Probably the most important relaxation of the Covid rules is the chance to properly celebrate a loved one’s life and all its contradictions
My dad’s funeral generated a gushing stream of anecdotes. I don’t remember any feelings at all, just event after event, most of which involved my brother or my dog. The one about my dad’s best friend is probably the best, but it is too salacious and actionable to tell here. The second-best featured my brother and the dog – he left the wake with my sister’s friend on the pretext of taking Spot for a walk. Whatever they did on this “walk” held insufficient interest for the dog, who brought himself neatly back home, carrying his own lead, like a cartoon. Realising they’d lost him, and mindful of what a terrible day that would be to lose a person’s dog, the frantic couple spent two hours wandering round Ramsgate, calling his name.
The day wasn’t funny because it was un-sad; my father was 64, and we felt absolutely bilked by the universe – robbed blind of two decades of matchless bonhomie. It’s just that the closer you are to a person, the more absurd you find those rituals that directly follow their deaths. When my uncle died a couple of years later, I read at his funeral, in place of my mother, who didn’t want to. In a hurry, I just Googled, “What to read at funerals.” When I stood up to solemnly intone the Song from Cymbeline – “Fear no more the frown o’ the great / Thou art past the tyrant’s stroke” – it was the first time I’d ever set eyes on the words. I almost had to stop halfway through, since my uncle was, memorably, a bit of a tyrant, never not frowning, so it sounded as if I was addressing the congregation with a poetic: “Everybody relax, he’s died.” The family all found that hilarious, his colleagues, maybe not so much.
