The Send Off

Standing in the late winter sunshine, with the last vestiges of snow at their feet, the mourners waited. The sorrowful hearse stood with the rear door open, a down-turned mouth like half a scream, the coffin its raised brown tongue. The bearers took their positions, shoulders ready. All people who had never known him.

The family arrived, their car pulling up silently behind the hearse. Black overcoats, black suits, black shoes, their heads bowed, emerging from the car, unsure of where to look. They took their positions among the other mourners, scanning faces but not taking in the details, unwilling to look at the coffin that held the mortal remains of a husband and father.

The minister appeared, like the shop keeper in Mr. Ben, and said a few words to the widow. The children, of whom I was one, stood awkwardly waiting. There is a logic to a funeral, which is understood until you find yourself in the midst of it. All logic disappears in that moment of grief, when you are left abandoned and unmoored.

The mourners began to converge, falling into line behind the small figure of the woman, their friend, who had lost her husband. She was saying something to the minister. Suddenly, a crystal bright burst of big band swing made them all jump. The opening bars of Glenn Miller’s “In The Mood” called them all to attention, some of them now half out of their skins with the loudness of it.

They filed into the crematorium, to pay their last respects.

It surprised me, how much an urn of ashes weighs, and how big it is. My father was an average-sized man. 5 foot 10 for most of my life, but shrinking as he entered his seventies, until he stood almost a head shorter than me. He was a giant, of course, when I was a child, and I would stand on his shiny shoes as he walked me around the room, my cheek pressed hard against the buttons on his shirt. Other times, he would hold my hands tightly as I walked myself up his legs to flip backwards through the circle made by our arms. I wonder if he groaned at the weight of me pulling on his arm sockets, the way I do when my son performs the same trick. I don’t remember if he did.

Surprising, then, that chocolate brown plastic jar filled with ground up bone and burnt up wood. I stared at it in its bag – a fancy bag, made to look as though you had been to a florist and come home with a houseplant. I looked down at it, noting how tall it was, and how wide, and registering a detached kind of surprise. I did not dare to acknowledge that its contents were all that remained, physically, of my father.

Not all that remained. My mother had placed some of his ashes in the bottom of a large plant pot, mixed in with soil, and bought herself a shrub to remember him by. It stood in the back garden, in full view of the kitchen window, where she could gaze on it and remember.

All bar a handful, then. Ashes and ground up bone. My brother knew a man who serviced the machinery at the crematorium. The Cremulator, they called it. A machine designed to crunch up bones and grind them into dust. I lifted the jar by its screw top lid, pulling it out of the bag. His name, in corporate Arial 11 point, printed on a sticky label, affixed to the side of the jar. I let the jar drop back into the bag. Too much, to see his name written there in such an anonymous typeface.

This sunny Sunday, a little over a month since the funeral, we were taking him to a mountainside, behind the fishing village where he and Mum had honeymooned half a century and more ago.

“He liked it there,” Mum said. “Even if he didn’t like it when we went to see Peter Ustinov at the Assembly Rooms. He stormed out in the middle of the performance, your dad. I didn’t know what the matter was.” She paused, remembering her 19 year old self, newly married, innocent of the world. “I thought Peter Ustinov was hilarious, but your dad said he was a blasphemer.”

She touched the edge of the bag, which was sitting on the kitchen table. I placed my hand on her elbow.

“Shall we go, Mum?”

We stood at the side of the car, staring in through the open door. I wondered what we were waiting for.

“Where shall we put your dad?” Mum asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “How about the boot? He won’t fall over there.”

“Oh, no,” she said. “I don’t want him in the boot.”

“Well, how about the foot well, behind the passenger seat?”

We stared into the foot well.

“The bag might get squashed,” Mum said, “when we push the seat back. I’ll have him next to me, on the back seat.”

“Okay,” I replied. “If you’re sure.”

“Yes,” she said. “I am.”

I waited, holding the car door for want of something to do. Since Dad had died, time had taken on a new elasticity, and the seconds sort of hung in the air observing us. Waiting, I think, for us to make our next move; waiting for something new to record. There is only so far that you can test the elasticity of time, though, and then it snaps back into shape, propelling you on to the next pause in your existence.

Mum climbed into the back of the car and arranged the jar of ashes in its pseudo florist’s bag beside her. I dropped my car seat back into position and sat down in it. My wife finished her cigarette and climbed into the passenger seat. Seat belts clicked into place. I started the engine and drove.

