Fading from Memory

Id been warned that the necessities of dealing with the funeral come at exactly the time one least wishes to think about such things, and it is so true.

We at least seem not to disagree too much about how the affair should be conducted. When I arrived at Greg's house he told me that he and Rachel would prefer not to have the church service and instead just have the service at the crematorium. I agreed immediately. I look askance at our parent's church. After over two decades of attendance and contribution to it, they have been all but ignored by it. I would be very cynical about anyone from the church who now turned up at the funeral to show how much they cared.

We met with the undertaker, and what ensued was one of the most excruciating meetings I have ever attended. She addressed us in approved deferential tones, and we embarked on the agenda. Details of dad's birth and marriage, ancestors and descendants were divulged, and then the discussion switched to funeral options. This is where it began to get difficult. Greg and I both feel that since dad is gone whatever respects we had to show to him should have, and in fact were, shown in the final few days of his life. The remaining acts now boil down to disposal of the body. I personally feel all questions of music, flowers, decorations, cars, personnel, ashes, public notices, and so on are meaningless except for one redeeming fact: there are people from overseas who are coming all the way here, and for that reason alone we need to have some event to mark the occasion. By that criterion we tried to answer the questions honestly and appropriately, but it still left plenty of room for awkwardness.

For example, simply deciding that there ought to be flowers on the coffin led to the subsidiary questions of how many flowers, what types, what to do with them afterwards, who might want them (we all had to say yes or no to this) and whether if other people would like them how we would go about getting them there.

Music: dad's favourite songs are all incredibly inappropriate - ABBA, Boney M, for example. He regularly used to sing 'John Brown's body lies a-mouldering in the grave' and would enjoy listening to Strauss's Death and Transfiguration on Sunday afternoons. Rachel seemed unable to decide, so I went through the astonishingly badly spelt list of musical pieces the undertaker proferred and chose Ave Maria, Nessun Dorma, and Vivaldi's Four Seasons. We are not going to be having hymns.

The most awkward part of the process was deciding the wording of the public notice (since Rachel thought we should have one). The undertaker wanted an adjective to complete the following phrase 'Don Pritchard, ... husband of Irene'. She suggested 'dear' and 'beloved'. Rachel seemed not to like either of these. I suggested 'forgotten' since we had apparently departed from the path of being conformist at this stage, and thought that maybe verity was called for, but we eventually decided on 'dear'. Then we had to think up different adjectives for '... father of' and '... granddad of'. It seemed ludicrous and, having been on the verge of excusing myself and going down the road to have a cup of coffee while the rest of the decisions were made, I had great trouble staying.

It wasn't upsetting. My reaction was one of exasperation and black amusement, I think.

We've settled on Thursday, at 11:45 am. The cremation will take place in North Ryde, at a crematorium I once used to pass every day on the way to work. I have asked that Rachel and Greg handle all the dealings with the minister or the celebrant, whichever is chosen to host the service. I can't offer anything constructive and I feel that the time spent considering the niceties of the event is eating away my time to think about dad. If we really had proper rituals we wouldn't have to go through all this, we would just follow the ritual. Our recent attempts to make funerals 'personal' has created a monster.

Dad will be attended by his four children, his three grandchildren, possibly a friend of Greg's who has known us for about three decades, and whoever is picked up by the public notice. We did not even raise the question of whether mum should come. I ought to contact all the masonic lodges that dad belonged to, but finding the addresses of them all entails going through the huge box of masonic material that I have collected and I am just not sure I want to do that this week.

Although I needed to sleep quite badly, I instead got ready to go and see dad one last time. I made sure I had breakfast first, then drove up to my office to get the funeral papers. From there I drove across Sydney to the retirement home. noting with some amusement that I took a slightly longer route than I should have. Obviously my mind is not entirely on what I am doing.

I often wondered how I would feel at this time, and now I know. The unexpected aspect is the variability. One moment I feel perfectly composed and practical, and the next I have a lump in my throat and am fighting back tears that I never thought I would shed. I kept saying to myself 'my dad died this morning', but it seemed almost to have no import.

When I got to the retirement village I gave the undertaker's contact details to the manager there, and then said I would like to go and see dad. She left me alone with him. This was my first real experience with a dead body, but it did not seem strange at all. Even the paradoxical facts that dad as we knew him was finally and irreversibly gone, but that everything physical was still there, looking very much as he had looked these last few days, did not seem disturbing. In fact, there was nothing scary about it at all, and I had no qualms about touching the body as if dad were still alive. I even said, aloud in the empty room, 'dad, if you can still hear me, this really is goodbye'. An amazing response for an avowed atheist and philosophical materiallst.

Dad's face was already looking slightly yellower, and his skin had that waxy pallor that I have read about so many times. His eyes were still half open, and his mouth agape, just as he had been all night. And now, I recalled that for a long time this morning, in the hours just before he died, there had been a tear on his face, just less than an inch from the corner of his left eye. I'd seen it there and attributed it to a purely physiological reaction, the eye protecting itself while not being able to benefit from frequent blinking. Now I wonder about that tear, and I wonder just what he knew about his situation in the last few hours. Was he aware of his own imminent death, and was he holding it back to spare us, or was he simply intent on not dying with someone watching him? Was he still able to hear and think, and know that he couldn't answer, and impotently burn against the frustration of this? We will never know and it is pointless to speculate.

Afterwards, I went to see mum. Although the residents in her section were involved in a communal activity, mum was sitting alone, at a table, with half a glass of orange juice in front of her. She looked terribly weary. I said to her: 'you look as if you've been up all night, too, mum.'

She smiled and mumbled a few things to me. I felt so sad for her; unable to appreciate her loss after all these years, blissfully ignorant of the loss, in just the last few months, of her best friend Ruth, her husband of 65 years, her house and all her belongings.

I got up after just five minutes and said goodbye to her. I don't think we should even try to start telling her what has happened.

Next, I went to mum and dad's house, and collected the mail. It made me realise we have a significant mopping-up operation ahead of us now: informing organisations that dad has died, and so on.

And after that I headed home, stopping on the way to buy milk and bread, and indulging myself with an ice-cream, which I ate sitting in the car in the car park. Feeling that after all that has happened, I just wanted to indulge myself with a simple trivial pleasure.

It was mid-afternoon when I got home. I finally went to bed for a few hours, to awake later feeling strangely dislocated, in a kind of limbo. I've been busying myself with small tasks that can be done on the computer, such as writing this entry and sending the recent photographs to those to whom they will mean the most.

It appears very likely that all of Derek's family, currently in Moscow, Munich and England will be flying out here over the weekend for the funeral which we anticipate will be held early next week.