laughing at a funeral
Friday, October 28th, 2005 01:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tamaranthMy handbag is big enough to carry a gravestone. I'll tell you how I know.
My father used to talk about how there were two significant dates in the year -- birth-day, and day of death -- and how the death-day came around every year but we never recognised it. He died on the 200th anniversary of the battle of Trafalgar, while I was thinking of him watching the celebrations on TV: that night, the bells of Plymouth rang for hours.
We bought the grave from a bloke down the market. This isn't as bad as it sounds. Paddy, one of my brother-in-law's friends, does some work for Cornish Market World, but also operates a green burial site that has been named as the best in the south-west. We bought the plot earlier this year, and I'd been planning to visit it when I next went to Plymouth. As it turned out, I saw it for the first time the day after my father's death.
It's an overgrown field on a Cornish hillside, with woods in the valley and the sea just over the next rise.
There aren't many graves, though the site's been operating for several decades. The graves are marked with flowers: there are young trees with silver plaques, but no gravestones. There's a standing stone -- or perhaps just an old gatepost -- halfway down the field, a pillar of granite about my height all lichened and notched: and a cat, black-and-white like my father's last two, trotting up the lane.
My sister and I had talked about the funeral several times, when my father was more ill than usual: we'd talked about music, flowers, sea burials, services. As it turned out, we improvised much of it. Because we were doing everything ourselves, there was room for everyone to do what seemed right and fitting.
We compiled a brief biography of my father -- both of us, in the process, learning new things about him! -- and had it printed up, with a couple of poems* and the Lord's Prayer. My eldest niece created a floral anchor, with white carnations and blue irises. Pauline, my father's friend, suggested sprinkling the ashes of his cats over the grave: "I don't know why I kept them so long," she said, over and over, "but this is the right thing, isn't it?"
The day before the funeral, sister and I went to Bovisand Bay, to a part of the beach that I'd never been to, a small secluded cove with steps leading down to it that she'd discovered with my father. There in the sunshine, splashed by the breakers, we picked out a stone to put on the grave: a rough triangle of mottled green shale, worn smooth by the ceaseless sea. We had the strongest sense of my father's presence, there on the beach: as though, if we turned around, he'd be there with us. It was immensely comforting.
Sister collected shells and driftglass: I picked wild flowers from the clifftop, and later from Plymbridge Woods where we used to walk, he and I, when he first moved to Plymouth. There weren't many flowers around this late in the year, but enough: white fuschia and a few late campion flowers, yarrow, Michaelmas daisies, ivy and oak and fronds of fern.
Sister's kitten thought they smelt lovely. Tasty, too.
The day of the funeral was rainy and misty. Pontsmill is down near Par, a good hour's drive from Plymouth: we left early, before it was properly light. It was a small gathering. My mother's sister was not well enough to travel: my father's sister not well enough to be told that her baby brother, her dear Dickie, had gone. (When I was looking through his papers, I found the announcement of his birth -- not from his mother and father, but from his brother and sisters.)
The coffin was white cardboard, with a laser-printed label: it was carried from the hearse. My father wasn't especially interested in music, but he loved Vangelis' Heaven and Hell, the theme music to Carl Sagan's 'Cosmos' series: it's the only piece of music I can remember him asking me to get for him. Now it will always make me think of muddy fields, and the smell of wet bracken, and veils of rain across the valley.
Ian, my niece's husband, had carried the CD player. Jane, my sister's step-son's ex-wife -- of whom my father was very fond -- read the Hopi Prayer, and then the story of my father's life: then we all said the Lord's Prayer, our sole concession to religion. (My father was not a religious man, and he found the hymns and prayers at my mother's funeral hypocritical and pointless.)
Then Ian started up the next bit of music (Sailor, Petula Clark)and my nephew Richard helped the pall-bearers remove the supports and lower the coffin -- the box, the box with a cold body in it -- into the grave.
It wouldn't fit.
Because my father had died on a Friday evening, Paddy hadn't been able to use his usual firm of funeral directors to collect and prepare the body. The firm he'd used instead had ordered a traditionally-shaped coffin, broad at shoulder-level (though my father's body was wasted and frail) and tapering at the feet: the grave had been dug for a plain rectangular box. Paddy said later that he had a sinking feeling as soon as they unloaded the coffin.
They tried angling it into the grave. Then they pulled away the green plastic matting around the edges of the grave (presumably put there in case any of us felt the need to kneel and pray, or something) so that the coffin wouldn't catch on it. One of the pall-bearers picked up a wooden support and tried to scrape away more clay. They'd only finished digging about five minutes before we arrived: the wet weather had made the sides of the grave collapse.
