Chief mourner

Angela Dunn

There can be no more bitter or wretched way to end a life than by a funeral with no mourners. What does that say about the tragedies or simple, sheer bad luck which must have dogged the deceaseds life to bring them to their last day on earth, un-mourned and, by extension, unloved?

I had gone to this old ladys funeral as a representative of my exs family, shocked and saddened that he wouldnt do so himself. I felt that, more than representing him, I was representing our young daughter, whose Great Aunt this woman was, though these two females had never met. A history of spinsterhood and, latterly, alcohol abuse, had brought the elder woman to a strange city, my home town, to be near her last living relative - my exs widowed mother. The kind and compassionate woman who brought her lonely sister-in-law to live in the same city as her would have been my own mother-in-law, had she lived. And had her son turned out to be more like the lovely person she was.

Anyway, this son blamed the strain of looking after his aunt for his mothers own early death. Consequently, he refused to attend the aunts funeral, in spite of my reminder that his mother would have been appalled at his dereliction of duty. So, I went instead. For his mother. For my daughter. From respect for all the women who have always shared the jobs of caring and of mourning, regardless of blood ties. I went expecting there to be perhaps one or two folk who had been flushed out by the death announcement in the local paper. I thought, at the very least, there would be staff members present from the Care Home where the aunt spent her last few months in this strange city.

The morning of the funeral, I dressed in black for work, and took an extended lunch break. I stopped off at Marks and Spencers on the way and bought some white lilies to take to the Crem with me, thinking I could place them amongst the others on the coffin, and no-one would know I hadnt had enough money to order them to be sent earlier from a local florist. In the end, my lilies were the only flowers there.

Well, actually, there was a dusty-looking, plastic bunch, of indeterminate variety, which must have been kept by the crematorium staff for those sad occasions when no other flowers were sent. Or bought. Or thought of. They were already on the coffin when I slipped in to the smaller of the two chapels in the crematorium, to find myself alone with the body of a woman Id met only once before. I placed my lilies on her coffin, next to the plastic ones, just as the Minister arrived to fulfil his Christian duty - and the pressure that society places on all of us to do the right thing by the dead.

As I quickly explained that I barely knew this isolated old lady, he told me that his would be a brief service, no hymns, for obvious reasons. A bible reading, two prayers, a call for Gods blessing on all three of us, and it was finished. A crematorium attendant removed my lilies from the coffin and took them away for display outside with the many dozens of wreathes and bunches of flowers for all those who had been, and would be, mourned at this place during the days that followed. I watched, with the minister, as the coffin did that eerie slide towards flame and nothingness on the other side of the crematorium curtain. Then I turned to leave.

I walked through the beautifully remote and peaceful Garden of Rest, back to the road which led to the city, less than a mile distant, but not even heard as a murmur in this tree-shrouded place. On the main road, I caught the bus back to work, and thought about how narrowly I had missed becoming that woman, no hymn sung over her cold, slight body. No flowers, except the supermarket purchase of a stranger. It could have been me, had my drunken unhappiness not been brought to an end for a reason that I did not yet comprehend, and only three years into my sobriety, I was still too superstitiously fearful of to examine.

What I did know, and could remember, all too vividly, was that nothing isolates you from your family and friends quicker than the drunkards anti-social belligerence, the alcoholics belief that everyone has got it wrong except you. My mother had already watched me having my stomach pumped once. My sister had hidden me, drunk and needy, from another ex lover. My friends had seen me ruin many evenings with my argumentative, unfocussed, tearful tirades.

There would only have been a limited number of those occasions left to me, before I simply became too difficult to include in peoples lives. Only a few relatives would have needed to pre-decease me to have left no-one who at least loved me from a sense of familial duty. Then I would have become that someone elses aunt burning in her cheap coffin on the hill behind the bus-stop.

I think thats why I phoned the crematorium later that day to find out what would happen to her ashes. Because it wasnt me, but for the Grace of God. Because I wanted to do something for the woman that it had happened to. Mind you, if you think that being the only mourner at a funeral is a tough gig, then you should try going out in the company of a crematorium employee to scatter the ashes of someone whose life you can only imagine in the dim, dark hours you lie awake worrying about her soul, about your own soul, about Life. But thats a story for another day.