The Blue Plastic Urn Doesn’t Fit

A woman arrives at the cemetery reception with a shoebox in her hands. English is not her first language. The box holds the remains of her stillborn child. She is asking, not demanding: can we hold this? Can there be a ceremony?

The receptionist hesitates. Computer says no. That’s not a service we offer.

Later, in the back room of the crematorium, I follow Sean, the crematorium operator. Caring. Gentle. Tired. He shows me the

storage room where the uncollected ashes wait. It’s surprisingly full. Blue plastic urns, industrial and indistinguishable, line the shelves like products in a warehouse. Each one labeled with a sticker. Each one meant to contain a life.

And then, another box. Zip-lock bags with names. “Those are the children,” Sean whispers. “There’s not enough ash to fill a full urn.”

I am pierced.

In that moment, it becomes achingly clear: the blue plastic urn doesn’t fit. Not just in size. But in meaning. In care. In humanity.

It doesn’t fit the weight of a mother’s love carried in a shoebox.

It doesn’t fit the silence of a child who never took a breath.

It doesn’t fit the reverence needed for lives that didn’t follow the script.

It doesn’t fit the complexity of grief, the cultural languages of mourning, or the desperate need to be seen in the wake of loss.

It fits the system.

But it doesn’t fit us.

This is where human-centred design is meant to come in. Not as a buzzword. Not as a superficial nod to empathy. But as a radical commitment to shape systems around human experiences, especially the ones that are messy, painful, and non-standard. Especially where grief walks in without a booking or a death certificate neatly filed.

But too often, human-centred design in death care is retrofit. It arrives too late. It's asked to decorate the surface of systems built for compliance, not compassion. And so, we end up with well-meaning signage or soft lighting in chapels, while the deeper architecture - the rules, the forms, the urns - remains indifferent to the grief it’s meant to hold.

If we took human-centred design seriously, we’d start not with what’s convenient or scalable, but with what’s uncontainable - grief, love, memory, loss. We’d ask:

• What does it mean to design for the sacred in a secular system?

• How do we honour difference - in culture, language, ritual, emotion - without reducing it to a checkbox?

• What kind of space is needed when what’s being carried is too much for a blue plastic urn?

Human-centred design should not be about making grief more palatable.

It should be about making systems more permeable; to feeling, to story, to meaning.

To do that, we must begin with deep listening. To mothers with shoeboxes. To crematorium operators like Sean. To all those whose care work happens behind the scenes, and whose stories are rarely included in the "design process."

Because ultimately, the question isn’t just: how do we design better services?

It’s: how do we reorient the entire field of death care from transactional to relational, from standardised to attuned, from procedure to presence?

What would it take for the death care industry to truly put humans at the centre; not as “service users,” but as grieving, breathing, aching relational beings?

What would it mean to design systems that can hold shoeboxes with reverence? That can treat a zip-lock bag of children’s ashes not as a logistical anomaly, but as a sacred threshold? That can make space for the slow, wordless rituals that accompany loss; especially the kinds of loss that don’t fit cleanly into forms or policies?

This is not about optimising grief.

So let the stories stay strange.

Let the boxes not fit.

Let the care not be standardised.

Let the people who show up to do this work be supported, not just trained.

Let the dead be honoured in ways that honour the living too.

And let those blue plastic urns be a reminder—not of failure, but of an invitation:

To design differently. To listen deeply. To make room.

I carried these stories with me long after I left that job. They haunted the quiet places in me; the places that still believe care should mean something. And in the end, they became part of the reason I walked away.

Because modernity’s institutions, even those tasked with tending to death, too often make no space for the individual, the human, the soul.

Everything is streamlined. Efficient. Profitable.

And so deeply disappointing.

I left because I wanted to make space - real space - for the grief that doesn’t fit. For the mothers with shoeboxes. For the tender, wordless truths that don’t belong on forms. And maybe, for myself too.