Funerals

FUNERALS

Many funerals are unsettling experiences, not necessarily in proportion to the sorrow felt. The traditional church service has in part an anonymous character, designed to emphasize the departed’s membership of the very numerous community of souls. Even in more secular times, it immerses those present in ancient and shared rituals, which tell that death is a state universally shared.

This timeless aspect should, of course, be offset and complemented by personal memories, tributes and prayers. Sometimes it is a bit of stretch. A sanitised biography may be delivered by someone (usually the celebrant) who may not have personally known the deceased. There may emerge a distinct impression that, for all the effort to “say only good of the dead” and for all the window dressing, there is little warmth felt towards him or her. For such a funeral the traditional elements sustain the whole thing.

Occasionally one attends a funeral entirely out of ordinary. In recent times, for me, there have been two.

My mother died in Dec 2012, aged 90. She had been under no illusions about the probably imminent coming of the end. Although she still lived on her own and possessed  undiminished formidable intelligence and memory, her body was failing and she suffered a constant succession of debilitating conditions.

She was fiercely irreligious from her 50s onwards (born a catholic…). Her wishes were for no funeral at all- she wanted her remains to be disposed of without ceremony.

But funerals are for the living. We, her family, wanted to compromise between her wishes and our need for ceremony. So we devised our own funeral “service”. This centred round a woodland burial, just across the fields from her bungalow outside Cambridge. The immediate family- 3 children, 4 grandchildren, a partner, and an ex-daughter in law who had remained close to her attended. The instructions to the undertakers were that  they should bring the coffin in an estate car, not a hearse.

The coffin was placed by the side of the grave and the undertakers withdrew out of earshot. Standing in a circle, we read tributes, personal and honest: no need to explain anything to a wider audience. Then the undertakers came forward and completed the burial. And that was that.

(A few weeks’ later we had a small memorial “service” for a wider circle of relatives and friends- led by a humanist celebrant. That was a good occasion, again devised by the family in collaboration with the humanist. Having a third party celebrant helps give structure to a larger occasion and takes a lot of responsibility off the shoulders of the family.)

The second funeral, in September 2014, was another extraordinary occasion, but as public as my mother’s was private.

A church in Blackheath was packed, literally to the rafters, or gallery, by several hundred mourners to celebrate the life, and mourn the untimely death, of lawyer Stephen Lloyd.

This was an occasion where was no need for any recital of Stephen’s life’s achievements. They had been writ large in national obituaries and internet memorials. And no one was there from mere duty. Stephen’s work and personality had enriched the lives of all who were gathered, family, friends, colleagues, clients and others.

The funeral service was almost entirely given to personal tributes. Stephen was a Quaker; and Quakerism is particularly fitted to promoting and framing this way of celebrating a life. The silence of reflection is the fundamental medium. Arising from reflection, spontaneous testimonies are offered by anyone, each contribution followed by renewed silence. Someone presides, really only as timekeeper and , on this occasion, introducer of the proceedings.

There were important exceptions to the lack of formal script. Stephen’s immediate family spoke in turn at the start of the funeral. Their words were sometimes painful, always moving and often amusing. His widow, Lorna, ended her valediction by quoting the epitaph written for himself by the American poet Raymond Carver (Late Fragment):

“And did you get what

you wanted from this life, even so?

I did.

And what did you want?

To call myself beloved, to feel myself

Beloved on the earth.”

The beautiful and moving ambiguity of this poem, when recited by the surviving spouse or partner, is that the “myself beloved”  is simultaneously the dead person and the living speaker.

On entering the church, each mourner  was given a sprig of a flower. We were asked to go up to the wicker casket and each weave our sprig into it.

Afterwards, Stephen’s four sons carried the casket out to an extemporised “bicycle hearse”. This was a low flat trailer pulled by two tandem bikes affixed either side of a rigid yoke. Thus the casket was pedalled away, followed by Lorna, also riding a bike.

One of the hearse bikes later suffered a puncture on the way.