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hawkwing_lbI hardly slept last night. It felt like a haunting, albeit a friendly one: every time I closed my eyes, I saw Florence's face. Her vibrant, alive face, so different to the waxy stillness of the corpse in the funeral parlour. The echoes of her voice. It seems impossible that all that life and personality should no longer be: it's as though all my life I had a compass pointing due north, but now the needle only spins in circles. As though some natural law has broken, leaving hollow emptiness in its wake.
All through the service I kept imagining what she would have said, how she would have mocked the priest with the country accent, complained about the incense, wound the family up with provoking comments, hugged and held and comforted and probably muttered What an awful lot of nonsense and told someone to shut up before the morning was out. It is almost as though she sits beside me still.
(And yet, she did believe in something. Comfortless as I - as an agnostic/atheist - find the Catholic service, with its insistence on the cleansing nature of baptism and the better more glorious life among the saints and martyrs, she probably wouldn't mind the ceremony. She always did like a proper fuss to be made.)
There was no proper shoulder-procession pallbearing, but I helped carry the coffin into the church, and out of it, and at the graveyard down to the grave. It's a bit of an undignified scramble, carrying a coffin down to a grave. Not really enough room in the paths in that graveyard for two people to walk abreast.
When it came time for me to read "Dirge Without Music," I angry-shouted my way through it. Any other way would've left me consumed with tears: I was crying by the end despite all.
Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.
On the way home from the funeral reception - for a small family, there are a lot of relatives I hardly know - Mum and I stopped at her house. I took a piece of clothing. Something that smells like her. A ghost of her warmth.
It feels wrong that the world should continue without her in it.
All through the service I kept imagining what she would have said, how she would have mocked the priest with the country accent, complained about the incense, wound the family up with provoking comments, hugged and held and comforted and probably muttered What an awful lot of nonsense and told someone to shut up before the morning was out. It is almost as though she sits beside me still.
(And yet, she did believe in something. Comfortless as I - as an agnostic/atheist - find the Catholic service, with its insistence on the cleansing nature of baptism and the better more glorious life among the saints and martyrs, she probably wouldn't mind the ceremony. She always did like a proper fuss to be made.)
There was no proper shoulder-procession pallbearing, but I helped carry the coffin into the church, and out of it, and at the graveyard down to the grave. It's a bit of an undignified scramble, carrying a coffin down to a grave. Not really enough room in the paths in that graveyard for two people to walk abreast.
When it came time for me to read "Dirge Without Music," I angry-shouted my way through it. Any other way would've left me consumed with tears: I was crying by the end despite all.
Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.
On the way home from the funeral reception - for a small family, there are a lot of relatives I hardly know - Mum and I stopped at her house. I took a piece of clothing. Something that smells like her. A ghost of her warmth.
It feels wrong that the world should continue without her in it.
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no subject
Date: 2013-11-30 05:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-30 06:02 pm (UTC)My grandmother Mary is in her 90s, and frail. I live in fear that she'll die before we get back to Australia in February, never having met her only great-grandchild, who has her maiden name as a middle name. She was born Irish Catholic, and shrugged off the disapproval of her entire family to marry an English Protestant in the forties, which right away tells you something about her. I don't think she's ever believed in god - or if she did, she stopped believing a long time ago - but when her husband, the English Protestant, died in 2007, she told me she said the catchetism for him, "just in case."
I'm so sorry for your loss.
no subject
Date: 2013-11-30 07:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-12-01 05:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-12-01 05:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-12-01 05:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-12-02 05:28 am (UTC)I'm sorry, which is such a lame thing to say, but it's all I can offer.
<3
no subject
Date: 2013-12-02 03:01 pm (UTC)<3