1964

At a friend’s funeral I hear the sermon lament on for an hour about our dearly departed. The topic of this sermon is endurance. She endured her illness without complaint or rancour because she was a good person. Whether being good made her less likely to complain, or whether her lack of dissent ipso facto caused this goodness is left unexplained to the congregation. It is also left uncommented just why not complaining about having cancer when you are forty-one makes anyone truly good at all.

The minister talks of living life through its troubles and travails, because we all have sure and certain hope that we will one day be alive again because of Jesus. The phrase sure and certain hope strikes me (and others, I hope) as being the most contradictory and illogical thing I have heard all day. If hope is sure then is it hope at all? But we too must endure all of this because that is the nature of our lot, at least whilst we are here.

Not one of us in this room is here because of Jesus. We are here because, in our differing ways, we loved the person that now is a dead thing in the box hidden from our unready eyes under the sheet in front of us. She believed none of this piety, but we realize that the sermon is for other people. We look nervously around from time to time. Who is the other person? Is it me?

The organist plays with outrageous ornamentation to songs we intone with obscure lyrics. The elderly and near-sighted minister fluffs words in letters from friends that could have been moving. There are tears. I suspect that no one apart from me is even listening to him. He asks us to put our hands together and pray. After this mind projection is brought to a conclusion the coffin with what is left of our friend in it slides away with a small billow of the cloth that looks like a faux magic trick. Downstairs the coffin is received by men who push it on a trolley to a further tomb where it is engulfed and largely consumed by flames. They will scatter the remains in the perfumed, blooming roses of the Garden of Remembrance and later revisit the scene to break stubborn blackened bones with picks and sticks. We endure it all.