It was one of those airless afternoons in the heat of mid-August, not long after I had been ordained. The tarmac shimmered, allowing the cul-de-sacs of north Liverpool to dream they might be Arizona freeways – and I was on my way to greet a dead man. I was still getting used to my cassock. It is a black woollen garment, designed to imbue me with the weight of my calling and stymied any attempt at severe clerical dignity. I might as well have been wearing a bin bag. Black, then, truly was slimming, in the way that hot yoga is slimming. My briny essence poured from my brow as I walked to the house where our appointment was to take place. There I was, trying to muster all the solemnity required for funeral ministry, and I looked like I’d just slid head-first down a log flume.
Louis, our pastoral assistant, had kindly but, as it would turn out, foolishly come along to help with the liturgy. We were there for a ‘lying-in’: the practice of saying prayers over a body that has been brought back into the family home prior to the funeral, which in this case was two days later. In some parts of Liverpool, where I served my first post, death is a public business. There is no bourgeois, privatized grief in Kirkby or Everton or Anfield. Dying and its after-effects remain ritualized in these terraced back-streets – meaning that, when the eternal beckons, every former docker or cabbie is treated like a minor royal, and every two-up two-down becomes, for a day or so, Westminster Abbey. The deceased is brought home, the ‘sheets’ are put up,fn1 and family and friends flock to pay their respects. Death, in short, is met with those ever-open Scouse arms of welcome, and carried, quite literally, into the front room. It’s an admirably forthright way of dealing with that which must meet us all, and strikes me as far healthier than a Home Counties ‘Life Celebration’ at a faceless suburban crem.
A crowd swelled outside the house. It looked as if the whole postcode was present: it was rammed out the front, down the alley to the side, in the garden. As I passed through – dabbing at the Niagara Falls emanating from my brow while trying to respond to every ‘Hello, Father’, ‘Thanks for coming, Father,’ and ‘God bless, Father’ – I found the inside even busier. There was beer and smoking, and I fielded a few winking ‘Very young for a vicar’ shots from matriarchs ensconced in chairs at key points along the route. It was not a conventional funereal atmosphere, with rosé closer to hand than rosaries. Rather, family and friends had gathered together as they would at a birthday or barbecue or – although, I confess, not my area of expertise – bar mitzvah. The only difference was that one of the guests was dead.
I was shown through to the room where the deceased lay. It had been agreed that I would say some prayers to start off the formal process of commending a soul to God, then lead a recitation of the Rosary. The sheets were well and truly up, the room immaculately decorated. It wasn’t a large space but it was full of the paraphernalia of a life – photos with children and grandchildren, trinkets from holidays long past – and the paraphernalia of death: cards, flowers, the air of ‘deepest sympathy’.
It was also full of people. There were, by my reckoning, about fifteen mourners already squeezed in round the edges of the room and only the smallest crack in the window through which any fresh air could enter. I looked to the body, to the crack in the window, to the book that contained the prayers and finally behind me, where a gathering crowd had clearly realized the main event was about to occur. It was a case of now or never, so I launched in: ‘Our Father, which art in Heaven …’
‘He’s doing the prayers!’
This rippled back through the assembled crowd, initially in a whisper but becoming progressively louder as it reached the outer circle (accompanied, with a good Scouse sense of irony, by a loud ‘SHUSH’). It became noticeably hotter as people piled in as subtly as they might. Still, from a selfish point of view, our little clerical party was facing away from this crowd, so I had a monopoly on the weak but much-needed waft of air through the solitary chink in the window.
The Rosary – for those readers not totally up to date with their popular Catholic devotional practices – consists of five ‘decades’: sets of ten recitations of the prayer beginning ‘Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee’. Each one is interspersed with further prayers. In the stifling heat, time had taken on a slower pace and ‘decade’ began to feel a little too literal. It was, I think, at the midpoint of the second decade when I began to notice that through the crack a faint but definite wisp of smoke had begun to dance. This was followed by – to someone who had spent his early twenties living in the back-streets of Prague – an all too familiar smell.
