JOURNALISM
THERE'S NOWT LIKE A GOOD FUNERAL SPEECH
My great aunts, Florrie and
Emily, were funeral connoisseurs. Attending my first funeral as
a teenager in Manchester, I was appalled when the undertaker discreetly
invited us to view the deceased. Not so the aunts, who scooted off
in their best blacks and a miasma of mothballs, emerging to assure
us, with tearful satisfaction, that ‘they do ‘em beautiful
at the Co-op.’
The service proved less satisfactory. In a chapel as sterile as
a dentist’s waiting room, with wonky canned music and a vicar
who didn’t know us from a bar of soap, it lasted all of twenty
minutes and conveyed less about my late grandparent than a driving
licence application.
I don’t blame the gents of the Co-op. Harold Wilson’s
modern Britain was no place for Victorian mawkishness. That attitudes
are shifting, however – that death could almost be said to
be coming back into fashion – is illustrated by a booklet
issued this week by none other than Co-operative Funeral Service,
offering advice on the writing of eulogies.
I wish it had been around when my Dad died. That’s the trouble
with funerals. The first you organise will inevitably be that of
someone near and probably very dear. Shocked, raw-nerved and bereft,
you’re suddenly stage-managing a clan gathering as big as
a wedding, in ten days flat.
It has become a cliché to compare Victorian coyness about
sex to twentieth century squeamishness about death, but one result
is that, while my generation was taught the facts of life as toddlers,
we’ve been left to learn the facts of death the hard way,
by experience.
I find it odd to think about the number of funeral services I’ve
helped organize over the years. I reckon it’s because a novelist
married to an actor must strike our acquaintance as a rarely useful
combination for the finding and delivery of readings. Don’t
laugh – or shudder – but I actually keep a fat file
of appropriate material these days. Florrie and Emily would be proud
of me.
But, hell, the standard response to a bereavement is an offer of
help – and I’m a lousy flower arranger. Moreover, I
once made a radio documentary about beirdd gwlad, the village poets
of Wales. Just as the local joiner makes the coffin, these wordsmiths
are called upon to craft a pithy epitaph. I can still hear a distinguished
bard declaring, in a voice as sonorous as a tolling bell, that it
is ‘important to say the last words about the dead, and to
say them well.’
Absolutely. And the eulogy – those carefully-chosen words
of evocation, celebration and parting – is the place to do
it. As Andrew Motion, bard to the English nation, says in his foreword
to the Co-op handbook, it is as if the speaker were handing a photograph
to everyone present, and allowing them to keep it when the ceremony
ends.
Mind, you can see why the not-yet-dead might get twitchy at the
prospect. A terminally ill Dennis Potter apparently told television
producer Kenith Trodd, with whom he had a spiky friendship, that
what chiefly worried him about dying was Trodd being invited to
deliver an address.
I don’t know whether similar qualms or just black humour
prompted a (rudely healthy) friend of ours to pre-record his own.
With a ghoulish echo, apparently produced via cupped hands, he intoned:
‘You probably all think I’m lying in that box over there,
but…’ At his funeral many years later, we waited, agog,
to see if the fabled tape would be played. It wasn’t, but
his eulogist told the story to piquant comic effect.
That, I guess, is where we contemporary funeral-istas part company
with the Victorians. They didn’t go in for jokes. They mourned
the death and anticipated the afterlife. Today, when even we churchgoers
are unlikely to cherish a simple harps-and-flowers vision of Heaven,
we tend to celebrate the earthly life while trying to make sense
of death. And, except in the most tragic circumstances, laughter
feels as right and proper in a modern ceremony as flowers and music.
It’s a tough call for the eulogist, however. We expect them
to be comedian, friend, biographer and comforter rolled into one
– but we need their words to express and release our communal
feelings. These rituals may be about the dead, but they are for
the living. The psycho-babblers talk about closure, Greek dramatists
about catharsis. Me, I stick with Florrie and Emily’s view
that there’s nowt like a good funeral for setting t’world
to rights.
And while I can’t answer for the Co-op’s contemporary
skills with the remains, I assure you they do a beautiful leaflet.
©Kate Fenton 2002
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