Death and an offshore wind...

... for Knots in the String.

I’m a funeral director’s granddaughter.

In my younger life, Pa was called an undertaker, but that changed after the war, and he became the more socially acceptable ‘funeral director’. Nothing was ever said by my mother or her sisters or even my grandfather, but nice or not, an undertaker was not a particularly socially acceptable career through the years. Undertakers (so aptly named) were those whom no one ever wanted to call to their home. Which is perhaps why Pa sent my mother and aunts to an excellent private school, The Friends’ School, a Quaker institution – the same school Errol Flynn attended and from which he was expelled (along with sundry other schools). No doubt Pa and Nanny hoped Friends School would give their daughters some cachet going through life.

(This image was taken well before I was born but shows the two titles - undertaker and funeral director)

As children, we had no qualms at all about telling any and everyone that our grandfather was Harold Millington, the funeral director. We had nothing to be embarrassed about at all. That said, my experience of holidays staying with my parents at Pa’s apartment ‘above the shop’ in the city, greatly coloured my own idea of how I wished to go.

Attitudes about death and funerals are so personal, so subjective. Like grief, no single thing is wrong, every little thing is right. Who are we to say what mourners should or shouldn’t do? Which in its own way, makes a funeral immensely positive. Families and friends try to do the best they can and for that they should be admired.

When I was young, I would venture downstairs at Pa’s, quite a scary proposition for a youngster. Black hearses parked in the garage, a phalanx of coffins delivered from Pa’s factory (the only factory on our island to craft coffins – Pa was originally a cabinet maker. Figures really…) The beautifully polished wooden coffins were ranked along the walls ready to be displayed in the showroom. I wondered if Vincent Price, all vampire teeth and black cloak-ish, would appear because this was long before the humour of The Addams Family – so for a child, there was nothing to lighten the oppressive load.

If there was to be an imminent funeral, there would be wreathes laying along the garage walls, ready to be positioned in the hearse once the coffin was placed in the vehicle. To this day I abhor the smell of lilies, carnations and chrysanthemums and will never have them in my house. There was a small chapel as well and inevitably I would have goosebumps when a coffin was waiting for family. I would run through the garage at full speed, never looking back over my shoulder in case a ghost or malfeasant was on my heels! And of course, as a child looking down into the street from the bay window above, all I could see were weeping people in black – so much sadness.

As I grew older, I attended funerals. The heaviness of the emotion, the long eulogies, the holes with faux grass laid over the clay, the coffins placed deep in the ground, the granite and marble, the headstones stretching like macabre street markers through the cemetery only strengthened my personal view.

That I didn’t want my family to have to grieve in public, to listen to platitudes, to watch a montage as long as a movie or as a friend said the other day in respect of her father’s passing, put up with hypocritical mourners who hadn’t even bothered to turn up when the deceased was alive! Worse in my opinion, those expensive places of interment, the graves, are inevitably forgotten down through the generations and become a sad memorial for what was once love and respect. That is not for me.

All this came back to me this week as my husband and I watched The Last Goodbye. Documentary maker, Ray Martin, investigated the ways in which we in Australia approach death. No race was excluded. First Nation, Muslim, Chinese, Pacific Islanders and more. He investigated cultural styles of farewell – so ineffably beautiful and poignant. He examined horizontal burials in massive cemeteries, vertical burials in a country paddock, cryonics, cremation. He visited the largest funeral convention in the world in Las Vegas. (People can have diamonds made from their loved ones’ ashes for heaven’s sake!) Ashes can be scattered via fireworks (Not for me. The Terrier is terrified of fireworks). One can have budget funerals, wicker caskets (golly, why waste a good picnic hamper?), cardboard boxes which the loved ones can write on/decorate. (Quite a good idea really – like the big multi-signed card one gets when one leaves a workplace.) No surprises then that death is an industry no – a big, moneymaking industry because all of us die in the end and must be disposed of. And that’s what annoys me. That money is made on the back of people’s grief and loss when they are at their most vulnerable and trying to do the right thing for their departed.

I organised both Mum’s and Dad’s very simple funerals. But how much easier it would have been if they had left details of what they preferred – style, flowers, music, whatever. This was the point that Ray Martin was making. Be organised, write your wishes down. So that I was quite chuffed to think I did exactly that five years ago. I’ve written an Advanced Care Directive and an End of Life Directive. My funeral will be simple, very private, very short and to the point – all guided by the detail I’ve written up for my family. I’d prefer no wake as well, although what my family might do to celebrate afterward is up to them because it is they who must process their grief however they wish.

They say death is final, but I don’t believe it is. Our lost ones are perpetuated by us in grief for as long as our hearts beat. It merely becomesa little easier, gentler to live with as time moves on. In a way, grief becomes a friend, guiding us along a pathway to memories and laughter if we should let it. I suppose the one thing being a funeral director’s granddaughter has taught me is that death is the same as life. Another phase to be dealt with in life’s great journey. We all have to go through it and it’s okay to do it our own way. Flamboyant, fussy, or plain. There’s a million choices in between and like book reviews, the choices are inevitably subjective.

I tell you what, though. If I had my choice, I’d love to have a Viking funeral like Rocket Gibraltar

or more recently, What We Did On Our Holiday, with Billy Connolly.

Both are the same story – movies that talk about death in the freshest, most honest and even humorous way, essentially through the eyes of children.

I can just imagine my raft floating out on the tide in full flame. There’s even my mother’s old striped deck chair in the boatshed for the sail!

And Heaven’s knows we have enough offshore winds these days to blow the smoke, flames and me to Valhalla! (If any of you have the same idea, click on this link - there’s romance in death I tell you…)

By the way, I’m not planning on going anywhere soon, offshore winds not withstanding!

Music? How could it be anything else but this?