Fordyce Maxwell: 'The vicar's real problem is confusion about what a funeral should be'

Published on Saturday 24 October 2009 19:56

THE oddest thing about funerals is that the person it should matter to most is past caring. Their problems are over. It is relatives, friends and, occasionally, those who turn up to make sure an unpopular deceased is precisely that who have to deal with the emotions a funeral of any kind produces.

Sometimes, true, that emotion can be wonderment. As in half way through listening to a eulogy beginning to wonder if you're at the wrong funeral and who is really in the coffin. Some are better than others at hiding their virtues while alive when the posthumous list is sprung on us.

No matter. I prefer the warts and all eulogies with humorous asides that have become more common in recent years, a celebration of a life rather than the misery of death.

Just as I prefer secular music – I'd like Fats Domino's Blueberry Hill and Willie Nelson's On The Road Again – although one disgruntled vicar quoted on the subject in the papers last week made one valid point when he complained about "ear splitting songs and bad poetry". That was about home-made poetry. About one in 100 of those who think they can write poetry can. What too many produce for birthdays, in memoriam and funerals might be heartfelt, but it's not good. Against that, I've seen it console and raise smiles where great, impersonal, poetry might fail.

The vicar's real problem, and it applies to most of us, is confusion about what a funeral should be. As a most reluctant and infrequent funeral goer I'm no expert, but for those with faith a straight religious ceremony has a lot going for it. The clergyman might actually have known the deceased and there's a chance the congregation will put some feeling into favourite hymns. My mother would have appreciated her packed funeral, ending as it did with burial in a leafy country churchyard beside my father.

In the same way my father-in -law, with no religious belief, would have appreciated – in his own "Hmm, no' bad" way – the humanist cremation service that reduced half of us to tears with the Pearl Fishers duet before all then high-stepping out with a smile at the end to the Radetzky March, two of his favourites.

Not forgetting the extrovert journalist George Hume's cremation where the coffin arrived on the back of his Land Rover accompanied by a jazz band, or the simple ceremony for a friend's mother, buried in one of the increasing number of "green" sites, in a cardboard coffin with a tree planted alongside.

Where funerals come unstuck, the main cause of the vicar's lament, is when Frank Sinatra's My Way and what he called "Gran's doggerel" are shoehorned into a religious ceremony.

It's one more confirmation of the fact that most of us have no interest in religion or established churches, with their in-fighting and intolerance, except a residual, confused and unrealistic expectation that in return for this neglect they will still provide wedding and funeral rituals.

It's up to the churches to end the confusion by saying: "Our way or no way. If you don't like that, call the Humanist Society and look out your Tina Turner CD."

They would get more respect, if fewer requests.