I loved my parents with all my heart. That’s why I refused to go to their funerals

To most, it would be unthinkable. But in a brave and deeply personal account, a devoted daughter says . . .

‘You’ll regret not going,’ I was told, but I never have I couldn’t bear to go through this pantomime of grief

AS A society, we no longer harbour many taboos. Little we do retains the ability to shock, be it our manners, our moral behaviour or dress. However, over the past couple of years, I have embraced what turns out to be a fundamental transgression: I couldn’t bear to attend either of my beloved parents’ funerals, and so I refused to go.

The reaction to this course of action was — and continues to be — one of profound shock from strangers, colleagues, family members and friends alike.

When I told people about my decision, each time it elicited as much lack of comprehension as horror. Even my partner, who knows me better than most, attempted to persuade me out of my position before eventually coming to terms with it.

The collective reaction was: ‘But they created you — didn’t you love them?’ The answer was not that I never loved them, rather that I loved them so profoundly that I didn’t wish to put my emotions through a wringer I consider as tawdry as it is unnecessary.

‘You’ll regret it,’ everyone warned me. But I never have, and am convinced I never will.

Of course, I understand that for some people, funerals can be a healing process and I respect them for that. But for me, it would not have felt right to attend.

My mother, Pam, died in the summer of 2015, at the age of 69. She was a retired nurse who’d met my father, Tim, a neuropsychiatrist, on the wards of the hospital in Birmingham where they both worked in the Sixties. My father died a year after her, last summer, aged 76.

Their marriage had spanned more than 40 years and produced five children and four grandchildren.

I am still frequently asked to explain why I failed to attend the funerals of these two people whom I loved, and who had loved me. My answer never varies.

Ironically, given my job, I am — and have always been — an extremely private person.

I may be a lifelong atheist, but I am an extremely Protestant sort of atheist — with a pronounced phobia of ceremonial exhibitionism, and a distaste for the provincial pomp considered obligatory at funerals as at weddings.

I fully appreciate that some people will disagree, but I find both events equally hard to bear, failing to understand why participants feel compelled to enact so much enforced ritual. To me, the Victoriana of top hats and tails, wreaths and gothic am dram is counter to the context of genuine emotion.

And genuine emotion was what I felt. I adored my parents and their deaths were incredibly painful, traumatic events. Once I’d made sure that my family felt no need for my presence at their funerals, which were held at the same crematorium in Birmingham, I could make my own mourning the priority.

Which is not to say my no-shows proved entirely uncontroversial for my four siblings. My brothers and sisters attended both services, and would not have considered doing otherwise.

My brothers appeared to associate this act with duty, while my sisters drew a good deal of strength from the various hangers-on that I would have considered so intrusive.

Nevertheless, my avoidance strategy spared us arguments. Not only are the five of us all very different, we also enjoyed different relationships with our parents.

Before I came to my resolution about non-attendance, there were a couple of hideous flare-ups about what my mother’s funeral should consist of. I didn’t agree with all the decisions made, so removing my presence meant I didn’t have to. Far more generous to let those to whom the ceremony meant something be able to take comfort in the version of it they wanted.

Meanwhile, my siblings kindly let me choose my father’s reading at my mother’s funeral — Shakespeare’s ‘Fear no more the heat o’ the sun’ (he was too upset to make the decision himself) — the passage which was read again at my father’s ceremony, for which I also picked the music.

To explain my very obvious absence, the humanist speaker who conducted both services merely made a statement to the effect that I would be remembering my parents in private.

The wisdom of this decision was confirmed by messages from so-called friends I now recognise as falling into the category of ‘funeral groupie’ when they heard my parents had died. ‘Looking forward to seeing you!’ they emailed, as though my parents’ deaths were the social events of the season.

Their outrage on hearing I wouldn’t be gracing the occasions with my presence — thus depriving them of their desired festivity — knew no bounds. My longing to punch said individuals remains strong.

What I did instead was improvise my own death ritual: stumble my way towards a means of expression for my grief that could mark what had passed, while allowing me to go forward into the future.

My mother died of a sudden and savage cancer. She was diagnosed in the wake of December’s shortest day, and died in June on the longest — the hardest six months of our lives.

She had been on the brink of death every few days during this hellish period, and part of me longed to see her misery ended. Yet, somehow that final cessation still struck as a paralysing shock.

