A close friend of mine died a while ago. She was still quite young. We had known each other since our early twenties; she was godmother to my daughter. A Catholic by upbringing, although never devout, she gave that as her faith on her hospital admission form.
So I was a little surprised when her widower said firmly that there was to be “no God” either at her cremation or at the celebration of her life that followed a month later. Absolutely no reference to anything religious. I did not argue, for I had no right to do so. When the dead leave no instructions about funeral arrangements, those are left to their next of kin.
An independent celebrant led the memorial, who had never met my friend. The room was packed, for my friend had been much loved. Women were enjoined to wear novelty patterned tights in her honour, and the readings and the eulogies were relentlessly upbeat. Except for one, delivered by her brother, who said she had been terrified of dying.
As the proceedings drew to a close, the celebrant said that she always liked to end on a cheerful note. Yes, we’ve been remembering someone who’s “passed”, but we must all leave this ceremony smiling. So she would read a poem. This was it:
When I am sad and weary;
When I think all hope has gone;
When I walk along High Holborn;
I think of you with nothing on.
There’s nothing wrong with Adrian Mitchell’s little verse in its proper context, but as the concluding words to a funerary rite, I felt that it was staggeringly out of place. “Naked came I out of my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return thither,” says Job. Perhaps to that celebrant’s subconscious mind it brought images of cadavers, bare bodies in their graves? Somehow, I doubt it.
This is not an argument for all ceremonial rites to be religious, let alone Catholic. Nor is it intended in any way as an attack on humanism. It’s simply an argument for solemnity. Death is serious.
It can have its comic aspects; there is room at funerals for laughter. But trying to make the whole thing cute or jokey just won’t work.
There is no culture in the world that I know of that does not treat death, or a dead body, with respect. Even animals grieve, it seems. When a baby chimpanzee dies, its mother will carry its body around with her, grooming it until it decomposes. Elephants visit the remains of their dead relations, stroking the bones gently with their trunks, rocking back and forth.
Why do animals mark death? One answer may be that these creatures are in their own way coming to terms with the reality of death, with its irreversibility, its finality and its universality: all living things will die. Death is hard to understand and even harder to accept; and yet accept it we must.
It’s a truism that death is now hidden about as far away as it can be in the West. It happens behind drawn curtains and closed doors; many of us have never seen a corpse. We do our best not to think about it. In consequence, we are more afraid of death than we were before.
In other times, and in other societies to this day, death was and is rather more matter-of-fact. The Torajan people of Indonesia famously keep the mummified remains of their dead relatives in their homes for years, propping them up around their dining tables, before they are eventually buried. Even then, they are regularly exhumed to be cared for, talked to, given new clothes to wear.
These practices are a long way from ours, but closer to home, in Ireland, it is still quite customary to hold a wake in the days between a person’s death and their funeral. Friends and family come and go, sharing food and drink and memories, singing the praises of the deceased, who may be lying there in an open casket, comforting those who mourn.
It’s impossible to superimpose one set of traditions over another entirely: we are where we are. But in 2024, where is that exactly? “No frills funerals”, or direct cremations, which no one attends, are growing in popularity; religious funerals are in decline. According to a recent survey, just under half of the people asked wanted any funeral at all. If there is some sort of memorial event, it will often be a celebration of life rather than a time for remembrance and a space for the complicated processes of sorrow.
What if there’s nothing at all? Nothing but a “wood-effect coffin” sliding into the furnace unattended? Ashes scattered by a stranger in a crematorium’s garden of remembrance, among the hard-pruned roses, however kind and careful that stranger might be? Should death ever be that lonely? With no rituals to solemnise it, how does grief begin to heal?
Old traditions; new traditions. There can’t be a single prescription, and yet there are valid reasons why people turn to ritual when they are bereaved. Tolling bells and unbleached candles, flowers on the coffin, hymns and prayers; set words and set actions shared, practised and repeated over centuries. In the aftermath of death there is enough to do without trying to invent new ways of coping.
Speaking for myself, which is all one can do about such deeply personal matters, I found great consolation in the old Church rites when my husband died, and in words that have been recited for millennia.
The Lord is thy keeper: the Lord is thy
shade upon thy right hand.
The sun shall not smite thee by day, nor
the moon by night.
The Lord shall preserve thee from all evil:
he shall preserve thy soul.
The Lord shall preserve thy going out
and thy coming in from this time forth,
and even for evermore.
I found it, too, in the prayer of commendation: “Go forth upon thy journey, Christian soul; go from this world. Go in the name of God…” and in the antiphon In paradisum: “May the choir of angels receive you; and with Lazarus who once was poor, may you have eternal rest.” When a wonderful young soprano, Raphaela Papadakis, sang Fauré’s Pie Jesu, her voice very clear in the stillness of the church, almost for the first time since the shock of his sudden death, I let my tears fall.
The fear of death – one’s own and, worse, the death of people one loves – is inescapably part of being human. Can it be made less grim? I think so. Keep company with the dying, let them know they are not alone, let them talk about it. Let’s all talk seriously about it. A deep need for seriousness, for spirituality, is part of being human too.
This article first appeared in the February 2024 issue of the Catholic Herald. To subscribe to our multiple-award-winning magazine and have it delivered to your door anywhere in the world, go here.
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