Funerals

There are times I seriously wonder what funerals are about. Services are so variable.

My mother's I remember even now, some 30+ years later, with anger. It was a load of Christian claptrap, by someone who had never met my mother, never wanted to know her. It was a job to be done, part of a conveyor belt of services to be performed that day. I kept my mouth shut at the time as I hoped it gave some comfort for my father.

Over the years since, we seem to be going to ever increasing numbers of funerals - a sign of our own increasing old age & mortality? The best, to my mind, capture something of the deceased, celebrate their lives. I know it's difficult to decide how best to arrange a service when you yourself are in shock & despair having lost someone much loved. It's difficult to think about funerals when all you want is for the ordeal to be over. Many funeral directors & priests are not good at making suggestions.

Yesterday's service started off not too badly. The first hymn was "All things bright & beautiful", not one I think of for such an occasion, & yet I did find it curiously appropriate. MK loved the world around him, loved nature, & to his dying days, one of his great pleasures was to look out of his lounge windows, across the paddock with all the bird feeders, frequented by small birds, down to the canal with its swan family & the fells beyond. He was a countryman at heart &, at one time, had his own smallholding.

Then we had a couple of poems read by a couple of his grandchildren, expressing the thought that MK did not want us all to be miserable but rather to be glad he had ever lived.

Then the service went terribly wrong. We had half a dozen sentences of MK's career, in which the priest even got the names of the family wrong, followed by an advertising blurb for the wonders of the services he himself could provide. Considering that MK was not a churchgoer, this galled us. (For a more detailed account of this horror read the Fox's blog.)

At the Pub afterwards, we were both subdued, partially because of the upset the priest had caused us. We can but hope Helen & her family found it a more satisfying service. I have to admit part of my quietness was that I'd had to take a sleeping pill the night before - my knees are still badly inflamed from my gardening efforts on Saturday. I often seem semi-doped the next day, as I was yesterday.

Also I felt no sense of relief. I always find the time between death & funeral a strain, a curious dislocated sense of waiting, unable to get on with life. I'm still feeling that. I'm telling myself that it is because I'm still very aware that we have another funeral to go to later this week. Maybe it will only be after that one that I will be able to feel that sense of release & be able to get back to life again.

Meanwhile I keep thinking of Linda, Dave C's widow. She came to the funeral & the do after. It was an awful ordeal for her, as she was only too aware of thinking of & missing Dave,who died only last April. She commented she has the image of Dave & MK sitting in heaven, over a pint of beer, putting the world to rights. I hope that's just what is happening.

As for myself, I hope, when the time comes, people will go away, feeling glad that they had known me & feel free to do that with humour & joy. Goodbyes are inevitable, but surely the focus should be on the privilege it has been for those still living to have known the deceased, on all the things that made that person unique, someone you wanted to know & enjoy being with.

So all I can say is "Goodbye Michael. You will always be loved, never forgotten." I just hope the next funeral is going to be more satisfactory.