In the latest contribution to Salut! Forum, my series of guest columns, Bill Taylor, familiar to most visitors to this site and its comments field for, well, being Bill Taylor, takes us back to his native North East of England to explore the complexity of emotions inspired by the death of his father
No, thanks, I didn't want to see my father's body. The man I knew was no longer in there. Better to look at the old pictures, like the one taken in 1938 when he and my mother, full of wide-eyed expectation for the future, got engaged. Though even then, she says, he had his cynical sense of humour and left-field view of the human condition.
I grew up with him constantly reminding me to "believe nothing that you hear and only half of what you see". Not a bad grounding for a journalist, though my choice of profession made him look at me, too, with a jaundiced eye.
"Good morning," I said to him on my first day in newspapers.
"No comment," he replied.
He died at home in North East England. I wore a pink tie to his funeral, which caused minor outrage among some of the mourners but was what he'd always said he wanted. My sister's husband, who couldn't quite bring himself not to, wore a black one.
"Well," he said. "It's the done thing, isn't it?"
Apart from the sadness of it all - though my dad, 88 and in rotten health, had been ready to go and went quickly when his time was up - it was interesting to see "the done thing", to observe the funeral rites of a place I left in 1973 and which is now quite foreign to me.
The role, for instance, played by euphemism, starting with the fact that no one ever actually dies (this, of course, is by no means confined to Britain). They pass away, they pass over, they pass on, they simply pass. Anything but the "d" word.
People looked at me oddly when I referred to the "funeral director". Over there, it's the "undertaker" - another fine euphemism. Someone who undertakes the unspeakable. Or perhaps I'm being unjust. Someone who undertakes to assist the dear departed to a higher plane.
The corpse is rarely kept in the front room at home any more, with a privileged few invited in for a quick lift of the lid and a farewell peek, but awaits the final journey in the undertaker's "chapel of rest" - euphemism number three, a reassuring picture of dignity and peace.
In the real world, Dad was doubtless filed away in a climate-controlled drawer. Embalming is the exception rather than the rule. My sister is a retired nurse with few illusions, and the undertaker felt able to give it to her straight: "If you want to see your father, let me know ahead of time and I'll put some clothes on him."
My parents had planned and prepaid their funerals. I remember my mother talking about the day the undertaker came to discuss the details. He and my father sat on the couch and debated suitable
hymns.
"They harmonised," my mother said, scandalised but delighted into laughter by it. "They sang bits of this and bits of that. The neighbours must have thought we'd got religion."
That was the biggest laugh of all. God in our family is only to be honoured when someone's looking. That and don't eat meat on Good Friday.
Which is why the minister who conducted the brief service in the crematorium chapel was a stranger. He visited us ahead of time with a notebook to jot down essentials for the eulogy.
"I'll do the eulogy," I said.
The minister was pleased, my mother and sister taken aback.
"What'll you say?" they asked.
"Leave it to me," I said.
"Can we see it when you've written it?" my sister said.
"No. You'll have to trust me."
"It's not really the done thing here," my mother said.
"Then it should be," said the minister. "Let him do it."
The day of the funeral, we waited at my sister's house until the hearse pulled up outside, with my father's plain wooden coffin - at least no one calls it a casket the way they do in North America - behind plate glass in the back.
There was a Mercedes stretch limo for the "principal mourners" and the undertaker in a frock coat, striped trousers and a top hat. He walked ahead of the hearse all the way up the street and then climbed into the passenger seat and we set off for the crematorium at a faster pace.
I didn't remember ever seeing this solemn little stroll happen when I lived in England.
"Very much the done thing now," my sister said. "Some people, if it's a burial and the cemetery's nearby, pay extra for a hearse pulled by two horses."
It used to be a depressed little town, with not enough commerce to replace the defunct coal-mining industry. It strikes me now there's way too much money around. Even with gasoline at around the price it is, horse-drawn hearses are nothing but ostentation.
A cousin I hadn't seen in decades showed up from London. He was amazed we had been able to arrange the funeral within a few days of my father's death. "The average wait where we live for a time-slot at the crematorium is three weeks."
That's just savage. A door closing way too slowly.
My parents lived in a seniors' apartment complex with 24-hour monitoring and care. Every time a resident dies, the manager hires a minibus for anyone who wants to go to the funeral and has a splendid buffet meal waiting when the mourners return. The importance of putting on a good spread cannot be over-emphasised.
This goes back a long way. There was a stand-up comic from the late 19th/early 20th century, I believe, who convulsed audiences with his impersonation of a widow saying, with the lugubrious satisfaction of one who has done her duty to the end, "I buried 'im with 'am."
We buried (so to speak) my father with, among other things, a large corned-beef-and-onion pie, a culinary blast from my past. Like so many things, not quite as good as I'd remembered.
Still, the "done thing" had been duly done. We all could rest easy.
* This is a piece that clearly fits my "more beside" promise on the home page. It has nothing to do with France save that it was in Paris that I last saw Bill and his wife, Lesley, an Englishman and his American wife who are both now naturalised Canadians and live in Toronto - though not the more famous one near Bill's home town of Bishop Auckland.
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