It was my father’s funeral yesterday. I reproduce here the words I said, and follow them up with a few musings.
Dad, or Chris, or Uncle Chris, Grandad, or whatever you called him, was a difficult man to know. He was, fundamentally, quiet and reserved. Almost everyone who has sent us tributes has called him a gentle man. I don't think I ever really thought about it, until now - to me he was, at least until dementia robbed us of everything except the 'empty shell', just Dad.
He was always shy, and didn't enjoy crowds of people. Being the son of the village doctor, birthday parties arranged by Gran tended to be large affairs... It was certainly not unknown for him to hide away in a wardrobe in the (usually vain) hope of avoiding them! Things didn't change much later either - I can well remember him using 'going up the field' as an excuse to get away from social gatherings, which I always thought was fair enough because he did have a lot of work to do running the nursery. Alas, I didn't have the same excuse! Mind you, once I was big enough to express an opinion, I wasn't forced to have birthday parties - I suspect that was his influence over Mum.
He wanted, on leaving school, to become a vet, so off he went to Glasgow Vet College. Things didn't go quite according to plan, and he failed an exam. In those days, there weren't any re-sits - fail an exam and, a few days later, your call-up papers arrived. So off he went for National Service, as an artilleryman. He excelled at this, and the army tried to persuade him to stay on as a regular, and become an officer. But that didn't appeal, so he went off to agricultural college after National Service - and the rest, as they say, is history, and well known to all of us here. He was amused though, in an ironic sort of way, when I became a physicist... The exam he had failed was in Physics!
And yes, now that I think about it, he was gentle. But he also had a keen sense of right and wrong. And woe betide you if you did something he didn't approve of - believe me when I say that those huge hands of his hurt when they made contact! I remember one occasion when their mere appearance solved an 'issue'. It was summer, and Dad and I had gone into Carlisle for something. Dad always backed into parking spaces, because it was what he'd been taught to do. Anyway, there was only one free space where we'd gone to park; as he pulled forward preparing to back into the space, someone cheekily drove into 'our' space. 'I'm not having this.' he said, got out of our car, walked over to the other car, rested his fists on the door where the window was wound down and said something along the lines of 'I think you'd better move.' and the bloke did - he swore, backed straight out and drove off. Dad got back in our car, parked it, and nothing more was said. Road rage? I suppose so, yet he didn't even raise his voice!
He was always curious about things, and very 'unsqueamish', which could sometimes cause interesting situations. When Linda and I were first married, we lived in a flat on top of one of the colleges at the University. Cockroaches were an occasional, 'seasonal', problem. Horrid things - they make me shudder. We had a cockroach trap in the kitchen. One day he decided that he wanted to know how it worked, so he picked it up and took the lid off... Suddenly there were 'roaches scuttling everywhere, much to the alarm of all but him - who was cheerfully trying to grab them and get them back in the, hastily closed, trap!
One other incident from that era embarrassed him, but caused much mirth too. The University used to hold receptions after postgraduate degree ceremonies. After I received my M.Phil., Mum decided we ought to go to the reception - who knew, we might even see the Chancellor of the University (Princess Alexandra in those days) again. It turned out that we were almost the only people there, so not only did we see the Princess, we had a long chat with her, during which she asked Dad what he did for a living, and he duly told her. She was curious then to know whether he talked to his plants... At which point he became very embarrassed. She pressed him for an answer, and eventually he admitted that, after he'd finished planting a greenhouse full of lettuce or whatever and was walking out, he would turn, mutter "Grow you buggers." and shut the door. Peels of laughter.
And now it's time for a confession. Dad would, very occasionally, when he and were out in the car together, have what he called a 'mad moment', and drive somewhere very fast. Not dangerously so, but much faster than he usually did. I hasten to add that I absolutely didn't, ever, 'egg him on'. Once, notably, this happened when he and I were going to the sailmakers to get one of my sails mended. I was learning to drive, and I drove part way, before he became tired of our slow progress, and also concerned that by the time we got there, he'd have shut up shop and gone for a sail, so we swapped seats and he drove - like the wind.
