tamaranth | laughing at a funeral

My 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.)