Monday 27 June 2011

Never Go To A Funeral On Your Own

If you should find out that you are coming to my funeral, and you will be going there on your own and won't know anyone there, then my friend you are excused. Turn round. Go home. With my blessing. I have been to a funeral solo and it is not how it should be done. It was six weeks ago, in mid-May, and while I got over the immediate impact, I realised this week I haven't really processed it.

Funerals are supposed to remind us of our mortality as well as of the life of the deceased. We are supposed to reflect on our life with and without them, and become aware of the little losses we will feel over the next year every time we do something and they aren't there as they used to be.

Everyone else had come with wives and even with children. I had never met any of these people, and I'm not sure many of them had met each other. Those people could share their grief, squeeze each other's hands or put arms round shoulders. I couldn't, so it was probably a good thing I wasn't feeling tearful. Actually I don't know what I was feeling at the time. I may have looked like I was on Mars.

The other people from the same part of his life that I was in did not show up. Unless I didn't recognise them nor they me, but I doubt it. I don't think I expected them to be there, but given that they were the only other people I knew, they were the ones who left me in the lurch. If that makes sense. There was nowhere to go with whatever feelings I had.

There was a long moment when I really thought that smoking a cigarette would be a good idea. I quit smoking in 1995 and after the first year have never had a craving or an urge for a cigarette. Until then. The original plan was that I would go back to work and go to the gym, as usual on a Thursday. On the way back to the station, I knew I had to go home. I stopped in Richmond to get some cake and chocolate (uh-huh, yep) and spent the afternoon and much of the evening watching DVDs. I even watched Rent - it's a great movie for when you're feeling a little emotional and then along came this...



...and because I'm a human being living a real life, of course I burst into tears. "Will someone care / will I wake tomorrow from this nightmare?" At the time I thought I was letting out feelings over my friend's death. The next morning, I got on with life, maybe a little subdued, but not emotionally hungover or upset.

I wasn't letting out feelings about my friend's death or my own mortality. You forget that I regard a quick and timely death as a reward for passing the endurance test that is life. I didn't feel sad for him. He died quickly and with all his faculties, despite the cancer drugs. His wife and son are left to get on with their lives, and they are both sensible, practical people who will do so with application, pausing every now and then to feel a twinge of sadness. They have a lot of support from their friends, and me, if they ever need it.

Yes, I was looking at all those people and once again there's a whole crowd I don't know that perhaps I might have thought I should. The funeral was making me feel isolated and lonely again.

Funerals are a religious service and I don't do religion. The more time passes, the more I see the Middle-Eastern influences of Christianity and the more those influences seem wrong for the times I live in. In my world what's gone is gone, and what remains are the lessons, the debt and the mess to clear up. (No. Good stuff never lasts beyond the moment.) No matter what happens, we will pay our taxes, our due bills and re-fill our refrigerators and petrol tank; we will go to work, where we will be surrounded by people who need us to behave as usual so they can do their job. The Middle-Eastern tradition was developed in a world where people could take weeks out to mourn or fast or attend ceremonies, and where those ceremonies served to gather together people who needed to be gathered together anyway. The Middle-Eastern tradition invites us to feel emotions and behave in a manner that is unsuitable for the Western world, and therefore to feel guilty if we don't feel the way it says we should. And I don't.

Nobody needed me there and there was nothing I could do. Why would I go somewhere I'm just going to feel useless? You may say: to show my respects. That makes sense in a Middle-Eastern setting where there's a functioning community and extended families, and my presence and actions will be noted and judged, but I live in the suburban world where my presence and actions are invisible. You may say: to show my support for the family. I had already done that.

I went because I thought it was the "right" thing to do. Well, guess what? It wasn't. I sat through a ceremony I think is a sham, humming along to lyrics I don't believe. Nobody needed me to be putting on a show. I was reminded that that when I die, I will not be found until the smell of my decomposing is noticeable by the neighbours. (Actually, I'm okay with that. I'll be dead when it's happening.) And mostly I was reminded that I have one nearby close relative and my few friends are otherwise scattered across the globe. Yeah. I needed that. The point of going to a funeral is to share our grief. I had no-one to share mine with. I should not have been there.

Which is why you are excused if you are travelling to my funeral on your own. Turn round, go back to work, go back to the world. With my blessing.

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