In Western society, death is the ultimate taboo.

We know it will happen to us — and everyone we’ve ever loved — and, that it could happen at any time. Yet the thought of our mortality is often shoved to the bottom of the too-hard basket. How can you answer emails and pay your rent if you have a ticking clock in your mind? Counting down the time you (potentially) have left.

This isn’t the case for Bill Edgar’s clients.

These people know that their time is not just coming — it’s here. And in the twilight of their lives, as age or illness consumes their mortal body, they have something they’d like to get off their chests. Something delivered from beyond the grave.

Bill Edgar is the world’s only “Coffin Confessor’”

The Queensland local has lived one hundred lives. From being born the son of a gangster to spending time in a maximum security prison and advocating for fellow victims of sexual abuse, it’s Edgar’s brutal past that means he has the nerve to stand up during client’s funerals and share what they always wanted to say, but never could.

Ahead of his talk at TEDxSydney on September 1st, I called Edgar to learn more about his profession and what he’s learnt from his dead clients.

VICE: I read that your first client started as “a bit of a joke”. Can you please share the story of how this job came to be?

Edgar: I was working for a gentleman named Graham, investigating his financial matters. I got to know him quite well in the last six months of his life. He had terminal cancer, but he needed to resolve some financial issues.

After all that was resolved, I sat with Graham and we spoke about death, life, the afterlife, and what happens when you die. He said, ‘I’d like to leave something behind.’ And I said, ‘Do your own eulogy.’

He says, ‘I’ve been to funerals before where the families don’t play it out of disrespect. I don’t know why [but] they get uncomfortable about the people left behind.’

So out of a joke, and only a joke, I said, ‘I’ll crash your funeral for you.’ Two weeks later, he took me up on the offer. He wrote it out and put it in an envelope. And the day of his funeral was [when] I interrupted and read aloud exactly what he wanted.

And how did you feel in that moment, doing your first one, when it was like, ‘Hey, I'm going to have to stand up here in front of this person's friends and family and share his inner thoughts’?

That was the big thing for me. I’m about to interrupt a funeral of grieving people that love this man. As far as interrupting the funeral service in telling certain home truths, I was happy to do that because I actually witnessed what this bloke was going through and the people he wanted outed, so I had no care or concern for them.

Was that first coffin confession Graham confessing certain things to people?

His best mate — who he’d thought was his best mate — was trying to screw his wife while he was on his deathbed. You know, he’s on his deathbed, in his own house, he can see up the hallway to his kitchen and he can see his best mate trying to take advantage of his wife. And she wasn’t taking any of it.

But he couldn’t get out of bed, he couldn’t yell, couldn’t scream. It was just horrific. I said, ‘I’ve got no problem at all standing up and telling him to fuck off.’

Whilst he was performing the eulogy, I stood up and I said, ‘Mate, sit down, Graham in the coffin’s got something to say and this is what it is.’

And what was his reaction?

As soon as I opened the envelope and read it, he left. He knew straight away. It started off with basically, ‘Brian, you’re no friend of mine. You’ve been trying to screw my wife while I’m on my deathbed. You’ve stolen items out of my garage. You’re an evil person and I hate you, and I hope to see you in the afterlife.’ It was powerful.

[Graham also] had three relatives and he said to me, ‘Bill, I don’t know if they’ll attend my funeral, but if they do, it’s my brother, his wife and their daughter. Can you please tell them to stand up and fuck off? Why are they here paying their respects when I could’ve seen them in that 30 years? They’re just vultures.’

When was this first funeral and how many funerals do you think you’ve crashed since?

[Graham’s] was January 2018. Since then, close to about 66–67 funerals. But there’s other things included in that. I do house sweeps now, so I go to people’s homes and I sweep them for items that they don’t want their family and friends to find.

I’ve seen joke tweets on the internet where it’s like, ‘When you die, you need to have a best friend who’s gonna come in and get rid of your sex toys.’ You don’t want your parents to see all that stuff.

Exactly. The first [house sweep] I ever did was a gentleman who was 88 years of age. He was taken to palliative care at the hospital and was never going to return home. His three sons were flying in from New South Wales to Queensland and he had a sex dungeon. He was mortified, he did not want them to find it.

So, I was engaged to go and collect everything, destroy everything and it was happy days for him after that.

It seems like there’d be a good market for that! It protects people’s privacy and dignity.

Oh, absolutely. Lately, I've been going to people's homes and collecting wills, estates and money and jewellery and taking them back to the clients who are in [aged care] homes. I didn't realise how many people actually have a fall at their own home, are taken to hospital and they get told they'll never go home.

And these people are then stuck in hospital, and all they've got is the hope that their family and friends will go to their house and look after their pets or whatever it is. But a lot of them (believe it or not) will go through their personal belongings. It's just a human nature thing. I don't know why. But they seem to go through everything. This is why I'm engaged to get and remove those things and bring them back to the clients.

How much is a funeral crashing versus a house sweep?

My services started with Graham putting the $10,000 price tag on [it]. I kept that [price] because it stops people just using my services for revenge or a joke. So it’s $10,000. They don’t need the money where they’re going, and I never get a complaint.

As well as crashing funerals and making house sweeps, you’re also a private investigator. How did you get into this profession?

I was Debt collecting and investigating a debt that I shouldn’t have been. The lady was so determined that she didn’t owe the money, she said she’d never had that debt. And the boss I was working for at one of the biggest debt collectors in Australia says, ‘I don’t care. Get the money, hound her, do everything you can; intimidate, harass.’ And I did… until the day she took her own life.

I felt terrible about it. I didn’t listen back then because I had a job to do. I had to make money for my boss. So, I started up a [private investigation] business called Freedom From Debt Collectors. And to date, I’ve probably helped around 16,500 people walk away from paying their debt.

Most people may assume that when crashing a funeral you’re confessing an earth-shattering secret or telling someone to fuck off, but there are also confessions of love or sharing words people couldn’t say in life, right? 

That’s the variety of my job. There was a lady [who], on her deathbed, confessed to loving her best friend of 45 years. She wanted to be with this lady and she was married with three children. Her best friend was married with two children. I read that out at the funeral, the love and the joy and everything and her husband was happy with it.

No one was offended. It was just a true love story. When I was leaving that funeral, the lady in reference to the friend came up to me and she said, ‘I felt the same way but I could never bring myself to tell her.’

I was like, ‘Holy shit, you lived your whole life without confessing to each other’s love.’

What do you think this job has taught you about life, in moments such as that?

It’s taught me to live and not worry about the small things. Every person that I’ve sat with on their deathbed, every one of them has said exactly the same thing; and it’s time. You cannot buy time. No matter how much you want [it], time is your enemy.

Talk to your loved ones as well. Tell them exactly what you want at your funeral. Don't bullshit around. And if they don't like it [or] they don't do it… then you hire a coffin confessor.