Sixty-Odd Going Under!

‘Did you not get the memo?’ 

‘What?’

‘This is a funeral, not a beach wedding’ 

I like to lighten sombre moods by making people uncomfortable with whether they should laugh or not. It is not for everyone. Maybe don’t dress for a sandy photoshoot then. To be fair it doesn’t matter what you wear to these occasions in my opinion. I just like to say stuff.

If it wasn’t for this area, the funeral industry would be dead. You can’t have a funeral without dead people. We had them in droves as the stench of death and near death permeated this side of town.

I can’t speak for death anywhere else, all I know is there is a hearse or two hundred that move through the town day and night. It always seems to be the busiest taxi rank. Hearsee (hearse’s? hearsi?) that cross each other’s path and wave hello then goodbye to each other as they take their cargo to the cul-de-sacs without a reverse gear

The coffin sits in the middle of my grandparents living room that’s filled with cigarette smoke and dank 15-year old conversations that are full of acne and bad breath. When your grandparents are old and frail, it’s hard to think of the tomorrows you will no longer have when they die. You think of making the most of all the tomorrows while they are still here. Their inevitable decline and death was always on the cards, and the life they lived now exists through the frozen eyes in the wood-framed photographs scattered about the room. I think of the good yesterday’s that ONLY they gave to me and that makes living in tomorrow ok.

The hearse sets off for the crematorium as I think of sixty minutes time when I can be past the eulogy given by the vicar. I know everything he is about to say. I don’t need anyone to tell me what life my grandad had or what sort of person he was. Because he told me himself. He showed me himself. I heard him myself. I saw him myself. I paid my respects while he was alive. 

The full stop on his life smudged by the offspring (gone off-spring) pitching in for materials he left behind.

Fighting. That was the surprise at my grandma’s funeral. Now I have to suck in air from the same spaces as these people who disgraced a memory with their drunken scandal. I had to insert myself into that trauma festival because my blood matches the blood of some of this lot. Let us set the night on fire with our nonsense. ‘Remember that time at grandmas funeral…’ will now never be uttered.

I feel my face and my stubble reminds me of the rash my grandad would give me on my face when he scrubbed my face with his stubble. 

The funeral happened.

I decide to show my face to put money behind the bar of his favourite wattering oyle (if you’re not from Yorkshire, remove a ‘t’ and you probably still won’t know what I mean as I didn’t address the second word there). It is a calmer affair, the kids of the shat show at my grandma’s funeral are now adults. And the adults at my grandma’s funeral are now almost adults. 

‘When are you coming around to ours?’

‘Never’ I say to my good uncle in a jokey tongue with mischievous eyes

‘Ah come on, we’ve not seen you in years’

‘Look, let’s just agree that we will see each other at weddings and funerals. Unless it’s your funeral. In which case, commiserations!’

My uncle laughed and I reminded him that I can’t make anybody’s wedding as I am busy on all those days.

Over ten years since that day and I have not clasped eyes on much of that gathering. Not much good has permeated my memory from some of their existences. Not like my grandad has. He is never not there. Wisdom never dies

THE END