We buried my brother at last. We are a stoical bunch. Few tears shed. His wife the most distressed of all could not manifest her grief because she was overwhelmed by the sheer number of people at the funeral to send off her husband and the spectacle.
Her memory and mind are going. She has not fully registered he is dead. Nor I, not that my memories are going. On the contrary, they stay with me.
If anything they crystalize at moments like this. When the white suited funeral officer in her red Akubra hat and matching scarf, offered a silver trowel filled with sand to toss down the hole over my brother’s coffin, I asked her to pour the sand into my hands. I wanted to feel its grittiness and to honour the tradition.
Dust to dust ashes to ashes. She also offered a sprinkling of rose petals to strew over his coffin but I declined.
When we buried our mother, the funeral officials offered their box of sand without the trowel. It seemed more fitting.
I wished it had been dirt, soil from the hole the undertakers had earlier dug for my brother.
I am rethinking the business of burials. I once thought that’s the way I’d like my mortal remains to be dispatched into a hole in the ground, for the worms and bacteria to eat away until all that’s left are my hair and teeth, my skeleton. But now the way the earth is so impacted by climate change, so overcrowded, I’m coming round to the idea of cremation. Though that too is fraught energy wise.
Bury us upright in shrouds.
After all, we won’t be there to notice whatever arrangements are made.
On a happier note, I reconnected with members of my extended family who live in Brisbane and were more able to attend the funeral of an uncle, perhaps not beloved though his children are.
His children and wife, rocked by adversity and the pain he brought into their small family through his contrary ways. He was the son of his father. He was a man wracked by severe illness on childhood. He was a replacement baby for his parents after the early death of an older sister during the Second World War. He was a talented man, forced to leave school early, who went back in later years to complete his education but stopped short of completing his elusive PhD, which must have hurt his pride, given his desperate search for achievement.
It was a long day beginning at four am with a trip to the airport, trouble getting into the correct long term car park which has changed its name to Value parking and finally getting onto our plane which arrived in Queensland around breakfast time.
It was not sunny, the sky heavy with grey clouds. A taxi to Kelvin Grove where the White Ladies house their funeral parlour. And then early for the service. We visited a nearby Aldi to kill time, stopped in a nearby café for coffee, then traipsed back to the parlour where a few of my siblings were already gathered ahead of the service.
This then is the best time. The gathering before an event. The next best was the eulogy delivered by my brother’s first-born daughter and flanked by her younger sister and brother.
A long testimony to her father’s life with the emphasis on his best qualities and only occasional reference to their struggles.
Eulogies to me are the most important part of any burial service. The story of the person’s life. The story of their achievements, but also some brief reference to their struggles. Not hagiography, but honesty.
They’re gone now. We cannot hurt them but we can build a story around them and then elaborate on their lives to add colour to the story of this family and to give hope to those who follow. However much they might have failed.