Uh-oh. That’s weed, went my brain.
‘Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee,’ continued my lips.
Now, ‘Judge not lest ye be judged’ is at the heart of the Christian faith, and you haven’t picked up this book to read a prolonged treatise against recreational drug use. Indeed, I can even see why the person had chosen this specific area to light a joint. To a passer-by, the living room looked unoccupied, with light-cancelling blinds: the perfect venue for a brief narcotic foray.
Unfortunately, none of this Christian charity helped solve the problem in front of me – namely that I was in danger of presiding over an elaborate hotboxing incident.fn2 As a young priest, this is not the kind of nightmare you anticipate: leaving a group of elderly, bereaved people not with a sense of being comforted as they mourned but instead as high as kites.
As I was the only one directly in the path of the offending billow, I considered whether I could change the direction of the smoke between the prayers. I concluded that blowing marijuana smoke over a body was probably not the best look for a cleric. My eyes darted to Louis. He had noticed it too. Cue frantic work by our respective facial features as we tried to communicate non-verbally while maintaining the dignity required.
I need scarcely mention how this second development had affected the sweating situation. The perspiration had now drenched my brow and was stinging my eyes. My cassock clung to me like an all-in-one Lycra exercise suit. The gusset of my boxer shorts— Let’s not go there.
In the end, I decided to speed up the Hail Marys. To its credit, the congregation kept up. Afterwards many remarked how it was good to do things ‘properly’ and that this was precisely what the deceased would have wanted. Considering the occasion, they were all in quite a good mood.
In future years, I would do multiple funerals with only a small congregation. Sometimes it was just me, the corpse, the undertaker and the angels. This almost carnival atmosphere was different, testament, I think, to the power of community in the midst of adversity. Something about hearing laughter mingled with tears spoke of the strength of the people gathered there, and sharing memories inevitably mixes grief and joy.
I said my goodbyes, comforted where I could, and retrieved a wad of red paper napkins from under a pile of sausage rolls to dab my moistened brow. Then, navigating the crowds, I made my way out into the sweltering afternoon. From there I wandered back to the church, contemplating death with (as I later discovered) pastry stuck to my forehead and God only knows what in my lungs.
†
All clergy have anecdotes about death. There are two reasons for this. First, death, even when it happens to others, does strange things to people, leading them to behaviour that is … Shall we say conspicuous? Second, it’s something we all have to face eventually so it seems only sensible to observe how others cope with it. That’s not to say all of us are affected by death in the same way. For some it’s the last dread terror while others greet it like an old friend.
My mother, a doctor who has dealt with death for some years, once observed that the clergy she encountered all appeared to be either hypochondriacs or hedonists. While the former seemed terrified of edging closer to the eternal, the latter embraced the bottle, tobacco or the mountains of baked goods parishioners tend to offer with such gusto as to meet their Maker sooner than He might have intended.fn3 Of course, being around death all the time means that priests can’t claim to be surprised by it. In fact, you might have thought that all that studying and preaching about God and eternal life would hone our instincts on the afterlife. In truth, all deaths hit in a different way, and many are still moments of deep pain, no matter how robust an individual priest’s faith in the afterlife may be.
To my mind, the best attitude for a Christian, and especially a priest, is to face death with a mocking glee. I will never forget the attitude of one elderly lady I met while I was training for ministry. I was in Rome, at a sort of Church of England embassy. It was the height of summer and – to continue a theme – swelteringly hot. This, though, was before the solemn dignity of orders had led me to possess the sort of all-black wardrobe Ozzy Osbourne might like, so I spent my days on a small internal balcony of a palazzo near the Forum, wearing shorts.
