A funeral

Yesterday I attended the funeral of the mother of a friend I have known since school. A funeral, the finally passing of person from earth, is a sad occasion. Yet if the deceased has had full life – this lady was 92 – then there is less tragedy and the life should be celebrated. In this spirit I travelled to Tooting crematorium. There was much pomp as the pall bearers bore the coffin, with a thickset powerful man whom we thought might have an evening job as a bouncer leading the way, arms swinging. There was humanist officiating called a celebrant who from a file read details of the deceased’s life. He  would not have met her. More moving then were words from her two grandchildren. There were a couple of reflective silences. We then had to leave for the next slot.

At the wake afterwards the tributes were more personal  from her workmates and friends. As so often happens at funerals you learn something you never know. In this instance, as an animator she had worked on Yellow Submarine.

Perhaps most moving of all was the second wife of her husband, who said the two ultimately got on so well they went on a cruise together, and this lady praised the deceased for actually keeping not one but two families together after the husband died young. I spoke of the first time I met the lady in 1968 which seemed to be of interest to the younger generation, hungry for stories of someone they knew and loved, asthese were  before they were born. All in all it was a moving occasion but exactly one she would have appreciated enjoyed. It made me think of the account of a funeral in Michael Frayn’s comic novel on Fleet Street , Till the End of the Morning, where newspapermen had to bury an elderly journalist “old”  Eddy Moulter. One said that Eddy would have enjoyed the funeral. “Don’t  say that …” said another “… he was not morbid.”