It is long after midnight, but I am home. Everything has been put away, and I have taken the last few minutes in the day just to write to you.
It has been very full.
Of course it was The Day. We cremated my father this afternoon. Well, we didn’t personally cremate him, although I might have liked that better, there is something passionate and final about the funeral pyre lit by the eldest son and the wife preferably being restrained from throwing herself upon it. Instead, because we are British, it was all very low-key and quietly civilised.
The undertakers brought my father’s body home yesterday, for a last night in the house that he built. He was in the living room surrounded by flowers. Of course we all went to see him, but it was oddly unemotional, because he didn’t look like himself at all. Death changes us, the person is gone, and really he looked like a badly executed model of himself. Somehow his suit seemed to have become too big for him. His hands were small and frail, and he didn’t look as though he was sleeping, like in a Victorian novel. He wasn’t there.
There is something reassuring about that. I don’t know what happens to the part of ourselves that is a person, but it had gone. We were saying goodbye to a shell, an outer casing. Without my father inside it, laughing or scowling or contemplating things, it was no more a part of him than his shoes and socks. My father had gone.
The undertaker covered his face for ever. We put the lid over him, and my brother screwed it down. Then we rode in a big funeral car behind him through the town to the crematorium.
There were a lot of people there, waiting.
I was going to run the service, and so I dived into the chapel first to be shown how things work, and of course that was absolutely fascinating. There are buttons that you press to tell the little chap in the back to fade the music out, and I got a far-too-short trip behind the scenes into the tiled and scrubbed area at the back, where they take the bodies when everybody has buzzed off, and a kindly chap with a lot of tattoos explained how it would all work, and reminded me that I had got to stop talking a few minutes before the end to give everybody time to file out.
Crematoria fine you if you over-run your allotted slot, so I had got to be jolly careful not to go on too much.
It had been a massive effort. Oliver had put together a slide show of photographs, and they played away in the background whilst I rabbited on at the front, and introduced everybody who had got something to say. Numbers One and Two Daughters both spoke, and jolly well they did too. Oliver read the speech that my uncle had written, and they all carried his coffin.
I would like to say it was emotional, but actually it wasn’t. It was a sheer flat panic of trying to squeeze everything in before the clock ran out. The clock was on the wall at the back, so I could keep checking it, and it practically whizzed round, I can tell you. There were no moments of silent reflection, and an awful lot of Right, you’ve finished now, get down quickly, whilst I tried to keep it all running the way it was supposed to run in my notes.
Obviously it didn’t, and I had to cut lots of things out that I would have liked to say, but we finished bang on time, and everybody filtered out slowly.
I stopped and watched the slide show on the way out. Lots of happy photographs of a vanished life.
After that there was a buffet at a restaurant that he had liked, and an awful lot of talking. I smiled and listened and nodded until my face ached. I am absolutely no good at that sort of social performance, and I think I asked everybody all the same questions, and tried to remember the answers in case I met them again later, but fortunately the children and Number One Son-In-Law all did it brilliantly well, and I was achingly proud of all of them, circling through the room, laughing and being interested in people, and asking relevant questions and not just the ones they had thought of in the car on the way there. I always copy the dear old Queen and say: Have you come far? which is an entirely harmless question and sets people talking about their dreadful journeys. I usually remember not to copy Prince Philip, who once, on hearing somebody had come from Stoke, said: My God, dreadful place.
Of course there were a few people that I knew. My cousin was there, which was ace, because I have’t seen him for ages, and my aunt, and some friends of my brother’s who I vaguely remembered, but most people were strangers, several of whom said cheerily that they remembered me being in nappies.
In the end it was over, and everybody assured us that they had had a good time, before finally drifting away, and we made our way back.
I dived into the camper van to take off the smart clothes, and had a last cup of tea with everybody before heading home.
Of course it is the weeks ahead that will be hardest for my mum now, once everybody has gone. The rush and flurry of a funeral lets you not notice the emptiness quite so much.
Life carries on.