Every Wednesday, just before midday, a coiffured vision in a twin set and pearls would burst in and holler, in a broad transatlantic drawl, ‘Nice shorts, Fergie! I love your legs.’ Being catcalled by eighty-somethings is not what they train you for in theological college. She had been a society beauty, married to an Italian aristocrat. He had died young, which freed her, like a character in a Noël Coward song, to live the sort of life you always assume only exists in novels. Yet it had not been without gilded tragedy. When a priest famously asked her how such a long widowhood had affected her, she looked away from him and said, in that cut-glass drawl, ‘Losing my husband was the worst thing that ever happened to me …’ Cue a long draw on a cigarette, followed by a swivel of the head to fix the priest with her gaze. ‘… and the best.’ Hers was an infectious joie de vivre that wasn’t going to let the petty inevitability of dying get in the way.
Most people engage with death rarely and only when absolutely necessary, but for the clergy, it may crop up three times a week during ‘the funeral season’. It might not be something we especially wish to dwell on, but there are always times of the year, as excessive cold or heat sets in, that result in a higher number of funerals. It isn’t that people don’t die during the rest of the year but rather that there are times when more people reach the end of their earthly sojourn than at others. Put another way, very few undertakers book a holiday in January. Like undertakers, your average vicar is well attuned to the reality and regularity of death, so a lexicon of stories – tales, myths, anecdotes – has risen around it. Consequently I, like most clergy, have thought about how I should like to go: clinging on, embittered, in a four-poster bed, while a howling storm rages and a cast of grotesque relatives sit in icy tension on the other side of a thick oak door. Sadly, death’s not something we ordinarily get a huge amount of choice in. What can be said is that no two brushes with death are comparable, no two griefs or stories of parting identical.
Many are deeply moving – families bereft of those who died too young, or tragically, or without warning. There are stories of sparsely attended ‘Eleanor Rigby’-style goodbyes, with a handful of mourners huddled round a grave to commend a soul, still precious regardless, to God.fn4
That said, in death tragedy and comedy are never too far from one another. I remember one of the first times I anointed someone on their deathbed. I arrived at a care home with, I was told, little time to spare. I was met not by doctors or family but with a procession headed by a man engaged in a series of determined attempts to pull his trousers down. Each time he succeeded, the staff following him along the corridor would rush forward and pull them up again. I allowed this strange picaresque to pass, let myself into the relevant room, and there prayed in an atmosphere of tangibly holy calm as a family bade a quiet, expected but still sad goodbye.
Some clergy tell stories with a gallows humour darker than any cassock, such as the vicar who witnessed a gravedigger keeling over dead into the hole he had just dug. Grimmer still, an unsuspecting clergyman found himself an inadvertent accessory to crime when one mourner used a funeral as cover to murder another. Most, however, are more comforting tales of errors and foibles that serve as reminders of our humanity.
A funeral early in my ministry in Liverpool was supposed to begin – as so many do for men of a certain age – with ‘My Way’ playing as the coffin entered. However, a mix-up by the family meant that the body was instead carried in to another Sinatra hit, ‘I’ve Got You Under My Skin’, which was, I suppose, a more technically accurate musical representation of post-mortem processes, if not exactly what the mourners had intended. Another involved the reading of a poem entitled ‘I’m Free’. It’s a meditation on the release that death can sometimes bring for those suffering but the person allocated to read it was gloriously camp in his approach, delivery and exit. It was rather like having a eulogy delivered by a pantomime dame. Observing these natural moments of comedy or irony isn’t a mark of disrespect – except, perhaps, to Death, who, we must imagine, isn’t too keen on anyone laughing in his face. A funeral, for all its sombreness, is a gathering of people, fallible and funny as they are.
As a child, long before any sense of belief dawned upon me, I attended my grandfather’s. I remember thinking how strange it was to see my grandmother, a woman for whom the word ‘robust’ was specifically created, in tears. It was even stranger to see my father and his brother, who had fallen out over some dogs around 1994, making polite small-talk over post-crematorium caviar. No surprise, then, that funerals were always, in my mind, a journey into the topsy-turvy.
