Not a good day

Yesterday was not a good day. It was time to go to another funeral.

A work colleague from Ghana had died over the Christmas break. He had been walking around a shopping centre no doubt engaged in the most normal of activities like that of buying food for the family when he suddenly had a major heart attack, collapsed and died. He was fifty four years old.

He leaves behind a young wife and two children from his current marriage as well as the kids from an earlier marriage and of course other grieving relatives.

This is the second funeral I have attended in recent times and both colleagues were actually younger than I was.

When I developed oesophageal cancer, I thought that I would be one of the first to die and that others would be traipsing out to the cemetery to see my mortal remains being placed into the ground and then go and have a coffee or a drink and perhaps share a few memories about me and then get on with the business of talking about the things that they were really interested in.

It is difficult to attend a funeral when you know that you only have a one in 5 chance of remaining outside the graveyard yourself. As you see your colleague, friend or loved one being lowered into the ground, as you see people gather around the lip of the grave site and pick up and throw the handful of earth onto the coffin, as you hear the kind words of the relevant clergy commenting on the goodness of the person who has passed away, there is a sense of déja vu. This could well be yourself and your attendance just a dress rehearsal for the event to come in your own life when instead of the other person being the focus of attention it will be your own turn.

At the end it is a simple ceremony. The guests all mean well, they all show respect for the deceased by being there and participating in this final farewell. Yet what is there really for them to do? They are merely participants in the conclusion of a journey which ends with a front end loader and a tip truck dropping earth back into the hole into which the corpse has been carefully, reverentially, placed.

"Ashes to ashes, earth to earth, dust to dust" these words are conjured into the memory as yet another person goes and joins the great carbon cycle. Someone, a real person who walked, talked and interacted with you until recently, has gone, to be no more. He has been reduced to the 98% water and a few chemicals from which we are all made and been returned to the cosmos from which he came.

Whether you believe in an afterlife or not, whether you have one form of faith or another or none, the one feeling which steals over you at a time like this, guilty and secret, is contained in the words that you have flippantly stated in the past: "every day above ground is better than one below it." How true those words are, you think. This guilty secret is then carried from the graveyard home. As you hug your loved ones on returning from the funeral you do tend to wonder when it will be your turn and when someone else will have the mixed emotions of being sad about your demise and glad that he/she is still alive.