Somehow, I craved bodily contact. As she lay there, an absent presence in her hospice bed, I laid my cheek against hers.

In all, I visited her body three times before her cremation. The final occasion, the night before the ceremony, proved particularly testing.

‘I’m so sorry,’ I heard myself repeating, as though I were the mother and she the child, and somehow it had been my job to save her.

The next morning, the hearses drew up outside my parents’ home in Birmingham, and I saw off my blackclad siblings, before going back into

the silent house. I sought out my mother’s jewel box — jewel being too grandiose a term for the assembly of milk teeth, nametapes and Christmas cracker ornaments, among the baubles and bangles we had given her over 40 years.

Slowly, I went through each heirloom, until the battered crown my sister had sported on her sixth birthday reduced me to sobs.

Later, my niece and nephews came to join me while their parents hosted the wake, each claiming their relic, while they reminisced about the minuscule, white-bread sandwiches their grandmother had made them as toddlers.

Good deaths are possible, but neither of my parents achieved one. My father died a year after my mother, desolate with grief. Next morning, we siblings sat around drinking tea, laughing and crying.

I always knew I might not attend his funeral — too much love to make my pain a spectator sport.

‘But, you adored him,’ everyone cried. And I did. All the more reason why I couldn’t bear to go through with what I saw as the masochism of some naff pantomime of grief.

I dressed my father when he was dying, as he once dressed me. After his death, it fell to me to assemble the outfit he wore for his cremation. Sobbing, I laid it out with the care that a mother lays out her child’s uniform ahead of his first day at school, touching every garment to my face.

I held his hand, kissed his face, talked about how ridiculous he — a doctor — would find my addressing him in this way. I cut a lock of the dense, curly hair that gave him his nickname, ‘Afro’, leaving a preposterous gap in the front.

Finally, I placed my mother’s nursing scarf under his head, a passage from his beloved Shakespeare in his palm, and coins for Charon (the ferryman who carried the ancients to the Underworld) on his chest. Had the funeral not been imminent, I would not have had the strength to leave.

Recently, I read George Saunders’s acclaimed novel Lincoln In The Bardo, in which the U.S. president cannot bear to leave the body of his dead child, and found myself unable to breathe, so powerful is its evocation of the living’s inability to let go of the dead.

While the others were at the service, I wrapped myself in my father’s sweater, despite it being July. The children again joined me during the wake, and we discussed the different way these deaths hurt.

‘I loved my mother desperately,’ I told them, ‘but he was my person.’ ‘He was my person, too,’ said Harry, eight, while Bryn, five, and eight-year-old Issy decided that she had been theirs.

I still haven’t read the letters people sent. My disbelief my parents have gone has nothing to do with not attending their funerals, and everything to do with how quickly we went from having active, young-seeming parents to the bleakest deaths.

I read an interview the other day in which Stella McCartney — whose mother, Linda, died almost 20 years ago — even now has moments in which she thinks: ‘I can’t believe Mum hasn’t called me today.’ Six months in, I’d find myself thinking: ‘And, she’s still dead’ about my mother, as though her passing were an affront.

Other times I am so felled that my chest aches. One night, weeping, I held out my hand, convinced I could compel my father to grasp it; not through any belief in life after death, but simply through the power of my will. Nevertheless, over these past two painful summers, I have devised my own formula for mourning — and damn anyone whose sense of propriety demands otherwise.

I’ll go to a funeral to support a friend. However, my likelihood of turning up will be in inverse proportion to my grief: the more I love you, the less likely I will be prepared to attend your funeral.

And I am not alone. We are embarking upon the age of the no-fuss funeral: ‘direct cremations’ in which the undertaker takes the body to be processed, the mourners then picking up the ashes.

David Bowie’s family opted for this policy, and it is on the rise thanks to increasing numbers of non-believers, and people who can think of better ways of spending £9,000 — money which has turned so many funerals into pageantry, rather than simple, solemn affairs.

Who knows, even those who found my non-attendance so abhorrent may find themselves reconsidering their options as these new practices take hold.

As to whether I intend to turn up at my own funeral, I may have to, but no one else will be expected to. When my turn comes, I would like it to be rapid and unmarked. No tawdriness, no voodoo and with tiny sandwiches for those who want them.

My own funeral should be rapid and unmarked