As the funeral service ended, more Glenn Miller was played over the AV system. People began to stand.

The minister spoke: “If you would like to make your way to the garden of remembrance, the side door to the chapel is now open.”

The mourners were ushered out of the side door and into the winter crisp grounds of the crematorium.

“I’m terribly sorry to rush you out,” the undertaker said to the family as they left, “but there’s another funeral after this one, and the staff need to prepare the chapel.”

Outside, the family stood in a row by the doorway, unsure for a moment about what to do next. The tranquil winter sun shone whitely in the sky. The eldest children moved away from the door. The youngest had no mind to stand anywhere other than where he was currently rooted. People came up to speak to him, faces he recognised. Few asked how he was feeling; all concentrated on the finer points of the ceremony and how well the minister had spoken. An elder from his mother’s church approached, a woman without social skills or compassion.

“That went well, I thought,” she said. When the youngest child made no response, she continued. “Was it very sudden?”

Perhaps she thought she was being supportive. Perhaps she thought this line of questioning would help.

“How did your father die?” she asked, seemingly determined to raise a reaction from the grieving son she barely knew.

“Suddenly,” came the reply. “At home.”

“Well,” she said. “It must be a relief, in a way.”

Strange the things that people say, the questions that they ask, hoping to build a dossier of facts to fill the spaces in their curiosity. I remembered the fury that gripped me when the woman asked me how my father died. I remembered the whiteness of my rage, and the calmness of it. It was a feeling both startling and joyous. A change from the gnawing sadness in the pit of my stomach. I had promised my mother, though, to be polite. Specifically to be polite to this woman. I must have known. To have had a conversation with my mother about what I would say to this woman if she turned up at the funeral, I must have known that she would be there, and that she would speak to me.

It was windy, when we arrived at the fishing village. The wind was blowing out from the mountains, out over the harbour, out over the sea. We stood in the car park, debating how much time to put on the ticket and counting change for the machine.

“Shall we have some lunch?” Mum asked.

We all looked at the bag on the back seat of the car.

“He’ll be okay there, while we go and have something to eat,” she said. “We can come back for him later.”

The day was developing an unreal quality. As we sat inside a small café, at a table in the window, eating paninis and drinking coffee, we tried to discuss how we were going to execute the thing we had come to do, without really mentioning it. The sun was beating on my back, and my eyes kept flicking to a well-thumbed copy of OK! Magazine, as though one of its cover stars would know the answer to our dilemma.

We had still reached no conclusions by the time we had finished lunch and returned to the car to collect the ashes. Mum was behaving as though we were on a secret mission.

“This bag doesn’t look like it’s come from a crematorium, does it?” she stage-whispered, standing beside the car and looking down at the brown plastic jar in the glossy black and white bag.

We agreed that it didn’t, and set off towards the back of the village, and the steep path up the side of the mountain. The potential guilt of doing something illegal hung heavy in the air. I didn’t think we were doing anything wrong, but I didn’t know for sure. My wife recalled how the undertaker had told us, “Who’s going to know?” I carried the bag with its heavy cargo, the stiffened string handles cutting into the soft flesh of my hand.

As we walked up a narrow pathway, alongside a row of pebble-dashed cottages, a boy of around ten years old came hurtling down towards us, muttering to himself. He was heavy set, and pink in the face from the heat and his exertion. I saw my wife look at him from the corner of her eye as he rushed past, like a ball bearing sent careening by a pinball machine. She caught me looking at her, and tried to stop the smile that was forming on her lips. I smiled back at her. I wanted her to know that it was okay to smile, that this day could not be any stranger than a small boy hurtling down a steep path, pursued by nothing but his own sense of urgency, but the feeling that we were about to do something that we shouldn’t was affecting us all and she looked away from me.

We reached our target destination: an old bandstand on a promontory that looked west over the sea and north over the railway line. We sat on the circular bench inside the bandstand, in a row opposite the bag containing Dad’s ashes, staring at it and summoning the courage to open its lid and scatter him to the wind.

As we sat there, catching our breath and trying to decide on our next move, Mum looked out over the sea.

“Which way is the wind blowing?” she asked.

My wife jumped up from the bench. “I’ll see if I can work it out,” she said, stepping out through the gap in the wall of the bandstand. She walked out, further along the promontory. The seagulls that nested just below its edge rose into the air, screeching at her. She held her ground and pulled a tissue from her pocket. The gulls dived away, and the tissue fluttered away from my wife’s fingers and north over the railway line. She turned to walk back to the bandstand.

