Dealing with death

Skull and crossbones flag flying in the boatyard of Hastings Sailing and Motorboat Club, Rock-a-Nore

I'm about to go to my fourth funeral in a little over three months.  The previous three have been intensely emotional occasions, since the deceased has in each case been in their fifties, only.  Two - Paul's brother and sister-in-law - had died of cancer, the third - Jo Grigg, the leader of the Stanza poetry group I've attended in Brighton for a little over a year - of an inoperable brain tumour discovered only a month before her death.

Tomorrow's funeral promises to be less traumatic, since the lady concerned was over 90, had been unwell for some time and had already expressed the wish for the "Grim Reaper" to come along and take her away.  The Irish funerals of Paul's brother and sister-in-law were a different matter, and I've written of the first of them in a separate post.  There could scarcely have been a greater contrast between the Northern Irish Catholic way of dealing with a funeral and that of Jo last week.  

We had been told to wear bright clothes in celebration of her life.  Both Jo and her husband had been regular attenders at the Bishop Hannington Memorial Church on the edge of Hove.  The service began with a short film projected onto walls on either side of the chancel, showing Jo reading one of her own poems.  It was a close-up, and looked as if it had been done by Jo herself at the computer.  The eulogy, prepared by Jo's husband Peter but read out by the vicar, was a moving tribute but succeeded in being upbeat even in the midst of grief.  

The religious side was present in the optimism of believers in the Resurrection and the next life.  But at the same time there was an absence of the theological paraphernalia I'm used to from my RC background.  The result was moving but at the same time affirmative.

Each of these three deaths has been shocking in its way: in each case a life has been cut off before it has run its course.  When I was speaking about this to my sister-in-law she quoted a friend of hers, who had said that this was the wrong way to look at things: a person dies when it's their time to die.  This may be at any age.

I've been thinking about this but find it unhelpful.  The sadness I've experienced at each of these funerals has of course been partly induced by the heightened sense of my own mortality.  But, even more than this, the sadness has been caused by a death before the normal course is run.  Jo's funeral was all the more striking because, although the family were clearly grieving their loss and in shock at its suddenness, they faced the fact of her death with a firm faith that gave them courage and optimism.  You can mutter about happy-clappy churches and poems being read instead of, or in addition to, Scriptural readings; about the favourite songs of the deceased being played over loudspeakers instead of organ music, and about the appropriateness of photos being projected onto church walls - but in the end it's this courage and optimism that impresses, whatever form the service takes.

Antony Mair