Portrait shot of Evie King. She sits three quarters on, visible from the middle upwards, wearing a blue velvet dress with short bobbed brown hair, against a white background. She smiles at the camera.

Humanist Society interview series: Evie King on demystifying death with her book Ashes to Admin

March 20, 2025

At our next book group we will mark Demystifying Death Week by discussing Evie King’s Ashes to Admin: Tales from The Caseload of a Council Funeral Officer, described by Adam Kay as “funny, poignant, enraging and eye-opening”. We caught up with Evie to talk about learning to live with death through admin….

Hi Evie! How did you come to write your book Ashes to Admin?

The book. like many things in life, was the result of a number of moments, mainly accidental. In the first instance, I burned out due to a combination of job, boss, commute and neighbours, and so decided to leave London and run away to the seaside. I then took a job at the only show in a very sleepy town, the council, as an administrator. My boss asked me to start writing procedure notes for an area we were soon to be audited on, namely public health funerals. Then she asked me to test the procedure in the real world.

Flash forward a few months and I opened the front door of my first house search as a council funeral officer, getting knocked back by the smell of death, and ascending stairs so dilapidated I could see the room below. It’s not even a job you can necessarily apply for, it just sits among the many duties the council has. I could not have planned it if I had tried. Scary really.

I have always been fascinated with the fact I will one day stop existing.

How did your work make you think differently about death?

It’s a tough one this. It would have been so convenient to have a plot arc whereby I go from death phobic or avoidant to fully accepting through a series of enlightening lessons and moments. In fact, I was always au fait with death, ever since I was a small child. My parents even got called in to school after I answered a “write a story about a picnic” task with a tale of laying down a blanket in a graveyard and all of the people’s arms popping up to take a sandwich.

I have always been fascinated with the fact I will one day stop existing. Though I suppose the job still has the potential to impact me further, and my big death clean during Covid was almost certainly the upshot of seeing so many items in the houses I attended become skip fodder overnight. In terms of Demystifying Death Week, the job has given me the behind the scenes knowledge and skills to navigate all of the practical aspects and by living it every day, through these tasks, some profound, some administrative, I have reached a place where I can bring the normalcy of death and the need for preparation to others. My second book is all about preparing and accepting.

What happens if you die without family or money? Who are the people this happens to? What if that was me? These are questions that pique curiosity.

Who is your book for?

Anyone who is likely to die at some point. I knew that it would have an inbuilt readership of funeral directors, celebrants (indeed it is on some celebrant course syllabuses) and death-adjacent folk. But I have found that it is for just about anyone. Mine is a job hardly anyone knows exists. But once you realise the need, you cannot un-see it. What happens if you die without family or money? Who are the people this happens to? What if that was me? These are questions that pique curiosity.

The one audience I was surprised to gain, though maybe not in hindsight, is the bereaved. I have had many recently bereaved people say they found the book comforting, in part because someone was being open and light-touch about the subject. I guess they are used to a lot of embarrassed silence. Ultimately it’s for anyone who has experienced that three-in-the-morning fear about how they will end their days, be memorialised or remembered. I want to shine a light on the topic and make it less scary.

There is no one type of person who dies alone or without anyone to arrange their funeral.

What lessons, thoughts, or feelings would you like readers to come away with?

There is no one type of person who dies alone or without anyone to arrange their funeral. Although there are characteristics that can play into it – solitary, reclusive – and also things like estrangement, none of us can guarantee anything. We are all one or two bereavements and life-events from dying alone. This isn’t intended to strike fear, rather show the bland happenstance and random nature of life. We can get married and have two-point-four children but they may all predecease us. Are we to be pitied and held up as the archetypal failed life because of timing? Our partner could develop dementia and not be able to arrange a funeral or even know we’ve died. But were we not loved?

By showing my people not as outliers but as individuals just like you and I, I hoped to shatter the grim image of the lonely death. In so doing, maybe I can help to tackle our fear of death in general: fear of death being a kind of fear of life after all. I wanted to show that nobody has nobody. You will be held and cared for, people will come out for you. We will all be forgotten in time, but we lived, and with that in mind, you can now get on with enjoying your life.

Attend our next book group

Buy Ashes to Admin

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