I could see my brother-in-law trying not to laugh. I didn't even try. I could practically hear my daddy laughing at us all. He'd have found it so funny, Petula coming round for the third time, and all of us standing there trying not to cry -- just like the Hopi Prayer says, 'do not stand at my grave and weep' -- and the pall-bearers getting mud on their smart black suits, trying to force the coffin into the ground.
Eventually Paddy found a spade and got digging, and finally the coffin went down. By then everyone was laughing and taking photos and joking:
"Yes, couldn't go smoothly with him, could it?"
"'E don't want to go, do 'e?"
"Reckon he's having a right old laugh, up there. Reckons we're all too bloody solemn."
Pauline and I scattered the cats' ashes: very gritty and full of cat-skull they were, and it was a messy job. Paddy tried to apologise for the problems, until I assured him that it'd been exactly right for my daddy: nothing ever went entirely smoothly, and he never let it bother him! (Apparently it'd been the best service Paddy'd ever had up there: I wonder if he says that to everyone? I wonder what other green burials are like?)
And then we all went to the Cornish Arms in St Blazey, which had opened especially for us, and propped up a photo-montage of my father at his best (stepping a mast, playing with a cat, in the Navy, on the beach), and toasted him, and remembered.
Sister and I went back to the burial ground later. As we reached the grave, now filled, there was a sudden intense burst of rain. We laid the stone, inscribed in silver marker-pen with his name and his dates, and decorated the bare earth with shells. It could have been any time in the last ten thousand years, out there with the rain loud on the leaves, and mist billowing over the hill, and that stone pillar like a figure seen out of the corner of an eye.
Come spring the grave will be covered with crocuses and wild flowers. In spring, we'll sit there on the wooden bench in the corner of the field, and drink rosé wine, and smell the sea. By then the writing on the stone from the beach will have faded, and all that will be left is a sea-smoothed stone. By then, the sense of loss will have faded, and all that will be left is memories and photographs.
I've mourned my father while he was still alive, mourned the man he had been once, and was no longer. Free from pain and infirmity and indignity. Free.
Safe journey, Papa.
*(The Hopi Prayer was one: the other is this one.)
My father used to talk about how there were two significant dates in the year -- birth-day, and day of death -- and how the death-day came around every year but we never recognised it. He died on the 200th anniversary of the battle of Trafalgar, while I was thinking of him watching the celebrations on TV: that night, the bells of Plymouth rang for hours.
We bought the grave from a bloke down the market. This isn't as bad as it sounds. Paddy, one of my brother-in-law's friends, does some work for Cornish Market World, but also operates a green burial site that has been named as the best in the south-west. We bought the plot earlier this year, and I'd been planning to visit it when I next went to Plymouth. As it turned out, I saw it for the first time the day after my father's death.
It's an overgrown field on a Cornish hillside, with woods in the valley and the sea just over the next rise.
There aren't many graves, though the site's been operating for several decades. The graves are marked with flowers: there are young trees with silver plaques, but no gravestones. There's a standing stone -- or perhaps just an old gatepost -- halfway down the field, a pillar of granite about my height all lichened and notched: and a cat, black-and-white like my father's last two, trotting up the lane.
My sister and I had talked about the funeral several times, when my father was more ill than usual: we'd talked about music, flowers, sea burials, services. As it turned out, we improvised much of it. Because we were doing everything ourselves, there was room for everyone to do what seemed right and fitting.
We compiled a brief biography of my father -- both of us, in the process, learning new things about him! -- and had it printed up, with a couple of poems* and the Lord's Prayer. My eldest niece created a floral anchor, with white carnations and blue irises. Pauline, my father's friend, suggested sprinkling the ashes of his cats over the grave: "I don't know why I kept them so long," she said, over and over, "but this is the right thing, isn't it?"
The day before the funeral, sister and I went to Bovisand Bay, to a part of the beach that I'd never been to, a small secluded cove with steps leading down to it that she'd discovered with my father. There in the sunshine, splashed by the breakers, we picked out a stone to put on the grave: a rough triangle of mottled green shale, worn smooth by the ceaseless sea. We had the strongest sense of my father's presence, there on the beach: as though, if we turned around, he'd be there with us. It was immensely comforting.
Sister collected shells and driftglass: I picked wild flowers from the clifftop, and later from Plymbridge Woods where we used to walk, he and I, when he first moved to Plymouth. There weren't many flowers around this late in the year, but enough: white fuschia and a few late campion flowers, yarrow, Michaelmas daisies, ivy and oak and fronds of fern.
