Everyone in the street stood quite still whilst the cortège slowly passed on its way to the church at the end of the road. The parents must have seen (though we could not see them) the people standing quietly in the street, and I hope that the respect we showed was of some comfort to them. I looked around the crowd and was impressed by the solemnity on all the faces. That experience was what I would call community ritual, something I had not seen for years.
Community ritual has largely been stripped away, and I doubt if the majority of young people would know what I am talking about. Social life used to stop for a funeral, as everybody paused in their daily affairs out of respect for the dead.
I remember well the death of my grandmother, when I was about twelve. She had a heart attack at home and died in her husband’s arms. Her body was laid out by the local handywoman, who was also the local midwife, and placed in an open coffin in the main room for friends and neighbours to come in and pay their respects. This was common practice. It may seem gruesome now, but in those days practically everyone felt it was right and fitting to go to the house with the purpose of seeing the body. They would stand quietly beside the open coffin, offer some suitable words of condolence to the bereaved, and perhaps reflect for a few minutes on life and death and their own mortality (nothing concentrates the mind so powerfully as the sight of a dead body). This is still practised on state occasions and on the death of royalty. It is a practice that is also routine in the Orthodox Church.
On the day of my grandmother’s funeral, the street was quiet. Every house had the curtains drawn and neighbours stood in their doorways as the funeral procession passed on its way to the church. Shopkeepers closed their shops for a while, and this ritual greatly helped my grandfather. I know, because he told me so. ‘She was treated with proper respect,’ he said. Afterwards, he did not have to hide his grief because neighbours understood and gathered round to support him. He lived alone for twelve years after her death, but was never lonely.
For many years afterwards the whole family gathered at Grandad’s house on her birthday and took flowers to her grave. I remember my uncles and aunts, a noisy bunch, joking their way through the woods to her graveside, where we all sang her favourite hymn. Then we all walked back to the house for a party. For my grandfather, this continued family ritual was just as important as the rituals at the time of her death.
Bereavement can be a devastating event. Dark clouds seem to cover the face of the earth. Reality evaporates and movement is suspended. An abyss of despair seems but a step away. The experience is very much eased if you have had the time to prepare for it, but there is no preparation for sudden or violent death and the shock that comes with it. The distress can be so traumatic it can lead to illness, and if the relative has to go to the mortuary to identify the body, particularly if it has been mutilated, the trauma can go on for years. There is always the question, ‘Why? Why did God allow it? There can be no God if such a thing can happen.’ Rage, hatred, and bitterness can burn or corrode, and often there is anger. Usually, God has to take all the blame, even from people who don’t believe in Him. Depression can follow, and years of professional counselling may be necessary. If true clinical depression develops, anti-depressant and psychiatric drugs are often prescribed: but this is not always the best way of treating a severe response to a life event.
In bereavement, only time – occasionally years of time – can heal and allow the person to start living again. It is a time of emotional crisis, and the greatest need is for companionship – not all the while, just someone to be there from time to time to listen, talk, occasionally to hold a hand, or even to take over for a while. But sadly most people, especially elderly widows, find themselves isolated and edged out of society if they have no man to accompany them. Most of us are so screwed up about death that we cannot even bring ourselves to talk to someone in mourning and the feeling of abandonment compounds the loneliness that inevitably follows the loss of a life partner or loved one.
Consequently, the bereaved will often try to hide their grief in a number of ways. They try to be cheerful and pretend everything is all right when, really, they are breaking apart inside and only want to cry and cry. Suppressing grief is a recipe for disaster and many people who act in this way suffer physical or mental ill-health at a later date.
Society has changed so much in the last fifty years. Families are smaller and move about more, communities barely exist – a group of strangers thrown together cannot be described as a community. Counsellors take the place of friends and neighbours, and bereavement groups replace communities. These are vitally important, and some have described them as lifesavers – ‘I don’t think I would be alive now if it had not been for my counsellor’. All hospices, NHS hospitals, most local councils, and most churches run bereavement groups in which people can sit and talk about their loved ones – and simply talking about the departed is frequently all that is needed. Such groups are important, because someone who has already suffered and recovered from a devastating loss can communicate meaningfully with others in the same position.
To be present at the time of death can be one of the most important moments in life. To see those last, awesome minutes of transition from life into death can only be described as a spiritual experience. And then afterwards, when the body lies still, one gets the strange feeling that the person has simply gone away, as though he has said, ‘I’m just going into the other room. I’ll leave that thing there while I’m gone; I won’t be needing it.’ It’s a very odd experience – the body is there, but the person has gone. No one would say, ‘I am a body’; we say, ‘I have a body’. So what, therefore, is the ‘I’? The ‘I’ or perhaps ‘me’ has just stepped into the other room. It is a strange feeling, and I can’t describe it in any other way. Another thing that is strange is that the body left behind looks smaller, quite a lot smaller, than the living person. The face looks the same, but calm and relaxed, wrinkles and worry lines are smoothed, and a feeling of serenity pervades the entire room. But the person, the ‘I’, has gone.
It also greatly helps the process of mourning to see the body after death, and preferably to assist in the laying out. Nurses used to do the job when I was young girl, and we always asked the relatives if they wanted to help. Nurses don’t do it any more, but anyone can ask the morticians if they can assist, and they will not be refused, even though it would be unusual these days. Respectful laying-out is all part of the ritual to which a dead person is entitled. Handling a dead body is not a repugnant or frightening experience and, somehow, it helps to accept the fact that the soul of that person has gone if you treat the body with reverence and respect before it is finally disposed of by cremation or burial.
The husband of one of my dearest friends died in hospital of lung cancer, but she was with him most of the time in the last few weeks. She told me, ‘I was with him, and I could see that he was going to die, so I pulled the curtains round and lay on the bed beside him. I took him in my arms (he weighed almost nothing, he was so thin) and whispered to him and kissed him. He knew I was there. Then he just stopped breathing, but I didn’t move. I stayed there with him until he was quite cold. Then I got up and went to one of the nurses and told them that he had gone. The nurse came to check, and touched him.
‘“But he’s quite cold,” she said. “When did he die?”
‘“It was at half past two – I know because I looked at my watch.”
‘“But you should have come and called one of the staff; it’s nearly four o’clock now,” the nurse said.