THE PRACTICE FUNERAL

I'm the sort of person who always worries when the fridge door is shut whether the light inside may still be on. The other day I attended a rather dreary funeral in a rather dreary crematorium. Outside the weather was hot and sunny; inside the eulogies droned on. I could hardly make out one word: bad acoustics on the crematorium's part; bad hearing on mine. My febrile mind started to drift....... what really was in the coffin............?


“I think,” said Fiona Summers to her friend Daniella White, “that I shall have a practice funeral. The doctor doesn’t seem to think I shall live very long and in the circumstances it seems a shame to miss a good party.”

“But, Fiona, it wouldn’t be a good party - not without you - we should all be extremely sad. Besides I am quite sure that you won’t die for a long time. In fact you are looking quite well.”

“Oh I intend it to be a good party. That’s why I plan to be present,” said Fiona archly. “Funerals can be such dismal affairs and if the bereaved are not sufficiently saddened by the loss of their loved one then contemplation of the undertaker’s bill soon sets that to rights. If you are going to spend that amount of money then you might as well ensure that you are around to enjoy the party. It’s also the only time that your friends and relatives are likely to say agreeable things about you, so it would be a shame to miss it.”

“But you can’t expect your husband to organise a practice funeral for his wife, can you?” asked Fiona. “The police might get to hear of it and he might be arrested on suspicion of helping you to die or something.”

“Indeed not!” replied Fiona. “Besides James could never organise anything even himself. No, I was rather hoping you would help me. You’ve directed many amateur plays with the drama group and a funeral is just a play in three acts: the church, the internment and the wake.”

Daniella gulped. She had wondered why Fiona had been so insistent that she come to lunch that day.

“I’ll write the script, of course.” continued Fiona. “We shan’t have any of those dreary hymns. Nor any of that ‘time to be born and time to die’ nonsense. No, I want a thoroughly modern funeral, that people want to come to because it will be a good show. Not to pay respect to my dead body. Then we’ll have something to talk about afterwards at the party. I can forgive people if they don’t remember me, but not if they don’t remember my funeral. So we shall want to get it right.”

“Really, Fiona! You’re not serious!?”

“Oh but I am! I have always envied Ophelia her funeral. After all two young men fighting over you in the grave would certainly liven up any internment proceedings. Do you think health and safety would let us do it with swords? I could lie upon a gravestone in a flimsy white dress with waterweed in my hair and people could take photographs and make speeches. What do you think? And then I could come to life again, as it were, at the wake.”

“No priest would ever allow that sort of thing in his church. He’d think it pagan.”

“Ah, yes, they’re so terribly hidebound, aren’t they? No imagination. There’s the Bible full of miracles and resurrections, of coats of many colours and people being swallowed by whales - but all we get are grey-faced men in cassocks and an interminable succession of Sundays after Trinity. Let’s do it then in the early morning.”

“Let’s do what in the early morning, exactly?”

“The me-lying-on-a-gravestone in my floaty white dress with waterweed in my hair while folk fight over my grave.”

“Folk? How many do you envisage?”

“Well, Ophelia only had two. But I am sure you can do better than that. Couldn’t you arrange something with those battle re-enactment people? There was a half-decent Civil War battle at St Fagans - I’m sure some of that must have spilled over into the church yard. To die horribly in the midst of a Civil war re-enactment sounds rather better at the foot of one’s obituary than to be terminated by some awful medical condition.”

“But hardly peaceful,” observed Daniella doubtfully.

“Who said endings should be peaceful? That’s just a convention. So that’s settled then. We shall have all the ceremonial in the early morning. You will bring me into the church - half-drowned and we shall have some rousing music and drama - West Side Story perhaps - and in between you can even say what a bad person I was.

“Bad person?”

“Oh yes!” Why speak only good of the dead if they are not around to hear you? Might as well give them the full works. So long as folk aren’t boring, anything is permissible. I mean that’s what we do at weddings, isn’t it? The Best Man and the Father of the Bride compete to tell the guests the true nature of the partner to whom they have just become unaccountably hitched by the grey man in the white cassock now drinking your champagne. We could do the same.

"In fact I shall declare you, Daniella, my Best Man - or rather Woman - and you can slander me to your heart’s content. If I really don’t like what you say I shall drown you out at once with a rousing chorus of ‘America’ on the organ.

“And then I shall be carried out and laid in the earth, below a spreading chestnut tree and a volley of muskets fired over my head to keep the spirits away. I shall take a few things with me for the journey. Some wine and cheese would be useful and some costume jewellery and heels, just in case I meet a passing spirit on the way. Do you think there’s sex in the afterlife? After all it would be something worth knowing. Then we can all go into the nearby pub and have a rousing funeral breakfast.

“Breakfast? Aren’t funerals generally in the afternoon?”

“My funeral will be in the early morning,” announced Fiona in a tone that brooked no countermanding. “And afterwards we shall have a really great party. We shall start with an egg, bacon and black pudding fry-up and move swiftly on to champagne. I shall try to move around incognito just to check whether you are really saying nice things about me. Anyway, think about next June, if I am still around. Now I really must dash. I have to go in for chemo at two.”