Sister's kitten thought they smelt lovely. Tasty, too.
The day of the funeral was rainy and misty. Pontsmill is down near Par, a good hour's drive from Plymouth: we left early, before it was properly light. It was a small gathering. My mother's sister was not well enough to travel: my father's sister not well enough to be told that her baby brother, her dear Dickie, had gone. (When I was looking through his papers, I found the announcement of his birth -- not from his mother and father, but from his brother and sisters.)
The coffin was white cardboard, with a laser-printed label: it was carried from the hearse. My father wasn't especially interested in music, but he loved Vangelis' Heaven and Hell, the theme music to Carl Sagan's 'Cosmos' series: it's the only piece of music I can remember him asking me to get for him. Now it will always make me think of muddy fields, and the smell of wet bracken, and veils of rain across the valley.
Ian, my niece's husband, had carried the CD player. Jane, my sister's step-son's ex-wife -- of whom my father was very fond -- read the Hopi Prayer, and then the story of my father's life: then we all said the Lord's Prayer, our sole concession to religion. (My father was not a religious man, and he found the hymns and prayers at my mother's funeral hypocritical and pointless.)
Then Ian started up the next bit of music (Sailor, Petula Clark)and my nephew Richard helped the pall-bearers remove the supports and lower the coffin -- the box, the box with a cold body in it -- into the grave.
It wouldn't fit.
Because my father had died on a Friday evening, Paddy hadn't been able to use his usual firm of funeral directors to collect and prepare the body. The firm he'd used instead had ordered a traditionally-shaped coffin, broad at shoulder-level (though my father's body was wasted and frail) and tapering at the feet: the grave had been dug for a plain rectangular box. Paddy said later that he had a sinking feeling as soon as they unloaded the coffin.
They tried angling it into the grave. Then they pulled away the green plastic matting around the edges of the grave (presumably put there in case any of us felt the need to kneel and pray, or something) so that the coffin wouldn't catch on it. One of the pall-bearers picked up a wooden support and tried to scrape away more clay. They'd only finished digging about five minutes before we arrived: the wet weather had made the sides of the grave collapse.
I could see my brother-in-law trying not to laugh. I didn't even try. I could practically hear my daddy laughing at us all. He'd have found it so funny, Petula coming round for the third time, and all of us standing there trying not to cry -- just like the Hopi Prayer says, 'do not stand at my grave and weep' -- and the pall-bearers getting mud on their smart black suits, trying to force the coffin into the ground.
Eventually Paddy found a spade and got digging, and finally the coffin went down. By then everyone was laughing and taking photos and joking:
"Yes, couldn't go smoothly with him, could it?"
"'E don't want to go, do 'e?"
"Reckon he's having a right old laugh, up there. Reckons we're all too bloody solemn."
Pauline and I scattered the cats' ashes: very gritty and full of cat-skull they were, and it was a messy job. Paddy tried to apologise for the problems, until I assured him that it'd been exactly right for my daddy: nothing ever went entirely smoothly, and he never let it bother him! (Apparently it'd been the best service Paddy'd ever had up there: I wonder if he says that to everyone? I wonder what other green burials are like?)
And then we all went to the Cornish Arms in St Blazey, which had opened especially for us, and propped up a photo-montage of my father at his best (stepping a mast, playing with a cat, in the Navy, on the beach), and toasted him, and remembered.
Sister and I went back to the burial ground later. As we reached the grave, now filled, there was a sudden intense burst of rain. We laid the stone, inscribed in silver marker-pen with his name and his dates, and decorated the bare earth with shells. It could have been any time in the last ten thousand years, out there with the rain loud on the leaves, and mist billowing over the hill, and that stone pillar like a figure seen out of the corner of an eye.
Come spring the grave will be covered with crocuses and wild flowers. In spring, we'll sit there on the wooden bench in the corner of the field, and drink rosé wine, and smell the sea. By then the writing on the stone from the beach will have faded, and all that will be left is a sea-smoothed stone. By then, the sense of loss will have faded, and all that will be left is memories and photographs.
I've mourned my father while he was still alive, mourned the man he had been once, and was no longer. Free from pain and infirmity and indignity. Free.
Safe journey, Papa.
*(The Hopi Prayer was one: the other is this one.)
