One Wedding and a Funeral

It had taken me nearly five months to organise my wedding.

For my mother’s funeral, we only had five days.

Essentially, it was the same event. The same church. Several hundred people. Flowers. Orders of service. Music. Family logistics. People travelling from far and wide. Something to follow afterwards.

Only this time there was no big white dress, no first dance, no champagne glasses and no happy flutter of RSVPs.

Funerals are funny things to arrange. Funny in the strangest, bleakest, most bewildering way. Nobody really replies. Nobody quite knows whether they should come. You have no idea if twenty people will turn up or two hundred. And when someone has reached ninety-seven years old, most of their friends, and a good deal of their family, have already gone on ahead of them.

Then come the practical questions, which feel both ridiculous and impossible.

Do you serve booze, or does booze feel inappropriate? What time of day should it be?How do you let people know? Who must be telephoned first? Who will be offended if they are told too late?

And how, in the middle of grief, when your heart is thudding and your mind is fogged, and you have not slept, are you meant to remember whether anyone has ordered enough sandwiches?

At one point, in a moment of madness, I decided my mother should be taken by horse and carriage from her home to the church, clip-clopping through the little lanes she knew so well. She adored riding. She adored horses. It seemed the most perfect final send-off.

Until my brother pointed out that perhaps she might look less like Lady Pamela making her dignified last journey, and more like a Peaky Blinders gangster arriving at the church.

He was right, of course.

My mother had left an envelope with her last wishes. Not specifying horse or car, but quite clear on this: she wanted it extremely simple and uncomplicated. She did not want a sermon. She did not want a eulogy. And she certainly did not want a memorial service.

My brother, with great care and tenderness, put together a service of highs and lows (on the cover of the order of service he included sketches by my father for my mother’s curtains in her drawing room.) A very close and dear friend of my mother’s flew from Northern Ireland and read the Prayer of St Francis of Assisi. Her grandchildren each spoke a bidding prayer. My brother read some extraordinary letters he had found between my parents, letters full of humour and honesty and difficulty, giving such insight into two people trying to make a marriage work.

The church was full.

The choir sang beautifully.

In the chancel there were twelve ornately carved seats, presumably intended for clergy, though we decided they should be filled instead by my mother’s own devoted team. Those who had been with her longest, or most deeply. Alison and Shirley, her adored carers. Katie and Joyce, who had worked in the house for over thirty-five years. Susan, her dressmaker. And so on.

There was one chair left. The twelfth chair.

Who should sit there?

Alison had the bright suggestion that the chair should be taken by the chiropodist.

Of course. Who else should sit in the twelfth carved chair in the chancel, other than her chiropodist!

Several years ago, when one of the new carers was settling in and the doorbell rang, she asked Katie, “Who is that?”

“Oh, that’s the footman,” Katie explained.

“The footman?” the carer said, surprised. “Lady Pamela has a footman as well as a carer?”

---

My four boys and their cousin carried my mother, carefully, lovingly, on their shoulders, into the church. My brother, my sister and I followed behind up the gravel path. At the end of the service they carried my mother out for the committal. The sun shone as her grandsons lowered her down. “Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” said the priest slowly.

Everything became suddenly silent.

The church bell tolled.

The peacocks, next door, in Brightwell Park, called out.

The spring lambs in the field beyond baa-ed.

The birds sang. But the gathered congregation were silent as my mother was reunited with my father in the graveyard.

---

Grief is my new companion now.

It arrives unexpectedly, catching me off guard. I try to move the feeling around, massaging it like a muscle, trying to loosen it, trying to breathe through it. But grief has its own timetable. It is not interested in my plans. It will not be filed neatly away. It comes when it wants to.

There were a few moments these last weeks that I found unbearable.

I had sat and slept beside my mother, since her fall, only ever leaving her for a short walk in her garden, or to stand on the doorstep and watch the moon rise. But I realised I had hardly cried. Because she was still there. Her lovely, gentle, warm breath beside me. I could hold her at night. I could feel her in my arms.

But when the undertakers came to take her away, the tears came.

As they approached the bed, I clutched onto my mother and sobbed, desperate for her not to be taken from me. It was a child’s grief then, not an adult’s grief. Not dignified. Not composed. Just the raw, primitive panic of goodbye.

And then, a few days later, she returned.

She came home in her lovely wicker basket, covered in flowers from her garden. On top sat her chocolate bunny, a recent gift she had loved but could not bring herself to eat. There it was, placed like a small sentry guard, keeping watch.

And I felt at peace.

Mum was briefly home, lying in her hallway, while we dashed about making funeral arrangements all around her.

Then came the day of the funeral.

Watching her leave the Grove, her home, for the last time, I shuddered. But when she was lowered into the ground in the graveyard, my body shook uncontrollably. It was not crying exactly. It was something more physical than that. A deep bodily refusal to accept the finality of it.

But over the next few days I found peace again.

Each evening I went to her grave and lay beside her and listened as the birds quietened for the night. There was comfort in being close to her, even there. Especially there.

And then this week I had to say goodbye, because I was leaving England for a while.

So I lay beside her once more and thanked her for everything. It was hard to leave her.

---

I am carrying with me her leopard-print scarf, the one she always wore over her hair, and the cashmere blanket that kept her warm. They smell of her. I breathe them in every so often to feel her around me.

But I worry the smell will fade soon, so I ration myself: only a little sniff here and there.

As a wise friend who has experienced heavy tragedy told me, “You do not get over it. You just get on with it.”

So I am trying. One small step, one small sniff, one day at a time.