Mum stood up and began to pull the urn from the bag, getting ready to take off the lid.

“We need to – “ my wife began to say, pointing in the direction of the mountains rising up behind us. She stopped because she had seen something.

A young couple appeared over the rise of the promontory. The woman was licking an ice cream. Mum sat down, and I stepped over to the jar, putting it back into the bag before either of our new companions could see it.

A look of disappointment came over the woman’s face as she realised that we were not planning to move from the bandstand straight away. Her boyfriend steered her to the front of the promontory, where he stood with his arm around her waist. Irritation emanated from the girl’s hunched shoulders and folded arms.

“I want to sit down,” we heard her say.

My wife joined us inside the bandstand, and we sat like a bunch of assassins, keeping each other in our sights, watching for one of the others to make a move. My eyes flicked from my wife’s face to my mother’s, trying to read what each of them was thinking. I knew that all we had to do was sit it out, wait for the couple to get bored of waiting for us to leave, but I didn’t know how long that would take.

I could see my mother trying to see where the young couple was without moving her head. They stood behind her, so I shook my head. The bag containing the urn was next to me. I put my arm across it, partly to hide it from the view of the young couple, should they turn and look our way, partly to reassure myself that it was still there. The wind blew into the bandstand, sending my wife’s hair across her face.

“They’re not going to leave,” Mum hissed.

I looked at my wife, who shrugged.

“Should I go and have a word?” I muttered to her. “Explain what we’re trying to do? Ask if they’d mind stepping away for a moment?”

“We need to do it,” Mum said. “Ask them.”

I could see that the young man could half hear that we were talking, and had probably sensed that things were not quite as they should have been. Perhaps he thought we were having a family row. He said something to his girlfriend, and her shoulders hunched even more. She turned her head to the side, away from her boyfriend, licking her ice cream defiantly.

I counted to ten. My mother was staring at me, her eyes wide and hard, boring into mine like lasers. I tried to remember how much time I had put on the ticket for the car park, and how long we had been up here. I looked at my watch. It had only been fifteen minutes, and yet it felt like a lifetime had already passed.

The young woman had moved away from her boyfriend and had turned to face him, so that she could look at us over his shoulder. I stood up and smiled at her, then started to make my way out of the bandstand and towards them. Her eyes widened, and she looked away from me. Her boyfriend turned his head to see what she had been looking at.

I held my hands out towards them as I approached, as though to reassure them that I wasn’t armed and meant them no harm.

“Hi,” I said, and opened my mouth to continue, but there was no need. The woman turned on her heel and started walking back down the hill. Her boyfriend smiled at me, nervous and apologetic, then followed her. We could hear the row receding as they made their way back down to the village.

I turned back to the bandstand.

“Now!” said my mother, leaping up from her place on the bench and taking the jar from its bag.

She looked at it, gripped between her hands, then looked up at me. She handed the jar to me.

“Will you?” she said.

I took the jar from her and unscrewed the lid.

“You’re sure about the wind direction?” I asked my wife. She nodded.

I carried the jar to the north side of the promontory, where it overlooked a disused footpath and the railway line. I paused, looking down into the jar, at the grey dust that it contained, then calmly began to shake the ashes out.

They flew away from me, towards the sand dunes that ran alongside the railway line. They fell on the gorse and on the grass at my feet. They blew up in puffs of grey cloud, riding on gusts of wind, before falling back to earth. I watched my father blow away across the mountainside, hoping that nobody was watching and, if they were, that they wouldn’t guess what the puffs of grey up by the bandstand were.

My mother walked over to me.

“Can I?” she asked, putting her hand on my arm.

Silently I tilted the jar back upright and handed it to her. I walked away and stood looking out to sea, with my back to my mother, giving her some privacy in her last moments with my dad.

Despite the sea, despite the traffic on the harbour road, despite the people walking on the beach, the silence in that moment was immense. For a brief time, I could not even hear the shooshing noise of the ashes leaving the jar. Time was stretching out again, like a thin piece of rubber, then suddenly it pinged back and the sound of the gulls, the sea, the traffic and people’s voices rushed back in around me.

My mother was asking my wife if she wanted to scatter any of the ashes. My wife was saying no. I listened to the wind blowing around me and the familiar sounds of the world continuing about its business, and I knew that my father was gone.


© J R Hargreaves 2010