Funeral

I went to a funeral yesterday. My sister-in-law’s dad died fairly unexpectedly a week or so ago, and I drove back to Chesterfield to represent my bit of the family.

I hadn’t known Les for long, but had of course seen him at all the kind of family gatherings where you tend to overlap with people. I’d sat next to him on the top table at my brother’s wedding (with both of us giving speeches), and met him at Christmas parties and family BBQs. I wasn’t quite a peripheral figure at the funeral, but I certainly wasn’t the main event. His three (adult) children and his wife were, and my brother was pretty senior too, as a pallbearer, and rider in the family car.

I tend to view attendees at all these big life events as being tiered - are you part of the core, are you a recent or old friend, or are you a hanger-on? I don’t mean anything bad by it, but I just think it’s a nice way of viewing things. At the last wedding I went to, I was a tier 2 guest - I said hi to the bride and groom, and maybe chatted for a couple of minutes, but really they should be spending their time with their family and life-long friends.

The symmetry between weddings and funerals is striking. You see the same people: aunts, cousins, long-standing family friends…people who you only see when the big occasions roll round. There’s a buffet and small talk. There are emotions. There’s alcohol. There’s camaraderie with strangers. And the tiers of attendees that I mentioned above. Weddings are much more fun and joyous, but a good wake can go that way too. The downside to weddings is the photos and the insistence that everything has to be just right.

As a teenager, I became something of a professional funeral attender. I was a member of the school council, and the school would usually send a person or two to the funeral of any student whose relatives had died - a nice gesture of somebody in uniform to show that the school was there for them and supporting. For me personally, I found them interesting and better than lessons (which was the alternative), and so I went to quite a few. As sixteen-year-olds we made friends with an old man in the pub, and when his wife died we were invited to the wake. It was only from the age of 18 or so that I started attending real funerals for people I knew (grandparents).

I always find it hard to stay dry-eyed during the eulogy - it’s not the person who has died, but the people who they’ve left behind that tears me up. At the funeral yesterday, we heard how Les’s 4-year-old granddaughter had said that she misses her granddad. How can you sit through that and not be affected?

That’s the emotional rollercoaster that comes with any good funeral - absolute devastation imagining a future without somebody, and how that is going to ripple through a family…but then I spent the afternoon and evening feeding chips to my one-year-old niece, reading her stories, and then putting her to bed. With families, as with kids, the highs are deep and soul-warming, and the lows are crushing. And all of it teaches you more and more of what it means to be human.

RIP Les - you clearly left the world a bigger and brighter place than you found it.