My own favourite funeral story is comparatively tame in comparison to many. Many of the potential pitfalls come, from the priest’s point of view, in what goes on around the funeral rather than during the service. The weight of emotion, the dignity of the liturgy and the grace of God will get you through the forty minutes in church, but they won’t help you remember to ensure your flies are done up at the wake or get you to the crematorium on time. In the latter case, undertakers are a huge help (they may well be in the former case as well but, thankfully, I’ve never tested them).
During one service, I had hitched a ride with the hearse from the church to the crematorium where we were to perform the committal of the body. I was sitting in the front of the vehicle, draped in black, next to the driver, also draped in black, as we drove slowly behind a senior funeral director. We inched along at her walking pace, as if we were in a lorry crawling over black ice. The procession was suitably stately. This was in a part of town where funeral cortèges were not uncommon – a hazard of playing host to a crematorium, you might say – and were always treated with ceremony and respect. Cars would slow down, signs of the Cross would be made, baseball caps removed, and pedestrians would often stand still. All reasonable responses to encountering a reminder of our shared mortality while on your way to Tesco.
That day was no different in many respects – signs of the Cross were made, hats removed and a couple of pedestrians indeed slowed down. To a halt, in fact, just as the hearse stopped at a red light. The pair, with a physical size disparity that would have been at home on a seaside postcard of a less enlightened era, were clad in jogging gear. They took in the scene in quiet contemplation. Then the silence of the afternoon was broken as the woman cried to the man, ‘That’s it – I’ve had enough! Fuck the couch and fuck the five K!’
I turned, the driver turned, the senior funeral director turned. Behind us, in the limousine in which the family were sat, several heads turned as well. It wasn’t the most conventional way to break the pre-cremation tension, but it was a strangely appropriate reminder of living earthiness before I pronounced, ‘Ashes to ashes, dust to dust …’
†
Clergy aren’t alone in needing something to smile about in the face of death: doctors, soldiers, police and undertakers are all part of the same quiet club. We may encounter it regularly but we still feel the pang of each loss and never become unable to grieve. Instead we develop coping mechanisms, one of which is, of course, sharing glances, nods, stories, sighs with others who go through it frequently.
This often shows during hospital visits. I have shared glances that pitch themselves between respectful resignation and cheery solidarity with nurses as I made my way through the Emergency Resuscitation Suite. Perhaps our association with death is why so many people – normal people, I mean – fear doctors or priests. We’re reminders of mortality. I suppose there are people who fear both for other reasons – the demonically possessed or Members of Parliament, for example – but we shan’t dwell on them here.
Part of it is perhaps born of clergy wearing black clothing. I was never going to be one of those vicars who shoehorn a bit of white plastic into a Hawaiian shirt, least of all when visiting a hospital, but I still try not to cultivate the angel-of-death look, offsetting my sombre dress with a smile. It doesn’t always pay off.
On one occasion, I swept into a ward to visit a parishioner who’d undergone routine care and was soon to be discharged. Understandably, in that world of Lucozade, bedpans and bleeping monitors, they needed a bit of cheering up. There were four beds: one with my intended visitee, one filled with a shapeless sleeping form and then, on the other side of the room, two beds in which sat gaunt men of indeterminate age.
‘Oho! Father’s here. Someone’s really done for now!’ the man on the right gargled, only half joking.
‘Oh, no, we’re all right,’ counselled the one on the left. ‘Doctors – fine. Priests – fine. It’s when you get a visit from the lawyers that you know you’re fucked.’
It was comforting to discover that there was at least one profession more feared and disliked than the clergy.
†
The difference between priests and other professional harbingers of death is, I suppose, that we are contractually obliged to throw in a caveat: that death is not the end. In fact, it’s a beginning. Death might seem a peculiar place to start a book, but for someone in this line of work it makes total sense. Unless you’re a cat or James Bond, death only happens once, but for priests, we sign up to death – or, more accurately, the promise that we will die – on the morning of our ordination and every day thereafter.
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