funeral. She had nobody in her life at all. But that’s what I do: I’m the coffin confessor,’ Bill, 56, tells Metro.
A ‘coffin confessor’ isn’t the kind of job you’d usually see on LinkedIn – they’re people hired by the deceased to carry out a final act, such as crashing a funeral to declare a truth or giving a message to a relative at their graveside.
Bill is the world’s only coffin confessor, he claims. He’s a man who has lived a hundred lives already – the son of a gangster, he’s been homeless, a car thief, spent time in prison, and even worked as acounsellor.
His first coffin confession client came while he was a private investigator – another one of his jobs – in 2018. He was enjoying some tea with a man who revealed he was dying from pancreatic cancer.
‘We started talking about life, death and everything in between,’ Bill recalls. ‘He then told me about his best mate who was screwing his wife on his deathbed.’
Bill suggested he put this in his eulogy, but the man doubted his family would believe him from beyond the grave. ‘I said, “Well, I could always crash your funeral!” I was joking, but a couple of weeks later, he texted me about it.’
After fact-checking the affair, Bill and his client hatched a plan: he would interrupt the friend’s eulogy and ‘Tell him to sit down, shut up or f**k off’, a message also to be directed at his estranged family.
When the man died later that year, Bill snuck into the service and two minutes into the eulogy – set by a timer on his phone – he did just that.
‘The man in the coffin’s got something to say,’ Bill told the mourners, before opening an envelope and reading out details of the infidelity. In response, the friend chose the latter option provided by Bill and ‘f**ked off’.
‘I crashed the funeral thinking it was a one-off, but I wasn’t even in my car when a woman came up to me and said, “You’ve got to see my auntie”,’ Bill recalls.
‘I stopped at a café and sat there thinking, could this be something people need? I’m standing in front of a coffin, and I’m confessing people’s thoughts, desires, sins, whatever it is.
‘So maybe I’m a coffin confessor, and then I went, “F**k, that’s not a bad name”.’
Bill has had 50 clients since who have asked him to, among other things, place items on their coffins, sweep their homes for belongings they don’t want loved ones to see or deliver a ‘gift from the afterlife’ to families. He charges a flat rate of AUD 10,000 (a little under £5,000).
‘One asked me to pinprick his body,’ the author of The Coffin Confessor says, something he’s had ‘thousands’ of people ask him to do. ‘I asked why, and he replied: “I’m terrified of being buried alive.”
‘One lady got me to confess to her son that she wasn’t his mother, but actually his grandmother. His sister was his real mother – and his father was his grandfather.’
During another funeral, Bill had to ask a priest to sit down while leading a service, as the deceased didn’t want a religious ceremony.
‘Funerals are for the living, people have told me,’ says Bill. ‘Well, f**k you, it’s my client that’s dead. It’s their funeral.’
While revealing affairs and abuse are common declarations, many of Bill’s clients, whether in their twilight years or as young as 23, also want to tell their family and friends how much they love them.
During a recent job, he knocked on the door of a man whose wife had died seven months ago to deliver him flowers – it was their anniversary.
‘It can be hard, especially when you’re face-to-face with somebody that’s in their late 60s, and they’re broken and alone,’ Bill admits. ‘Then all of a sudden, they say, “What, she’s thinking of me?” And I’m like, “Yeah, she is”.’
While we’re all born unaware we will die one day, from an early age, death surrounds us – leaves turn brown, a squished ant stops moving and cartoon characters vanish.
Psychologists say that children can understand death as young as two, but it can take decades, if ever, to come to terms with it. That’s why Bill wants people to talk about mortality. In the four minutes you’ve been reading this story, about 400 people have died.
Regret, as researchers have found, incites us to reflect on our actions and imminent death is the ultimate driver for that, and Bill has heard many over the years.
He believes the admissions he’s asked to take care of are a final act that gives a sense of control to someone who knows their death is imminent.
Bill also knows that he doesn’t need to do the confessions – how would they know? – something his first client pointed out.
‘But then I remember that we all die,’ Bill says. ‘You don’t know what’s on the other side – they could be waiting there for me if I haven’t done it.’
Death, unsurprisingly, is something that weighs heavily on Bill’s mind.
Why would people need a ‘coffin confessor’?
Dr Roger Giner-Sorolla, a professor of social psychology at the University of Kent, has a few ideas why.
‘Naturally, the thought of making such brutally honest confessions, not at all socially approved of in everyday life, comes with a strong dose of shame, and the clients show signs of having been inhibited by this feeling,’ he explained to Metro.
Roger said that shame is far different from guilt, which is about what someone has done to another, rather than their image.
‘Sometimes, doing the right thing is shameful, but not doing the right thing is guilt-inducing,’ he added.
‘These two negative feelings bookend the dilemma and make it exceptionally painful. No wonder they jump at the chance to have someone else alleviate their guilt without incurring the shame cost!’
The Judging Passions author said how the coffin confessor’s clients are willing to pay thousands for the service is ‘noteworthy’.
‘All money has an expected value of zero if you wait long enough,’ Roger added, ‘and no investment really pays off in the end, except what we leave to other people.’
‘I’ve come to the terms that we’re all going. Every person on the planet’s got a skeleton in the closet, whether you want to let it out or not,’ he explains.
‘I’ve let mine out already through my book, but death is coming. Death won’t wait. It’ll take you when it wants to.’
In turn, it means Bill has spent years decluttering his life, settling scores and telling his family he cherishes them, the kinds of things many of his clients regret not doing when they could.
‘They all say they need time, but I think, f**k that, I won’t need time. I’m going to do it now,’ Bill adds.
‘Very few of us die living, and that’s what I try and do.’
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