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.