The small chapel at Warriston crematorium in Edinburgh is furnished neutrally with rows of conference-style seats, large amounts of pale polished wood, an electric organ in the corner at the back and a plain wooden cross that hangs from a hook on the wall, presumably so that it can be taken down if necessary. The coffin sits at the front on a catafalque.
One day last month it was my mother’s bamboo coffin at the front. She had had dementia for several years, and then she suddenly fell ill with something else and died. There is a lot to say, but it’s the “DIY” nature of her funeral I want to focus on, because it occurred to me that it reflects how life is today for many Catholics. We do not invariably live in a monolithic religious culture where everyone’s attitudes are pretty much the same – and that is more of a challenge, but it can also be a good thing because it forces us to think about what we really believe.
My mother’s immediate family consists of just my father, my sister and me. We knew that we were going to have a small gathering of about a dozen – with a party for all her friends at a later date – and felt that she would not have wanted a priest.
My mother was nominally a member of the Church of England, but she had inherited from her father a deep suspicion of priests and ministers. This didn’t inconvenience my father, her husband, because he didn’t go to church either. Having been brought up Scottish Presbyterian, he didn’t “get on” with Anglican services where we lived in England. When I became a Catholic in my early twenties my mother’s attitude was of sceptical amusement, really. She was an agnostic rather than an atheist.
None of us thought a funeral led by a minister who had never met my mother would work, so we decided to say the words ourselves. My father addressed the grandchildren, five of them, aged 11 and below. In a talk of just the right length, he explained what Granny was like before dementia set in – where they travelled to together, for example, and how when she was growing up in Wolverhampton during the post-war years of rationing her parents kept three pigs in the garden. One day the pigs went away and after that they had hams hanging in the kitchen.
My sister gave some very funny and well-observed recollections of my mother’s ways, how she loved parties and gossiping over fags and a glass of wine.
We found that standing up and bringing Mum into our memories was not something we could breeze through easily.
It helped to have a text, and my chief contribution was to read excerpts from some of the scores of letters we received. Many recalled our mother’s zest for life and impish sense of humour.
One message came from a friend of mine who is a Catholic priest and it was addressed to all three of our surviving family. It said simply and beautifully: “I have just received the sad news of your dearest wife and mother, who has now passed to another realm of existence. Here all will be clear, all of life’s mysteries and pains will be understood and transformed.”
In between the spoken sections we had music that Mum had liked: Elvis (Can’t Help Falling in Love), the Everly Brothers (All I Have to Do is Dream), Abba (Thank You for the Music), Fauré’s Agnus Dei, and Parigi, o cara from La Traviata, which was the first opera my parents went to together. We sang Lord of All Hopefulness and the children joined in, having been drilled in the hymn in advance.
For the committal I adapted prayers from the Book of Common Prayer, so we had the famous words “earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust”, and, from Psalm 103, “As for man, his days are as grass: as a flower of the field, so he flourishes / For the wind passes over it, and it is gone … But the mercy of the Lord is everlasting …”
We made a clear statement of faith and trust and hope, that Mum was with God now and her suffering was over, even if her beliefs, like those of (I should think) many people at the funeral, were not firm or clearly thought out. It was true to Mum, it had integrity, it seemed to keep everyone happy, which is not always the case where family events are concerned – and there was a space for God.
Afterwards, one of our cousins, a clever, streetwise social worker who wears patent leather Dr Martens boots and provides sex education classes for teenagers, came up to me to say how glad she was that we had included the “religious bits”.
Andrew M Brown is The Daily Telegraph’s obituaries editor
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