On Funerals

Funerals are a pain in the neck.

Ok, that sounds sounds selfish and flippant, but I mean it literally.

The day after we farewelled J – a 40-year-old ex colleague, who’d left behind a wife and kids, the littlest just barely 2 years old – I woke up with a stiff neck. The shooting pains sent me pretty briskly to one of those bulk, walk-in massage shops for the half-hour ‘neck & shoulders’ special. The practitioner seemed quite shocked, “Your shoulders are very bad”, asking if my life was particularly stressful at the moment. I told him  “I went to a funeral yesterday?” and with a knowing “say no more” shake of head, he advised several more treatments within the week to break down all those knots. Maybe they see this kind of thing a fair bit.

The funeral was hard. Aren’t funerals hard for everyone?

I think I spent the whole service in a tensed position. My shoulders were probably up around my ears the whole time. It was the slideshow at the end that hurt the most. Photos of his kids. happy, loving, innocent faces. I cannot understand what their life will be like with Daddy gone. Suddenly. How will Mum explain it to them? How will she get them through each day without falling apart herself, in front of them? 

I have no idea. I grieve for them. 

When I learned in the car on the way home that J committed suicide (that was the unspoken and logical theory, at least) my shoulders no doubt hunched so far up around my ears that the traffic sounds in the cross-city tunnel went all muffled. How do you explain that to his children? How could they understand why their dad would do such a thing? How painful and hellish must your life be that the only viable option to curing that hell is to just check out completely - regardless of the people you’ll leave behind.

I didn’t go back to the walk-in masseur. The muscles unlocked eventually and within a week the stabbing pains forgotten. But not J, or his wife, or his kids. They haunted me daily for a while, and now less and less over time. But he will always there. 

Less than a year later - far too soon - my neck muscles acted preemptively this time. The day before we were to farewell M, a friend from Uni, I woke up with pains so piercing I really could not move, not even a little bit. To quote my physio when she saw me a few days later - It was a shocker. The only way to get out of bed was to sit up lightning fast, like ripping off a bandaid, with a blinding blue/white flash of pain.

I dreaded the difficulty of another funeral and this would have been my perfect excuse to chicken out. I would have too, if I hadn’t organised two other uni friends to go with. They even did all the driving, since I couldn’t turn my head. 

By contrast, this service was not that hard. I loved the celebrant who at one stage so broke down she was unable to speak; I can only think she must have known M quite well. The ceremony was terribly sad - of course - that doesn’t even need to be said. But it was also joyful at times. A testament to the remarkable man who I wished - too late - I’d managed to stay in touch with after uni. 

The loving speeches were peppered with jokes and anecdotes. We cried, we laughed, we exchanged glances of surprise when we learned a few totally unexpected things about the guy. And perhaps all this was possible because his death was neither tragic or taboo. A sudden accident and with no drawn out suffering. He died doing what he loved. And you can’t really ask for more than that. 

At the wake, we uni buddies clustered magnetically and swore that we would have a reunion party very soon; promised ourselves that the next thing to bring us all together would not be the marking of another untimely death.

- - - - 

A few days later I was diagnosed with acute wry neck – though there was nothing cute about it, boom-tish – a fairly crippling condition that required bi-hourly therapy. But it’s mostly forgotten now. 

My Uni friends and I have since gone home, back to our regular lives. At the wake I made new-year’s-like resolutions to stay in touch regularly with every single one of my friends, on the basis that we could disappear at any second. 

I got all organised. To the guy who promised to host the party I sent a contact email address for another mutual friend to add to the invite list. I emailed old friends I’d lost touch with, some replied and we exchanged ever more vague promises to catch up as soon as we are both in the same city, until one way or another the email chains went quiet. 

I  slipped comfortably back into my unsociable, work focussed habits. Slipped back into easy habit.

I don’t hold my breath that the party will ever happen. Normal life just gets in the way and it takes something as massive as a death to drag us out of our daily routine and current social circle, to cancel all the usual appointments for the day, to ask for time off work and to drive across the city to a suburb we’d never normally have any reason to visit – to be reunited after countless years; to stand around drinking and laughing about old times, comparing unreliable memories, and realising that none of us has really changed, as if only a few weeks had passed since we last saw each other.

In the midst of life we are surrounded by death, and yet we carry on as if we are immortal – to paraphrase someone famous. And if you can find the original quote I’d love to have it.