Mourning

Last Saturday we buried my dad. He died at the age of 82. Over the past two years he had been ill and his condition grew slowly worse with time. Medical intervention became more and more difficult as both medicines and his faltering organs interfered with each other. Last week the pain from his failing heart became so intense that the doctors gave him enough morphine to combat the pain. As a result he slowly and quietly drifted off.

My dad was an organist by profession and a church musician. He had his own ideas about what his funeral had to be like. Already years ago I had learned from him that a funeral needn’t be just sad mourning and sorrow. According to his faith, there were also reasons for joy. He had managed to find things to express that joy that were different from the ones we had talked about before. The most notable thing was: they were not expressed in words, not even in song.

All candles in the church were lit, something that is only done at occasions like Christmas and Easter. It was not explained, nor mentioned. It was just visible.

When my father’s coffin was carried out of the church all four church bells were rung. It is customary to only ring one (usually a low one). Ringing all bells is again something done at festive occasions. At some point in his life my dad had written a poem about why he wanted to be ‘surrounded’ by the sound of all bells ringing when his coffin was carried out. This poem was read just before that, so there were words to it, but the expression itself was just sound.

Later in the day, after we had buried him, we had dinner at a restaurant across the church and the same bells rung, this time for a wedding. My father would have liked that. He had an enormous antipathy for crematoria, because these were places that you only went to when someone had died. They were places of death, whereas churches were places where people lived: they were baptised there, married in it and were buried from there. For every important point in life there was some ritual available in a place intrinsically linked to life: a church.

There was one ritual that neither my dad nor any other family member had thought of. It was sort of imposed on us by the parish priest at the service the night before the funeral. A small wooden cross bearing my father’s name and dates of birth and death was carried by us to a corner in the church where a collection of crosses inscribed with all the names of those recently deceased were kept. The crosses are kept there for a year, hanging on a wall for public display. Those who want to, can burn a candle im remembrance of the departed.

This ritual struck me as important, exactly because is was -ever so nicely- imposed on us. Those in mourning tend to see their grief as their own. My mom lost a husband, my brother and I a father. Those losses are real, but not the only ones. The community as a whole has lost one of it’s members. Even if that is not felt as acutely as the losses of my mom, my brother and me, it is still real. We are not alone, even if the company isn’t perfect.