Always, on those occasions, as we neared home again, he would say quietly 'We won't say anything to Mum, will we, because otherwise we'll never be allowed out on our own again.' And we never did. Until now. At this point, keeping the secret seems a bit pointless.
Dad was, as I've already said, a quiet man, and hard to know. One thing he wouldn't talk about was religion. I honestly have no idea at all what, if anything, he believed. I don't think even Mum knows. The only thing Linda or I can ever remember him saying on the subject was that he was pleased that I'd found a faith. So I can't, in all honesty, say whether I believe he is in heaven or not. Some of my more conservative fellows would say that he can't be. I'm not so sure. God is holy, to be sure, but alongside that is set his justice and most of all his love. Therefore I fully expect, when I arrive in heaven, to be surprised by who has got in - and who hasn't. It says in Matthew chapter 7 verse 21:
Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven.
With that in mind, I am going to finish with a short reading, after which we will observe a period of silence, during which you are free to listen to the music, think and remember Dad, or pray, as you wish.
Then I saw “a new heaven and a new earth,” for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea. I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Look! God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. ‘He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death’ or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.” He who was seated on the throne said, “I am making everything new!” Then he said, “Write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true.” He said to me: “It is done. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End. To the thirsty I will give water without cost from the spring of the water of life. Revelation 21:1-6
I hadn’t been to any funerals for a while, but now, in the space of a little over a year, I’ve been to three - my wife’s father, a family friend (only last week), and now Dad. Funerals seem a very odd business in the cold light of day. I woke very early this morning, thinking about the subject. In some ways, Hebrew thought, which has the person as one whole being, makes a lot of sense... Until you get to a person’s funeral, and then the Greek idea of the person being made up of 'separate bits’ - body and soul - seems to me to make more sense.
It was, for me, an odd feeling, sitting in a strange, almost church-like, building, with a box containing the abandoned, derelict, unneeded body of my dad. A very strange sensation indeed. Faint echoes, not pleasant at all, of sitting, more than twenty years ago, in our church near a tiny, white, coffin, when the world seemed to have come crashing down around our us. But different again... Somehow this occasion seemed right and/or fitting though, where that didn't, doesn’t, and presumably never will.
So I was sitting there, contemplating this wooden box, sitting there, in its turn, upon this sort of platform, with a curtain track above it on the ceiling. Dad wasn’t there, though I knew his body was. And yet, in a strange way, he was, and is - we were all thinking about him - his influence on our lives, the things he’d said and done. But, in another way, he (the soul of him) hadn’t been there for a long time - we’d spent years trying to care for his, still warm and moving, but really little more than that, body.
Somehow, the closing of the curtain at the end of the brief ceremony (little more than some of his favourite music, and my tribute, reproduced above), was a fitting end to a process of loss which had begun years before. It finalised, and brought to completion, a process of separation which had begun perhaps ten years before, when I had written him a letter, expressing my concern over what I think of as the beginning of his ‘withdrawal from life’. That point, and that letter, probably marked the beginnings of my grief - I could see, way back then, the sort of path the rest of his life seemed likely to take. The funeral isn’t the end of the grief - there are still questions, and some anger, and sadness, and remembering - of good times and bad - to be gone through. But it is the end of a chapter in the story; the turning of a corner - of turning away from the past and looking to the future again, with all that it holds.
Coming back home again felt rather like plunging back into the vast, rich, teeming, waters of life again. Very dear friends had invited us to eat with them after our journey - it was lovely to feel part of a young family again for a while, to eat good food; to see and play with one of our young god-children, and to be reminded, through that, of beginnings rather than endings, and all the vast potential and hope of human life. Despite the griefs of this life, I am so very blessed too.