Some like to plan their own funerals in detail. Churchill is said to have devised the route his coffin should take from London to his burial place so that General de Gaulle would have to embark at Waterloo, a nice example of exercising power to the very last. My wife has a list of hymns that will have mourners totting up more church hours than many will have scored in years. They are all very fine hymns too. Happily she doesn’t include Monty Python’s Always Look on the Bright Side of Life – which has knocked Frank Sinatra singing My Way off the top spot in the funeral music charts this year.
My own requirements are more modest. Sometimes, indeed, as the day of departure comes nearer I find myself inclining to the shuffle-the-dead-off, shovel-’em-in school of thought with as little ceremony as possible. Dust to dust, ashes to ashes, and that’s that, with no promise of any sure or certain resurrection either.
The fashion today is to treat a funeral service as the celebration of a life, well-lived or not, rather than as a solemn prelude to entry into eternity. This makes sense if you agree with Andrew Marvell that “The grave’s a fine and private place,/ But none, I think, do there embrace.” So, if I hadn’t given up on alcohol some 20 years ago, I might have opted for a recording of Marlene Dietrich singing, “And when I die, don’t pay the preacher/ For speaking of my glory and my fame,/ But see what the boys in the back-room will have,/ And tell them I’m having the same.”
This doesn’t, however, seem quite right for one who has kept going on espresso coffee and San Pellegrino.
Be that as it may, music is necessary because funerals, even if often more agreeable occasions than weddings, are a bit grim without it. Siegfried’s Funeral March is magnificent, but a bit pretentious for one who has never led the heroic life. Better perhaps to have the assembling congregation treated to a recording of Paul Robeson singing Ol’ Man River, as a reminder that though life is mostly “sweat and strain”, they should, while it lasts, be glad just to keep rollin’ along like the Mississippi.
There must, for old time’s sake, be a couple of hymns. John Bunyan’s magnificent To be a Pilgrim is a popular funeral choice; “Hobgoblin nor foul fiend/ Shall him dispirit./ He knows he at the end/ Shall life inherit.” Grand stuff, but I don’t think I measure up to it. Likewise the Battle Hymn of the Republic is great to belt out, preferably to the tune of John Brown’s Body rather than the Walford Davies one, but it too makes claims that don’t seem appropriate. It comes in the same category as Onward, Christian Soldiers. Even for non-believers, the Psalms are the great source of consolation, none more so that the 23rd in the Scottish metrical version, sung to the tune “Crimond”. I’ve known it all my life. So it seems right that it should accompany me into death's “dark vale”.
As for Readings, none of that St Paul stuff, for I’ve always disliked him. A couple of Housman poems would do nicely, or perhaps some verses from the Rubaiyat: “Myself when young did eagerly frequent/ Doctor and Saint, and heard great argument/ About it and about: but evermore/ Came out by the same door wherein I went.” Absolutely.
As for the interment… Since I’ve lived in the Borders half my life now, I like to think of the most beautiful of laments, “The Flowers of the Forest”, or, as we call it, “The Liltin’ ”, being played by a lone piper as the coffin is lowered. If I happen to have the good taste to depart in the autumn, and it’s a soft afternoon up the valley with the sun half-obscured by gathering mist, there shouldn’t be a dry eye in the kirkyard. Then, if it can be arranged for the Selkirk Silver Band to be there, they will strike up Alexander’s Ragtime Band to change the mood and ensure that everyone leaves with a spring in their step. Except me, of course.
