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THE FUNERAL began with the words, “Hello, everyone, and thank you for coming.” Common Worship probably allows for such a greeting, and doubtless every section of the anodyne service that followed came from the same source, although the compilers of that liturgy can hardly be blamed for one of the hymns, “Living Lord”, played as a slow march.
It was all especially inappropriate as one of the deceased’s great pleasures was choral evensong, and he would regularly travel 20 miles to sing Prayer Book matins. It emerged that the distant relatives who had been responsible for his funeral had “left it to the local vicar”, but a niece had remembered singing “Living Lord” when at school.
Even sadder were the days before civil partnerships, when families at a funeral would “reclaim” a member who had been in a long-term relationship with cruel phrases such as “He loved his family best.”
I am glad I had the wit during my mother’s terminal illness to ask her to dictate to me anything she would like the family to remember. She gained a huge sense of peace by giving precise instructions for her own funeral, ranging from the service itself to ensuring there would be plenty of Gordon’s for Uncle Derek, and no sausage rolls, because I would have trouble vacuuming up the trodden-in flakes.
So it was that when the rector called a couple of days after her death, and asked if we had thought about the service, my father and I were able to say: “It’ll be a Requiem beginning with the Asperges, no purple vestments, black for the liturgy of the word, white for the sacrament. . .”
By the time we got to the Gospel, he had got the drift. “In my Father’s house are many mansions, not rooms, I guess?” He then permitted himself a wry laugh. “This is the first time I haven’t been greeted with a family saying, ‘Whatever you say, Rector.’”
One mark of the extent to which the population at large has become disconnected from the Church, even at the time of death, are the wayside flowers at the scenes of road accidents — those on blind corners or crossroads telling their own tragic stories of lives cut short. What these wayside shrines show is a Church no longer satisfying a demand and helping mourners mark a death. We resort to ordering teddy-bear or motorbike wreaths made out of yellow chrysanthemums, and suffering uncomfortable half-hours in strange churches or crematoria.
Fewer than 100 years ago in Cambridgeshire, for example, the premature death of a young woman was marked by a procession through the village to church, her white-painted coffin carried by her schoolfriends dressed also in white. Lads were buried in black-painted coffins, carried by their friends dressed in their darkest clothes and wearing black sashes. Even the young knew what to do, and did it — with dignity.
For their own peace of mind, and for the comfort of their survivors, those with church connections would do well to plan their own funerals: it is less macabre than leaving it to chance. I have bought my plot, incorporated instructions in my will, and my mourners will not be shirking dust, ashes, and worms destroying the body. The parson will also need a voice that will shake the building (without a radio microphone) when pronouncing, “I know that my Redeemer liveth.”
David Self is a former BBC radio producer who writes regularly for The Times Educational Supplement.
‘Planning is less macabre
than leaving it to chance’
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