Henry's funeral

Henry’s funeral was beautiful.

I feel some ideas.

At the arrival I felt empty handed. I felt I wanted to have brought, found or made an object to symbolize something of what Henry has meant to me in my life.

I felt like I wanted to put that object together with other people’s objects, to create a shrine, either to be buried or burnt with him, or to be kept as the shrine to him.

I also felt like I wanted more of a circle, more space to hear everyone’s story of Henry. I loved the speeches and the things that the vicar said, she did a really tender job of making meaning out of it. She brought in the ‘what God would say if he was here’ bit – and I valued that. Who will speak at these events on behalf of the Other? And also, who will sing and dance and move on behalf of the Other?

I also wanted a bit more space for grief. I wanted to broaden the boundaries of what’s acceptable. I wanted to interact beyond words.

Finally, I’m not entirely comfortable with the elemental disconnection of the cremation process. I liked burying Charlie and covering his cardboard coffin first with rosemary, for remembrance, and then with earth. I liked the viscerality of that. These crematoriums with their seating in rows, and the curtains electronically closing, the coffin electronically being removed back or down away, closure, ending, seen and viscerally known – doesn’t satisfy me viscerally – it feels somehow like the death supermarket, the death ikea, the death conveyor belt moving your goods towards processing at the check out

Crass I know yuk but it feels true. I don’t know what the answer is, I know there’s not enough land for us all to be buried in these cities. But how do we say goodbye to the body more viscerally, more elementally, without getting gory?

I don’t know if this would work.

But here was a thought that seemed to encompass most of these things.

A circle, however many layers deep of people

In a sanctuary of a space, with nice lighting.

With people taking it in turns to place the objects that they have found or created

In their grieving

To place them in a shrine that is created in the centre of the circle

Taking it in turns to tell the assembled their stories, what the dead person means to them, a memory, a quality

But actually I wanted that circle before death

I wanted us to do it in life

We kept so far away

When we saw him last, the party we had with him,

We kept so polite

I told him in a letter, after the diagnosis, what he meant to me

So that’s it really, a circle, objects, the creation of a shrine

Maybe some singing

And crying

Some songs that could go on a while

Enveloping the feelings of the present

And while the circle passes

Anyone could cry

And that would be ok

Songs like the seal woman’s song

Easy to learn

And then to put some soul into

So that the soul of the music comes not through the words, as it does with the lyrics of our Christian hymns we sing, but through the spirit of the assembled in singing.

Meaning through body, through heart.

I don’t know about what to do with the body.