I was 25 before I went to my first funeral.
It was my Gran’s, and a bit of a steep learning curve, as I was in charge of writing and reading the eulogy. I say reading, what actually happened was that I read about a sentence, and then stood there in front of everyone, sobbing and sniffing, until my mum came up and read it out for me. I stood next to her if that counts.
I had a hand in the funeral planning and although it was a privilege to be involved, I was at a bit of a loss – my Gran hadn’t left any specific wishes or plans, so how did we really know what she would have wanted? When I was little she always said she wanted to be pushed off a cliff at 65 and she quickly changed her mind about that one, so without any explicit instructions, who was I to say what music she’d want played at her funeral?
Funeral planning is a bit of a taboo, something we don’t want to talk about, but it shouldn’t be – we’re all going to die after all, it’s the one thing in life we can be certain of, so why not plan for it? Making a will last month really brought it home to me.
“Do you have any preference over whether you want to be buried or cremated?” the consultant had asked me.
“Not really,” I said, thinking I was being helpful and easy going, “I don’t mind either way.”
“OK,” she said, “but you might want to give it some thought as it’s often much easier for the people you leave behind.”
Do you know, as obvious as that sounds, I had never thought about it like that. If anything, I thought I was being accomodating by not stating a preference, but the more I thought about it, the more obvious it seemed. I thought back to my Gran’s funeral planning, when we were all so overcome by the stress and emotion of her death, and about how much simpler it would have been if she had laid it all out for us and all we’d had to do was say ‘yes, go for it.’ View Post