The Warmth of Mournfulness

There is something about priests, funeral people; all those people connected with death and birth. They do have this mournful; sad: I am here for you countenance. I think if day after day I had to be empathetic and solemn I would get a huge urge to giggle or swear or dance some weird jig. I know I never would but the effort of being connected and there for people must be so difficult to maintain day after day with so many different people.

At the funeral parlour, Sophie walked slowly from the back office when we opened the door; sparking off the doorbell. She was gentle and very quiet, she even spoke slowly and everywhere there were boxes of tissues for all those waiting tears.

But she was lovely; you could tell she loved her job, loved the ability to care for and respect the family and the person who had died. I have no idea how she navigated the issue of fees and charges without it being awkward but she did, we even smiled and laughed a bit before leaving.

I can’t remember who it was that was at the registrars; another lovely person; keen to say how much she loved her job. That she had actually requested to be transferred from weddings to funerals. Once she realized we were happy to talk she certainly talked. While we dripped water from the rainstorm outside she talked about being a nurse in the past, about mental health, about the horrors of working on a locked ward decades ago, lots and lots of stuff.

It is funny the stuff we do; we get asked basic questions and suddenly cannot answer them. The man before us was delayed because when it came time to pay for the death certificates his memory deserted him and he forgot his pin number; had to phone his wife to ask what it was.

It is a bit disconcerting to see offers of buying the fountain pen that signed a birth certificate when you are trying to work out what has happened to your dad. Hard to concentrate on the details that have been written on the form in any meaningful way. I missed the fact that the local authority area had been missed out and both of us didn’t notice that the postcode was not included.

It is a surreal time; my eulogy says very clearly that I don’t think dad is dead. Why would I say that? I don’t expect to see him walk in the room. I don’t expect to see him in the garden next time I look out the window or sat on the sofa watching tv.

I know I will never see him again and yet at the same time I do not know he is dead in my heart. Sometimes we have been very tired; sometimes Mum doesn’t sleep at all. I sleep because I anaesthetize myself with alcohol in the evenings. I still do not concentrate much. I still make simple mistakes when making decisions and I still feel that I do not feel anything at all about Dad’s death. It makes me guilty. I worry that for all the professed love I had, I am still that selfish self-absorbed teenager, blind not only to my own emotions but to everyone else’s. I do a lot of giggling, I get bored. I need space and yet I feel nothing at all, just nothing. In fact when I used to say I had no emotions I now think even the dregs of feeling that might have clung to my heart have been sucked out leaving a sterile, pretty cold being, behind.

Not a tear has risen in my throat, I have felt anxious, as though my throat was closing on itself and I have found my leg jiggering again after an absence of months. But mainly it is absence and the wish to sleep.

The Rector called by today to sort the services. I am not sure what a Rector is but I think she is also a Priest. She came in the door in her black robes, her dog collar and came straight to me to shake my hand to commiserate. She was like the funeral parlour lady but so wonderfully still in herself.

And she held us together. When she asked us what we wanted, Mum started veering around the place; losing grasp of what she had already said she wanted. And somehow she gathered the threads, coaxed a meaning from the different hymns that had been suggested; found the readings we wanted, looked up passages that needed read, talked about the tone of the two services and all the time she was still, in a warm and loving way. She left us with instructions for what we still needed to do and left to start organizing. I liked her very much.

She said a prayer for Dad before she left. I am so far from this area of life so I did not reply ‘amen’ at the end as it seemed very wrong to, but I did make some sort of squeaking noise.

I had been wanting to ask her about the devil stuff but thought it would upset mum and be inappropriate. I remembered the comments on twitter that said that such thoughts were signs of illness and that I should take more medication.

In the end I emailed her, told her of my diagnosis and my knowledge that I am evil and possessed by a devil, while still being an atheist. I asked her what I should do; talked of my fear that I would be desecrating something special and holy if I entered the church and the chapel when, in reality, I am a devil.

Her reply was so nice, so kind. I don’t quite believe it but I am going to say that I do. She said she saw an articulate, gentle, compassionate person with not a trace of evil and that she had seen evil in the past and known it for what it was. She said I would be welcome at the church and that God and Christ were far more powerful than the devil even though I wasn’t a devil. It was so kind of her.

I worry that I will set the seeds of destruction to her church, her beautiful strength, her lovely congregation but somehow I think that is ok; almost that I have raised the risks and that they have been accepted. I do so hope I do not do anything to harm the people I love and the people who are helping us at the moment.

We spent the rest of the morning organizing. This death thing is so time consuming, it seems to mainly consist of sending off forms to people and paying money to other people. It was a relief to walk along the cliffs later at the Seven Sisters at the barn walk. The sky had cleared up hugely, a patchwork of bubbling cumulus clouds and blue sky with storms and dark towering cumulonimbus out to sea. The path, sticky with the wet clay from the rain. And the sun making patches of silver among the dark shadows left by the clouds on the English Channel.

It has been a good day: funeral organising, trip to the dump, walk, shopping, tea for mum and now writing, followed by smoked haddock. Then fireworks at the seafront later.