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no subject
Date: Friday, October 28th, 2005 01:02 pm (UTC)safe journey indeed.
no subject
Date: Friday, October 28th, 2005 01:03 pm (UTC)At my great-aunt's funeral, when I spoke, I told the story of how she'd written a letter to the Housing Department of the local council about a problem I was having with their bureaucracy, and how literally the day they got the letter - indeed, it couldn't have been more than three hours after it hit someone's in-tray - I got a phone call from someone telling me everything had been resolved, and "would you please tell [your great-aunt] that everything was okay now?" I was too nervous to be really conscious of it, but my dad told me that he felt a ripple of people wanting to laugh and repressing it: it was so much her, that ferocity and stubbornness and willingness to stand up for someone who was one of her people - and she could be pretty damn intimidating if you got on her wrong side.
I've been to three funerals that were really, genuinely comforting - and all three were recognisably and definitely what the person who died would have wanted.
no subject
Date: Friday, October 28th, 2005 01:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: Friday, October 28th, 2005 01:15 pm (UTC)Thank you for sharing what must be an extremely personal moment of your life.
no subject
Date: Friday, October 28th, 2005 01:24 pm (UTC)My mum's funeral also involved a cardboard coffin, green burial site and lots of laughs and comedy moments. As a family we tend to manage comedy funerals, which many people find odd (at Gran's funeral we scandalised the crematorium staff by falling about laughing when my uncle pulled out his Christmas present from the deceased - a dancing singing Christmas tree) so I'm glad it's not just us.
no subject
Date: Friday, October 28th, 2005 01:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: Friday, October 28th, 2005 01:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: Friday, October 28th, 2005 01:50 pm (UTC)I have strong and very fond memories of my mum's funeral too. Its one of the ways she is still with me. Although it was a Catholic funeral we incorporated several family/Irish traditions that our local priest and undertaker wasn't familiar with making it more personal and special. Just as we were moving away from the graveside it began to rain heavily and one of my aunts said 'That's Ann telling us to get to the pub!'
Laughter is a great thing at funerals, I believe a proper Wake that truly celebrates the life that has moved on is important. I am glad you and your family were able to do that.
Take care x
no subject
Date: Friday, October 28th, 2005 01:54 pm (UTC)Thanks so much, it meant a lot to me on many levels.
no subject
Date: Friday, October 28th, 2005 01:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: Friday, October 28th, 2005 02:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: Friday, October 28th, 2005 02:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: Friday, October 28th, 2005 03:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: Friday, October 28th, 2005 02:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: Friday, October 28th, 2005 03:03 pm (UTC)Dave would have liked a green burial, but the place nearest us (that folk could have got to) was really manky. So, Humanist doofer at Lawnswood Crem (Dave was a pagan, but not rally Wiccan, and his Ma had enough of a fit about there being no prayers in the ?ceremony) and much laughter among the tears. All our friends and work colleagues packed into two chapels, with "live feed" from one to t'other, made for giggles of recognition at anecdotes etc.
A couple of weeks later I collected his ashes and went with Dave's family and my mate Jan to scatter his ashes at Janet's Foss near Malham (the background picture on my LJ). We hid his trolls in rocks (!) and said our "au revoirs"- just as we were leaving, there was terrific thunder, but no apparent rain. "That'll be Dave." we said, "He never could resist a bit of drama!"
I, too, did some of my mourning for Dave while he was still alive, because I knew that his time left was to be so cruelly short. Mind you, given the circumstances, I wouldn't have had him stay another ten seconds, because now he's no longer in pain.
After Tony Benn's wife died, he said there was a great hole in his life, but that he had filled the hole with flowers and memories. What a very beautiful way of looking at bereavement.
no subject
Date: Friday, October 28th, 2005 04:27 pm (UTC)Thank you for sharing a bit of your father with all of us. Thank you for celebrating a life well lived by those who loved him.
no subject
Date: Friday, October 28th, 2005 05:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: Friday, October 28th, 2005 06:50 pm (UTC)And on a pull-myself-together note, my friend Dick is a retired minister in New Orleans. He's lead several funerals but says that the one that sticks in his mind occurred several years ago in one of the above-ground cemeteries for a very traditional family that had buried all relatives in the same stone vault. Unfortunately, people have gotten a little bigger since the vaults were built 200 years ago, and the man being buried was definitely extra value size. When the coffin went "thunk" as they failed to push it into the vault door, Dick found himself having to ad lib the preaching and praying while checking progress out of the corner of his eye. I believe that in the end he said it was the coffin that gave way, not the vault.
no subject
Date: Saturday, October 29th, 2005 02:20 am (UTC)no subject
Date: Saturday, October 29th, 2005 07:24 am (UTC)no subject
Date: Saturday, October 29th, 2005 07:59 am (UTC)Thanks for sharing that; it sounds like the way I'd like to go... :)