Telling it like it is
I refused to go to my parents’ funerals
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 was – and continues to be – one of profound shock from strangers, colleagues, family members and friends.
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.
Genuine emotion
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 had met my father, Tim, a neuropsychiatrist, on the wards of the hospital in Birmingham where they both worked in the 60s. 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.
I have always been an extremely private person with a distaste for the pomp considered obligatory at funerals, as at weddings. 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. They attended both services, and would not have considered doing otherwise.
To explain my absence, the humanist speaker who conducted both services made a statement to the effect that I would be remembering my parents in private.
My mother died of a sudden and savage cancer. She was diagnosed in December and died in June – the hardest six months of our lives. Part of me longed to see her misery ended. Yet, that final cessation still struck as a paralysing shock.
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 it had been my job to save her.
The next morning, the hearses drew up outside my parents’ home, and I saw off my black-clad siblings, before going back into the silent house. I sought out my mother’s jewellery box. Slowly, I went through each heirloom, until the crown my sister had sported on her sixth birthday reduced me to sobs. Later, my niece and nephews joined me while their parents hosted the wake. They reminisced about the minuscule, whitebread sandwiches their grandmother made them as toddlers.
My father died a year after my mother, desolate with grief. I always knew I might not attend his funeral – too much love to make my pain a spectator sport.
It fell to me to assemble the outfit my father wore for his cremation. I laid it out with the care that a mother lays out her child’s uniform for his first day at school, touching every garment to my face. I held his hand, kissed his face. Had the funeral not been imminent, I wouldn’t have had the strength to leave.
‘i’ve never regretted my decision’
Still in shock
I still haven’t read the letters people sent. My disbelief that 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. 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.
I’ll go to a funeral to support a friend. But the likelihood of my 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.
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.