Sadly, Fiona wasn’t around next June for her practice funeral for she died peacefully, if unexpectedly, on 31st May. Nevertheless, Daniella had followed her instructions to the letter and a few days later the early morning practice funeral was ready to be staged to Fiona’s own personal script.

But a question now arose as to whether to proceed with the practice funeral now that the poor soul was actually dead. Those of her friends who knew her best - and who anyway had a starring role in the bizarre proceedings - were all for keeping to the schedule on the good theatrical principle that the show must always go on. Others, who included many of Fiona’s older family, were appalled that any such thing could be contemplated and insisted on reacquainting themselves with The Rev. Solomon Dreary of the local crematorium.

“That’s not what Fiona wanted,” pleaded Daniella.

“But, it’s the proper thing and, more importantly it’s what I want,” observed Fiona’s Mother, imperiously.

Daniella could see that the Civil War re-enacters might no longer be needed. There was an incipient Civil War in the family which could turn easily enough into fisticuffs at the graveside.

“I suppose we shall just have to have the practice funeral without the deceased,” concluded Daniella to James. Everything has been booked and we can’t just not turn up now. But it will be Hamlet without the Prince.”

“Or rather Hamlet without Orphelia,” said James, who had been a doubtful supporter of the practice funeral while Fiona had been alive but who had become its most ardent supporter now that she was actually dead.

“I suppose we couldn’t just kidnap her?” he suggested enigmatically. “Kind of ‘borrow’ her for a few hours from the undertakers. They’re a large firm and I’m sure they have so many dead bodies in coffins that they wouldn’t miss one for a few hours. We could then dress her in her white and floaty robes and get her to the church in time to lay her on the gravestone.”

“But how would you move her? You couldn’t very well walk around with a coffin under your arm - or even a coffin in your little hatchback.”

John thought. “We’ll walk her”, he said suddenly. “We’ll take her out of the coffin and with you on one side and me on the other it would just look as though we were returning from a rather good party. No one notices anything anyway in the early morning. Anyone who is up is half-asleep and anyway too busy listening to the dawn chorus.”

Daniella felt that the idea of strolling nonchalantly to her funeral as though from an all night party was one that Fiona would thoroughly have approved.

“But afterwards?” she asked. “We couldn’t very well tip her into the ground and return an empty coffin.”

“Why not?” said John, a malicious twinkle in his eye. “Of course, the coffin won’t be entirely empty. I know a friendly farmer who always seems to have fallen stock that needs incinerating. He’d be very glad of a free cremation. And I’m sure that to the crematorium ovens a dead calf would be all in a days work.

And so it was arranged. On a beautiful and cloudless summer morning Fiona was liberated from her coffin and, supported by Daniella and James, brought carefully through the lych gate and into the churchyard. She was dressed in her best Ophelia frock and James had entangled strands of supermarket watercress in her hair. Her real friends - those whom she loved and who had loved her - were all waiting, crowded around, cameras clicking.

If her feet were dragging and her face were pale (despite Daniella’s best efforts with stage powder) then let it generally be known that she had fallen into the river while gathering flowers for her Prince. She even held a bunch of buttercups, hurriedly picked, in her cold fingers. Willing hands picked her up and laid her on the flat tombstone near the spreading chestnut tree, through whose branches the early sunlight fell dappled onto the grass.

In the night someone had thoughtfully dug a grave, though whether the authorities had been informed of this was doubtful.

Suddenly pandemonium erupted all around. The churchyard was filled with smoke as from all sides there seemed to come musket fire and the shouts of angry men. Someone discharged an artillery piece and clouds of white smoke obscured the mourners, if such they where, from the graveside.

John was saying his last goodbyes. Fiona’s children were weeping. At last there was hush. Daniella imagined she could hear her old friend saying, ‘Oh do just get one with it' and Fiona was bundled, a little unceremoniously, into the gaping earth. Then a sergeant in helmet and leather jerkin drew up what remained of his raggle-taggle actors and three volleys of musket fire rang out again over the grave.

Everyone applauded. Even Fiona, Daniella imagined. What a send-off!

Events had now to be concluded at a fast pace if the party were to avoid detection. Earth was bundled onto the grave, the ground levelled and turf put back. John planted Fiona’s bouquet of buttercups. Suddenly, all that was left were a few strands of watercress, which Daniella thought that she might turn into soup.

A short-time later John collected a half grown Friesian bullock calf which had conveniently succumbed the previous day and arranged it comfortably in the coffin, which he and Daniella then returned to its bier at the undertakers.

By the time they got back the party in the pub was in full swing. Though the eggs and bacon were long finished, several bottles of champagne remained. Everybody was relaxed and happy. The photographs, taken against the rising sun, looked tremendously ethereal.

All good things come to an end, however, Daniella reflected. Even Fiona. And she would need to get herself home and change. She had, she remembered, to attend the sad and dreary funeral of a bullock calf later in the day.

Story Copyright Fennie Somerville 2010